Page 12 of Once Broken Faith

Voices drifted from the dining room when I was halfway down the stairs. They were talking quietly, presumably so as not to wake Quentin. I could have told them not to bother. He was a teenage boy. He didn’t wake up for anything short of a small explosion, and even then, he was just as likely to decide that I could take care of things, roll over, and go back to sleep.

Then I came around the corner at the bottom of the stairs, and the dining room appeared before me, and I stopped worrying about little things like that. I had much bigger problems.

High King Aethlin Sollys was settled in what was normally my seat, a tumbler of lemonade in front of him. To his left sat a woman with hair the color of molten silver and eyes like chips of blue topaz. They were both wearing human clothes—him a button-down shirt, her a Toronto Furies jersey—and neither was wearing a human disguise. I blinked, schooling my expression. They weren’t wearing cosmetic illusions, either, and the left side of the High Queen’s face was covered in small, pitted scars, like the aftermath of a bad case of acne. She was pureblooded Daoine Sidhe. Daoine Sidhe don’t get acne.

Almost as if she’d read my mind, Maida smiled, shrugged, and said, “Fae may be immune to most human skin conditions, but it turns out we’re not immune to smallpox.”

“Oh,” I said. There didn’t seem to be another good response. May, who was sitting on the other side of the table, gave me a pointed look. Right. I couldn’t stand here silently forever. “So, um, to what do we owe this not at all terrifying honor?”

“Well, as you may have noticed, we were in the neighborhood,” said Aethlin. He chuckled at his own joke. May mustered a sickly smile.

Maida sighed and planted her elbow in her husband’s ribs. He made an exaggerated “oof” noise. Rolling her eyes, she looked to me, and said, “We wanted to come and see where Quentin is living, and talk to you a bit, as his parents, rather than as the High Monarchs of the Westlands. Do you think you can try to make that separation? For me?”

She sounded so earnest—and more importantly, so sincere—that I took a deep breath and said, “I’ll try. But you have to promise not to charge me with treason or something if I complain about the way he never wants to do the dishes.”

“He’s going to be High King someday,” said Aethlin. “He’ll never have to do the dishes.”

He’d said something similar the first time we met, during their visit to the Mists to confirm Arden as Queen. Believe it or not, I was much more relaxed with them now. “Which makes it all the more important that he do the dishes now, while he can still learn something from it,” I said. “Plus I’m really bad at doing the dishes, and why do I have a squire if not to make him do menial household chores?”

“Dishes build character,” said Maida. “Is he happy? Healthy? Is he eating his vegetables and making friends and having a normal life?”

I paused, looking between the two of them before I settled on Maida and said, “I’m guessing you’re the one who married into the royal family, huh?”

She smiled. “Is it that obvious?”

“Pretty sure he,” I gestured to Aethlin, “has never done the dishes voluntarily in his life, so yeah, it’s that obvious.”

“I was a Baron’s daughter in the Kingdom of Endless Skies,” she said. Kansas, in other words: a Kingdom so broad and so flat that in the end, they’d had to go with “we have no mountains” as a name. “No household to speak of, and my father didn’t want me treated differently by his staff, so he let most of them go after I was born. I did dishes. Also milked cows and fed chickens and learned how to wash my own clothes. It’s part of why I was willing to agree to the proposal that Quentin be put into a blind fosterage. It was important to me that he understand the people he would eventually be ruling from the bottom up, and not just from the top down.”

The other part of her agreement had been, of course, the fact that the request was coming from Eira Rosynhwyr, the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn, whose every wish was her descendants’ command. If Maida didn’t want to bring that up, I wasn’t going to do it either. I still paused. No household, no staff, and those scars on her face . . . “Forgive me if I’m overstepping my bounds right now, although you did promise not to have me arrested for treason, so there’s that, but . . . um . . .” I stopped, realizing I had no idea how to address the High Queen without taking us back toward the overly formal.

“Maida,” she prompted. “You can use my name when I’m talking to you as the mother of your squire. If anything, in this social context, I should be the one using your title.”

“Please don’t,” I said. “All right, um, Maida, forgive me if this is a delicate question, but I’ve never heard of a pureblood catching smallpox. It’s usually a human disease. Was your mother human, by any chance?”

She smiled radiantly. “Oh, I told you we’d found a good knight for Quentin, didn’t I?” she asked, glancing at her husband. “She’s smart, and she makes him do the dishes. Our son is in excellent hands.”

“Yes, dear,” said the High King. I swallowed a laugh. Under the circumstances, it could have been misconstrued, and I was still trying to dodge that whole “treason” thing.

Maida looked back to me. “Yes,” she said. “She was a local girl. Father had purchased her from one of the other nobles, who had snatched her to be a nursemaid for his children.”

“Ah.” I nodded. Using humans as nannies and wet nurses is an old fae tradition that thankfully never managed to get much traction on the West Coast. Grab a human girl and make her take care of your kids during those messy, inconvenient parts of childhood, then dump her fae-struck and confused back into the mortal world. Fairy ointment is used to keep the kidnapped women connected to the fae world. Wipe it from their eyes before they’re sent home and they’ll have no way of explaining what happened to them. It’s cruel. It is, in every sense of the world, inhumane. But then, everything the purebloods do is inhumane, because they were never human to begin with.

“It wasn’t like that,” she said. “He bought her so he could set her free. He didn’t think it was right to keep slaves. And she refused to leave. She’d been in the Summerlands for fifty years by that point; everything she’d ever known was dead and gone, and she was still young because of the spells she’d been under. She was happy not to be beholden to a cruel master. She didn’t want to go and live among the humans. So she took over running his household, and eventually they fell in love, and I came along. I was his first child. He made me his heir.”

“I thought changelings couldn’t inherit,” I said.

“They can’t,” said Maida. “Father didn’t care. He was going to do right by me. He fired half his staff when he realized my mother was pregnant, and he fired the rest after I was born. I grew up surrounded by the people he thought of as family, and none of them ever cared that I was a mortal child. But then the pox came.” She touched the side of her face, looking briefly self-conscious. “Mother died. I lived, but barely. Father became withdrawn and quiet. He’d found the love of his life, and while he’d always known that he’d outlive her, he’d been expecting more time. So much more time.”

“I was a United States Senator when all this happened,” said Aethlin. May and I looked at him blankly. He chuckled. “It was part of my training to be King. I had to wander the whole continent, meet all sorts of people—Quentin will be expected to do the same, once he becomes a knight errant.”

“Right,” I said. Because he was going to be High King someday. He couldn’t learn the whole country if he stayed in California forever. We were many things, but we were not absolutely representative of the people he would be expected to rule.

Aethlin continued: “Part of my duties involved calling on every noble with a holding large enough to offer me hospitality. I’d already visited the King of Endless Skies, and both Duchies; there were no Counties at the time, so I came to a Barony, and met the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.”

“I had pox scars on my face and chicken shit in my hair,” said Maida.

“You hit me with a broom,” said Aethlin. “No one had ever hit me with a broom before.”