A table had been set up at the center of the room, piled with plates of cucumber sandwiches, scones and cream, and blackberry tarts. My stomach growled as uncomplicated hunger washed through me, not a hint of nausea. I glanced to Arden. She nodded.

  That was all the permission I needed. I moved toward the table, grabbing a small plate and beginning to fill it with a heavy hand. Arden had more or less admitted that this was an ambush, meaning this food wasn’t intended to be shared with anyone I didn’t decide to share it with. That was fine by me. If my Queen was going to ambush me, feeding me was really the least that she could do.

  Arden waited until my plate was full before she made a small coughing noise to get my attention and said, “It’s been hard to get a message to you these past few months. Tybalt and May have been running interference.”

  “Can you blame them for being a little overprotective?” I asked. “We’re all still recovering from what we went through. Poor Rayseline is barely leaving her room.”

  “Why? I thought she spent the duration of Titania’s enchantment in the former Blind Michael’s lands, which should have been…”

  “If you say ‘restorative,’ I’m going to have to throw a scone at you.”

  “I wasn’t going to say ‘restorative.’ Just that for someone who has such a complicated relationship with most of Faerie, I can see where being removed from it entirely might be something of a relief, especially since her memories weren’t tampered with the way the rest of ours were.”

  “You’d think. But Blind Michael’s lands weren’t exactly a nice vacation spot—and remember, we were all enchanted for four months.”

  “What does that have to do with—oh.” Arden’s eyes widened as the significance of those four months finally hit her.

  I nodded. “Yeah. Oh.”

  Rayseline Torquill is the only daughter of my sworn liege lord, Sylvester Torquill of Shadowed Hills. She’s also my cousin, technically, even though we aren’t actually related. Family trees can get remarkably complicated in Faerie. When she was born, she was half Daoine Sidhe, and half Blodynbryd laced with Kitsune. Blodynbryd aren’t mammals, and Raysel’s body had been tearing itself apart from the moment she was conceived. That might have been difficult but survivable, had she not been abducted as a child and grown to adulthood in an enchanted prison, with only darkness and isolation as companions. The trauma of that time had led her to do some pretty awful things, and she’d been elf-shot, meaning she should have slept for a hundred years.

  We have a cure for elf-shot now, created by the alchemist Walther Davies, and waking Raysel had become possible. But I had spoken to her while she was sleeping—it’s a long story, just go with it for now—and she’d begged me to find a way to get her away from her parents. She needed to rest, recover, and decide how she was going to move forward from everything that had happened, everything that she’d done. She needed to figure out how to be herself, and not the pretty prisoner her mother wanted her to be.

  That was something she had in common with me: my biological mother, Amandine, always had firm ideas about what she wanted her children to be, and wasn’t inclined to change her ideas just because we turned out to be people rather than pretty dolls for perfect playtimes. But unlike me, Raysel’s parents hadn’t divorced, and she hadn’t been given the opportunity to decide which of them she was going to belong with. She was trapped. I was supposed to be a hero, and so, when she’d finally been woken up, I’d done what I could to save her. I’d claimed offense against her for her crimes, backed by the Duchess Lorden and Tybalt, and I’d managed to get her released to my household for a year’s time.

  One year. Eight months of which were already gone, four stolen by Titania, the other four spent dealing with what had happened during that ordeal and trying to readjust to the real world.

  “There has to be something we can do,” said Arden.

  “The laws of offense are pretty clear, and strictly time-based,” I said grimly. “Four more months and she goes back to Shadowed Hills, whether she’s ready or not.”

  “You know, I’m the Queen in the Mists, and her father is one of my vassals,” she said. “I could order him to let her stay with you.”

  “Can you order her mother? Luna’s a duchess by marriage. I’m not sure whether that means she’s directly sworn to you.”

  “She isn’t, but her title means I have some authority over her all the same.” Arden frowned thoughtfully. “I’ll figure out a way we can extend her time in your care. I know she needs your hospitality to help her healing. But Rayseline isn’t why I wanted to speak with you. Please, have a seat.”

  I sank gratefully into one of the chairs next to the refreshment table, noting as I did that my plate was already half empty. I hadn’t even noticed eating what I’d chosen. That said something about the care Arden had taken in selecting her high-calorie bribes: none of them were upsetting my newly finicky stomach in the slightest.

  “So what do you want?” I asked, leaning over to take a few more slices of crostini smeared with a tart mushroom spread and sprinkled with watercress. According to the pregnancy books that May had been reading obsessively, I wasn’t supposed to have half the things on this table, but that was in the mortal world. I had every faith that Arden wouldn’t serve me anything that could hurt me. Maybe upset my stomach, sure, but hurt me? She would never knowingly do that.

  “Titania’s enchantment removed several of us from our positions,” said Arden, sinking into another of the chairs and choosing a chicken salad sandwich for herself. “Muir Woods was entirely sealed off for the duration of the spell. No one could get in or out.”

  “Tybalt told me,” I said, trying to figure out where she was going with this.

  “Did Tybalt tell you that it didn’t seal until she removed me from my position?”

  I frowned. “Okay, so what?”

