Page 89 of Be the Serpent

“I’m tired, Toby. I’m so, so tired.” She shook her head. “I can’t lie, and I still can’t tell you how tired I am, because the words aren’t there. I’ve been bound this way for more than five hundred years. I was grieving the deaths of my children when she caught me, and I’ve never had the time to process their loss, not really, not without every hero and would-be despot in Faerie banging down my door. I am exhausted. Unbind me and I’m at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean an hour later, sleeping a century away. Titania is back. She’s limited but she’s freer than she’s been in five hundred years, and she’s not going to stay gone for long. Unbind me, lose me as a resource, and she’ll take you apart. Faerie can’t afford that. So you can’t set me free.” The corner of her mouth twitched upward in a smile. “Anyway, I said I was the one who got to kill you, and you don’t want to make a liar out of me, now do you?”

“No. I don’t.” I turned to look at Oberon. “Do you have anything to add here? Anything at all?”

He shook his heavy, antlered head, not quite meeting my eyes. “As my daughter says, she cannot lie,” he said. “Anything I add would simply imply that I didn’t trust her to tell the story on her own.”

“Real nice, another excuse to stand around not doing a damn thing,” I snapped.

He finally focused on me. “What?”

“You heard me. All you’ve done since I found you is abdicate responsibility. You’re supposed to be the King of All Faerie, the one who rules without boundaries or borders, and you’ve been doing what? Oh, right, hanging out in the Luidaeg’s apartment while we keep tearing each other apart out here. We needed you. We still need you. And you might as well not be here. You didn’t want your wife running around making trouble after your other wife got fucked by your daughter, so you locked her in a box you thought would hold her, and you didn’t think about the consequences. You did the absolute least you could do, and when that wasn’t enough, way hey, off you fucked for five hundred years. I know you’re a living god and all that crap. I no longer give a shit. You’re the ultimate deadbeat dad, and you care so much when it doesn’t inconvenience you, and you disappear so quickly when it does.”

Oberon looked at the Luidaeg, incredulous. She shrugged. “Sorry, Dad. I love you a lot, way more than she does, and she’s not wrong. You kinda suck.”

“There was a time when Faerie knew what it meant to respect me,” he said, and his voice was a roll of thunder in the distance, and he was the destruction of everything I held dear. I had to fight not to shy away.

The memory of Titania in the moment when they first stepped into the newborn Faerie kept me standing exactly as I was, watching him through narrowed eyes. She’d been so young, and so undamaged, and so ready to begin this wild new adventure with her sister and her lover by her side. She reminded me of Raysel, I realized. Somewhere along the line, something had broken her, and unlike Raysel, I wasn’t sure she could be fixed.

“There was a time when Faerie knew who you were,” I said coldly. “Now where the hell is your wife? Not Maeve, I already know you don’t know where she is, but Titania. The one who killed my best friend and my niece and only didn’t kill me because she couldn’t.”

“My Lady of Flowers has . . . concealed herself from me,” said Oberon carefully. “I know not where she walks.”

I stared at him. “You lost her? Again? I thought you’d be more careful this time.”

“She is not an object, to be misplaced,” he said. “She is a Queen, and walks where she will.”

“No,” I said. “Nope. People who want to kill me need to be watched. They need to be tracked. I need to know where they are at all times. And you lost her.”

“He didn’t lose her,” said the Luidaeg. “He just didn’t care enough to watch where she went.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Not sure why you’d think that was my goal.” She looked at Oberon. “Not sure why you’d think you’re the only one who’s run out of patience.”

He frowned. “You were supposed to be on my side.”

“And you were supposed to step in and say ‘Hey, that’s not cool, don’t do that’ when your wife decided to make it so that I couldn’t lie, but here we are,” she said.

“Can we get back to the part where you lost Titania?” I demanded. “Because I am really not cool with this. Can you find her?”

“No. As before, she has concealed herself from me.”

I considered the virtues of walking away from all of this. Tybalt and I could move to the middle of nowhere—what Kingdom corresponded with Ohio, anyway?—and live a peaceful life devoid of Firstborn, and long-lost Faerie monarchs, and centuries-long revenge plans. And if we did that, I’d give us a year, tops, before the boredom brought us crawling back and begging for a little recreational chaos. It wasn’t flattering, but it was true.

I sighed. “All right. So we have a missing Faerie Queen, and no way to protect ourselves from her.”

“I didn’t say that,” said Oberon.

I gave him my full attention. “Oh?”

“She still can’t harm you,” he said. “When I restored the bindings, I did not thrust her back into the mirrored lives—you convinced me it was cruel to innocents, if not that it was cruel to her—but I did return the injunction against hurting my Jenny, or her descendants. She can no more do you harm than my sweet Annie can tell a lie.”

“Bite me,” said the Luidaeg.

“Even so,” he said. “She will not hurt you. She can’t. Nor can she return to harm the children of her last mirroring: they are also safe from her, forever, or so long as you claim them as your family.”

I paused. “Wait. Did you bind her not to hurt anyone I consider my family?”

He nodded.