Page 44 of Sleep No More

Arden hit him with a pillow. He laughed even harder, shoulders shaking with the force of it.

“You’re disgusting,” said Arden, and all but thrust herself out of the bed, shoving her brother aside in the process. She stormed toward me, and as she got closer, I saw that at least half her fury was an exaggeration for Nolan’s benefit. “Sorry you had to see that.”

“It’s okay,” I said, relaxing.

“Been awake long?”

“No. Was just looking for the garderobe.”

“The . . . oh, wow, you grew up low-tech. We at least reached the fifteen hundreds before we decided to shut down progress. We do indoor plumbing here on the Golden Shore.”

“They have flush toilets at Shadowed Hills,” I said stiffly. “They also have enough space that using them doesn’t wake up everyone else in the tower. Mother couldn’t install those if she wanted to, we’d never sleep again.”

Arden paused. “That may be the best argument for disgusting, inconvenient archaic technology I’ve heard. But no, we don’t have one of those here. You need the bathroom?”

I nodded vigorously.

“So we don’t have one of those here, either. We just pop over to the royal knowe when we need to use the facilities, then come back here until we’re ready for people. I don’t know if they’ll be that considerate with you, given the situation—we may be going straight into dealing with everything that’s been building up. Are you ready for that?”

“It’s that, or I’m peeing on your floor,” I said tersely. “Please take me to a bathroom.”

“Your funeral,” said Arden, and sketched a circle in the air, gesturing me through.

The hall on the other side was comfortable and warm, all polished wood and slate flooring. The ceiling was high, with exposed beams supporting dangling chandeliers filled with domes of gleaming witch light. Wait, no—not witch light. There were holes in the domes, and as I watched, a pixie emerged from one of them, leaving it to go dark until another pixie darted inside and lit it up again.

I turned to blink at Arden as she stepped through after me.

“Chrysanthe has an agreement with the local hives,” she said. “They don’t attack the crops, she gives them housing and all the kitchen scraps they can handle. In exchange, they light the halls and hunt the bugs that might otherwise denude some of our more valuable crops. Means we can slap an ‘organic’ label on things, and charge the assholes in the Mists twice as much as we charge the non-assholes.”

“Oh,” I said, bemused by the idea of basing pricing on attitude. If a pureblood did it, it couldn’t be wrong, and surely they didn’t sell directly to any changelings.

“Here, this way,” she said, guiding me to an unlocked door.

On the other side was a large bathroom, complete with large bath and floor-to-ceiling mirror. I stopped dead, getting my first look at myself since Shadowed Hills.

If I’d ever looked worse in my life, I couldn’t remember when. My hair was matted with blood and a variety of indistinguishable flavors of filth, several of which I was happy not to know anything about. Completing the effect, a few yarrow twigs jutted out of the snarls at odd angles. Father’s illusions were gone, which meant I could see how much my normal pallor had converted to a waxen sallowness, and how deep the dark circles under my eyes were.

A jagged hole in my shirt exposed a wide swath of equally blood-caked skin where I’d been stabbed, and my hands were covered in dried blood. I didn’t look like I’d eaten, slept, or bathed in roughly a decade, rather than having been safe at home in my mother’s tower less than two days before.

Arden, who had entered the room behind me, paused when she saw me staring at the mirror. “You can probably take the time to wash up—I’ll run interference if anyone tries to stop you,” she said. “Might be better not to go in front of the Queen when you’re looking like that. Assuming you want her to listen to you and not shoo you out to go and tend the cattle.”

“Do you ever take anything seriously?”

“I try really hard not to.” Arden’s reflection shrugged broadly. “Last time Nolan or I took anything seriously, a bunch of people died.”

I turned to gape at her. “Windermere. I knew I knew that name!”

She grimaced, glancing down. “Yeah, well, Nolan didn’t want me to change it, so here we are.”

“But you’re dead!”

King Gilad and Queen Sebille Windermere had been the rulers of the Kingdom in the Mists in 1906, when a terrible earthquake hit the mortal world hard enough to echo into the Summerlands. That was when we’d lost all contact with the Undersea. Prior to that, relations had been strained, but there had still been ways to pass between the Kingdoms. Then the earthquake had shattered their tenuous connections to the land, and their knowes sank so deep that we’d never been able to reach them again.

Titania had mourned, of course. Most of the denizens of the sea were descendants of Maeve and thus not to be fully trusted, but the Merrow were born of one of Titania’s own daughters, and she’d loved them dearly. Their loss had hurt her so badly that the rest of Faerie had moved inland in order to honor her grief, no longer living directly on the coasts. When I was a kid, August used to tell me stories about the abandoned knowes along the shore, falling slowly into disrepair, haunted by the shadows of the people who’d left them behind.

They’d given me bad dreams that kept me awake for days, until Father had ordered her to stop torturing her baby sister, and she’d gone looking for other ways to torment me.

The Undersea wasn’t the only thing we lost in the Earthquake. An assassin named Oleander de Merelands had somehow managed to break the wards on the royal knowe, slipping in while everyone was distracted by the shaking of the ground and murdering the king and queen in their beds. As far as I knew, no member of the royal family had escaped alive, not even the children. That was why Titania, in her wisdom, had left the choosing of our next monarch to the Rose of Winter, and why we answered to our current Queen, who was a distant relative of the Windermeres, born of a distaff line but close enough to claim the crown.