“I didn’t ask for that,” I objected.

  “No, but your husband did, your squire did, and even your liege did,” he said. “Duke Torquill appears to be trying to step up and do right by you, and if that takes the form of telling your queen to take it easy on you, I say it’s time to allow it.”

  “Huh,” I said, too astonished to say anything else.

  Simon turned his face toward Nolan, his body still angled toward me in a clear effort to keep me at ease. “Is he here?” he asked.

  I already knew from Arden that he wasn’t, and yet I caught my breath, waiting for Nolan’s answer. I hadn’t realized until that moment just how much I wanted to see Sylvester, to smell the comforting dogwood and daffodil scent of his magic, to feel like I was finally able to go home again. Maybe Shadowed Hills was never going to be the home it had been when I was younger, but for part of me, it would always be the place where I’d been granted my knighthood, something that’s supposed to be impossible for changelings. The place that had taken me in when no one thought I was worth taking.

  Even if we were never close again the way we had once been, he would always be a part of who I was. He had been kind to me when no one else was or needed to be, and I’d always believed it was because he somehow saw something in me that no one else did, something worth caring about. The worst part of learning that Simon was legally my father had been discovering that I was technically Sylvester’s niece, and he might have been kind to me for reasons I had no control over.

  Nolan shook his head. “I’m sorry, but no,” he said. “He sent word through one of his vassals. Sir Etienne?”

  “I know him,” said Simon.

  “He was my knight,” I said, surprising sorrow washing through me.

  Finding out that Sylvester might have only cared about me at first because of his brother had been a shock that I was still recovering from. At least I knew Tybalt loved me because of who I was. There was no other explanation for him deciding to stick around, much less marry me. Not that marrying a walking disaster said much about his taste in women, but hey.

  “Is Etienne still here?” I asked, when the silence got to be too heavy and needed to be set aside. “I haven’t seen him since we all got back.”

  “I believe he’s returned to Shadowed Hills, as he had no direct business here and was needed there,” said Nolan. “If I see him, I’ll tell him you asked after him? Perhaps he can be enticed to return.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’m just glad to hear that Sylvester spoke for me.”

  Things had been strained enough between us for the last few years that I’d been half-expecting him to release my fealty. I wouldn’t be an unsworn knight for long, even if that happened. Arden would be happy to take my oaths, and if for some reason I didn’t want to pledge to her, January or Li Qin, in Tamed Lightning and Dreamer’s Glass, respectively, would be thrilled to have the opportunity to claim me. I had choices now, options, and Sylvester wasn’t the only game in town.

  But he was finally making an effort after too long spent in silence, and if I could forgive him enough to stay with my original liege, that would absolutely be my preference.

  Simon rose, shooting me an apologetic look. “Forgive me, my flower, but it seems my presence is required,” he said. “I’ll return if I can.”

  “I’ll hold you to that,” I said, as lightly as I could manage.

  He smiled, and stepped through the portal Nolan had opened in the air, vanishing as the portal closed and Nolan and I were left alone.

  He looked around the small parlor, then walked over to take an éclair from the table. “Sorry to steal your dad,” he said.

  “He’s not my dad,” I protested. “Father, yes, but ‘dad’ is different, at least in the human world.”

  “Still.”

  “It’s okay. We both knew we weren’t coming to a social event before we got here.” I watched Nolan carefully, trying to gauge his mood. He looked reasonably relaxed. “I was talking to your sister earlier.”

  “She told you about what’s been going on?”

  “She did, and I just wanted to ask you if things have really been that bad.”

  Nolan turned to look at me. “No, you don’t. You want to ask me if she’s telling you the truth.”

  I shrugged. “So what if I am? I’m almost at term here, Nolan. What could possibly be so important that it can’t wait a few weeks to let me give birth? With the way I heal, you know I’ll be ready for duty by the next morning.”

  “Look.” He sighed heavily. “Some of the stuff that’s been swiped, it’s not great. We can’t have it among the populace any longer than necessary, especially not right now.”

  “What’s so important about right now?”

  He pulled a face, moving to take Simon’s deserted chair. “Based on what I know about you, time was you’d have been the one bringing this to our attention. Weren’t you a part of the changeling underground?”

  “Weren’t you asleep back then?”

  He smiled a little. “Touché. Anyway, what I hear says you used to run with the criminal element in this kingdom.”

  I bristled. “Those two statements aren’t the same thing. Changelings aren’t automatically criminals.”

  “No, but we force them to be, sometimes.” He shrugged. “When you can’t get a place without either prostrating yourself or violating your morals, it starts to look like your choices are servant or thief. And thief starts looking better and better. You can’t ask people to eat shit and pretend it’s gourmet cooking forever. You shouldn’t even do it once.”

  I must have looked stunned, because he smiled again, shrugging this time.

  “I was a labor man before the elf-shot. Luxury of knowing I would never be king: I had time to worry about what the rest of the kingdom looked like. Changelings weren’t thriving even then, and everything I’ve heard says it’s gotten worse. Am I wrong?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Arden handles the throne, I try to keep an ear on what’s happening that might affect the throne. And the changelings of the Mists are unhappy since the dissolution of Titania’s world. I think they saw how bad things could get, and how much of that inequality was rooted in our current system.”

