A Red-Rose Chain

Tybalt stepped into the office. I followed. Joe reached past me to close the door before turning off the light and casting the entire room into shadow.

“Hold your breath,” he said, and we were plunged into cold.

The transition lasted only a few seconds. Then we were standing in ankle-deep grass, surrounded by trees that had twisted and tangled together until they became an impassable wall. Tybalt released my hand and snapped his fingers, allowing his human disguise to waft away into nothing. I took his lead, clapping my hands as Quentin had instructed. I hadn’t cast the illusion, so I couldn’t feel it give way, but my ears stopped itching, and I assumed that meant the release had worked.

A voice chuckled from the shadows near the base of the trees. “What an odd young lady you’ve found, Rand. She’s lovely, but so unique. Whose bloodline is she? Whose name claims her?”

“Come out, Jolgeir,” said Tybalt. There was an edge of impatience in his tone, so thin that I only heard it because I knew to listen. “We are here at your sufferance, and for that, I am grateful, but we are not here to be your playthings. You have plenty such, and finer than we.”

“I don’t know that I’d trust you to assess the value of my toys,” said Joe—Jolgeir—from his hiding place. But he strolled out into the open all the same, giving me my first look at Tybalt’s local equivalent without his human mask on.

Fae tend to stop aging in their mid-twenties, thanks to whatever quirk of impossible biology makes purebloods immortal. Jolgeir was no different. He was recognizably the frame on which the older human man had been constructed: his facial features were a little finer, and his ears, now sharply pointed and subtly feline, would have looked wrong on the pleasant human proprietor of the little comic book store. His hair was still silver, although now it was the mottled silver of a gray cat, shot through with veins of purest white. His eyes were a shade of blue never seen in a purely human face, and his pupils were vertical slits, like Tybalt’s.

He was still wearing brown slacks and a button-down shirt, which explained why Tybalt hadn’t suggested I change my clothes. Kings get to set their own standards, and the standards of the people around them. Of the three of us, Tybalt was the one who looked slightly overdressed. That wasn’t so unusual. He usually dressed better than I did.

Jolgeir looked me thoughtfully up and down, less like he was looking for something wrong, and more like he was trying to take a fair and accurate measure. Finally, he said, “Forgive me for my earlier rudeness, but I truly must ask, what bloodline bore you? You look most like the Daoine Sidhe, but you are not Daoine Sidhe, and no other race so fine in face and form would suit you half so well.”

“I think that was a compliment,” I said. Jolgeir smiled, revealing one pointed incisor. I relaxed a little. A King of Cats who was relaxed enough to be smiling at me was a King of Cats who wasn’t planning to disembowel me any time soon. “Do you know Amandine?”

“Amandine, the blood-worker? The one who claims to be Daoine Sidhe, and is such a liar that I can’t bear her company? That Amandine?”

“That’s the one,” I said. “She’s my mother. She’s also a Firstborn daughter of Oberon. Surprise, and all that.”

Jolgeir frowned. “It seems odd that she could be Firstborn, and I not have heard.”

“Like you said, she lied about it for a long, long time. She even lied to me, until I figured out what she was doing. These days, it’s not quite common knowledge, but she doesn’t get to make it a secret anymore, either. If she didn’t want people to know she wasn’t Daoine Sidhe, she shouldn’t have left me in the position of needing to figure out my magic on my own. Makes it sort of hard to keep things on the down-low.”