Page 17 of The Innocent Sleep

“I asked the pixies, and they showed me the scraped-out hall that would be the door, if the door were open at all. But it’s not, because Arden disappeared a hundred years ago and never came back.”

I frowned. “Arden disappeared, yes, but we found her. October found her.”

“Not here,” said Raj. “It’s like the world has completely rewritten itself. The old Queen is back on the throne, the one who held the Kingdom before Arden. The one without a name.”

I stiffened. “That’s not possible.”

“But it’s happening.”

The false Queen had been put in place by Eira in her guise as Evening Winterrose, part of the Daoine Sidhe First’s long plan to shape Faerie to her desires. I didn’t know her before her ascension; I don’t know who she was or why she wanted the throne. All those things ceased to matter when Evening put her in power, using the chaos that followed the Earthquake to cement her position before anyone could object. The existence of King Windermere’s children had been an open secret in some circles, but it seemed those circles had never extended to include the High Kingdom. The presumptive new Queen had taken the throne with the support of a local noble of high station and higher reputation. What more could be expected?

Nameless and without a family to stand behind her, that new Queen had ushered in an age of suffering for the changelings and shapeshifters of the Mists. Under her, we had been treated as little better than beasts. I had attended her Courts solely to annoy her, seeing it as my duty to keep her uncomfortable if she was going to oppress my people so. The Cu Sidhe and Swanmays had all but left the Kingdom. The cats remained. The cats always remain. Without us, the Shadow Roads begin to crumble, and the balance of Faerie falls out of true.

The false Queen had always hated changelings in general, and had come to hate October in specific. October had been mouthy and insouciant, unwilling to accept her “place” in the social structure, or in Faerie as a whole.

In many ways, she has always been more feline than she realized.

October’s reputation as a king-breaker had begun at home, when she’d been forced by the false Queen’s own hand to put Arden on her father’s throne and depose the pretender. That hadn’t been the end of our problems, as the woman had come back again and again to try and reclaim her throne, until she had finally crossed the truly unforgivable line by arranging the abduction of October’s daughter. It was because of her that Gillian had become a Selkie, bound to Faerie for a hundred years in defiance of her own Choice.

The false Queen had been taken into custody after that, and had been imprisoned in Arden’s dungeon for the past year and a half while the slow wheels of pureblood justice ground toward a condemnation. Everyone knew she would be punished, but as elf-shot was no longer the sentence it had once been, and none of the people involved wanted to cross the lines of morality that she had so gleefully skipped over, things had been moving at a crawl.

I stared at Raj for a long moment, silence building between us, my motionlessness a challenge. He looked back, unblinking, until I was forced to look away, conceding the version of reality he described.

“So Arden is gone and the false Queen holds the throne,” I said. “What other horrors wait in the world outside our walls?”

“There hasn’t been a lot of time for us to go poking around, with the whole Court needing to be fed,” he said. “I think this is the longest I’ve been able to sit still in about three days. And while we have the old station restrooms, they’re not enough for everyone, and they can’t help the people who can’t change shapes at all. We’ve had to set up litter pans in the tunnel, and getting trash bags and more litter takes almost as much time as food collection does.”

I grimaced. “How uncivilized.”

“It’s how mortal felines handle things,” he said, with a shrug. “And just stop for a second and think about it. Normally when a member of the Court needs to relieve themselves, they use the shadows to reach a private location. Well, right now, they can’t even get into the shadows. We have one public bathroom and one employee bathroom. Both of them work, although I’m not sure how, since it’s not like the plumbing can go anywhere, but they have to be cleaned five times a day.”

“I hope that’s a duty you’ve been able to evade.”

“Oak and ash, yes. I pulled rank when one of the older tabbies tried to force me to pick up a mop. But like you said, this isn’t sustainable, and it hasn’t left me a lot of time to explore.”

I nodded. “Have you been to Shadowed Hills yet?”

“No. It’s too far to go without knowing what I’ll find when I get there, and Gin and I have both been hoping you’d come back from wherever it is you disappeared to. Why did you decide to go to the Undersea instead of coming back here?”

“After I failed to find October at our house, and discovered our closest allies missing, I needed to consult with another of the Firstborn, to determine whether Titania was truly behind this, as I had already started to suspect,” I said. “The only one of her children I could think of who might be nearby was Amphitrite, who had promised at my wedding that neither I nor October nor any of our children would ever need to fear death by water. I decided to test the limits of her gift, and went to her in the water.”

Raj looked at me with horror. “And did you die?”

“I am a King of Cats, but I am very short of lives anymore,” I said. “I didn’t die. I found Amphitrite, and she took me to Saltmist, where I learned that the Undersea has been cut off from Faerie even as we have. Dianda and Patrick are sick with worry over the missing members of their family—Simon, August, and Dean were all above the water when this began, whatever it is. According to Amphitrite, this is her mother’s doing, no question, and is thus a very large and complicated illusion.”

“If you get hungry inside of an illusion, you still need to eat,” said Raj. “If October’s cats had been trapped outside due to an illusion, they could still have been hit by a car or mauled by a dog. Whether this is an illusion or not, we’re suffering, and you’re still King here, even if it’s not for that much longer.”

I took the implied criticism with as much good grace as I could muster. He was correct. This was still my Court and these were still my people, and while I had agreed to step down out of the understanding that I could not be fully present for them and for my family, the transition was still ongoing.

“I won’t apologize for worrying first for my wife, but I returned as soon as I was able,” I said. “We’ll find a better way.”

“We have to,” said Ginevra, stepping out of the shadows near the wall. Like Raj, she looked utterly exhausted, her normally rosy cheeks pale and wan, her eyes dull. “I don’t know how much longer we can do this.”

“There must be other royal cats we can reach out to,” I said. “Shade, in Berkeley, or Barbara, in Tamed Lightning. Perhaps things are not so dire where they are. Has anyone attempted to reach the other Courts?”

Ginevra shook her head. “Both the people you’ve just named are Queens. I can’t go to their territory without an invitation.”

“What of your father?” I asked. “You could return to him.”