Page 56 of Be the Serpent

“They did,” I said. “And then we claimed offense, the way I told you we were going to, and the Queen supported our claim, and now Raysel is going to come and spend a year in my house.”

“You know, we didn’t get a lot of good lessons out of Devin, but of the ones he had to offer us, I think you were his prize pupil.”

I blinked. “Come again?”

“He was a horrible, manipulative asshole, and we all deserved better, and nothing he did to us was fair.” The distinctive sound of eggs being whipped in a glass bowl drifted out of the kitchen. “But as long as we had him, we always had a Home to go back to when we needed it. He taught us the most important thing we could do in this world was be a haven for people who didn’t have anywhere else to go—and that just having someone who would open a door and say ‘You can stay here if you need to, I guess,’ isn’t the same as having somewhere to go. Your mother would never have tossed you out of her tower. Julie’s evil uncle would never have banished her from the Court of Cats.”

Her tone didn’t vary as she mentioned Julie’s relationship to Tybalt. I glanced at him. He looked hurt, but not particularly angry, or surprised. That was probably for the best.

“Did you forget who I married?” I asked, mildly.

“Did you forget how much she hated him?” The eggs sizzled as Stacy poured them into the waiting pan. “He never abused her, never beat her or starved her or intentionally insulted her, but she was never comfortable in his Court, either. I wouldn’t have let you marry him if he’d been actively abusive. But he wasn’t good for her then. He’s good for you now.”

“That’s a complicated form of forgiveness.”

“What can I say? I’m a complicated lady.” Stacy poked her head around the corner of the kitchen doorway. “Grab plates and set the table?”

“Aren’t we going to wait for the kids?”

“Breakfast for dinner means we don’t wait,” she said. “Your eggs will suffer for it if we let them get cold. Come on, be a sport, and set the table.”

“On it,” I said, and moved toward the kitchen.

Tybalt watched me go. When I looked back, one last time, he mouthed exaggeratedly, “Be careful.”

I flashed him a smile, pulling the little jar out of my pocket and removing the lid. The second sip of Oberon’s blood was as overwhelming as the first, and it burned when I swallowed it. The smell of roses snapped back into sharp relief. I hadn’t realized until that moment how much it had been settling into the background, fading into the way things always worked and always were.

That seemed to be part of the danger in dealing with Titania. She remade the world in her own image, and as she did, she became a part of the way things had always been, smoothing out and justifying contradictions, making it harder and harder to argue with them. I kept that thought in my mind as I stepped into the kitchen, where Stacy was transferring scrambled eggs onto a serving dish. She looked up and beamed at me, and she was the Stacy I had known and loved for almost my entire life, and I had no idea how I was going to do this. Whatever I might have said to Oberon, I was here to kill my friend. My friend who had never really existed. But all the memories I had of her, all the time we’d spent together, the look on her face when she’d finished doing my makeup before I got married, the way she’d smiled at me when she set Cassandra in my arms for the first time as a wrinkled and furious newborn . . . all those things were real.

Titania could take my friend away from me. She couldn’t take what we’d been to one another. No one could do that, and I held to that thought as I got the worn earthenware plates down from the cupboard and pulled mismatched silverware out of the cutlery drawer, carrying it all into the next room to spread out across the table. Five kids meant it was never completely clear, even with Cassandra living in Muir Woods and Karen spending half her time at the Luidaeg’s; a half-finished Lego set took up a big chunk of the middle, and a small stack of poetry books weighed down some junk mail at the far end. I looked at the books and swallowed hard, catching the faint lingering scent of Jessica’s magic in the air around them.

“Hey, Stace?” I called, trying to sound casual about it. “Did you know Jessica was a Seer?”

“Oh, you mean that little game she likes to play with her books?” Stacy bustled into the dining room, Tybalt behind her. He was carrying a tray of pancakes and a platter of bacon, and looked perplexed about it. Under any other circumstances, his natural feline irritation at being pressed into helping bring out the food would have been funny. Right now, though, it was hard not to read it as another piece of evidence that Titania was rising, and giving Stacy the ability to compel others to do her bidding.

“Yeah, that,” I said.

“It’s not really Seeing, though, is it?” She put the eggs and a bowl of mixed berries on the table. “She reads a poem and then she tells you what she thinks it’s supposed to mean. She’s like one of those carnival fortune-tellers—not even the tarot readers, the ones who throw a handful of leaves on the table and then say they can see things in the shapes they’ve made. It’s just a way to make herself feel special. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

I frowned. I had never heard Stacy talk about her children so dismissively. “Why does she need to make herself feel special?” I asked.

“Middle child, not as surprisingly unique as her sisters, not as popular with the other kids as her older brother, not the youngest like Andrew,” said Stacy. “It doesn’t matter how much we love her, or how often we tell her she’s perfect exactly the way she is, all she sees is the places where she’s not enough. You remember what it was to be a teenager, Toby. Feeling like we didn’t measure up was our hobby.”

“We were surrounded by purebloods,” I countered.

“Yes, and she’s surrounded by oracles and king-breakers and impossible heroes,” said Stacy, and turned to walk back into the kitchen. “I know you never did it on purpose, because you never would, but you’re not the most amazing thing for her self-esteem.”

That stung. Even though I was sure none of this was purely Stacy speaking, it still stung. I stayed where I was, staring after her, as Tybalt moved to put an arm around my shoulders, holding me in place.

Stacy returned after a moment with whipped cream and syrup, setting them both on the table before taking her own seat and waving for us to do the same. “Come on, now, eat, eat. You love my cooking.”

“That’s true,” I allowed, and pulled away from Tybalt, easing myself into a chair. I didn’t reach for the food. I didn’t trust her not to have poisoned it, and blood-magic aside, I’ve learned some things about putting strange things into my mouth. Those lessons started with her eldest daughter—not Cass, her actual eldest daughter, Eira, who had used her own blood to set a binding curse upon me, somehow exploiting a loophole that forbade her to harm my grandmother’s direct descendants. If I’d been a little bit slower, or a little bit pickier about my allies, that incident could have been the end of me.

After Eira failed to kill me, it seemed almost like a waste to go off and get myself murdered by her mother. So instead, I sat there with my hands resting in my lap, close to the hilts of both my knives, and looked levelly at Stacy across the table. I wanted her to shed that face and show herself as she truly was, to manifest as Titania, so I could fight her without feeling like I was destroying something beautiful and precious. And I never wanted that to happen.

I didn’t want to fight Stacy. I wanted to go back to where I’d been the day before, where all the things about her that suddenly seemed like warning signs had just been parts of how the world worked, unremarkable aspects of reality. Where she was always going to be with me, always going to be my friend, and the idea of a world where Stacy didn’t exist was unthinkable.

Tybalt’s hand gripped my leg under the table, tight enough to provide a reassuring pressure, nowhere near hard enough to hurt. I shot him a relieved glance, and he nodded.