  “No one was able to get into the knowe after it was sealed.” Arden paused, pinching the bridge of her nose with one hand. “But there was a window when they could have, and well, someone did.”

  I sighed. “I’m guessing I’m not going to like whatever you’re about to tell me next, so maybe you should just spit it out.”

  Arden dropped her hand. “The royal vaults have been raided. Almost everything of any value is missing. Including the hope chest.”

  THREE

  I FROZE WITH A crostini half-raised to my mouth, then slowly lowered it back to my plate. “I’m going to need you to explain what you know to me,” I said, voice low and as level as I could possibly make it. “Slowly. Assume the pregnancy has made my thoughts as clumsy as my feet, and use small words.”

  Arden nodded. “All right. Titania didn’t get all the details of her spell right the first time. The Library confirms it, and the Gwragen agree. She was trying to craft her perfect Faerie, and every iteration was a little different than the ones before it. I can’t remember any but the last of them—none of us can—but they were all recorded in the Library. And before she realized that getting me and Nolan out of the way required booting us down the coast to the Golden Shore, she tried a few other approaches.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Well, first, she tried to let me stay Queen while she wiped my mind and made me her obedient little toy. But that apparently destabilized everything, since there was no way to make me Queen and let me be the one to kill Oleander. Nolan killed her in that timeline, and it all fell apart when I tracked him down and had him arrested for breaking the Law. Apparently making me try my own brother for murder caused me to rebel and everything went to shit. We didn’t even need to bother you to break her toys in that version.” Arden smirked, looking obscurely pleased with herself. “So she reset it all, and the second time, she brought back her shitty false Queen, and had me serving as her Chatelaine while Nolan was her Seneschal. I think it was supposed to teach us our place or something. Instead, the false Queen got a little murdery and knocked down the whole house of cards. It wasn’t pleasant, and I think I’m glad not to remember it. The third go-round, we were on the Golden Shore, and Muir Woods was sealed.”

  “All right,” I said, wondering just how much of the four months I remembered were as implanted as the rest of Titania’s false memories. May and I had discussed the fact that Titania had revised her enchantment several times, something which most people would never have to know. I certainly hadn’t expected it to have actual consequences.

  “But the knowe was open and in use during her first two tries; that must have been when whoever it was cleared out the vaults,” continued Arden. “They got away with essentially everything.”

  “Including the hope chest,” I said. I was starting to think through the implications of that, and none of them were good.

  Hope chests were created by Oberon as a means of turning the changeling children of his descendants fully fae; they were essentially an inanimate version of Amandine’s descendant line, with the same magical ability to change the balance of fae blood. Anyone fae could use them—anyone. We even have stories of merlins successfully using hope chests, and merlins have so little fae blood that they age at almost the same rate as humans do. In the wrong hands, a hope chest could be used to change someone against their will, making permanent alterations to their selves. They could do that in the right hands, too, but at least when the hope chest was locked in Arden’s vaults, I didn’t have to worry that it was being used to torture people.

  Faerie is a world made up of hundreds of different, loosely related species. Children of Oberon, Titania, and Maeve, united only in that we’re all functionally immortal: if something doesn’t come along to kill us, we’ll live forever. But we’re not human. That may be the most important thing about Faerie: none of its denizens are human.

  And yet somehow, through some bizarre twist in an already bizarre biology, we can breed with them.

  The offspring of fae-human unions are people like me, changelings, who straddle two worlds without fully belonging to either. If changelings have children with pureblooded fae, their children are still changelings, until enough generations have passed that they breed the mortality back out again. If they have children with humans, those children are still considered changelings for a generation or two. But anyone with a quarter fae blood or less is considered a thin-blooded changeling, and is less likely to be able to perceive or interact with Faerie.

  If it stopped there, it might be okay. The pureblooded fae might not hate us as much, and while we’d probably still exist, we’d have an easier time blending into the glorious chaos that is Faerie. But thin-blooded changelings can live entirely in the mortal world, and many of them do, walking away from the rest of us in favor of living in a world that doesn’t pity and belittle them for the circumstances of their birth. If they can adjust, they often do better than their more fae counterparts. They’re usually a little prettier than the humans around them, a little more compelling, and they can turn that into a good life.

  Their children will be more human still, and if those children have children, well.

  That’s when you get merlins. Merlins are still changelings, technically. But they have so little fae blood that they’re really just long-lived humans in most ways that matter. Most … but not all. Because something about dumping that much humanity on top of a few drops of fae blood has a tendency to unlock power most fae can only dream about. Not most changelings: most fae. Merlins have the potential to inherit all the magical strength of their fae ancestors with few, if any, of the limitations. Iron doesn’t burn them. Rowan doesn’t bind them. And sunrise doesn’t tear their towers down.

  The first wars in Faerie were fought over the existence of merlins. Changelings were bad enough, but at least we mostly fit into the feudal structure our parents had so painstakingly created. Merlins, though … merlins broke things.

