Page 7 of Night and Silence

Danny smirked. “As I was sayin’.”

The stairs widened as we approached the bottom, until we emerged into an open-walled sunroom with a latticed ceiling dripping with fruit-heavy grapevines. The grapes were pale pink and glowed from within. The pixies in my hair gave a pealing chime of delight and launched themselves into the air, racing to fill their arms with as much fruit as they could hold before darting away. Lowri chuckled.

“When did Arden plant grapes?” I asked.

“They were planted by the previous chatelaine, who hailed from a Kingdom in France before she came to the Mists,” said Lowri. “We found them here when we opened the lower levels. They’ve responded marvelously to care, haven’t they? We should have enough fruit to begin pressing our first wines in a season or two, once the Hobs figure out where the wine cellar is, and we’ll have drinkable vintages a decade or so after that.”

“You haven’t found the wine cellar yet?” Quentin sounded scandalized.

Lowri shrugged. “It hasn’t been a priority. This way.”

She led us across the sunroom to another set of stairs, this one made of redwood planks set into the side of the hill. More grapevines laden with glowing grapes twined around the trees around the steps, providing a soft light that led us down the last twenty yards or so into the valley, where a series of rough farm buildings had been constructed. There was something I recognized as a stable, a chicken coop, and several smaller, boxy structures that I assumed were for goats or sheep or the like.

There was also a dark-haired man in vaguely old-fashioned clothes, using a pitchfork to shovel hay into one of those smaller structures. It looked like a cross between a toolshed and an aviary, with wire mesh covering three of the four sides, and a door set into the fourth. He looked up at the sound of footsteps, smiling brightly at the sight of Lowri.

“Milady Glastig,” he said, bowing around his pitchfork. His accent was as outdated as the rest of him, like he hadn’t spoken to another person since sometime in the 1920s. Which, well, wasn’t far wrong. “I had wondered if you would grace me with your beauty on this night.”

“Sire,” said Lowri, bobbing her head in greeting. Her cheeks colored under the force of his attention. “I believe your sister asked me to remind you that it is no longer the custom to greet those of no family name with the name of their species.”

Nolan Windermere, Prince in the Mists, dismissively waved the hand not clasping the pitchfork. “So much has changed. How can I be expected to keep up?”

“Your sister bids you try.” Lowri stepped to the side, indicating our motley band with a half-sweep of one hand. “Sir October Daye, squire, and companion, to see you, sire.”

“Hi,” I said.

The change in Nolan’s demeanor was immediate. He straightened, returning his hand to the pitchfork, and offered a stiff nod. “Sir Daye. Squire Daoine. Master Troll.”

I could see the utility of calling people by the name of their descendant line when they didn’t have a family name—or, as in Quentin’s case, had chosen not to give it. Danny has a family name, McReady, but so far as I was aware, he hadn’t met Nolan before, and I wasn’t sure Arden could have told him Danny’s surname if she’d tried. There are a lot of fae in the Kingdom in the Mists. Arden was doing her best to meet as many of them as she could, but there was no way she was ever going to learn all their names. The numbers were against her.

“Quentin,” I said, pointing appropriately. “Danny.” Then I pointed to the trash can. “Arkan sonney, as requested, no longer running wild in San Francisco. Am I correct in assuming you’ve been preparing a, um, sty for them?”

“They’re not pigs,” Nolan said, sounding faintly affronted. It was a nice change from the stiff, awkward tone that had characterized most of our interactions thus far.

At least we could have interactions these days. When I first met Nolan, it was extremely one-sided, on account of his having been elf-shot and put into an enchanted sleep by the false Queen. It was all part of her campaign to keep Arden from seeking the throne, and it had worked for a very long time. Arden had been too busy worrying about what would happen to her brother if she got killed or captured to even think about politics.

Then the false Queen had been dethroned. Then Arden had regained her place and been officially recognized as Queen in the Mists. Then—as if all that hadn’t been enough—our friend Walther Davies had finally unlocked one of the doors alchemists throughout Faerie had been throwing themselves against for centuries and discovered the cure for elf-shot.

Nolan had been the first person Arden woke when the cure was approved by the High King. No one blamed her for prioritizing her brother, especially not me. I sometimes suspected Nolan might blame her a little, but if he did, he was smart enough to know it hadn’t been her fault. Her trying to take her throne sooner wouldn’t have woken him up or created the conditions that led us to the elf-shot cure. It might have ended with her dead and him waking up alone, in a world that had marched a hundred years into the future without him.

Elf-shot was created as an alternative to murder. Sometimes I wonder how anyone can possibly know that and still say the fae are kind.

“Pigs or not pigs, we have a bunch of them, and some of us need to drive back to San Francisco before bedtime,” I said. “Is that where they go?”

Nolan started to answer, only to pause and smile as warmly as I’d ever seen him do, eyes fixed on a point behind my shoulder.

“You don’t have to go back to San Francisco,” said the voice of Arden Windermere, Queen in the Mists. “We have plenty of guest rooms.”

“Last time we stayed in them, Quentin wound up elf-shot,” I said, turning to face her. “Plus, I need to feed the cats. May gets pissed when I assume she’ll take care of it.”

Arden smiled wryly. “Oh, Maeve forbid your cats should go unfed. They might wither away to nothing.”

I swallowed my first response. She hadn’t been talking about Tybalt. I knew she hadn’t been talking about Tybalt. That didn’t stop my temper from flaring. “According to them, it’s a constant risk.” I indicated the trash can. “We got your beasties. Can we put them in the pen?”

“That’s what it’s for.” Arden walked past me to stand next to her brother, not seeming to notice that her gown—dark blue velvet the color of the Pacific shore at midnight, with drifts of “foam” made from seed pearls and tiny opals stitched around the hem and neckline—was dragging in the dust. Then again, she never seemed to care much about that sort of thing. For her, queenship was a way to protect her family and her father’s legacy, like a jumped-up form of customer service. She was doing a good job so far. She was never going to be one of the great elegant monarchs from the history books, and she didn’t seem to have a problem with that.

Standing next to her brother, it was impossible not to see the resemblance. They both had hair the color of blackberries, so dark it managed to cross over into verging on purple, and mismatched eyes, one pyrite, one mercury. The order of the colors was reversed, his pyrite to her mercury, but apart from that, it would have been understandable to assume they were twins. I knew they were a few years apart, with Arden the elder, but little things like that don’t tend to matter in Faerie, not once the parties involved are past childhood.

Tybalt has centuries on me. I have decades on Quentin. Someday we’re all going to be adults together, and I’m just human enough to find that unsettling.