Once Broken Faith

by Seanan McGuire

  It hadn’t worked out that way. He died, leaving them unprotected. Nolan had been elf-shot by the forces of the woman who was claiming to be Gilad’s rightful heir. And Arden had gone into hiding, where she’d remained until I tracked her down and dragged her, kicking and screaming, back to her birthright. She didn’t seem to be holding a grudge about that, but it was sort of hard to tell, given that since she’d taken the throne, she’d formally named me as a hero, sent me to act as a diplomatic attaché to a hostile neighboring Kingdom, and was now asking me to help her go against the wishes of the High King.

  Okay, scratch that. She was definitely holding a grudge.

  I took another breath, getting my balance back before I stood upright again. “Okay,” I said, tugging my leather jacket straight to cover the last of my dizziness. “Where are we going?”

  “This way.” She spun on her heel and stalked deeper into the knowe, gesturing for me to follow.

  The knowe in Muir Woods belonged to Arden’s father before his death. Someone had sealed it after he died and she disappeared, keeping it from the clutches of the false Queen. Its continued existence had been our first real clue that Arden was still out there somewhere, waiting to be found. Without a member of the Windermere line to anchor it, it should have faded back into the Summerlands, becoming inaccessible from the mortal world. Instead, it had waited, patient as a faithful hound, certain that its master would return. Now, with her in full-time residence and her people working to open, restore, and decorate the place, it was slowly returning to the majesty it must have possessed before King Gilad’s death.

  Which was very inspirational and all, but knowes were living things that didn’t have to play by the normal rules of linear space and sensible architecture. Every time I came to visit, the place seemed to have grown larger, and half the new rooms didn’t make any sense in relation to the rooms around them. The entry hall was relatively static, for which I was grateful. Everything else was anybody’s guess, and I’ve never been a fan of guessing games.

  Arden led me down the entry hall to a narrow doorway and through that doorway to a winding stairway that seemed to stretch upward for the better part of forever. On the mortal side of the knowe, the whole vast estate was just a crude door in a redwood tree, surrounded by more on every side. Here in the Summerlands, the redwoods remained, although these were fae trees, never threatened by loggers or pollutants. Consequently, they’d grown even taller than the giants of the mortal California coast. They were interspersed with the equally tall spires of the castle battlements and towers. We were inside one of those towers; I realized that before we passed the first window and I saw the woolly red bark of the trees growing outside.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Patience,” said Arden, and kept climbing.

  Most of the responses I wanted to offer to that would have been inappropriate, especially considering that she was the Queen and I didn’t want to be banished. Again. I bit my tongue and kept climbing, following the curve of the stairs up, up, up, until we came to a short landing. The stairs continued upward. Arden ignored them, opening the door on the landing and revealing a wooden walkway wending off into the trees. I inched close enough to see that we were at least fifty feet above the ground. The forest floor was a distant, far-off dream.

  “Nope,” I said, taking a step backward.

  Arden turned to me, raising her eyebrows. “What?”

  “I said, nope,” I said. “Not going out there. No. Would I survive a fall from that height? Sure. I’ve done it before. I’d just lie there screaming while I waited for my bones to knit back together. No big deal, except for the part where no way in hell am I going out on that thing. That’s what, three feet across and made of untreated redwood? In this fog? That’s going to be as slippery as a Merrow’s ass, and I’m not going to do it.”

  “I need you to come with me,” said Arden. She seemed puzzled, like she couldn’t understand why I wasn’t jumping to obey.

  “You’re getting better at this whole ‘monarch’ thing, but no,” I said. “I know my sense of balance, I know how often I get hurt, and I know it’s not a good idea to tempt fate. I’m not going out there.”

  “Oh, for the love of Maeve,” muttered Arden. She took a step toward me. I braced myself for the inevitable attempt to haul me through the door. Instead, she waved a hand in the air before shoving me backward, through the portal that had opened behind me. I stumbled, caught off-guard—

  —and emerged in the middle of the treetop walkway. As I’d feared, the wood was slick from the fog hanging around us, and my sneakers slipped slightly before I managed to catch my balance and go still. Standing dead center, there was only about a foot of wood to either side of me. It would be so easy to fall. So very, very easy to fall.

  Arden stepped through the portal, which closed behind her, and looked at me. “There,” she said. “They say the first step is the hardest, and so I’ve spared you that much. Now will you come on?”

  I gaped at her. “Root and branch, you can’t be serious right now.” I waved one arm as much as I dared, trying to indicate the area around us without attracting the attention of gravity. “Bridge! Very long drop! If you can teleport me here, why can’t you just teleport us to where Walther and your brother are waiting?”

  “Because Master Davies says the potion he’s brewed to counter the effects of elf-shot is delicate, and if we want it to have the best shot of working, we shouldn’t do any magic in the room,” said Arden. “No illusions, no gateways, nothing. I want them awake. That means we’re not doing anything to endanger that.”

