Full of Briars

by Seanan McGuire

  “She was punching holes in the walls of the world,” said Toby. “It had to stop.”

  “Yes,” said Mom. “So you . . . changed her? Did she consent?”

  “Fully,” said Toby. “She had to go one way or the other—she was too dangerous as she was—but she got to choose.”

  “I see.” Mom looked at me again, then at my father. “The situation here seems to get more complicated every time we take our eyes off it for an instant.”

  Arden laughed bitterly. I jumped. I’d almost forgotten she was there. She might be a queen now, but she’d been a mortal retail employee for a long time, and she knew how to blend into the background when she wanted to. “Welcome to my life,” she said.

  My parents looked even more perplexed. It had probably been a long, long time since one of their vassals dared to say something like that in their presence. There was another point to be made there, but I couldn’t think of how to phrase it without angering my parents and embarrassing Arden. So instead, I forced a smile and said, “Toby is good at complicating things. That’s why she’s been such a good teacher for me. By the time I’m High King, I’m going to be completely unflappable.”

  “This is the most ridiculous conversation I have ever been involved in,” muttered Dad.

  “Also a pretty common side effect of the company we tend to keep,” said May. “Look, I get that this is all a lot to take in, and that you don’t have all the time in the world. We really, really don’t want you to take Quentin away from us. How long are you staying?”

  That was Arden’s cue, and she met it admirably. “We’re still opening the knowe. Most of the chambers will be unsuited for habitation for another few months, so I am afraid I can’t offer you the type of housing you deserve, but we’ve cleaned and reopened my father’s quarters. I would be honored if you chose to rest upon the hospitality of my house, and spend the day.”

  Mom frowned. “We can’t take your room.”

  “I don’t sleep in my father’s quarters.” Arden grimaced. “I’m sure this is another of the cultural differences Sir Daye mentioned, but it wouldn’t feel . . . right . . . for me to sleep in his bed. I have a smaller room near the library. I think it’s going to be a while before I feel comfortable in anything larger.”

  “Too late to refuse to confirm her just because she grew up surrounded by humans,” said Toby quickly. “No backsies.”

  “I don’t believe there are ‘backsies’ where thrones are concerned,” said Tybalt, sounding amused.

  Toby was unrepentant. “I don’t care. I want to be sure.”

  “You want a great many things,” said Dad. He looked to Arden, and nodded. “We’ll accept the hospitality of your house for one day. That will give us time to speak with our son, and decide what’s to be done. Sir Daye?”

  “Yes?” said Toby. There was a sudden edge in her voice. Then she glanced at me, and I realized that it wasn’t so sudden; she had just been doing her best to hide it. She was scared.

  And so was I. When my parents had said they needed to come to the Mists in order to confirm Arden as the new Queen, I had been looking forward to a fun reunion. Not . . . this. Not the threat of removal.

  “If you will excuse us, I feel the need to spend some time with my son,” said my father. “Please return in the morning. We will share a light meal, and give you our decision.”

  Toby swallowed, hard, before bowing. “Yes, Your Highness.” She looked to me one more time, making no effort to hide the bleakness in her eyes. “Behave yourself, squire.”

  “Yes, Sir,” I said, and bowed, as deeply and formally as I knew how. My form was perfect. I knew that much. I was showing her the kind of honor I’d be expected to reserve for kings and queens when I was grown, and I was doing it on purpose. I wanted my parents to see.

  I was still bowing when the door closed. I straightened to find myself alone with my parents, and with Queen Windermere, who stood uneasily in the space between them and the wall.

  “I’ll have my seneschal show you to your rooms,” she said, and was gone, stepping through a hastily sketched circle in the air. It smelled, ever so faintly, of redwood trees. Toby would have been able to pick it apart in an instant, telling me which redwood trees, and which parts of them. I couldn’t.

  I looked at my parents. They looked back at me.

  “We have a lot to talk about,” said Dad, and he’d never said anything so honest in his life.

  Three

  King Gilad’s quarters were vast, as befitted the ruler of the Mists. A large central chamber opened onto a private bedroom, library, sitting room, and servant’s quarters, where his personal valet would have slept, always ready for his king to need him. Taken together, it was larger than the apartment Toby had been living in when I first met her. Even the servant’s room was bigger than my bedroom at the house.

  This sort of grandeur was nothing new to me. At home in Toronto, Penthea and I had shared a suite much like this one with an ever-shifting array of nursemaids, each selected for their grace and discretion. None had ever stayed long enough for us to become dangerously loyal or attached to them. I didn’t even remember them all by name. But I remembered the space, and how much of a comedown in the world it had been when I’d moved into my temporary quarters at Shadowed Hills. By the standards of my peers, I might as well have been living in a shack. Things hadn’t improved much since then.

  I wouldn’t have traded my metaphorical shack for all the castles in the world.

  Mom and Dad had been escorted through the halls by Madden, who took his duties as Arden’s newly appointed seneschal very seriously. Arden herself had come back for me after they were gone, opening a gate between that room and her father’s, so no one would see me too close to the High Regents. It could have raised questions. If not for my being squired to Toby—a changeling, viewed as unsuitable by even minor monarchs—people would probably have already started asking.

