Page 89 of The Innocent Sleep

He scowled at me. I shrugged, trying to look guileless.

“I simply want to understand the charges against me, since so far as I’m aware, I’ve done nothing wrong. None of us here were involved in a jailbreak, and even if we had been, your own words would put us in Golden Shore at the time, where, I believe, any crimes we committed wouldn’t fall under the authority of the Queen of the Mists. So I ask you, who are we plotting against?”

“Oh, you’re a clever one, aren’t you?” He grinned at me, and kept grinning as something struck me in the back of the head, knocking me once again to the forest floor.

August shrieked something. Several more of the men grabbed her as she kicked and fought, apparently enraged. It wasn’t my problem, however. My problem, which was somewhat more immediately pressing, was my sudden inability to keep my eyes open. Bit by bit, they drifted closed, and my last coherent thought was that I would need to apologize to October: it was more difficult to carry out heroism-adjacent acts without being knocked insensate than I had ever anticipated.

I don’t know what happened for a time after that. We were moved, somehow, whether into a mortal vehicle or via some other means, and when my eyes opened next, I was on my side on a hard marble floor, a layer of heavy fog above me and the rowan-and-rosewood cuffs no longer clasping my wrists. My head ached as if I had been drinking all day with my old theater fellows from long-lost Londinium, and when I tried to sit up, it spun and rang, awakening a fierce nausea in my belly. Concussion? Quite possibly.

That was something I had never taken into account when scolding my wife for her tropism toward injury: when she got hit in the head, she was perfectly fine inside of the hour. I, on the other hand, felt as if I were going to throw up all over the polished marble around me. At least if I did that, the fog would cover it.

I’d been here before, I was sure of it. It had been a while, but this place was too familiar to be entirely new to me. But between the disorientation and the throbbing in my head, I couldn’t quite place where I was. Ah, well. I was quite sure something dreadful would happen soon enough to ground me in my location.

I must have made a noise when I woke up, because someone moved in the nearby fog, moving toward me. I tried to tense away from it, and only succeeded in squirming slightly, uncomfortable on the cold stone. I was, effectively, helpless.

“Tybalt? Is that you?”

The voice belong to Garm. I released what little tension I had managed to muster, licked my lips, and croaked, “Aye.”

“A little archaic, don’t you think?” Garm bent, hands breaking through the fog as he reached for me. Oddly, his cuffs were as missing as my own, presumably removed by our captors once they considered us fully in their power. They no longer thought we posed them any threat. In the moment, I couldn’t say that they were wrong. I grasped hold of Garm’s hands and let him pull me to my feet, the motion making my head spin even worse. “That looked like a pretty nasty hit you took. You all right?”

“I feel very much as if I’ve been drinking for the past several weeks and am about to pay the consequence,” I said gravely, and was impressed with myself when I didn’t slur. “Still, I believe I’ll live, and at the moment, that seems to be of more importance than anything else. Where are we?”

Garm raised his eyebrows. “Every time I think I’m used to the idea that things are different in your world, you go and say something that reminds me just how different we’re talking here. This is the Queen’s knowe.”

Of course. It hadn’t occurred to me right away because where I was from, this place was sealed and half-dissolved, lost back to the firmament of Faerie. What’s more, I had only ever seen this room when it was being used for the Queen’s Court, which had been a very monochrome affair, lacking the pomp and circumstance of some royal courts, but had made up for it by being filled with light despite the ever-present fog, sourceless illumination piercing through the sheets of mist and turning everything into a magical parade of people appearing and disappearing within the gray.

I looked around. Simon and August were nearby, the former weeping, the latter apparently trying to comfort him. She shot me a venomous glare when she saw me looking their way, and I wondered what I could possibly have done to earn her ire while I was unconscious on the floor. I dismissed it as irrelevant for the moment, and spent the time I had before the next inevitable crisis finishing my study of the space around us.

The ballroom—what was it with nobles of the Divided Courts and ballrooms? Did they think I was going to be impressed by their heating bills?—was vast, too large to have been constructed by any mortal means, the floor and ceiling both hidden by choking layers of water vapor, fog above us, mist swirling to our knees. Tall pillars of filigreed marble presented a game attempt at seeming to hold up the unseen ceiling, but couldn’t possibly have provided enough structural support to do the job. This was a place woven from and sustained by magic alone, called back from nothing when Titania decided she had need of it.

There were no walls. There was no furniture. Only foggy endlessness stretching on in all directions. That, too, was a magical effect; no space is truly limitless, whether inside a knowe or deep below the sea. It was clear, however, that we were meant to be awed, and so I shifted a little closer to Garm, lowering my voice.

“Can you seem impressed?”

“I don’t know. Is pants-wetting terror in the right family of emotional responses?”

I managed, barely, not to laugh at his tone, which skirted the line between sarcasm and terror with elegant ease. “If there’s anything I’ll take from this world and be grateful for, it’s your friendship, Garm. I don’t know that we’d have ever gotten to know each other better in our own reality, and I have enjoyed coming to know you better.”

“Am I . . .” He hesitated. “Am I a good person in your world?”

“A little suspicious of my lady, at times, and very protective of your liege, as is right and proper,” I said. “But not cruel or capricious or inclined to deceit according to any accounting I have ever heard. Those who have served with you speak well of you.”

“Grianne?”

“I can’t say she speaks well of you, because I can’t say she speaks,” I said. “She is, in my world as well as this one, a proper Candela, and communicates through other means than words.”

Garm looked relieved. I looked around again.

“Pleasant as it is to have a moment to catch our breaths, it seems odd that we were taken prisoner and then abandoned,” I said. “Where are the guards?”

“They brought us here, said we’d be sorry to have conspired against their lady, and left,” said August. “What they intend to do with us from here, I do not know.”

“Intimidation tactics,” I said. “They’re trying to awe and impress us with their power. After all, if they can uncuff us and leave us to our own devices, doesn’t that mean we’re powerless to do anything against them? Surely they’d feel compelled to keep us bound and under guard if we had any power, or any potential to cause real harm. We’re not alone, of course. We’re being monitored closely.”

“You sound very sure of yourself,” said August.

“It’s what I would do, and I’ve been a King for longer than the mewling whelp who claims this Court has known what a crown was, much less that she would trade her name to have one.”