Page 68 of The Innocent Sleep

“Yes. Tea would be lovely.”

“Then I’ll be right back.” Chrysanthe paused to press a kiss to Theron’s temple, and then was away, her cervine lower body making her stride a fascinating thing to watch. It’s not polite to stare at queens. I wrenched my eyes away, turning to Theron.

“You have been remarkably accommodating through all of this, Sire,” I said. As a King of Cats, I am under no obligation to use titles or honorifics for monarchs of the Divided Courts, but under the circumstances, politeness seemed like the best possible approach.

“You tell me the Golden Shore stands in your other world, and while you haven’t told us everything, the fact that you’re willing to fight to have that world restored—the fact that you married a changeling, and see nothing wrong with her mortality, tells me your version of Faerie is likely to be kinder to my subjects than this one,” he said. “We have the fewest purebloods of any Kingdom on the western coast, did you know that?”

“I suspected, but wasn’t entirely sure.”

“Very few purebloods choose to settle here. Not much chance for power, and having the best farmer’s market in the Westlands doesn’t make up for limited opportunities to put themselves above others. So they don’t come, and those that do come don’t often stay. More and more every year, we’re a kingdom of changelings hoping no one notices how easy we’d be to conquer. It helps that people who yearn for power rarely want to spend their time picking apples or planting rhubarb, and like everyone else who’s been eating mostly food grown in the mortal world for the last few centuries, our noble courts wouldn’t know what to do without peppers and potatoes and tomatoes. They’re addicted to the fruits of the human world.”

“And?”

“Have the Cait Sidhe ever been inclined to farming?”

I shook my head. Theron smiled.

“I thought not. Some things have origins in Faerie. Goblin fruit, for example, or starberries. They grew first in the deeper realms, and when we had to leave those lands behind, people carried seeds or cuttings with them. Others, it’s hard to say. Where did the first apple tree sprout, Avalon or Earth? Again, we don’t know. We know where the first Earth apples were cultivated, and we know that the people who tended them did so in ways Faerie would never have considered, but we don’t know if they originated there.”

I frowned. “All very interesting, I’m sure, but I’m afraid I don’t understand what that has to do with you being so calm about everything.”

“The potato, on the other hand, well. We know where the potato came from. The people native to the continent we call Aztalan developed them over the course of centuries, without magic. Just hard work and the understanding that they needed the land to feed them, so they would convince it to do precisely that. They understood farming. They knew what it was to speak gently to the ground.”

I looked at him, more confused than ever, and said nothing.

“Whenever a new noble has come here from Titania’s Court, full of ideas about power for the taking and gaps in the leadership here on the Golden Shore, they’ve wanted to plant their gardens of nothing but fairy fruit, and there are no fae potatoes,” said Theron. “They want to feast the way they’ve become accustomed to, but also to sunder the food on their table and the food in their fields from one another. Tell them a potato came from mortal soil, they recoil and ask if you think them a changeling, to be fed on human scraps. They demand things that don’t exist, fae peppers and potatoes. They’d collapse our Kingdom inside of a week.”

“I won’t pretend such attitudes don’t exist in our Faerie, but I’ll say that they’re less common, and less . . . acceptable? I think that’s the correct word. People who want to behave as if nothing good has ever come from humanity find it difficult to make much headway in modern society. We have our prejudices and our bigotry. We’re trying to be better. October and I were wed in the knowe of the High King of the Westlands, our marriage officiated by the eldest of the Firstborn yet living. A Cait Sidhe monarch and a changeling, wed in sight of the greatest powers our world has to offer. And while our path has not been smooth . . .” There was a literal attempted coup during our wedding, but it had nothing to do, oddly enough, with the realities of our union. It had been politically expedient and conveniently timed, nothing more. “. . . while our path has not been smooth, no one has objected on the basis of what either one of us is. We’re allowed to exist, with the possibility of happiness, which is more than Faerie would have offered us two hundred years ago. Who knows what it might offer us two hundred years from now?”

