“All I’m going to do is go up to the tower and ask Walther about the elf-shot,” protested Quentin. “I can do that on my own. I’ll stick to the servants’ halls, and if I get stuck, I’ll ask the knowe where I’m supposed to be. You can’t be the only one who knows how that trick works. I’ll be fine.”
“If you get yourself killed, I’m telling your parents,” I said.
Quentin smiled. “If I get myself killed, I’ll tell my parents myself.”
“You would,” I said, and resisted the urge to ruffle his hair. He was getting too old for that. He was getting too old for a lot of things—like letting me protect him.
Oh, who was I kidding? He’d been born too old to let me protect him. He’d just been willing to pretend for a while. As I watched him walk back to the door we’d arrived through, I couldn’t shake the feeling that pretending time was over, and he was finally prepared to face the world for what it really was. Dark, complicated, and unforgiving. He glanced back once, offering me a quick, encouraging smile. Then he was gone, slipping through the door, back into that narrow stairwell full of stars, and I was alone in the courtyard with a frightened little girl and a woman who’d seen the death of empires.
I turned to look at the Luidaeg. Her lips were twisted in a small moue of understanding; her eyes were kind. “It’s never easy when they grow up on you,” she said. “Believe me, I’m an expert on people growing up and leaving you behind. But he’s a good kid. You’ve trained him well. So have I, if you count destroying his ability to feel healthy fear as ‘training’ him. He’ll be fine.”
“I hope so.” I stood. “You said you could knock me out. Can you guarantee I’ll wake up again without sleeping a full eight hours? I have work to do.”
“You can’t storm around the knowe waking kings and queens at your leisure.”
“Watch me.”
The Luidaeg snorted. “Spoken like a true changeling. These are people who don’t like to be inconvenienced. They’ll be furious if you drag them out of bed in the middle of the day.”
“Ask me if I care.” I spread my arms, not looking away from her face. “A man is dead. A woman has been elf-shot. I don’t know if the two are connected. I don’t know how they could not be. I don’t have a fingerprint kit or a clue. I didn’t get to go talk to the servers because I got dragged back to the conclave. If interviewing Dianda gets me something I can use, that’s what I have to do—and if I’m willing to disrupt her dreams to ask my questions, why wouldn’t I interrupt someone else’s way less enchanted sleep? They can always nap on the way back to their own damn Kingdoms.”
“When you decide it’s time to make enemies, you don’t fuck around,” said the Luidaeg. “I’ve always respected that about you. Karen? You sure you’re all right with this?”
There was something in her tone that I recognized, and it stung: she was talking to Karen the way I’d always spoken to Quentin, to Raj, to the flock of teenagers that fell into and out of my life like so many lost puppies looking for a home. She was checking to make sure Karen felt safe and protected. I was Karen’s aunt. I should have been the one she turned to. But I wasn’t. Faerie’s greatest monster was.
I was never going to get used to the idea of being jealous of the Luidaeg.
Karen bit her lip and nodded. “I am,” she said. “Auntie Birdie needs me, and what’s the point of me having this weird power if I don’t use it to help the people I care about? It’s already ruining my life. I may as well get some good out of it.”
“Good girl,” said the Luidaeg, and touched Karen’s hair with an almost proprietary hand. Then she turned, walking back toward the open door to their shared chambers. “Come on, both of you. I don’t have all day.”
Karen and I exchanged a glance before we both stood. She slipped her hand into mine, her fingers cool against my skin, and we trailed across the courtyard, following the sea witch to whatever fate awaited us.
Arden had apparently been assigning suites based on status and how dangerous it would be to piss the occupants off. The Luidaeg was the most frightening person currently in the Bay Area, and so she got the nicest chambers. The door from the courtyard led into a beautifully decorated room larger than my old apartment, with redwood floors and walls papered in velvety paper patterned with tangled blackberry briars. The furniture was elegant and rustic, all plain, varnish-stained wood and comfortable looking cushions. One entire wall was made of stained glass panels, all of them set to slide open, if the occupants desired, and reveal the good green world outside.
“Whoa,” I said. “And I thought Quentin and I had a nice room.”
“Ask your kitty-boy to show you where he’s supposedly sleeping; the monarchs get the really good spots,” said the Luidaeg, walking onward. “Come on. The kitchen’s this way.”
“Wait—you mean you have an actual kitchen?” The idea that every large suite would have its own kitchen seemed improbable in the extreme, both logistically and because it would have put an awful lot of royal poison tasters out of work. When you lived in a feudal society mostly controlled by functional immortals, losing your job was a big deal.
“Yup.” The Luidaeg looked over her shoulder and smirked at me. “I’m reasonably sure this is where the parents of the current monarch are supposed to stay when they come to visit. ‘See Mom, see Dad, I still respect you, even if I really don’t want to give back the throne.’ We’re in here because no one wants to tell me I can’t fix my own dinner if I feel like it, but they want me near the communal food sources even less.”
“Gotcha,” I said. In the normal course of things, assuming fewer murders, Kings and Queens were made when their parents got tired of being in charge and stepped aside in favor of a younger generation. It happened more often than most people would think. Yes, purebloods enjoyed having power, but after a few centuries of not being able to travel or take a weekend off, finding something else to do started to seem extremely attractive. And there was always the option to wander away for a century or two, come back, claim the throne was still yours by right, and lead a dandy war against your own kid. Fae parents weren’t always as attached to their adult children as my human upbringing told me they ought to be. I guess when you were a thousand years old, your eight-hundred-year-old kid looked less like your baby, and more like the competition.
The kitchen matched the front room for elegance and simplicity: all redwood and polished California quartz, with an old-fashioned stove and an actual icebox instead of a refrigerator. “I hope Arden can convince her staff to modernize this place,” said the Luidaeg, going to the sink and turning on the water. “Faerie has embraced the idea of indoor plumbing and using small quantities of ice, rather than turning entire towers into eternally frozen storage boxes for our vegetables. It’s not unreasonable to want a microwave.”
“Ice is modern?” asked Karen blankly.
“Honey, when you’ve lived as long as I have, everything is modern. The idea of being a teenager is modern. In my day, you’d have already been declared an adult, thrown out of your parents’ house, and left to fend for yourself.” She opened a drawer. Empty. She scowled at it, closed it, and opened it again. This time it rattled as the small jars filled with herbs and oddly-colored liquids knocked against each other. She began pulling them out and lining them up on the counter. “This idea that Faerie should always be a twisted mirror of the human medieval age is proof that sometimes, people don’t like change. I love cable. The Internet is amazing. Not having my ice cream melt is amazing. Hell, having ice cream is amazing. There was a time where you either found a Snow Fairy or you waited until November—and even that’s a new word, as we measure such things. Anyone who says the past was perfect is a liar and wasn’t there. Everything that thinks can aspire, and everything that aspires wants something better than what they’ve left behind them. Get me a bowl.”