“Believe me, so am I,” said Elliot. “She’s a wonderful regent, but she doesn’t do diplomacy well.”
I had to laugh at that. Diplomacy was not and would never be one of my strong suits, and somehow it kept turning into my job. Elliot answered my laughter with a lopsided smile, eyes twinkling above the bushy tangle of his beard.
Elizabeth finally looked up from her glass, eyes hazy with her omnipresent inebriation. I’d never seen her without a drink in her hand. Sometimes I wondered whether she rolled out of bed and straight into her cups. “Could you please keep the noise down?” she asked. “I intend to get righteously drunk before they bring the first course around, and you’re slowing me down.”
“Hi to you, too, Liz,” I said.
“Hello, October.” She sighed, and took a swig before setting her glass aside. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
“I know.” According to the Luidaeg, the bargain she’d struck with the Selkies after their ancestors killed her children was coming to an end. I was going to play a part in whatever that meant. I just didn’t know what that part was, or when it was going to be necessary.
“But until that grand day comes, you’re all going to play nicely, or I’m going to pull your fucking spines out through your nostrils,” said the Luidaeg, stepping up behind me. I twisted to look at her. Karen was sticking close by her side, and while my niece looked shaken, she didn’t seem any more traumatized than she’d been when they walked away. That was a nice change.
The Luidaeg’s eyes, however, were only for Elizabeth. “Hello, Liz,” she said. “I wasn’t sure I’d see you here.”
“However much I may dislike my position, I’m still leader of our colony, and that means things like this are important,” said Elizabeth, making no effort to conceal the bitterness in her tone. She lifted her glass in a mocking half-salute. “Hello, Annie-my-love. Broken any young girls’ hearts recently?”
“No, but I haven’t spent much time trying. Maybe I’ve lost my touch.” The Luidaeg took one of our table’s two remaining seats, leaving the place between her and me open for Karen. “When are they going to feed us?”
I blinked. “Uh. Shouldn’t you be at the high table? Please don’t claim insult on the Queen. My nerves can’t take it right now.”
“Please, that bullshit? No. I gave my seat to your kitty-boy. He needed it more than I did, and he’s making them even twitchier than I would.” The Luidaeg smirked before looking to Karen. Her expression softened. “Sit down, honey. It’s okay.”
Karen sat, and again as if by magic—maybe actually by magic; this was Faerie, after all—more servers appeared, this time carrying platters of food. There’d been no survey asking what we wanted to eat, and yet almost everyone seemed to receive a different meal, one suited to their tastes. The Luidaeg got a bowl of fish chowder. Elizabeth got a piece of baked salmon surrounded by potatoes carved into rosebuds. Luna got a salad made entirely of edible roses.
I got a bowl of spaghetti with meat sauce, covered in parmesan cheese. Quentin and Karen got the same thing, only twice as large, accounting for their teenage metabolisms. I chose to see this as a sign that I was rubbing off on them, rather than a comment about how immature my taste in food was. It wasn’t easy, but like I’ve always said, if you can’t lie to yourself, who can you lie to?
The food was excellent. I expected nothing less from Arden’s kitchen. And, for a while, everything was quiet. That’s the nice thing about formal dinners: they give people an excuse to cut the small talk and pretend that things aren’t as awkward as they inevitably are.
Naturally, it couldn’t last. King Antonio of Angels shoved his chair back from the table, sending it clattering to the ground. Dianda, who was sitting across from him, calmly put her fork down and looked at him with all the flat blankness of a snake getting ready to strike at its prey.
The room went silent. I stole a glance at the high table. Everyone there was looking toward the disturbance, but none of them had moved yet. I couldn’t decide whether that was a good sign or a bad one, and so I turned my attention back to the standing king.
“How dare you,” Antonio snarled, eyes fixed on Dianda. “This is an insult and an outrage, and one I should have expected from a perverted daughter of the sea.” His Merry Dancers swirled around him, mirroring his supposed fury.
Dianda raised an eyebrow before pushing her wheelchair back from the table and standing. She made the transition from mermaid to woman look effortless, even though I knew from experience that it was nothing of the sort. “All I said, sir, was that there was no reason to restrict regency of our greater demesnes to those of unmixed blood. My son is my heir. The fact that his father is Daoine Sidhe is no reason to deny him his birthright.”
“You should never have married outside your own kind if you wanted your bloodline to endure,” he snapped. “The very idea—”
“Oberon passed no laws against inheritance by children of mixed blood, unless you consider a ruling made by one of his descendants to carry backward through the family tree,” said Dianda, her tone icy. “As I seem to recall, the ruling in question said only that changelings could not inherit their family lands or titles. Nothing about fully fae children.” She seemed unbothered by the fact that the entire room was staring at her. The Undersea was still largely alien to me, but I knew enough to know that they solved their disputes in a much more violent, visceral way than most of the Divided Courts.
Her comment seemed to have been enough to enflame a few more tempers—just what we needed. Chrysanthe, the Queen of Golden Shore, stood, hooves clattering against the marble floor, and braced her hands on her own table as she demanded, “Why do we still abide by such an outdated, archaic ruling? Changelings have as much of a right to their inheritance as anyone!”
That was the final straw. The room was suddenly full of shouting nobility, all with their own ideas and opinions about what was to be done. Most were against the idea of changelings inheriting; about half were against the idea of mixed-bloods inheriting; all of them were against the idea of somehow being overlooked in the fracas. Liz started drinking faster, holding her tongue. Quentin and Karen sat frozen to either side of me, too stunned to eat.
Right. “I don’t think this is the part we’re needed for,” I said, standing and offering each of them a hand. “How about you come with me, and we’ll see if we can’t get out of here before someone starts throwing punches?”
“Okay,” said Karen gratefully, taking my hand in hers. Quentin didn’t take my hand, but he did stand. Given that he was eighteen now—almost an adult by human standards, even if he was still a baby to the fae—that was all I’d been expecting.
Sylvester started to stand. The Luidaeg looked at him, narrow-eyed and silent, and he sat back down. I’d have to thank her for that later.
If anyone else noticed the three of us making our quick, quiet escape, they didn’t say anything. I didn’t know the layout of the knowe as well as I would have liked, but I knew knowes in general, and I knew there were always multiple ways out of a room. In the end, all we had to do was follow the servants to find our way to a narrow door in the corner near the balcony windows, half-hidden by tapestries. We slipped through. The door closed behind us, and we were in a quiet, well-lit hallway, with no shouting nobles or risk of flying food.
Quentin looked at me. “Next time, can we be out of town when something like this happens? Like, in another Kingdom or something?”
“Next time, I will take you to Disneyland,” I said. “Karen, you okay?”
“Sure.” She laughed unsteadily. “That was sort of like being in someone else’s nightmare, only no one was naked, and there were no lobsters on the walls.”