A Red-Rose Chain

“That’s all I ever ask,” she said, and left the kitchen, leaving me alone with Quentin.

He looked at me. I looked at him. He shrugged. I sighed, and said, “I bet this isn’t what you were expecting when you asked to be my squire, huh?”

“It’s better,” he said, with a brief grin. “By the time I’m King, there won’t be anything left that can surprise me.”

“I guess that’s a good trait, in a King.” I pushed away from the counter. “I should pack, and you should, too. Leave behind anything that might let them figure out who you are.”

He blinked at me. “You never figured it out.”

“I wasn’t looking, and I’m not a hostile monarch getting ready to go to war against the Court you represent,” I said. “For all I know, you carry a handkerchief with the logo of the Westlands on it, and seeing it would let any servant in Silences know that you’re the missing prince.”

“I think that’s the plot of a Disney movie,” said Quentin slowly. “But okay. I’ll make sure I don’t pack anything that could give me away.”

“Good,” I said. I retrieved my neglected sandwich from the counter. “Let’s go get ready to do something incredibly stupid.”

“Business as usual, then,” he said, and fled the kitchen, laughing, before I could swat him. I followed, a smile on my face. That was the nice thing about sharing my home with people that I loved: even when things were bad, I could generally find something to smile about.

Quentin beat me to the top of the stairs and was already in his room by the time I reached the hall. I paused for a moment, listening to the sound of him opening drawers. He would be done packing well before I was. Unlike the stereotype of the teenage boy living in mess and chaos, Quentin kept the tidiest room in our house. May’s bedroom was always an explosion of fabric and makeup and bright colors. And my room was, well . . .

I turned and opened the door, revealing the battered outline of my secondhand bed, rescued from being a spine-breaker only by the addition of a memory foam mattress topper, and the heaps of unfolded laundry that always seemed to sprout up around my dresser and nightstand, like strange mushrooms. Spike, my resident rose goblin, was asleep in one of those piles of laundry, curled into a tight ball with its nose resting on its spiny tail. The cats were equally asleep, on the bed.

Spike had tried to sleep in the bed with me, Cagney, and Lacey when I first brought it home. Unfortunately, being a rose goblin meant that it was completely covered in thorns. I’d only needed to roll over on top of it once to know that it needed to sleep elsewhere.

“Hey, guys,” I said quietly, and walked across the room to the closet. “Jazz is going to be taking care of you for a while, all right? Try to be nice to her. She’s probably going to be pretty stressed out.” Cagney and Lacey, as expected, ignored me.

Spike was another story. The rose goblin clambered to its feet, stretching in a languid, catlike manner before rattling its thorns at me and making an inquisitive keening noise in the back of its throat.

“What?” I asked, opening the closet and beginning to paw through my growing collection of ball gowns. I was going to need to bring them all. The irony of wearing dresses created by the false Queen’s magic to a Court where she was currently in residence did not escape me. After a pause, I also dug out the black spider-silk formal I’d worn when I went to prevent our war with the Undersea, and the silver spider-silk gown I’d worn to Arden’s Yule Ball.

“I know there’s some sort of a rule against wearing the same dress to two court functions, but it’s a stupid rule, and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t extend across Kingdoms,” I said, dumping my armload of formalwear on the bed. Spike, still watching me intently, rattled its thorns again and chirped. “Okay, seriously, what?”