  Less than half an hour had passed, and I was finally back where I’d wanted so desperately to be five years ago: alone in the company of my parents. I’d just never expected the word “alone” to hang so heavily.

  “Quentin, please,” said Mom. She had released the cosmetic spells hiding the scars on her face; she finally looked like my mother, and not High Queen Maida of the Westlands, long may she reign in the glory of the rose and thorn. “I just want to understand why you don’t want to come home.”

  “I don’t care whether we understand,” said Dad. “I want to know what makes you think we won’t take you back to Toronto, regardless of what you think is best for you. You’re a child, Quentin. A child we sent into blind fosterage too soon, for reasons I honestly never fully understood. I was never fostered. Your mother was never fostered. We could have kept you at home and no one would have questioned it.”

  I said nothing. I remembered the night they’d come to me and Penthea and told us they’d been convinced by some of their advisors that sending us away would be best for us. I’d been twelve; Penny had been ten, and she’d clung to me and cried when she was told I’d be leaving first, sent all the way across the country and forbidden to have any contact with her until her majority, when she would be brought home. They’d sent her into her own fosterage two years later. I still didn’t know where she was. I had never asked exactly who had convinced them that we should be fostered. I didn’t want to know.

  “Quentin?” There was a dangerous edge to my father’s voice now. I hadn’t heard it in years, but I remembered it clearly. “Answer me. Why do you think you get a say?”

  “Because while it’s traditional for children to hate their parents, I was under the assumption that you enjoyed my good opinion of you,” I snapped. There was no one here but us: I couldn’t be accused of speaking out of turn or reaching above my station. Life with Toby might not involve practicing a lot of the manners that had been drilled into me during my childhood and du
ring my ongoing etiquette lessons at Shadowed Hills, but that didn’t mean I’d forgotten a single thing. “All I have ever wanted was for you to be proud of me. When you sent me away, I thought it was because I was such a profound disappointment that you couldn’t stand to look at me. Do you know how long it took for me to get over that? Years, Father. Years I spent thinking that I was an embarrassment to my house and family name.”

  Mom gasped softly, putting a hand over her mouth. Dad looked ashamed.

  “You have never disappointed us,” he said, softening his tone. “I know you may not want to hear this right now, but your mother and I are intensely proud of the man we see you becoming. He shows in your letters. In your actions. In the way you choose to argue with us when etiquette says you should be dutiful and patient and do as you’re told. I would never have argued with my father the way you’re arguing with me.”

  “I argued with mine,” said Mom.

  Dad shot her an amused look. “Your father was a Baron in Kansas.”

  “I still argued with him,” she said. “He made me feed the chickens and do the dishes.”

  “Sir Daye doesn’t have chickens,” I said.

  “But she does make you do the dishes,” said Mom.

  I nodded. “And I have to vacuum, and clean the bathroom once a month. There’s a chore chart.”

  “I never expected to hear a son of mine say the words ‘chore chart’ like they were reasonable things,” said Dad.

  “But they are,” I said. “We don’t have servants, and if everybody didn’t take turns, one person would wind up spending all their time cleaning. That’s not fair. And I didn’t like it at first. I thought it was beneath me. I still did it, because there was no way to say ‘no’ that wouldn’t involve explaining why I thought it was beneath me.” I’d pushed back in those early days—sweet Oberon, how I’d pushed back—and Toby had listened, nodded, and then cuffed me in the arm before giving me another lecture about how being a pureblood didn’t make me better than anybody else. Eventually, it had become easier to do the dishes than it was to listen to her.

  That was what I couldn’t figure out how to explain. I’d started doing the dishes because I didn’t want to be yelled at anymore, and I’d continued doing them because it was the right thing to do. Because the whole house was happier when we were all pulling our weight, and my being a prince didn’t make my silverware any less in need of scrubbing. I could form the concepts. I could see them in my mind. I just couldn’t find the words to bring them into the light, where other people—where my parents—could see them.

  “That’s very enlightened of you, Quentin,” said my mother, after the moment of stunned silence had passed. “I’m so glad this has been good for you. It’s been everything we could have wanted in a blind fosterage. You’re coming back to us stronger and wiser than you left. But it’s time for you to come home.”

  I took a deep breath. This was it, then: this was where I set myself against my parents. Oh, goodie. “Are you ordering me home?”

  “What?”

  “Are you ordering me home? It’s a simple question. It has sort of big implications, but it’s still pretty simple. I’m your heir, not your vassal. I’m sworn in service to Sir October Daye, through her fealty to Duke Sylvester Torquill. If you order me, I will be breaking my oaths, because neither of them will release me from my word.” I tried to look stoic and brave. I was pretty sure I looked like I was about to be sick. “Maybe in a couple of hundred years that won’t matter, but I promise you, if you haul me away from here, there are going to be people who go ‘wait, he was Crown Prince?’ And they’re going to talk about how I’m not even on the throne yet, and I’m already oathbroken. People like to gossip. Everyone will know.”

  “People in the court talked when we sent you away; that gossip hasn’t hurt you any,” said Dad.

