Page 78 of The Innocent Sleep

“I am trying. It kills me to look into her eyes and see no understanding there, no memory of what we are to one another. She will go with Ginevra to retrieve the sea witch, and we will be able to unmake this twisted reflection of the world as it ought to be. We’ll be able to go home.”

“Home,” said Arden, more softly. “I don’t even know where that is anymore.”

“Muir Woods,” I said. “You have a beautiful knowe. The carvings reflect the history of your Kingdom, and the halls are filled with light.”

“Last time I was there, they were full of dust and screaming,” said Arden. “Did the Earthquake happen in your world?”

“Yes,” I said. “King Gilad was killed, as was the woman we all widely believed to be his lover.”

“She wasn’t queen?”

“Not in our reality. He wanted to protect her, so he never took her as his wife. But Sebille was Queen of his household, no question, and those of us who haunted his halls knew that you and your brother were special. You have your father’s eyes, and while he didn’t claim you, he allowed you far more freedom than the children of a chatelaine would be expected to have.”

“I see.” Arden hesitated. “Do you know who killed them?”

“We always suspected Oleander de Merelands, but she escaped both capture and punishment in the chaos which followed. She was being controlled by the woman you call the Rose of Winter, which may explain how she so easily evaded consequences for her actions. Regardless, she died before you retook your throne.”

“How?” There was a hungry desperation in Arden’s voice, like she needed to know there was a world where she hadn’t broken Oberon’s Law before she reached adulthood.

“In our version of Faerie, Sylvester Torquill has a daughter, Rayseline. She’s one of the missing in this world. We hope to find her soon. Oleander convinced her to form an alliance, and when Raysel turned on her, it caught her by surprise. Raysel used one of her own poisoned blades to end her life.” It was a dramatically simplified accounting of what had happened, and that made it as accurate as it could be.

“Was Raysel executed?”

“No. She was elf-shot in the aftermath, and was found innocent due to extenuating circumstances. She was awoken right before this all began, and is to spend a year in our household, paying off the offense my lady claimed against her.”

“Your world is complicated,” said Arden, wrinkling her nose.

“I suppose so. To us, it’s just the world we live in. And the complexity is part of how you know it’s real.”

“I guess I can see that.” Arden sighed.

The yard behind the knowe was large, fenced in around the edges with chicken coops. It was late enough that none of the birds were stirring. I could easily see spending a pleasant afternoon here, playing tag with the roosters and prowling the grass for mice. But that was something for the future, when the world was back to normal.

“I will try to be kinder to her, if we come back into the same space. I will do my very best not to let my own pain translate into lashing out. But as I cannot guarantee my good behavior, I will remain here, away from her, until I know that she has gone.”

“You’re staying outside, then?”

I looked around.

“This seems a pleasant-enough space to sit alone with my thoughts. Yes. I’ll stay here, for now.”

“Gotcha. Well, I’ll let you know when they’re off, and if Their Majesties want you to come back. That was rude, you know.”

“They have my apologies,” I said, and watched as Arden opened a gate in the air and vanished, gone as quickly as this Arden always was. Was this version of the woman I knew flightier because she wasn’t a queen, or because she hadn’t gone through a lengthy period of isolation from Faerie, during which she’d been forced to conceal her magic? If anything carried over from this Faerie, I rather hoped it would be the ease with which she moved through our world. She was a good Queen, as monarchs of the Divided Courts went. It would be nice to see her comfortable with herself.

I walked deeper into the yard, listening to the sleepy clucks of the few chickens who were still awake. Most of them were sensible enough to be well asleep. The smell was strong but not overwhelming as I drew closer to their coops; they were clearly well tended, which matched with everything I knew about the fae farming techniques in Golden Shore. If these were Alectryon—fae chickens, for lack of a better term, although that was something like calling Daoine Sidhe “fae humans,” which would be a quick way to enrage them—then they were each worth their own weight in gold, even before taking their eggs into account.

Some people said Golden Shore was the wealthiest Kingdom on the West Coast, and I suspected those people were speaking more truth than they realized. It was easy to take the excessive display of gold inside the knowe as the desperate flaunting of scraped-together wealth, and not see it for perhaps inadvisable commitment to a decorating scheme.

I found a bench between two hutches and sat, closing my eyes. The smell and sound of healthy chickens was reminiscent of my youth, when I’d gone often to the Torquill estate to pass my time with children near my own age. Father had allowed it because he saw it as a means for me to form bonds within the future nobility of the Divided Courts, believing it would advance the interests of the Court of Cats.

He would have been so ashamed of me, if he had survived my ascension to the throne. And knowing how badly I would disappoint him only reinforced my conviction that my choices had been good ones. Living my life to disappoint my father had been something to aspire to.

The quiet of the evening was pleasant, as was the wind blowing in from the fields, carrying more interesting scents to tickle my nose and keep me company. Inside, I knew, Ginevra would be attempting to convince October to accompany her on a quest to find the Luidaeg; Simon would, doubtless, be objecting. How I wished I had the right to object along with him! Never mind that in the real world, I had the right and he did not. We weren’t living by real-world rules right now.

We were living by Titania’s rules, and she said it was my place to sit and suffer in silence while my wife ran headlong into certain danger, all unaware of the possible consequences. I tried to think back to the earliest versions of October I had known, young, untested, burning to prove herself. She’d been chaos incarnate in those days, tripping over her own feet and falling on her own knife more often than not. Trouble had been a talent of hers, all the way back to the beginning, and if Magdaleana and May’s suppositions about the structure of this spell were correct . . .

The two of them had never forgotten themselves, because Titania’s casting had picked them up and shunted them into a place where they’d be harmless. If either of them left the Library, they lost the protection it offered, and they began to be absorbed into the illusion. Whatever hidden place that key unlocked was likely to be very similar to the Library, in that there would have been no point to wiping the memories of its occupants. They would know themselves, and some of them might know October as their enemy.