Page 10 of The Unkindest Tide

Days ticked by, and plans were made as we inched toward Moving Day. May first had a lot of power and significance once, back in the days of the Three. There was a time when they’d formed a stable triad, keeping Faerie safe and secure. But something had changed. Whatever it was had happened early on, before changelings existed, before the Firstborn had children of their own, and it had resulted in Oberon splitting his time between two very different Courts. That was when the Divided Courts earned their name. Starting with their split, on May first, Oberon would kiss Maeve good-bye and return to Titania’s bower. On November first, he’d repeat the trip in reverse.

Of course, that all ended when the Three disappeared. Moving Day has been symbolic for centuries. The smaller inhabitants of Faerie, the pixies and the bogeys and the so-called “monsters,” still respected Moving Days. Even the ones who didn’t necessarily pack up and go would at least rearrange their nests and shift their belongings in symbolic recognition. The larger fae, however, the ones who liked to pretend we didn’t miss the Three, or that we hadn’t been affected by the dwindling of the First in their absence, mostly ignore the significance of the holidays. They’ve been reduced to excuses for feasts and grand celebrations in the modern world, Beltane Balls and Samhain revels, and no one really talks about what those days originally meant, to us or to anyone.

I don’t have many fond memories of my mother these days. I never had a lot of them, but the more I learn about her, the more even the good ones wind up tainted as I realize what she was to me. Still, I remember her waking me early on Moving Days, with scones and jam and bowls of berries in sweet cream. I remember her taking me around the tower grounds, telling the stories of travel, the migratory fae, the way we used to wander the worlds, until one by one, our Firstborn put down roots and wove themselves a homeland. Sometimes we’d go to watch the pixies in flight, but we’d always wind up inside, and spend the bulk of the day cleaning everything we could reach before moving our beds from one side of the room to the other, symbolically renewing the spaces where we lived, making them seem new again.

Those had been good days. Maybe the best days, as I measured the interactions between my mother and me. I lay in my bed three days before the end of April, Tybalt snuggled against me, his breath slow and even and peaceful, and wondered whether whatever the Luidaeg had planned for us was going to result in ruining those last few happy memories of my mother.

If I don’t have a lot of fond memories of my mother, I have even fewer illusions about her. Most of them died a long time ago, and I can’t say I was necessarily sorry to see them go. But it would be nice to still believe she had occasionally cared about me, even if it was only in the way a farmer cares about the dog who herds the sheep back into their barn at the end of the day. Maybe I’d never been anything more than useful to her. Given how much I did know, I wanted that to be enough. Oberon’s eyes, I wanted that to be enough.

My elderly Siamese cats, Cagney and Lacy, were curled up on my pillow, keeping me solidly between them and Tybalt. They liked having him around in much the way I imagined they would have liked having a tame lion around: a larger predator that wasn’t interested in eating them kept them at least a little bit safer, but that was no real guarantee that tomorrow, the lion wouldn’t decide it wanted a meal of domesticated feline. They were technically subjects of the Court of Cats—all cats belong to the Court of Cats—but they weren’t fae, and they couldn’t reason with him the way a fae cat would have.

Cagney purred and pressed herself against my head. Lacey did the same. I closed my eyes, trying to convince myself I could go back to sleep. It didn’t work. I’d gone to bed shortly after dawn, and while it had only been about seven hours, part of me was all too aware that midnight was approaching fast. Once the clock struck twelve . . .

We didn’t have any carriages to turn back into pumpkins, but there were going to be some uncomfortable transformations all the same. Nothing was going to stop them now, short of another kidnapping or murder, and I wasn’t actually sure either of those would be enough to get me out of this. The Luidaeg had been waiting centuries for the chance to avenge her children. She wasn’t going to let something that someone else could handle force her to wait any longer.

“I know you’re awake, little fish,” said Tybalt softly. “Would you like to discuss what’s troubling you, or would you prefer to play at slumber?”

I winced. “How long have you been awake?”

