Page 10 of When Sorrows Come

I rolled onto my side, propping myself up on one elbow. “Then why did you bother to ask?”

“It seemed polite.” He looked at me solemnly. I looked back.

Even my residual irritation couldn’t rob me of the ability to enjoy the view. Tybalt was not the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. I live more than half the time in Faerie these days, and we have entirespeciesthat have been bred like show dogs for the sole purpose of each generation being prettier than the one before it. That’s sort of a joke but also maybe possibly not since I’m thinking specifically of the Daoine Sidhe. Their Firstborn is exactly the kind of woman who would command her descendants to choose their spouses purely on the basis of how attractive they thought the babies would be.

Cait Sidhe don’t do things that way. Their beauty, when it arises, is entirely natural, the result of good choices and good genes. Tybalt is pale, thanks to living a primarily nocturnal life, with sharp, strong features and the lithe build of a runner or swimmer. He doesn’t need to be a powerhouse, not when he can be fast enough to defeat most opponents without risking a hair on his own head. Plus, I like that I can get my arms around his shoulders without straining.

His hair is brown, more-or-less striped with black depending on his mood and how comfortable he is. Like most Cait Sidhe, he learned to suppress his more animal attributes when he was very young in order to be taken seriously. Most of the time, his feline heritage shows only in his pupils, which are oval and react strongly to the light, and in his incisors, which are larger than the human norm. No whiskers, no tail, no flexible ears.

It’s like at some point we decided, “Hey, we’re immortal magical beings who live in a world of rainbows and miracles. Let’s all conform to the most boring standard we possibly can, okay?” It’s no wonder the fae go to war at the drop of a hat. There’s nothing else for us to do.

His eyes are green, rare for a human but common among the Cait Sidhe, and banded in different shades like the layers of a piece of malachite. I used to find his mouth cruel, before I got permission to start kissing it, and now I find it perfect. So no, he may not be the most beautiful man in the world, but he’s the most beautiful to me.

He was clearly done with Court business for the night, havingexchanged whatever he’d worn to visit Ginevra for a shirt advertising Shakespeare & Co. Books in Berkeley. Sometimes his endless dedication to Shakespeare in all clothing choices gets old, but it makes him happy, and it’s not like I’m exactly vying for Faerie’s best dressed over here.

“So,” he said, with a small but audible sigh. “You know.”

“That I’m apparently getting married tomorrow? Yeah, you could say that I know. You could also say that I’m unhappy about being left in the dark about the one thing I explicitly said I wanted to be informed of. I’ll get over it. You may have to give me a little while, and some assurance that Kerry’s already working on the cake, but I’ll get over it.”

“I know you dislike secrets—” he began.

I held up a hand to stop him. “A surprise birthday party is a secret. A surprise public proposal is a bad idea. A surprise wedding is anaffront.”

“You said all aspects were up to us,” he said, pivoting to a slightly safer place in the conversation. “You said you had no opinions.”

“I also said you should tell me where to be and trust me to be there,” I said. “You sort of dropped the ball on that one.”

He sighed. “I wanted to avoid a diplomatic incident if at all possible, by preventing the monarchs through whose territory we are to travel from sealing their borders—against either one of us.”

I blinked. That was a wrinkle I hadn’t considered.

Kings and Queens of Cats are territorial even by fae standards, and they don’t coexist. Ginevra’s father, Jolgeir, is the King of Cats in Portland, Oregon. When Raj takes his throne properly, she’ll have to choose between going home and challenging her father to a fight—potentially to the death—or striking out to find a territory that doesn’t currently have a ruler. Either way, she can’t go home and return to the way her life was before she discovered she had a Queen’s potential running in her blood.

To reach Toronto, Tybalt would have to pass through the territories of every Cait Sidhe monarch between here and there, and unlike the Kings and Queens of the Divided Courts, who would treat us like temporary, somewhat unwelcome guests, he could have been faced with challenges.

“I don’t heal like you do, little fish,” he said. “I would prefer not to come to your bower broken and bleeding and already half-dead.I would offer you a poor wedding night if I did. Had word gotten out too soon of our planned nuptial date, the chances of someone deciding they had the time to assemble a challenge would have been higher than anyone wishes to take, myself included. This way, we will pass through like riders in the night, swift as anything and twice as difficult to catch or corner.”

“How are we getting to Toronto?” I sat fully up, and politely didn’t comment on the look of profound relief on Tybalt’s face. Had he really been expecting me to sulkthathard? Well, maybe I would have, if not for Etienne slapping some sense into me. I can be petty when I want to be. I try my best to avoid the urge.

“Sir Etienne has agreed to the loan of his daughter for the greater distances,” he said. “Otherwise, we will be depending on the kindness of each successive Kingdom to carry us along. The High King insists this is how he and his wife travel when the need strikes them, and that all his vassals will be obliging.”

Somehow, I doubted they were going to be as obliging for a king-breaker and a King of Cats as they were for the High King and Queen of the Westlands, but that was a problem for the future. For tomorrow, apparently. “Okay. Do I need to pack?”

He blinked. “Is that all? My punishment for conspiracy is allowing you to select whatever horrors you desire from the black hole you refer to as a wardrobe?”

I reached over and socked him lightly in the shoulder. “Be nice, or I’ll decide to be mad at you after all. My wardrobe doesn’t contain any horrors.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “No. Merely bloodstains and suspicious slash marks.”

“Is it my fault I have a very stab-able face?”

“Yes,” he said dryly. “As it is not your face, but rather, your actions, which generally inspire the stabbing, I have to conclude that it is absolutely your own fault. I wish it weren’t, as it means to accept you as you are is also to accept that you will occasionally come home covered in blood and act as if I’m being unreasonable for being upset about it, but I cannot change the world with wishing. I’ve tried many a time before, and almost always, getting what I wanted would only have made me less than the man I am.”

“Almost always?” I asked.

“Yes.” He smiled like the sunrise. “I wished you would marry me, and unless you inspire a level of stabbing that is awe-inspiringeven for you, my Lady of Knives, in three days, my wish comes true.”

“Three days? Not tomorrow?”

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