Maybe she was right. Maybe I did have the makings of a revolution. The only question now was whether I wanted to start one.
Marlis was still clinging to her brother, still weeping in huge, shuddering gasps that seemed like they would shake her entire body into pieces. Only Walther’s arms were keeping her from breaking. Rhys had done this to her—and he’d done it on purpose. He’d done it because he thought that it was funny. Oberon might not have been willing to forbid the things that we did to each other, but maybe he should have—and maybe that was why so many of his descendants were heroes. Because we had to fix what he couldn’t, or hadn’t, or wouldn’t.
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Let’s do this.”
THIRTEEN
WALTHER HAD LEFT MARLIS with a supply of the antidote he’d dusted on her cookies, and a promise that he’d find a way to make her long torment end. I think that even if I hadn’t been willing to stand up against Rhys, Walther would have been plotting a revolution all by himself. The tearstains on his shirt made the reasons exquisitely clear.
Ceres escorted us to the edge of the forest, leading us through the trees until the path that would bring us to the palace appeared out of the green. There were rose goblins lounging there, basking in the moonlight and “coincidentally” keeping an eye on the distant keep. I had every faith that, had Rhys sent people looking for us, the rose goblins would have come to warn Ceres. The fact that they would have warned us at the same time was almost an accident.
“Remember,” she said, and then she was gone, melting back into the green like she’d never been there in the first place.
“It’s amazing how quickly a purple person can disappear when she really puts her mind to it,” I said. The path stretched out in either direction. Thanks to the way the forest bent, both ways seemed to lead to the castle. I turned to Walther. “Which way?”
“This way,” he said, and started walking. Tybalt and I followed, letting him set the pace. We’d all had a hard night, and it wasn’t over yet, but of the three of us, he was definitely the one who had suffered the deepest and most painful shocks.
After we had walked in silence for several minutes, Walther said, “You didn’t ask.”
“What?” I turned my head enough to see the side of his face. “What do you mean?”
“Sorry.” He rubbed his face with his hand, spreading his fingers so as to cover the whole thing before lowering his arm and saying, “When she thought I was her sister, you didn’t say anything. And now you’re not asking. It’s not the response I expected.”
“Ah.” We kept walking, me taking advantage of the pause to put my thoughts in order. Finally, I said, “I guess I didn’t know how to respond. I still don’t. You’re you. You’ve always been you. If who you are used to be someone different, that’s your business, not mine.”
“There have always been members of my Court whose parents named them one thing, but who were in truth another,” said Tybalt. “When I was younger, they would go to the stage. Only men were permitted, you see, so a man who was in truth a woman could live a woman’s life, petticoats and powders and all, under the guise of playing pretend. And few who would enforce the law looked critically at the stagehands—I suppose they assumed it would not have been worth the dangers of being a woman in the theater if you never took the stage. They did not understand that the attraction was in having the freedom to be themselves, free from judgment, free from social laws.”
“You know, sometimes I forget how old you are,” said Walther.
“But I never forget how old I am, even as I am surrounded by the children of this modern world, who do not understand the trials of those who came before them,” said Tybalt. He sounded amused, which meant he was probably being clever—or at least thought he was.
I elbowed him lightly in the ribs. “We get it. You’re a creepy old man, and I’m way too young for you. Now quit it.”
Tybalt laughed.
Walther rubbed the side of his face this time, rather than the whole thing, and sounded relieved as he said, “I didn’t expect this to be quite so easy, if it ever came out. I was expecting . . . I don’t know.”
“Is this because I’m a changeling?” I asked gently.
“I feel like a jerk for saying it, but yeah,” he said.
“I understand.” And I did. Faerie could be backward in a lot of ways—the absence of indoor plumbing in many knowes was a big one—but having a population of semi-immortals with a very low birth rate meant that in other ways, Faerie had always been ahead of the mortal world. No one batted an eye at May and Jazz’s relationship; they would have been normal and accepted in any Court in the world a hundred years ago, or five hundred years ago, all the way back to the beginning of Faerie. The odd part would have been May’s history as a night-haunt, not the fact that they were both women. The only limit Faerie really put on who someone loved came when it was time to produce heirs . . . and since adoption and fosterage were both acceptable within the nobility, even that wasn’t required.
But I wasn’t solely a child of Faerie. I’d been born and raised in the human world, in the 1950s. Yes, I’d moved to the Summerlands when I was very young, but that didn’t mean I had escaped without a fun assortment of human prejudices on top of the fae ones I’d learned during my adolescence and adulthood. Some purebloods, when they were making the case for why they were better than their changeling cousins, would point to our supposed “small-mindedness” as proof that we would never be good enough. And in some ways, in some cases, they were right.
“I’m sorry you had to be afraid of how I’d react,” I said, when the silence got to be too much for me.
Walther flashed me a quick, crooked smile. “It’s cool. We’re cool.”
“Cool,” I said, and then burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of my own reply. Walther blinked, looking nonplussed, before he started laughing as well. Tybalt didn’t join in, but smirked, shaking his head.
“I am to be forever surrounded by the young,” he said. “I would bemoan my fate, but I am not yet sure whether it is intended to be punishment or paradise.”
“Here’s a tip,” I said, still half laughing. “If you call me a punishment, you’re going to spend our wedding night sleeping on the couch.”
“But ah, you see, I will have a wedding night. So long as you do not steal that from me, I can endure any trial the world sees fit to set before me.”
“Right.” I glanced to Walther. “Marlis mentioned the Cu Sidhe as a major tie. Do you think we should have brought Tia after all?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Everyone who made it out of Silences scattered after the war. There were always Cu Sidhe in the Court, but most of the time, they were dogs. They seemed happier that way. No one really questioned it . . .” He trailed off as we came around a bend in the path.
The mouth of King Rhys’ gardens appeared before us, marked both by the tall topiary archway that separated cultivated paths from forested wilds, and by the guards in the livery of Silences who stood across the opening. There were four of them, two armed with short swords, and the other two armed with nasty looking polearms that probably had some fancy name but really just looked like giant manual can openers on sticks. Whatever they were, they meant business.
The three of us stopped dead. It seemed like the best way to prevent actual death from occurring. “Can I help you?” I asked.
“Sir October Daye, you are under arrest for sedition and conspiracy to commit treason,” said the guard in the middle. He was tall, black-haired, and silver-eyed, with the sharply pointed ears and harsh cheekbones of the Tuatha de Dannan. Not part of the original guard, then, and not another relative of Walther’s being forced to work for someone who wanted to destroy him.