A Red-Rose Chain

I put my head down on his arm, closed my eyes, and let the world go away for a while. If I dreamt at all, I dreamt only shallowly, and there was nothing there that could hurt me.

Tybalt pulling his arm from under my head rocked me back into wakefulness. I opened my eyes, blinking first at the canopy above me, and then, as I shifted positions enough to look at the rest of the room, at the open doorway. May was standing there, arms folded, a concerned look on her face. She was wearing a dress I’d never seen before, a sedate concoction in gray silk with blue accents, like something out of a Waterhouse painting. I sat up, blinking again.

“Are you awake?” she asked. Her voice was flat, devoid of anything that would tell me how she was feeling.

Tybalt, who had been sitting up and rubbing his face in an effort to wipe his own weariness away, stiffened. I felt him changing positions on the bed next to me, and knew he was moving into a position from which he could maneuver better.

“Yes,” I said cautiously.

“Good. I’ve prepared milady’s dress for the meal. May I enter?”

“Yes,” I said again, even more cautiously this time.

“You are gracious,” said May, and stepped into the room, pulling the door closed behind her. Her posture and expression instantly changed, going limp with relief. “Oberon’s ass, I thought I was going to pull something. It’s worse than we thought out there, and it’s a damn good thing you both got some sleep, because I don’t know when that’s going to happen again.”

“What?” I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands, trying to chase the sleep away. It wasn’t happening fast enough. “What’s going on?”

“Quentin needs to get up.” May strode across the room, her new gown snapping at her ankles, and pounded on Quentin’s door with the heel of her hand before shouting, “Yo! Get your ass up! We have forty-five minutes!”

Her tone did what all the eye-rubbing in the world wouldn’t have been able to do, rocketing me from groggy wakefulness into full alertness in an instant. I hadn’t heard my Fetch sound that panicked since before we’d been separated. Once—and only once—she’d thought I was about to die, taking her with me. She’d sounded like this then.

“May?” I slid off the bed, standing. “Seriously, what’s going on?”

“What’s going on is that this Kingdom is fucked up, and it’s our fault.” She rounded on me, eyes brimming with unshed tears. “We knew, Toby. We knew Silences was a puppet government, and we knew the current king got the throne because he was willing to be an asshole to changelings. We knew that meant things here were probably bad. And we ignored it. It was inconvenient, and we ignored it.”

“May, honey.” I reached out and grabbed her hands. Behind her, the door to Quentin’s temporary room swung open and my squire stepped into the room, blinking blearily underneath the tangled fringe of his hair. I ignored him, focusing on her. “You still haven’t told us what you’re talking about. We want to help, but you have to explain.”

“Almost all the staff here are changelings, Toby,” she said. There was something dull, nearly broken, about her voice. May was a pureblood, but unlike most purebloods, she had never enjoyed the privilege of that position. As a night-haunt, she had been exiled to the edges of Faerie, denied the glitter and pageantry of the courts. And when she had finally become a Fetch, she had done so with the memories of two changelings—myself, and Dare—fresh in her mind. Despite her centuries of living, she remembered growing up as a changeling more vividly than she remembered anything else about her youth.

Slow comprehension was dawning at the back of my mind, hampered by an unwillingness to accept what she was saying. But understanding is a cruel beast: it will have its hour, no matter how painful.