  “Huh,” I said. “No one’s said anything to me.”

  “You’ve been out of touch, Sir Daye. I doubt anyone was willing to take the risk in coming to you.”

  I nodded, thoughtfully. He looked at my expression, picked up an egg salad sandwich from the refreshment tray, and rose. “Looks like you’ve got a lot to think about. I hope you’re thinking of how to help Ardy. She’s going to need you.”

  A wave of his hand opened another portal in the air and he stepped through, leaving me alone.

  I picked up my own sandwich and nibbled. If the changelings of the kingdom were that unhappy, some of the things Arden had said were missing became even more urgent. One advantage of mortal blood: we’re better at handling iron without taking serious damage. And with the fount that dispensed a cure for iron poisoning in the mix, someone who really wanted to stick it to the man—or whatever—could be making iron weapons, swinging them around with abandon, and then healing themselves before permanent injury could set in.

  While Arden was trying to be a good queen, she was going against decades of poor treatment, and Titania hadn’t helped. Maybe she had even better reasons than I’d thought to be in a rush about this.

  I continued nibbling at my sandwich, trying to eat as slowly as I could, so as not to upset my stomach, and was barely a quarter of the way through when someone rapped on the parlor door. I turned toward the sound, but kept chewing rather than saying anything.

  The rapping was repeated with a little more confidence when no one yelled at the messenger. The knob turned, and the door creaked open enough to reveal Lowri, the Silene who was the current head of Arden’s guard. We’d met while she was still in service to the false Queen, and we were friends, or something like it. She cocked her head to the side, goat-like ears brushing her shoulders.

  “You all right in here, Toby?” she asked, stepping into the room.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Great. You ready to come and face the court?”

  I blinked. “I thought I was going to go last.”

  “This is going last,” she said. “Everyone else has given their testimony. Given the false Queen’s known and ongoing enmity toward you, and multiple abuses, everyone has agreed that you’ll be the last one to speak before her sentencing. Will you come?”

  “Of course.” I set my plate aside and stood.

  I must have looked uncomfortable, because Lowri offered me her arm. I took it gratefully, leaning on her to supplement my balance.

  We left the parlor, Lowri folding one hand over mine and keeping me steady as I continued leaning on her arm and let her lead me back toward the main receiving room. She glanced at my swollen stomach, lifting an eyebrow, and asked, “Weren’t you planning to wait a little while before you got—?”

  “We were,” I said. “To be honest, it takes most fae so long to get pregnant that we weren’t taking any special precautions. Neither of us expected it to happen this quickly, if it happened at all.”

  “And what … she … did, it didn’t hurt the baby?”

  “Thank the root and the branch, no, it didn’t,” I said. “My own healing powers are strong enough that she couldn’t get through them to do any real damage, not without trying so directly that she’d violate her own geas and pull Oberon’s wrath down on her head.” Not that Oberon had been all that wrath-y since I’d known him. He was mostly a silent, detached, somewhat sullen presence haunting the Luidaeg’s apartment, refusing to get involved with the problems and politics around him.

  Which would have been fine, if he hadn’t been the father of us all and a technical living god. We needed his help, and he was happier sulking in the corners and watching his descendants without letting them know he was there.

  It’s probably not great for my health to be this pissed off at my own grandfather all the time, especially not when he has the kind of power that can turn continents inside-out, but I’ve never been all that focused on being good for my own health.

  “Do you know yet whether it’s a boy or a girl?”

  “No,” I said. “Honestly, I’m not even sure I won’t be having a litter of kittens.” I didn’t think it was going to be kittens. The baby had been kicking up a storm for the last few weeks, and the impacts felt distinctly like human feet, no claws. One small thing to be thankful for.

  “Don’t you want to know?”

  “Not really.” I shrugged. “I just want a healthy kid. One I get to stay with, one that Tybalt gets to help me raise. Nothing else matters half as much as that. Plus I haven’t been to see any human doctors, and Jin doesn’t exactly have an ultrasound machine.”

  “I guess you can’t really involve the humans, can you?” asked Lowri speculatively.

  “How’s that?”

  “I mean, all the prenatal stuff is pretty noninvasive but there’s always the risk that the baby wouldn’t look human on their scans, and they’d expect you to come back when it was time for the birth, and it would be hard to explain the way you heal in the delivery room.” Lowri shook her head. “Better to stick with the court healers and do it all in Faerie.”

  “Yeah,” I said, mind suddenly filled with bloody images of delivery rooms destroyed by my panicking husband when he realized my rapid healing was going to betray the existence of Faerie. “Much better to do it that way.”

  Lowri laughed and kept leading me down the hall, toward the inevitable chaos of the court.

  FIVE

  PLEASE STATE YOUR NAME and title for the official record.”

  “Sir October Christine Daye, Knight of Lost Words, sworn in service to Duke Sylvester Torquill of Shadowed Hills, wed to King Tybalt of the Court of Dreaming Cats.” Technically that last part wasn’t in my title, and could have been left out. With what felt like half the population of the Mists staring at me, it seemed like a good idea to remind anyone who might not have my best interests in mind that I had people who not only cared about me, but would have diplomatic immunity if they chose to break the Law.

