Page 31 of A Divided Duty

“You knew Luna was pissed,” I said, matching her formality with my own. Arden can be an interesting balancing act. Sometimes she’s the Queen in the Mists, and wants to be treated as such; other times she’s the woman I met in a mortal-owned bookstore, the one who owns more T-shirts than I do and spends most of her free time worrying about her brother.

“I knew the Duchess Torquill was ‘displeased,’” she said, using her fingers to put quotes around the word “displeased.” It wasn’t strictly necessary. I could hear them. “I didn’t know she was mad enough to be completely irrational and try to incite a war against our allies!”

“To be fair, neither did I,” I said. “Luna and I aren’t exactly on what you’d call ‘friendly speaking terms’ these days.”

“Is that the modern way of saying she seems to despise you beyond all sense or reason?” asked Nolan mildly. He had a reasonably crisp Mid-Atlantic accent that I suspected he was actively working to maintain. He’d been awake and part of modern Faerie for almost exactly three years, and yet he still sounded like he’d just emerged from a 1920s radio play. Accents drift, speech patterns change, and yet his didn’t.

Intentional or not, the sound of his voice clearly soothed Arden, who leaned toward him without getting up.

“Something like that,” I said. “There’s a lot of history between me and the Duchess Torquill, and not all of it is particularly positive. I think she’d kick the ladder in after me if she saw me fall down a hole.”

“Her anger can’t possibly just be because Raysel’s doing her term of service with you,” said Arden.

“No. I think a lot of it is because Raysel’s doing a term of service with anyone. Luna wants her where she can see her at all times, to make sure she’s safe. I can respect that impulse in a mother, if not the way she’s been going about acting on it. Raysel did what she’s trying to atone for. There’s no denying that. And being with us has been incredibly good for her. She even leaves her room sometimes, when no one’s dragging her. It’s been pretty cool to watch.”

“Why does she blame you so much?” asked Nolan.

“Raysel was … You know how there are some combinations in Faerie that just don’t work? Folletti and Daoine na Tine, or Bridge Trolls and Naiads. You can’t mix air and fire or stone and water.”

“The pairing won’t kindle,” said Nolan. “I’m aware of how biology works. I’m not a child.”

Privately, I wondered whether any pureblood fae understood how biology worked, really, or whether it mattered. Inside Faerie, biology was an endless negotiation between an ever-shifting number of species, some of whom had functional needs so different that it was a wonder they could even communicate, much less reproduce.

“Luna’s a Blodynbryd,” I said. “They’re rare, but they’re like Dryads: essentially plants dressed in mammalian-seeming skin, walking around and expressing themselves with an ease that makes it easy to forget what they really are. But when Raysel was conceived, that wasn’t all Luna was. Luna escaped from her father’s halls by dressing herself in the stolen skin of a dead Kitsune girl, and like the Selkies, the change went all the way down to her bones. That’s how she was able to conceive a child with Sylvester. Only she was still Blodynbryd, under the skin, and Raysel was born part plant, plant mammal.”

“And?” asked Nolan, puzzled.

“All those old stories about changeling madness are just that: stories. They justify punishing changelings for getting too ambitious or reaching above their station. But sometimes, the right combination of descendant lines can cause genuine issues for the people who carry them. Raysel’s body was tearing itself apart. We all thought she didn’t have much magic, because what she did have was occupied trying to keep her alive. When she got elf-shot, I was able to go into her dreams and talk to her about what she was going through. And then Luna realized I could communicate with her daughter.”

“Oh, no,” said Arden, realizing where this story was going.

“Luna asked me for my help. To make it so Raysel could be healthy and happy and safe when she finally woke up. So I went back into her dreams and asked her what she wanted.” I shrugged. “She wanted to be able to think. She wanted magic, and a body that wasn’t ripping itself apart. I offered to shift the balance of her blood, and she chose Daoine Sidhe. I wasn’t there to make the decisions for her, just to do what she asked of me. I pulled the Blodynbryd out of her, and after her magic had settled enough to make her no longer dangerous, the Luidaeg agreed to let her wake up, as long as someone was going to be keeping an eye on her.”

“You really did orchestrate the whole plan to claim offense against her, didn’t you?” asked Arden.

I nodded. “I did. She wanted me to. She needed time to be awake, aware, and recovering. There’s only so much healing you can do in dreams.”

“So the Duchess Torquill resents the fact that you transformed her daughter into something new?” asked Nolan.

“Easier to resent me for respecting Raysel’s autonomy than to resent Raysel for making her own choices,” I said. “I’m the easy target, and Luna has a lot of stones to throw.”

“Angry people make bad choices,” said Arden. “Is she angry enough to keep antagonizing the Undersea delegation?”

“She’s never going to forgive Dianda for being the one whose claim of offense was clean enough to stick, but I don’t think she wants a war over it,” I said. “She said her piece, she lost. She’s going to back off and lick her wounds for now, until she figures out her next moves.”

“Good.” Arden stood, shaking her skirts out so that they hung properly again. “I can’t strip her of her title without stripping Duke Torquill’s title as well, and he hasn’t earned that, but I’ll banish her from court if I have to.”

“She’ll never forgive any of us if you do that.”

“I’m not sure I care anymore.”

“Fair enough.” I looked around the courtyard, trying to seem unconcerned. “You feeling okay? This is all really formal compared to the way things normally work around here.”

“I’m Queen in the Mists. I’m allowed to favor formality.”

“You are. You just never have before.”

“Things were different before.”