A Red-Rose Chain

“I feel like a jerk for saying it, but yeah,” he said.

“I understand.” And I did. Faerie could be backward in a lot of ways—the absence of indoor plumbing in many knowes was a big one—but having a population of semi-immortals with a very low birth rate meant that in other ways, Faerie had always been ahead of the mortal world. No one batted an eye at May and Jazz’s relationship; they would have been normal and accepted in any Court in the world a hundred years ago, or five hundred years ago, all the way back to the beginning of Faerie. The odd part would have been May’s history as a night-haunt, not the fact that they were both women. The only limit Faerie really put on who someone loved came when it was time to produce heirs . . . and since adoption and fosterage were both acceptable within the nobility, even that wasn’t required.

But I wasn’t solely a child of Faerie. I’d been born and raised in the human world, in the 1950s. Yes, I’d moved to the Summerlands when I was very young, but that didn’t mean I had escaped without a fun assortment of human prejudices on top of the fae ones I’d learned during my adolescence and adulthood. Some purebloods, when they were making the case for why they were better than their changeling cousins, would point to our supposed “small-mindedness” as proof that we would never be good enough. And in some ways, in some cases, they were right.

“I’m sorry you had to be afraid of how I’d react,” I said, when the silence got to be too much for me.

Walther flashed me a quick, crooked smile. “It’s cool. We’re cool.”

“Cool,” I said, and then burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of my own reply. Walther blinked, looking nonplussed, before he started laughing as well. Tybalt didn’t join in, but smirked, shaking his head.

“I am to be forever surrounded by the young,” he said. “I would bemoan my fate, but I am not yet sure whether it is intended to be punishment or paradise.”

“Here’s a tip,” I said, still half laughing. “If you call me a punishment, you’re going to spend our wedding night sleeping on the couch.”

“But ah, you see, I will have a wedding night. So long as you do not steal that from me, I can endure any trial the world sees fit to set before me.”

“Right.” I glanced to Walther. “Marlis mentioned the Cu Sidhe as a major tie. Do you think we should have brought Tia after all?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Everyone who made it out of Silences scattered after the war. There were always Cu Sidhe in the Court, but most of the time, they were dogs. They seemed happier that way. No one really questioned it . . .” He trailed off as we came around a bend in the path.

The mouth of King Rhys’ gardens appeared before us, marked both by the tall topiary archway that separated cultivated paths from forested wilds, and by the guards in the livery of Silences who stood across the opening. There were four of them, two armed with short swords, and the other two armed with nasty looking polearms that probably had some fancy name but really just looked like giant manual can openers on sticks. Whatever they were, they meant business.

The three of us stopped dead. It seemed like the best way to prevent actual death from occurring. “Can I help you?” I asked.

“Sir October Daye, you are under arrest for sedition and conspiracy to commit treason,” said the guard in the middle. He was tall, black-haired, and silver-eyed, with the sharply pointed ears and harsh cheekbones of the Tuatha de Dannan. Not part of the original guard, then, and not another relative of Walther’s being forced to work for someone who wanted to destroy him.