  Oberon’s one and only Law: no one is allowed to kill purebloods, not even other purebloods, although changelings are fair game. Due to their somewhat animalistic nature and separate political structure, the Law has never fully applied to the Cait Sidhe. They can, and do, kill each other. Could they get away with killing other fae? I was pretty sure no one here wanted to give Tybalt a reason to find out.

  Madden nodded, as did the short woman standing just behind him. She was no taller than an eight-year-old child, with straight brown hair that hung around her face like a curtain and yellow eyes that lacked whites, pupils, or irises: they were just yellow from side to side, nothing like a human’s, but also nothing like a cat’s.

  She was new to Arden’s court, and we had yet to be formally introduced—or introduced at all, with the way my family had been conspiring to keep me at home. Still, I’d heard rumors about how Arden had managed to entice an Adhene to join her service, and now here she was, a living lie detector at the formal court that would determine the false queen’s sentence.

  Not that we didn’t all know the false queen was guilty. This was a performance as much as anything else, a way for people to understand just how much she had victimized our Kingdom and its citizens, and I couldn’t blame Arden for putting it on. Even if I did need to pee.

  Adhene always know when someone is lying. It makes them angry. And while they’re small people, they have incredible physical strength. Pissing them off is a bad move.

  Madden caught my eye. “And do you have a complaint against the unnamed woman who fraudulently occupied the throne in the Mists following the death of King Gilad Windermere?”

  “If I say no, do I get to leave?”

  He shook his head. “No. If you say no, I look really disappointed and ask again.”

  A titter ran through the crowd. It wasn’t that funny, but they’d been here for a while, and they were looking for anything to break the boredom. I sighed. “Then yes, I have a complaint against her. Several.”

  “Please detail your complaints. If you state anything untrue, Bahey will interrupt, and I will ask you to reconsider.”

  Bahey must have been the Adhene. I swallowed the urge to sigh again, and nodded instead. “Understood.”

  “You may begin.”

  Madden stepped back, gesturing for me to face Arden. I turned toward the throne, trying not to look at the crowd to either side. It was filled with familiar faces, many of them more than a little bit distracting. The Luidaeg wasn’t there. Too bad. If anyone could have demanded I get dismissed on the grounds of “nothing new to say, don’t torture the pregnant lady,” it was her.

  “The false queen’s dislike of me began to manifest after I was knighted,” I said. “She granted permission for my training, but I guess she thought I’d give up, because she seemed to hold it against me when I went through with it. Any time I had to interact with her she was unpleasant, verging on hostile. She never outright banned me from her court, but she made it quite clear that I was unwelcome among my betters, and that she would prefer it if I kept my distance. After my time in the pond—”

  Despite my attempts to tune out the crowd, I saw Simon wince out of the corner of my eye. I understood and shared his discomfort. The past was the past, but we both hated to be reminded of what he’d done to me, even knowing that it had been done to save my life. I would never have survived Evening’s wrath if he’d refused to follow her orders. Neither would he. So instead he’d done his best to seem like her obedient little minion while also letting his daughter live.

  It had been a narrow road to walk, and it wasn’t one I envied him.

  “—when I came back, she started tormenting me more actively,” I continued, trying to keep my eyes fixed on Arden. It was better than watching Bahey, who would lose her temper if I dared to say anything that wasn’t completely true. No pressure or anything.

  Not that I wanted to lie to Arden. I may not be a major fan of the feudal system the way it works in Faerie, but even though I wasn’t thrilled about her forcing me back to work, she’s not bad as monarchs go. She doesn’t go around treating her subjects like trash just because she can, she doesn’t belittle changelings or allow goblin fruit to proliferate inside her territory. She could be a lot worse, and that’s a relief, since it’s largely my fault that she ended up in charge.

  “Can you cite examples?” she asked.

  “Any time I had to appear before her, she would transform my clothing into something she liked better, even if I’d made an effort to dress appropriately for court. Not illusions, either. Full-on transformations, that I didn’t have the capacity to undo. I lost some of my favorite pairs of jeans that way.”

  Another titter swept through the crowd, and the hint of a smile tugged at the corners of Arden’s mouth. “Can you cite a less petty example?”

  “I can.” I took a deep breath. “She granted me the title of Countess of Goldengreen for my part in the death of Blind Michael, as a part of an intentional bid to strip me from the service of Duke Sylvester Torquill. As a countess of her territories, my fealty shifted to her.”

  “Most people would disagree with the idea that being ennobled is a torment.”

  “It is when it’s intended to make you vulnerable to attack. She shifted my fealty from Duke Torquill to herself to remove the protections he could offer me, and proceeded to charge me with a violation of Oberon’s Law. With no liege to speak for me, I was sentenced to death. She commanded I be taken to the Iron Tree, where I would be bound, blinded, and burned. Prior to my execution, I was locked in an iron-lined cell, and nearly succumbed to the poison before I was rescued by allies who shall go unnamed.”