“Not long,” said Tybalt. He ran a hand across my hair. The cats made small grumbling noises and got up, prowling down to settle at the foot of the bed, well away from any potential activity.

“Are you lying?” I rolled onto my side, so we were almost nose-to-nose.

Tybalt smiled. “Small untruths between lovers are not necessarily lies; sometimes they can be considered a form of kindness.”

I considered this and sighed. “Right. Kindness. I’m . . . I’m all right, I think. This is a good thing. We’re bringing back the Roane. We could use a little prophecy in our lives right now. Maybe if we hadn’t lost them, we wouldn’t have been caught flat-footed when Janet broke Maeve’s last Ride, and things wouldn’t be so messed up.”

“Ah, but if not for Janet, your mother would never have been born, and if not for your mother, you would never have been born, and perhaps I am a selfish man, but I prefer a world that has you in it.” He leaned closer, until his nose actually touched mine. “Must I begin quoting sweet William before you’ll believe me?”

“How did I wind up falling in love with such a nerd?” I asked.

He smirked. “Luck.”

I laughed. “Right. Luck. Luck, and bleeding all over you way too many times for comfort, and a lot of other unpleasantness, but we’ll roll with the one that doesn’t ruin the upholstery.” I sobered, looking at him. “Don’t you wonder, sometimes, what it would have been like if we hadn’t lost them? If, I don’t know, Janet had broken the Ride but not so badly that Maeve . . . well, that whatever happened to Maeve happened? Maybe things would be better.”

“Or perhaps you would never have been born because your mother would have been treated as a proper Firstborn princess, regardless of her maternity, and never encountered a human man, nor deigned to let him touch her.” Tybalt ran a hand almost reverently down my cheek. “I am younger than the loss of the Three, but older than you.”

“Very aware, and just human enough that it sort of creeps me out if I think about it too hard, so if we could not talk about your age in bed, that would be awesome,” I muttered.

Tybalt laughed, once, sharply. “Oh, October, I look forward to the day when there are so many centuries between us that the existence of the years I spent without you is no longer of any importance or concern.”

“That day is not today,” I said.

“Indeed.” He stroked my cheek again. “When I was a boy, quests to find our missing King and Queens were common. A good way of burning off extra, unwanted heirs, on the chance that your bed was blessed enough to get them. Too many good fae were lost, and not only from the Divided Courts, for with the loss of the Three, the surviving Firstborn began to go as well, and we were not as settled in the idea of ruling ourselves then as we are now.”

I blinked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean there has never been a High King of Cats, but once, men such as my father would have been unable to run their Courts as petty dictatorships. Malvic himself would have stepped in and stopped the cruelties, and he would have been allowed to do so, because we were in the habit of obedience. Our Firstborn, when they walked the world, did so as judge and jury—and while they may have kept us kinder with one another, they also kept us as children. We never learned the ways of self-control, for there was no need to do so.”

“Huh,” I said. “Evening must have loved that.”

“Given her descendants, I’d suppose she still does.” He offered a small smile as he sat up. “Now that you’re well and truly distracted, are you prepared to tell me what’s actually bothering you, or shall I dredge up more ancient history and pretend it passes for pillow talk?”

“Bastard.” I swatted him in the arm as I sat up.

His laughter was sincere, and enough to melt away a bit more of the tension in my shoulders and back. If Tybalt was laughing, the world couldn’t be that bad. “My father took no wife, and I never met my mother. He bought me from her when I was but a kitten, and my eyes not yet opened. My sister went back when she was older, after I was King in my own right, but it was too late; the woman who bore us had already stopped her dancing.”

Meaning, in the often complicated parlance of the pureblooded fae, that she’d died. I blinked once, trying to decide whether saying I was sorry would be appropriate. He didn’t seem upset, and there was no way of knowing how many centuries ago this had happened. Not without asking, and that would take us even farther down the path of “things I really would prefer not to discuss in the bedroom, thanks” than we’d already gone.