  “If you drop me off a bridge, I’m pretty sure Walther is going to be a little reluctant to wake up your brother!” I don’t have a fear of heights. I have a healthy respect for heights. I really, really respected the fact that a fall from this height would hurt like hell, even if it probably wouldn’t kill me. My particular bloodline came with accelerated healing, to the point that I’d survived being stabbed in the heart, and had probably drowned on at least two occasions. That didn’t mean I didn’t feel pain. If anything, it meant I felt pain more, since I could heal from my initial injuries before I finished receiving the next ones down the line.

  “I’m not going to drop you off the bridge,” said Arden. She was starting to look seriously annoyed. “Calm down and follow me. This is a perfectly safe walkway. No one’s fallen since I took over.”

  “So people fell before you took over?”

  She sighed. “My father had a lot of Cornish Pixies on his staff. They fell because they liked it. Look, you’ll have to walk the same distance to get back to the stairs as you will to get to our destination. But if you turn and walk away from me, you’ll have traveled that distance while also pissing off your regent. Do you really want to do that?”

  “Dirty pool, Windermere,” I said, narrowing my eyes.

  “Madden is my best friend. Nolan is my brother. Those two, those two sleeping men, they are everything I have. You’re the reason I had to give up my mortal life, remember? No more job at the bookstore, no more coffee with Jude and listening to Alan grumble about cleaning up after customers. I am not,” she held out her hands, palms toward me, “running away from my responsibilities again. You said I got one shot at trying to quit, and I took it, and you were right. I can’t do that again. But I have no one who knows me, October. Lowri is doing a fine job as my stand-in seneschal, but you know what she calls me?”

  “Going to go with ‘Your Highness,’” I said cautiously.

  “Sometimes she gets informal and shortens it to ‘Highness,’” said Arden. “I’m a crown to her, not a person. She doesn’t know what I like to read, or care about how I made a living while I wasn’t in charge. My time among the humans, it’s like . . . it’s like she thinks it’s some weird kind of zoological expedition. I went out, I watched them, and then I came back home where I belonged. And she’s the be
st of them! She’s just about the only person who even bothers to pay attention to things like how uncomfortable I get when Court goes for more than six hours. I’m not threatening to run again, I’m not, but I don’t know how long I can do this without someone around here who can call me on my bullshit.”

  “I’m calling you on your bullshit right now,” I said. “I really don’t want to plummet to my death today.”

  “You’ll get better.”

  “I’m still not a fan of plummeting.”

  Arden sighed. “We’re not friends, Toby. Maybe we can figure out a way we can be. Maybe we can’t. You’re always going to be the woman who hauled me back into this world.”

  “And barring death, dismemberment, or abdication, you’re always going to be the queen,” I said. “I get it.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to go from a life where things aren’t perfect, but you’re always surrounded by people who care about you, to being alone? Even when I’m surrounded, I’m alone.”

  I went cold. “I think I have a better idea than you know,” I said.

  In 1995, I was engaged to a human man named Cliff Marks. He and I had a two-year-old daughter. I was working as a private investigator, mostly taking on fae clients who wouldn’t realize how little training I’d actually had. I had friends. I had a family. I had a future planned out, stretching ahead of us like a road to peace and prosperity. And I lost it all in a single moment, when Simon Torquill—my liege lord’s brother, my mother’s husband, and technically my stepfather—transformed me into a fish and left me in the Japanese Tea Gardens to be forgotten. He’d been trying to save my life. I’d remained there for fourteen years. Not long, by pureblood standards. Not even that long by changeling standards. But for humans like Cliff? For little girls like Gillian, who didn’t even know she had fae heritage? It was forever. They had never taken me back.

  Maybe the life I had now was better than the one I would’ve had if not for that day. There was no way of knowing, and honestly, it wasn’t a question I liked to dwell on. I’d found a new family for myself, and I was happy. But before I was happy, I’d been very, very miserable.

  “Then you should understand why I have to do this,” said Arden. “I’ve been patient. I kept thinking he’d tell me to go ahead, that he’d say, you know, Master Davies is a citizen of the Mists who was traveling to Silences on official business, and if it was okay for him to wake up the citizens of Silences, he should be allowed to do the same at home before we start talking about bottling up and hiding his cure. But he didn’t say that, and I can’t wait any longer.”

  I took a deep breath. Held it. Let it out. “All right,” I said finally. “Lead on.”

  As long as I kept my eyes on the back of Arden’s head, I didn’t have to think about how high up we were, or how close I was to falling every time I took a step. For all that she’d spent most of her life in the mortal world, she moved along the impossibly long walkway without hesitation or visible distress. Being a teleporter probably had something to do with that. If she fell, she could open a portal and land in her own bed, cushioned by feather pillows, entirely unbruised. I didn’t have that sort of safety net.

  We reached the next tower in surprisingly short order. Arden opened the door and held it while I stepped through. Moving past me, she offered a strained smile, said, “That wasn’t so bad, now, was it?” and started up another stairway, identical to the one we’d left behind.

  I swallowed my first response. Just to be safe, I also swallowed my second response, and followed her up the stairs. They terminated at a landing barely wider than one of the steps. She knocked.

  “It’s open!” called Walther.

  Arden took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and opened the door.

