Page 75 of Sleep No More

“I’m not a hero,” I said. “I’m a lady’s maid.”

Her laughter was short and bitter. “As if servants have never been heroes? They’ve turned the tide of more than one war with unlocked doors and well-timed poisons. You can be a hero no matter where you’re standing in the fray. There are people who need you, and people who love you, and people who would be, quite sincerely, lost without you.”

“Tybalt,” I said, the word bitter and half-familiar on my tongue.

“Kitty-boy,” agreed the Luidaeg. “You remember more there than you want to let on, don’t you? Can’t say as I blame you. Gin says Titania dealt with the complication of the cats by making it so they all died out centuries ago. Right now, all you know about the Cait Sidhe is legend and rumor, and now here’s one of them looking at you like . . . okay, let me guess. Like he wants to peel your skin off your flesh and use it to make himself a nice new pair of boots.”

“Everyone seems to think saying his name should be enough to make me swoon and demand my memory back, but he keeps glaring at me. He’s so angry. I can’t understand why I would . . . why would anyone want to give up a life where they’re happy to be with someone who’s so mad at them?”

“He’s not mad at you, kid,” said the Luidaeg. “If I know the cat—and I do know the cat, better than I honestly want to, and I can thank you for some of that—but if I know the cat, he’s panicked and terrified, and so mad at Titania that he can’t see straight. He’s mad at the spell, Toby, not the person under it. If he seems mad at you, it’s not on purpose. I’m not trying to push you to accept or feel something you’re not ready for yet, but you’re very important to him. Possibly the most important person in his world. He waited a long time for someone to come along who could love him back the way he needed to be loved, who wouldn’t leave him, and that’s supposed to be you. Right now, he’s probably afraid it’s not, and that’s got to be tearing him up inside. Try not to blame him for feeling the way he does. He’s got big feelings. They get the best of him sometimes.”

“I thought you couldn’t lie.”

“I can’t.”

“So how are you telling me how he feels, if you don’t know?”

“I can’t lie, which means I can’t speak an intentional untruth, but I can say what I think, and as long as I don’t know one way or another, it’s allowed. I can’t promise you this is all going to be okay. I can’t say no one’s going to get hurt, or that you’ll definitely remember the last four months with enough clarity for the emotional ties to remain. But I can tell you Tybalt isn’t mad at you, because I know him better than that. If he’s mad at anyone besides Titania, it’s probably himself, for not somehow realizing this was a risk and whisking you off to the Court of Cats before she could cast her spell.”

She stood.

“Anyway, you’re awake now, and if Anthony’s going to sleep this off, he can do it with Acacia to watch over him while we go and get on with things. Feeling up for it?”

“Does it matter if I say no?”

“At this point, not really.” She sounded halfway sympathetic, which helped. Of course, she ruined it immediately afterward, by saying, “I spent years beating you into a properly heroic shape, and I can’t say I’m a big fan of this showroom shine you’ve got going on right now. Let’s fix it.”

She left the room, leaving the door hanging open as a rectangle of slightly brighter dimness in the dark. I rose, my bloody kirtle falling stiffly around my legs, and followed her out.

Grianne and Ginevra were in the main hall with Dean, Acacia, and Raysel, who looked much more relaxed now than she had before. Dean, on the other hand, was clearly even more anxious. He rushed out to meet me, grabbing for my arm.

“We have to go to Shadowed Hills!” he blurted.

“Not the best idea for me,” I said. “I’m sort of wanted for murder in the Mists right now, and I don’t think I can count on a second magical rescue from the Queen’s dungeons.”

“Grianne says Quentin is serving as Etienne’s squire!”

“He is,” I agreed, trying to pull my arm away. “He a friend of yours?”

Dean stared at me. “He’s your squire!”

I blinked. A lot of what he’d said before suddenly made a whole different shade of sense when looked at from that as a starting point. “He most assuredly is not,” I said. “I’m a changeling. Changelings don’t take squires.”

“You’re also a knight, and knights do,” insisted Dean.

“Changelings don’t get knighted!”

“Yet you did,” said the Luidaeg, wearily amused. “You were even a Countess for a hot minute, before you managed to shuffle that responsibility down the line to dear Dean here. Quentin’s been your squire for years. Somehow he’s not dead yet, which means one of you is doing a better job than I expected.”

“But . . .” I stopped, shaking my head. “But Quentin hates me. Always has.”

“Does he hate you, or does he hate changelings?” asked the Luidaeg. “Because I remember some of the ideas about changelings he had when I first met him, and it sounds to me like Titania would have been leaning pretty hard on those prejudices when she gave him his history. She told him changelings were inferior. That they exist so every pureblood gets to feel superior to someone, which probably helps her keep the court structure stable. And that changelings never deserve anything more than their existence. He knows the rules. He knows how the world works. And then you come along and screw everything up, the way you always do.”

I blinked at her. “What do you mean? I followed all the rules, just like everyone else.”

The Luidaeg laughed. “I don’t know which is funnier—that you believe that, or that you think I’m going to believe it. Kid, no matter how you slice the situation, you’re Amandine’s daughter, and this time you got to have Simon for a dad. He’s always been a soft touch, and nothing I’ve seen implies that Titania actually took the time to rebuild people from the ground up. She just gave them new histories and plunked them down to get on with it. Did he treat you like you mattered? As much as your sister?”

I nodded. “The rules were different for me, but . . . I was always his daughter. He always loved me.”