A Red-Rose Chain

May and Jazz sat at the table in the breakfast nook, polishing off the remains of what looked like an ice cream sundae the size of my head. It’s good to have goals. They were looking up when I arrived, courtesy of Quentin, who was already digging through the fridge with the manic intensity of a man who had just been informed that there was never going to be food ever again.

“Long night?” asked May sympathetically. As my former death omen, she was unique in all of Faerie: a Fetch whose existence was no longer directly tied to any one person’s survival. Amandine had somehow severed the bond between us when she shifted the balance of my blood away from human to save my life. This had left May with a copy of my original face, all soft changeling edges and bluntly-pointed ears, and a level of indestructability that even I couldn’t match. She seemed pretty happy about the situation.

We’d been living together since she first appeared. People used to mistake us for each other, but that hadn’t happened in a while. It helped that May’s style was best described as “Jem and the Holograms meets Rainbow Brite.” Her spiky brown hair had been bleached to within an inch of its life and dyed in a variety of pinks and purples, and she was wearing a tie-dyed cotton sundress. Between that and the increasing sharpness of my features, anyone who could mistake us for each other was either legally blind or had recently been hit in the head.

“Long, and getting longer,” I said. “Nights like this, I wish I still drank coffee. Quentin, can you make me a sandwich, too, while you’re rooting through the fridge like—Oberon’s ass, I don’t know, something that roots. I’m too tired to insult you.”

“Wow, you are tired,” said Jazz, May’s live-in girlfriend. She was a Raven-maid, with long black hair, warm brown skin, and eyes rimmed in avian gold. The band of black feathers tied in her ponytail held her fae nature; without it, she would have been as human as any of our neighbors. Skinshifters are somewhat odd, even by fae standards. Raven-maids and Raven-men are even odder, since they’re diurnal when most of the rest of Faerie is nocturnal. May and Jazz’s relationship was a love story about missed sleep, compromises, and working around differences. In that regard, it wasn’t that different from my relationship with Tybalt.

At least we all got along, for the most part. Not bad for a changeling, a cat, a death omen, a bird, and a prince in hiding.

“Yeah, well.” I leaned up against the counter, half watching Quentin as he emptied the fridge onto the table. We were apparently having leftover pot roast sandwiches, with mashed potatoes and cranberry jam. I’d eaten stranger. “I don’t really know how to give the short version of this, so here’s the badly edited one: the Kingdom of Silences has declared war on the Mists for the crime of unrightfully deposing our former Queen. One of their people elf-shot Madden—I have the arrow that came with the message, I’ll be taking it to Walther this afternoon. Arden tried to run. We tracked her down, things got a little heated, I grabbed her without permission, and as my punishment, she’s making me go to Silences as the ambassador in the Mists. Hopefully, we can get this all sorted out before I convince them that they should slaughter us all in our beds.”

May blinked. Jazz blinked. Both of them stared at me like this was the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard.

Finally, Jazz spoke. “They’re sending you as a diplomat?” she asked, with exquisite care. Right then, she proved that she was more of a diplomat than I would ever be. “Did you explain to Queen Windermere why that might not be the . . . smartest choice?”