  The tower room where Madden and Nolan slept couldn’t have been farther from the basement King Rhys had used to store the elf-shot victims in Silences. It was round, airy, and circular, with wide windows set in the walls between the beds, open to allow the night air to flow through. Walther had apparently been serious about his “no magic” rule; there were no witch-lights or charmed lanterns. Instead, he’d set up several halogen camping lights around the edges of the room, creating the odd impression that we’d just stepped onto a film set. That was the only reason to light the place so unforgivingly.

  There were eight beds arrayed like the spokes of a wheel. Only two were occupied, one by a burly man with white hair streaked in carnal red, the other by a man whose blackberry-dark locks and olive skin betrayed him as Arden’s brother. Madden, who’d been asleep for less than two months, was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. This was still his time. Nolan had been asleep a lot longer. He was dressed like he was planning to roll out of bed and head for a Great Gatsby-themed party, down to his suspenders and polished shoes. He’d been elf-shot in the 1930s. His nap was nearly over. I still understood why Arden felt like she couldn’t wait any longer, especially now that Madden had joined him. She needed her support system. I couldn’t imagine going a hundred years without mine.

  Walther was standing between the two beds, spinning a fine rosy liquid in a wine snifter like he was a sommelier and we were here to enjoy a pleasant dinner while surrounded by coma patients. He turned at the sound of the door opening, and looked relieved at the sight of me. That was a fun change. “Toby,” he said. “I was afraid you weren’t going to come.”

  “Why, because this might technically be an act of treason against the High King, and hence a good way to wind up locked in gaol for the next, oh, twenty years?” I shrugged like it was no big thing as I strolled into the room and sat down on one of the empty beds. It wasn’t as soft as it had looked from a distance, more like a bier than a bower. I blinked. “Wow. Orthopedic?”

  “It wouldn’t do to have your sleepers wake up in need of a chiropractor,” said Walther, with a tight smile. I smiled back, trying to look sympathetic and encouraging at the same time. He was in a tough spot. If he refused Arden—who was, after all, the Queen of the Kingdom he was currently living in—he could wind up banished. Not the end of the world, but he’d been working for a while to get tenure at UC Berkeley, and a change of address would mean starting all over again. If he didn’t refuse her, he could be pissing off the man in charge of the entire continent. No wonder he’d wanted me present. I was his security blanket.

  Walther was originally from the Kingdom of Silences to the north, overlapping the human state of Oregon. His aunt and uncle were the rightful rulers of the place, and he’d been raised, along with his sister Marlis, under the expectation that he’d eventually become one of their court alchemists. Only there’d been a war, and his family had lost the throne for a hundred years. During that time, Walther had fled to avoid elf-shot or enslavement—the two fates that befell the rest of his family—and had eventually become a chemistry teacher. The work suited him. He would probably never have gone back to Silences if I hadn’t dragged him.

  Good thing: going back to Silences had resulted in his family regaining their place. Better thing: we’d come away with a functional cure for elf-shot, the purebloods’ weapon of choice when it came to waging war. Little enchanted arrows that could put a person to sleep for a century. Problem: having a cure changed everything. We’d barely managed to get home before the edict had come from the High King, asking us to keep the cure secret while he decided what to do next. And now he was coming here, which was a whole new problem.

  Arden cleared her throat. “The beds were designed by a Coblynau crafter who knew what would be best for our sleepers,” she said. “Now let’s wake those sleepers up.”

  “Before High King Sollys gets here and says absolutely not, don’t do it,” I said.

  She shot me a sharp look. I shook my head.

  “I came when you asked me to. That means I’m going to be in just as much trouble as you are. More, it means I’m supporting you in this. If h
e asks, ‘Did Queen Windermere wake her brother after I told her not to?’ I’ll tell him the truth, but I’ll also tell him you had a good reason to do what you did. That doesn’t mean I’m going to pretend you had permission.” I turned to Walther. “You have a queen and a hero, which is another word for ‘scapegoat,’ telling you to go ahead and wake them up. So go ahead. Wake them up.”

  “You’re also the only person I know who’s been elf-shot twice and can still give orders,” said Walther. He gave his rose-colored liquid one more swirl and turned to Arden. His posture shifted with his attention, becoming formal and serious. Arden hadn’t been kidding about the way people behaved when they were talking to royalty. “Who would you like me to wake first, Highness?”

  “My seneschal,” she said, without hesitation. “Madden will want to know what happened, and Nolan is going to need a lot more catching up.”

  Walther nodded, and moved to Madden’s bedside, bending to press the lip of his wine snifter against the other man’s lips. He placed his free hand under Madden’s head, bringing it a few inches up from the pillow, so that gravity would be working on his side. I wanted to ask how he could be sure that Madden wouldn’t choke, but I held my tongue. Walther had already managed to wake me, May, and his entire sleeping family. He knew what he was doing.

  After a moment, he pulled the snifter away and stepped back, letting Madden’s head return to the pillow. I risked a glance at Arden. She had folded her hands and pressed them beneath her chin, eyes wide and solemn as a child’s as she watched.