“And that, more than anything, is why I’m willing to accept your story,” said Theron. “You don’t threaten my Kingdom or my crown, or my lovely lady wife. You threaten the monarch to the north, who has never been an ally of ours, and whose exiled children would make much better neighbors. I admit, I don’t like the thought of losing them. They’re pests and problems, but they’re our pests and problems, and the service they’ve provided to the Golden Shore is beyond measure. Which is, I suppose, where your story gets muddled for me. If Titania designed every aspect of the world, why are Arden and Nolan allowed to steal changelings on my behalf? Why aren’t they good little nobles, sitting quietly in someone else’s Court, free of all complicated thoughts and actions? You’re outside the narrative you say she’s made. They’re not.”

“Oddly, I think I can answer that,” said Simon.

I turned to him, eyebrows raised. “Can you? Then, by all means. I’m ever so interested to hear what you might have to say.”

Simon exhaled. “Titania is a gardener.”

“Forgive me if I can’t picture her getting her hands dirty.”

“Not in that sense, not like you or I might garden. She’s never needed to dig. Flowers blossom at her touch. Instead, she plants ideas, not seeds. She tells her children what will please her and walks away, trusting them to grow in the direction she desires. She sets her stage and doesn’t bother to direct it.”

“That’s not a good way to grow a healthy crop,” said Theron.

“Since when has Titania cared about healthy crops?” asked Garm. Everyone turned to look at him. He shrugged. “What? It’s true. She doesn’t care if Faerie’s healthy, as long as it looks healthy enough that she gets praised for it. My liege before Duke Torquill wanted his guard to match, no matter what. Well, we had a Baobhan Sith join our company. She was real skinny, but had these huge feet. You’d never have guessed it to look at her. The chatelaine couldn’t find uniform boots in her size. We had to order out to another fiefdom. It took them more than a month to arrive. And the whole time, she was doing her rounds in boots two sizes too small. Rubbed her feet raw, she did, blisters and bleeding, and all because our Count wouldn’t allow her to wear shoes that weren’t ‘in uniform,’ or go barefoot and have me cast illusionary boots for her.”

He scowled as he stopped, apparently gripped by the unpleasant memory of his former comrade. In a softer voice, he added, “She left as soon as her feet healed. Wore her new boots until then, and took them with her when she walked away. I didn’t get to say goodbye. The more I learn about the way Titania likes to handle things, the more she reminds me of that Count. She wants us to look perfect more than she wants us to be perfect.”

“So the Windermeres aren’t cultivated seeds that she planted with care and nurtured. They’re like mint plants, or blackberries,” said Simon. “Something hardy and good at holding on, that she uprooted and threw aside without checking to see whether it was going to land in healthy soil.”

“Letting them have their father’s throne would mean taking away one of her favorite daughter’s best tools,” I said. “She needed to remove them. From what we’ve been able to determine, she didn’t kill anyone, only shunted them out of her way. Friends of ours have been scattered across multiple Kingdoms. For all that I know, some of them may be here, on the Golden Shore.” This would be a logical place for her to have placed Jasmine, at the very least, and for a moment I entertained the thought of looking for her.

But no. May had made her wishes very clear, and I would be going against them if I were to put her into the situation I had been living in for the past four months, confronted with a functional stranger wearing her lover’s face, unable to be close or offer comfort, unable to do anything but stand helplessly off to the side. It had been a kind of torture I’d never experienced before, nor ever wished to experience again.

I collected myself, and continued. “So she changed their circumstances enough to make them flee the kingdom while young enough to be tucked safely away in someone else’s fiefdom. They were still themselves.”

“Illusions can change your memories, but they can’t modify the core of who a person is,” said Garm. “A brave man will still be a brave man; a coward will still be a coward. If they were always going to be stubborn and overly ethically rigid, that was going to happen no matter what.”

That raised some horrifying concerns about Quentin. I paused for a moment to stare at Garm, not quite ready to voice them, and Arden made her reappearance in that pause, stepping out of the air in front of the dais.