  “No, because it was all home gossip. Everybody’s got a missing prince or princess to worry about. Everybody’s got a fostered kid, or knows one. But a scandal? That’s the kind of thing that gets you on daytime television.”

  My parents looked blankly at me again. I swallowed the urge to sigh. If this was how Toby felt when she dealt with most purebloods, no wonder she spent so much time in a bad mood.

  “It’s a thing mortals—never mind, it doesn’t matter.” I shook my head. “If you want me to be High King someday, you have to let me do things the right way. Like finishing my knighthood. Like keeping my word.”

  “You broke your word when you revealed your parentage,” said Dad, sounding more confident now that we were back on what he felt was familiar ground. He was right and I was wrong, and everything was going to be fine.

  “I revealed my parentage to get the rightful queen on her throne, depose an imposter, and prevent the exile of my knight, which would have resulted in either me being kicked out of the Mists—not good when I’m supposed to be in charge someday—or in the false Queen finding out who I was. She would have used me. You know she would. I needed to make a choice. I made the right one.”

  “But, Quentin . . .” Mom’s voice was soft. I turned. The tears in her eyes were visible now. She smiled wistfully at me. “Don’t you miss us?”

  The truth was, I didn’t know. When they’d first sent me away, I’d cried myself to sleep every morning, condemning myself as a weakling and a coward for being so scared to be away from my family. I was a prince, and princes didn’t cry. But I’d also been a twelve-year-old boy, surrounded by strangers, far from home, in a place where even the air didn’t taste right. Duke Torquill’s wife and daughter had still been missing, and most of the duties of my fosterage had been set by Sir Etienne from the guard and Melly from the kitchens, both of them working together to keep me from attracting the Duke’s attention. He was always a good man. Even good men could become dangerous when they were tangled in their grief.

  Every day, I’d prayed to the root and the branch that my parents would realize they’d made a mistake and come to take me home. Every night I’d struggled to be perfect in every possible way, so someone would tell them what a fine young man I was growing into, and they’d realize that I would be an asset to their court, and come to take me home. Every moment had been focused on the idea of earning my way back where I belonged.

  And then Toby had come back from the pond.

  Duke Torquill had started assigning me to her company, first as a messenger, then as an assistant, and finally as a squire. She hadn’t wanted me in the beginning. She’d claimed it was dangerous, and she hadn’t been wrong about that—the first time I’d gone somewhere with her, I’d ended up with a bullet in my shoulder and a whole lot of my blood on the floor. But it had been exciting. It had been interesting. It had been something I could learn in the Mists that I couldn’t have learned at home in Toronto, and I had wanted it. I still did.

  I took a breath. “I miss you, Maman,” I said finally. “I miss you every day. I wonder what you’re doing, and what Penny’s doing, and if she thinks about me—I mean, I’m five years older now, which means she is, too, and she was younger than I was when I went away. Maybe she doesn’t remember who I am. But I’m not a little boy anymore. I stopped praying for you to come and carry me home a long time ago.”

  Mom looked down at her joined hands. Dad looked at me.

  “This is really what you want, son?” he asked. “To stay here, in this . . . this mess?”

  “It’s sort of funky in the Mists sometimes, but I like it,” I said. “It feels like home, for now.”

  His lips drew tight. “You understand that no matter how much it feels like home, you’ll have to come back to Toronto when you reach your majority. As heir to the throne, you need to learn the traditions and standards of the position that will one day be yours.”

  “I know.” My majority was years away. If I still didn’t want to leave the Mists when I reached it, there was going to be a problem. But maybe I’d c
hange my mind. I’d already changed it once, when I stopped being the boy who would have done absolutely anything for the chance to go home. “That’s not now, Father. I love it here. I have a purpose. I’m learning, and everything I learn is going to make me a better king someday. I’m not in any hurry to take your throne. Don’t you want me to be as prepared as possible?”

  Mom laughed. Dad and I both turned to look at her. She was wiping away her tears, and she was smiling.

  “Oh, give it up, Aethlin. We taught the boy to think and then we sent him away to learn how to argue; you’re not going to win. All you’re going to do is chew on each other, and we have little enough time here that I’m done with wasting it. Quentin is right. We can’t pull him out of the Mists without leaving him oathbroken, and that knight of his isn’t going to release him just because we tell her to.”

  “Toby’s pretty stubborn,” I said gravely.

  “And you haven’t been picking that up from her at all,” said Dad.

  I grinned.

  “If you’re to stay here—and I’m not yet saying that you are—I’ll need to know everything about what you’ve been doing,” said Mom. She scooted over, making space for me on the couch between them. “Who your friends are, who you choose to spend time with, everything. Omit not the smallest detail, nor elude the tiniest trace, or I’ll know.”

  “Then what?” I asked, settling myself in the place she had opened. The warmth of their bodies was familiar, and soothing on a deep, almost indefinable level. These were my parents. They loved me, and even if we disagreed, they still wanted what was best for me. It was my job to make sure they understood that “what was best” was a moving target, and always had been.

  “I’ll tickle you until you repent,” said Mom solemnly.

  I laughed, and so did they, and everything was going to be okay.