Page 47 of The Innocent Sleep

Still, we fared well enough, especially compared to the Courts with fewer royals to serve them. Raj became a frequent visitor at Shade’s Court, spending as much time as he could helping her keep the nursing cats fed and the kittens healthy. Considering the fate that had befallen his own mother after Oleander poisoned the Court’s supply of food, it was understandable that he would take this personally.

Ginevra worried about her father, who had thus far refused her offers to come and visit, saying he would have trouble letting her go again if she did, and wanted to avoid throwing us all off-balance. “Royal cats have always been precious,” he’d informed her. “Now, however, we are the key to survival, not just of the Shadow Roads, but of our entire species. Continue to do whatever it is you say you’re doing to change this reality, and I’ll hold the fort up here. Fix it, Gin. If anyone can, I know it’s you.”

He’d asked her to stop calling after that. When she called anyway, he refused to discuss anything of any import, or to answer any specific questions about his Court. She was, politely and with the absolute greatest regard, cut off.

All three of us were frequent visitors at the Library of Stars, now that we knew the situation. Technically, we had no Library cards. Magdaleana was unable to issue them without the Library’s approval, and as the Library was opening its doors without objection, she assumed that meant we were allowed. The rules had, after all, changed during this effective assault upon us all.

Visitors came and went as normal, doing their own research, working on their own projects. Really, that was in some ways the worst of it; Titania’s Faerie was so normal. It continued as if it had always been this way, as if this were a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the world. As if Maeve were a traitor, fae with animal qualities were “beasts”—a fact that never seemed to account for the fact that humans, like cats, dogs, and seals, were animals born of the mortal world, and yet had somehow shared their qualities with many among the fae—and changelings existed to serve.

Garm brought several other Gwragen to meet us at the Library, proud and smug over his ownership of the mystery we represented. All of them were surprised to see us, not having realized how deep the revisions went, but all also agreed, after checking the histories describing the Shadow Roads, that we must have existed all along, or else the Candela would have lost the power of passage.

Grianne was more of a surprise. She also came to visit with us in the Library, over and over again, and when I made use of my room at Shadowed Hills, she was frequently there, not speaking, just sitting in a shadowy corner and watching me. I would have thought I was being spied upon, were I not a cat, and well aware of the feline means of showing interest and fondness. Perhaps that was why we shared the Shadow Roads with the Candela; they were, in many ways, a very feline type of fae.

I came periodically to Shadowed Hills to see if anything had changed, and to try for a glimpse of my October—after meeting with Mary in Saltmist, I had stopped going to the tower more than once a week, not wanting to allow my own impatience to risk a bad outcome to our situation. August chased me away whenever she saw me, and as October never exited the tower unescorted, August always saw me first.

It was difficult not to take that behavior personally, even as I knew August had no idea that I was anything other than a stray that had somehow managed to enter the Summerlands. She seemed to truly care about October’s wellbeing, and keeping wild animals away from the garden was just a part of that concern.

I had seen Simon at the tower twice, both times from a great distance, and once at Shadowed Hills, exiting the receiving room. He seemed to be in good spirits, and was closer to the man I’d known when August was young than the man that he’d become in Evening’s service; well-fed, clean, with properly tended clothes and a tendency to easy laughter.

Of Amandine, there had been no direct sign. Apparently, one of the things Titania had done in creating her “perfect world” was dispose of the hope chests while simultaneously making Amandine’s nature known. Amandine was thus living the life she had once feared, constantly in demand by outlying fiefdoms who wanted her to adjust their changelings, making some more fae to serve in the homes of higher nobles, and some more mortal to work in the places where Faerie and the human world collided.

It was barbaric. I had seen October offer that precise choice to others, but she had always been exceedingly clear that it was a choice, a way of giving power back to people who had all too frequently been powerless. Ginevra had elected to become fully Cait Sidhe even without knowing that she would be a royal cat when the process was done; she’d wanted better control over her powers, and to be able to fully embrace her father’s world. Neither of her parents had pressured her in one direction over the other, and no one had ordered her to accept the transformation.

Cait Sidhe are natural shapeshifters. Perhaps that’s why we have such a natural loathing for people being changed against their will. Still, Amandine had little rest. She had position and respect and awe, all things I knew she would enjoy, but they came with a lack of privacy and a constant stream of demands upon her time. I found that somewhat charming. It galled me to admit that I took pleasure in any part of Titania’s workings, but I did. I enjoyed knowing that Amandine was still suffering, even in a world where she thought she had everything she wanted.

