Page 2 of Be the Serpent

I spent fourteen years in that pond. Fourteen years for my two-year-old, mostly human daughter to grow up thinking I’d run out on her as soon as the challenges of motherhood became more than I could handle; fourteen years for my carefully constructed mortal life to fall apart. When the spell had finally broken and dropped me back into myself, I had been completely lost, thinking I would never be able to rebuild . . . thinking I’d failed everyone I’d ever cared about.

Now here I was, six years later, with a man in my bed who I’d have sworn hated me when I went into the water, a blood-sister under the sea and a heart-sister in the bedroom down the hall, and two boys who might as well be my sons just one room down from her. Raj didn’t technically live with us, since he was going to be the next King of Cats just as soon as his Regent decided he was ready to challenge Tybalt for the crown, but he was here more nights than not. He knew his responsibilities were going to take up a lot more of his time soon, and more, he knew that Quentin wasn’t going to be with us forever. We all knew that.

I had mostly been able to not think about it until my wedding, which took place in the knowe of Quentin’s parents, the current High King and Queen of the Westlands, aka the faerie bosses of North America. And yeah, the math on that makes him the current Crown Prince, meaning that one day not too far in the future—like within the next nine years—he’ll have to go back to Toronto and take up his adult duties. Which will suck for all of us, but maybe for Raj most of all. I’m Quentin’s knight and surrogate mother figure. Dean is Quentin’s boyfriend. Raj, though . . . Raj is his brother.

I made my way to the bathroom and clicked on the light, squinting in the glare. Being afraid of water doesn’t exempt me from the need to shower, although I draw the line at baths. I left the door open. Cait Sidhe don’t share the feline dislike of getting wet, and if the sound of the shower woke Tybalt, there was a chance he’d come to join me. Sometimes it’s nice to take chances.

Fae are more nocturnal than humans, meaning we tend to keep hours a lot closer to human teens than human adults. Waking up before noon would normally have meant climbing back under the covers and trying to steal a few more hours of peace before something exploded or tried to stab me or otherwise complicated my life. Not an unreasonable fear, either; I seem to have a calling for chaos, and it finds me even when I don’t go looking.

But today, I would have been up soon, with or without the nightmares to serve as an unasked-for alarm. Because today, in addition to being the six-year anniversary of my return from the pond, was the day I’d been called to attend formal Court at Queen Windermere’s knowe in Muir Woods, where I’d stand witness and provide testimony as Rayseline Torquill’s parents petitioned to have her woken from her enchanted slumber.

I had to wonder if Luna requested this date out of the mistaken belief that being reminded of my own lost years would make me more sympathetic to her daughter’s plight. Her daughter, who had been elf-shot on the same day as my daughter, Gillian, who was only in the line of fire because Raysel kidnapped her and put her there.

Gillian had been born mostly human, but had still been partially Dóchas Sidhe, despite growing up completely ignorant of Faerie. All that had changed on the day Raysel grabbed her and dragged her into danger. My then-boyfriend, Connor, had been killed trying to save her, and he died believing he’d failed, because Gillian was too human to survive being elf-shot.

For a pureblood like Raysel, elf-shot meant a hundred-year nap. For a changeling like Gillian had been, it meant a quick, painful death . . . or would have, if not for the fact that me being Dóchas Sidhe gives me a certain measure of control over someone’s blood. I offered my daughter the choice she’d been denied before, the choice between Faerie and a mortal life, and when she chose humanity, I pulled Faerie out of her veins, taking the poison with it. I freed her from my world to save her life, and that was due to Raysel’s actions.

Of course, Gillian ended up being elf-shot again some time later, and had been transformed into a Selkie in order to save her life. She wasn’t a Selkie anymore, having been transformed a second time, into one of the Roane, but she’d never be Dóchas Sidhe—or human—again. Those paths were lost to her. And I could trace those losses back to Rayseline. I’d agreed to speak at her trial. That didn’t mean reminding me of how we’d come to be in this position was a great plan.

Sadly, Tybalt didn’t come to join me as I scrubbed the last of my slumber away and rinsed the shampoo out of my hair. He was still sleeping peacefully when I stepped out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, and moved toward the dresser.

It was the sound of the drawer sliding open that finally caused him to crack one eye open, watching lazily as I dug for something to wear.

