Page 20 of Once Broken Faith

Tybalt knew Arden. He could have told her he was coming. The fact that he hadn’t could only have been intentional, a move designed to put her off her guard. It might have been a reaction to her failure to invite him in the first place: I didn’t know. I didn’t know a lot of things, including what sort of game he was playing here, and since I couldn’t ask him, it was difficult to keep the pit in my stomach from opening even wider than it had before.

The Luidaeg gave me a sympathetic look. “Never forget that he’s from a different Court. You can love him—I know you do—and he can love you, but there are places where your differences will always win out. Maybe it’s good that this is happening now, while you still have the distance to see them.” She reached over and carefully untangled my fingers from Karen’s. “You, come with me. We need to do a circuit of the room, so everyone here remembers you’re under my protection.”

Karen bit her lip and nodded, only looking back once as the Luidaeg led her away.

Walther, Quentin, and I stood silent for a moment, taking in the room. Whoever was in charge of the decorating—probably Lowri, given how recently Madden had been woken—had pulled out all the stops. Redwood boughs draped with fog-colored ribbons formed great arcs across the ceiling, heavy with the glittering shapes of pixies and fireflies. The floor was hidden by a warm, conjured mist that smelled of blackberries and the sea. Everywhere I looked there were servers in the colors of the Kingdom, moving through the crowd with trays of drinks and small canapés. Most people were seated by this point, and the servers were bringing them baskets of fragrant bread and larger glasses of sparkling wine.

The only table not being attended by one or more servers in Arden’s livery had been claimed by the King and Queen of Highmountain. They sat alone while their Barrow Wight handmaid rushed back and forth, bringing them trays of delicacies, carting away their empty glasses, and trying to avoid colliding with any of the servers.

“Paranoid about poison?” I guessed.

“Or they’re just jerks,” said Walther. “Not uncommon, as it turns out.”

“I can take you to your table, if you want.”

All three of us turned. Madden was behind us, golden eyes glowing in the diffuse light, dressed in the colors of the Kingdom. He’d never looked so much like a seneschal. Mostly, I was just glad to see him awake and moving around.

“That would be nice,” I said. “I’m not quite sure what the pecking order here is supposed to be, apart from ‘everyone is more important than you.’”

“Nah, not everyone,” he said. “Some people are less important. But, mostly, you’re right. Come with me.” He started across the room toward one of the tables that still had open seats. One of the people already seated there had hair the color of fox fur, russet red and inhuman.

Sylvester.

For a brief moment, I considered turning and running for the door. My fiancé was ignoring me, my niece was being tormented by a woman who should have been incapable of hurting us until she woke up, and now I was being seated with my semi-estranged liege? There wasn’t enough “no, thank you” in the world. In the end, I couldn’t do it. Walther needed me here. The High King had ordered me to be here. Karen needed me to be here. I squared my shoulders, straightened as much as I could, and allowed Madden to lead us to the table.

There were seats for ten. The five occupied seats were held by Sylvester, Luna, Li Qin, Elliott, and Elizabeth Ryan, who had somehow convinced the servers to give her a large glass of whiskey instead of the sparkling wine that everyone else was drinking. She barely glanced up as we approached the table.

Sylvester, on the other hand, rose and offered me his hands. “October,” he said. There was no mistaking the delight, or the relief, in his voice. “I was hoping you’d come sit with us.”

No matter how angry with him I was, he was my liege, and the man who’d been the closest thing I had to a father for most of my life. I slipped my hands over his, letting him close his fingers around mine, and said, “I guess this is where Arden wanted us. Hi, Sylvester. Hello, Luna.”

Luna Torquill, Duchess of Shadowed Hills, and formerly a friend, did not reply. She turned her face to the side, showing me the tapered point of one white-skinned ear. Her hair was pale pink at the roots, tapering to red-black at the end, and had been partially braided to form a crown around her head, while the bulk of it fell, loose and unencumbered, down her back. She was beautiful. There was no denying that. But she wasn’t the woman who’d known me as a child, or the one who used to comfort me. That version of Luna had died when her own daughter poisoned her, forcing her to abandon her stolen Kitsune skin in order to survive.

“I met your sister,” I said, partially out of spite, partially out of sheer stubbornness. I wanted her to see me. I wanted her to acknowledge that we had a history, and she couldn’t just cut me out of her life because she didn’t want me anymore. “Ceres, I mean, in case you have other sisters. She’s living in Silences these days. She said she was glad to hear that you were doing well.”

“I’m not doing well,” said Luna. “My daughter yet sleeps, for all that you changed her blood. When your mother changed your own, you woke. The same for your own child. You’ve kept my Rayseline from me. So no, October, I have nothing to say to you.”

“Luna,” said Sylvester, in a chiding tone.

Luna said nothing.

“I think I know why that is, actually,” said Walther. I turned to look at him. So did Sylvester. Walther flushed red, and continued, “When I’m mixing a potion, a lot of it is about intent, telling the spell what I want it to do.”

“All magic is like that,” I said finally, pulling my hands out of Sylvester’s and sitting down. He held on to me for a few seconds longer than I wanted him to, resisting my efforts to remove myself. In the end, however, he had to let me go. Anything else would have been rude.

“Sure, but that’s the point,” said Walther. He sat. So did Quentin. As if by magic, servers appeared to set goblets and bread in front of the three of us. “When your mother changed you, she wanted you to wake up. When you changed your daughter, you made her mortal, and you knew she needed to wake up or she was going to die. So you both brought intent to what you were doing. You removed the elf-shot as part of removing the parts of the blood that weren’t needed anymore.”

“Oh,” I said quietly. That was all. I didn’t dare say anything else: I was too afraid that he was right.

Rayseline Torquill was Sylvester and Luna’s only child. She had been born the daughter of a Daoine Sidhe and a Blodynbryd, something that would have been impossible if Luna hadn’t been wearing a skin stolen from a dying Kitsune, making herself part-mammal for as long as she had it. Faerie genetics don’t follow rules so much as they obey vague suggestions, at least when they feel like it. Rayseline had been born with biology that was forever in the process of tearing itself apart, and eventually, she’d snapped under the strain, trying to murder her parents and claim their lands as her own. She’d killed my lover—her ex-husband—Connor O’Dell when he’d jumped in front of the arrow intended for my daughter. Sadly, his sacrifice hadn’t been enough to keep Gillian from being hurt. It had just been enough to make me lose them both, him to death, her to the human world.

Raysel had also been elf-shot on that day, and her mother had asked me to soothe her pain. I’d done the best I could, slipping into Rayseline’s sleeping mind the way I had once slipped into Gillian’s—the way my mother had slipped into mine—and asking what she wanted to be. When I’d finished, she was purely Daoine Sidhe, more prepared to control her magic and her mind . . . and she’d still been asleep, because I hadn’t wanted her awake.

Luna must have known that from the start. It explained a lot. And it didn’t make things any better between us. I wasn’t sure anything could.

Li Qin smiled at me across the table. She was a short, lovely woman of Chinese descent, with eyes almost as black as her hair, and an air of serenity that came from knowing she was in control of her own luck. Literally: her breed of fae, the Shyi Shuai, manipulated probability in a way that could lead to remarkable good fortune and equally remarkable backlash. I sometimes suspected, although I’d never asked her, that one of those backlashes had influenced Li’s widowing. Her wife, January O’Leary, had been Sylvester’s niece, and she’d died when I wasn’t fast enough to save her.

Sometimes I wondered why Sylvester wanted to make peace with me. I wasn’t good for his family.