  As a changeling, I could understand the impulse. Faerie is often cruel to her part-human children. We aren’t equal to our fully fae relations, we can’t hold lands or titles, and worst of all, we die. There’s no point in investing in us as friends or allies, because we’re always here to go. I tried not to think about that when I didn’t have to. Since my return from the pond where Simon had left me, I’d made no new human friends, and very few changeling friends. One day, I was going to die, and everyone I loved was going to have to mourn for me.

  A large part of Titania’s enchantment had been geared toward making sure the changelings it ensnared knew our place, knew with absolute conviction that we were well below the station of even the lowliest pureblood. We were a servant class in her perfect world. It was a version of the existing system, taken to its absolute extreme, and given that, it wasn’t hard to understand why merlins, when they realized how much power they could wield, might decide to burn a corrupt and broken system to the ground.

  But when merlins started smashing things, people got hurt, and that mobilized the rest of Faerie against them. The first war against the merlins drew the Firstborn into the conflict. People died, both during the war and after, when the changelings who hadn’t rebelled were executed to keep it from all happening again. Did things need to change? Absolutely. And at the same time, I had too many kids and teenagers to take care of to want to see Faerie caught up in another cycle of violence.

  “So there’s a hope chest somewhere out in the world, and we don’t know who has it, or what they’re going to do with it,” I said. “They could be planning to charge changelings to turn them fully fae. Or to turn them fully human and eject them from Faerie.”

  “Or they could be planning to tinker with them until they get merlins,” said Arden. “Either way, we need it back—and it’s not the only thing we’re missing. Various pieces of tableware—there are a lot of enchanted knives and hampers out there. The fount that treats iron poisoning. Arthur’s Mantle, Clydno’s Halter, lots of other things that probably shouldn’t have been on this continent to begin with. Tudwal’s Whetstone, and the scabbard that can transform any metal into iron.”

  I had never heard of half those things, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. The last item on the list caught my attention above the rest. “Why would something that makes more iron even exist?” I asked sourly.

  “Gremlins are immune to iron. Coblynau are resistant, and like the challenge of embedding magic into metal. Maybe someone needed a weapon they could count on to protect their holdings. Or maybe they were a serial killer. I don’t know why the thing exists—I don’t even know its name. We found it in the treasury of the false Queen’s knowe, and we locked it away for safekeeping. We locked a lot of things away for safekeeping.”

  “Not so safe if they’re out in the world now.”

  “No, I guess not.” Arden sighed. “I’m sure you know what I’m about to ask.”

  “Can it wait another few weeks?” It had already waited for months. Maybe this was just a warning of what was to come.

  Arden shook her head, looking genuinely miserable. “I wanted to wait, please believe me, I wanted to. And when it looked like this might just have been a thief taking advantage of a great opportunity, I was able to keep pushing back calling for you. I hoped we could reach your due date.”

  I frowned. “I need you to cut to the chase here.”

  “Whoever has these items has started either using them, selling them, or both. We don’t know if they’re all in the same hands. But we do know that someone is using the scabbard to make weapons for criminals,” she said. “The first would-be Robin Hood with iron-tipped arrows could have been a fluke. The seventh? Not so much.”

  “Why haven’t I heard anything about this?” I asked. “I know I’ve been out of the loop, but there still should have been something.”

  “We’ve been doing our best to keep it under wraps. People are already unsettled enough about what happened. Having the Queen of Faerie effectively declare war on your kingdom and way of life doesn’t leave a lot of confidence in the way things are.” Arden sighed. “My guards have been constantly busy, and my vassals are getting overstretched. Duke Torquill wasn’t able to attend tonight because he needed to be home with his guards, protecting Shadowed Hills.”

  “And again, why haven’t I heard anything? Not even from the Luidaeg.”

  “It was all little things until this last week, when everything seemed to start collapsing at once. We’ve had over a dozen muggings, all purebloods, which makes it seem like changelings taking revenge for the way they were treated during the enchantment—understandable, just making things worse right now. Which is probably why we had a Daoine Sidhe highwayman with an iron sword set up by a freeway onramp and start slashing tires on changeling cars. Just two nights ago Dame Altair was attacked on her way home from the Library. That was the first time one of my direct vassals was assaulted.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “She is,” said Arden. “One of her footmen, however, is not. The man was cut down with a blade of purest iron, and has stopped his dancing. He’s the first so far, but if things continue as they have been, he’s not going to be the last. We have to find the stolen artifacts, October. We have to find them soon. I would give you the time you need to birth the baby and recover if I had it to offer, but you’re the only Hero I have right now, and I need you to do your duty by the kingdom.”

  “Can’t you name another Hero?” I asked, half-desperately.

  Arden sighed again, looking down at the plate in her hands. It was much fuller than mine. Apparently, she didn’t have much of an appetite. “I would if I could. I’ve already had my people searching for what’s been lost. Even Nolan’s been going out in the city trying to find traces of the artifacts. I’ve amped up my guard, and set them patrolling as much as their numbers allow. Golden Shore has sent additional guards to bolster their ranks, and I’ve offered protection to my vassals. Nothing’s worked. I really hate to do this while you’re expecting, but I don’t have a wide variety of heroes to choose from, and you’re the best finder in the Kingdom.”