Eion worried for his daughters. I couldn’t blame him. The more I learned about the treatment of changelings in Titania’s world, the happier I became that all the changelings of the Cait Sidhe were safely locked up with the rest of my Court, well out of the reach of any of these people who thought themselves better than us as they behaved more like beasts than we had ever done. His daughters were good girls, young, sheltered enough to see nothing wrong with the lives they had lived or the society they had lived them in; they would do well on the Golden Shore, if he could only get them there. I had advised that he take a route through Shadowed Hills, where Sylvester’s general air of ennui and failure to enforce any truly draconian controls would mean their journey was more likely to succeed.

As Moving Day approached, we all grew restless and uneasy. Amphitrite had returned from her mapping of the barrier around the isolated Kingdoms, having determined that it was in truth unbreachable, and had been in Saltmist ever since, the additional anxiety of having her First in residence driving Dianda to climb the walls.

I would have liked to have my own First in residence. Or the Luidaeg, if I could have been allowed the luxury of choice. Even Hirsent, with whom I had a rather checkered past, would have been welcome. Anything to feel as if we were preparing for a fight while actually armed, and not swinging wildly in the dark.

Attempts at finding Janet had been fruitless. If she existed in this world at all, she wasn’t any place where I could find her, and there simply wasn’t time to continue focusing on it once it became apparent that it wasn’t going to be a quick, or easy process. The doorway to her courtyard was gone as if it had never been, and I had no mechanism for determining where it might have been relocated to. All I achieved by continuing that search was splitting my focus and increasing my frustration. We had more important things to worry about.

At least I knew our Undersea allies were working diligently to breach the surface. According to Amphitrite, they could swim higher every day, until the sunlight through the sea touched their skins. It was unclear whether this was the daily process of sunrise eroding one of the barriers of Titania’s spell, or whether her focus was simply slipping as her denouement approached, but she thought they might be able to touch land soon, to come out of the sea and touch the transformed world.

We had been below twice more, to keep them updated, and once—as we reached the last month before Moving Day itself—for a planning session that had been unpleasant for all of us. It began as usual, with Ginevra and me descending to discuss the rapid approach of Moving Day, while Amphitrite stood in for the absent Mary, providing what context she could for the Roane Seer’s words. Dianda was frazzled and furious, as always seemed to be the case in this remade world, while Patrick had visibly lost weight, and haunted the back of the meeting room like a wraith, clearly consumed by his fears for their missing husband. I felt a kinship with the both of them that I had never known before. We were united in our misery and our fear.

I would have preferred a less-unhappy bonding activity, but I suppose we don’t get to dictate the world—and if Titania’s example was anything to go by, that was entirely for the best.

“On Moving Day, October will ‘leave the safety of the nest,’” I said. “I presume that means her mother’s tower, as Mary said I would be able to enter once she was outside. I’m also interpreting that to mean I should enter, that it will influence events in some way that helps us.”

“That seems fair enough,” said Patrick. “Otherwise, Mary would presumably have told you to stay out of the tower if you’d make things worse by going inside.” This was a familiar refrain. We had engaged in several miserable debates about interpreting the Roane Seer’s words, and they were beginning to drive me almost as mad as my lady’s absence.

“I hate prophecy,” muttered Ginevra. “It’s never a clear set of steps. It’s like trying to assemble an IKEA bookshelf using an instruction booklet that’s been translated from Swedish to Japanese to English without a human double-checking the translations.”

“I have no idea what any of that meant,” I said. “But. On Moving Day, October will come out, and if we’ve done things correctly to this point—”

“Hard, when you don’t know what that means,” said Ginevra.

I shot her a quelling look. “—she’ll come to us,” I finished. “At that point, I can give her the key to the Thorn Roads, and we can go to find the Luidaeg.”

“Sorry, that’s not going to happen,” said Ginevra.

I turned, slowly, to blink at her. “I beg your pardon?”

“You’re not going to be the one who approaches her with the key and the quest,” she said. “I am. I adore you, Your Majesty, but there’s no way you’ll be able to control your emotions well enough to keep yourself from scaring her. Even on your very best behavior, you’re a little too intense for the person October thinks she is right now.”

“As I have told you before, the matter is not up for discussion,” I said, in my iciest tone. I could feel my teeth sharpen in response to this challenge to my authority—this betrayal. How dare she? How dare she deny me the right to go to my own wife, the woman I had promised to protect above all others? And how dare she try to force the matter in front of our allies, people who were not Cait Sidhe and would think less of me if I answered as she deserved?