“Not dressing nicely for Court?” he asked.

“The sun’s up, and we have to walk through Muir Woods to get to Arden,” I said. “Unless you feel like maintaining a don’t-look-here from the parking lot to the top of the trail, I should wear something that doesn’t look out of place in a national park.”

He yawned extravagantly. “Or you could let me carry you through the shadows, as befits my lady wife.”

I threw a pair of socks at him. “Try again, kitty-cat. I just washed my hair, and I don’t want to get there with icicles on my head.”

Tybalt batted the socks aside. “I don’t understand why you would refuse a faster, safer means of travel with such regularity.”

“Can’t go through the McDonald’s drive-through on the Shadow Roads, and the boys are riding with us.” As my squire, Quentin had a vested interest in the proceedings. As Tybalt’s heir, Raj had much the same. And Dean, Quentin’s boyfriend—who was now also my little brother by marriage, one of the many, many things I try not to think about any harder than I have to—had been one of the others kidnapped by Raysel on the day when she was elf-shot. She cut his finger off to send a message. I still wasn’t sure which side he’d be speaking for.

Ugh. The only thing worse than attending a formal Court is attending a formal Court where I’m expected to participate in legal arguments. Normally, I come in, get into a fight with the nearest noble, stab something, and leave. It’s very efficient and dramatic and entirely inappropriate when you’re trying to convince the Queen to authorize the early awakening of someone who may not have broken Oberon’s Law in a way that anyone would hold against her, but who had definitely behaved in an inappropriate and impolite manner, possibly racking up several charges of offense in the process.

Including the one she was expecting me to make. Which was going to be its own big barrel of bullshit, and now I got to wade through it. Tybalt, Quentin, and May all knew about it, which meant Raj and Jazz almost certainly did too. None of them had told me not to do it. That didn’t make me any less anxious.

I dug out one of my oldest pairs of jeans and a black T-shirt with the Paxton Gate logo on it, pulling them briskly on. Tybalt was out of the bed by the time I had my jeans buttoned, and in the bathroom as I was belting my knives around my waist.

For years, the two I carried were a silver one gifted to me by a girl named Dare who thought I was going to be her hero, and an iron one given to me by Acacia, the Mother of Trees, when she realized I had to be the one who killed her husband. I’d been forced to stop carrying the iron knife after my blood shifted one time too many and left me too fae to handle it safely. I could push myself back toward humanity—my magic allows it—but Tybalt would kill me if I did that on purpose, and honestly, I wouldn’t blame him. I’m still trying to stay at least a little bit human, but at this point, making myself more mortal would just mean making myself more vulnerable, and risk taking me away from another family. I’m not going to do that.

Today would be the first day I carried two knives to Arden’s Court. The first, the silver, was familiar. The second was relatively new, although it felt natural and easy in my hand, and was made of a material I still hadn’t identified. In a very real way, it was the only gift I had received on my actual wedding day. Contrary to mortal customs, purebloods believed gifts should be given in private when possible, rather than forcing the recipient to perform gratitude for an audience. Wedding gifts were still showing up almost daily, making my front porch a constant surprise and my dining room a maze of boxes.

The knife was different. I hadn’t even realized it was a gift at first; I’d thought it was just something I could use to cut the cake. But when I’d tried to return it, the Luidaeg had interceded, explaining that once her father—you know, Oberon himself—handed someone a weapon, it was a grave insult to hand it back, and did I really want to insult my grandfather, the Lord of All Faerie, on my wedding day? Was I that eager to become something genuinely unpleasant and leave Tybalt functionally a widower?

I was not. And so now I carried a gift from the father of us all on my left hip, sharp and deadly and ready to be used.

But no pressure.

My life got weird at some point, is what I’m saying, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Tybalt emerged from the bathroom impossibly already dressed, which meant he’d probably popped over to the Court of Cats long enough to retrieve one of his apparently unlimited pairs of leather pants, combining them with a plain white shirt of a style that would have looked more contemporaneous on the set of a BBC period drama than the streets of San Francisco. We made an odd couple. But then, we always have.

“Are you ready, little fish?” he asked, voice mild.

I smiled, pulling my wet hair back with a scrunchie. “I’m always ready to go with you,” I said, and leaned in to kiss him, and together we left the room, heading for the chaos yet to come.

TWO