It was clear that I wasn’t going to get any answers until I gave him my sandals. I sighed and bent to undo the buckles before stepping out of my shoes and handing them over. The soft earth squished between my toes. Quentin looked entirely too amused. That may have been the sleep deprivation. He normally had more sense than that.
“To answer your first question, no, I was not yet with the Lady de Merelands, although I had made her acquaintance a time or two. Enough that—and I say this not to boast, but with the resignation of hindsight—she desired me. She disliked your mother for reasons of her own. The thought of stealing and corrupting a Torquill boy from his lawful wife appealed to her. She was already in Even—in her employ. I’ve asked myself, more than once, whether what happened may have been triggered by Oleander asking her mistress for a puppy.”
Simon’s fingers moved as he spoke, plucking twigs from the bracken, blades of grass from the base of nearby mushrooms: anything, in fact, save for the mushrooms themselves. He began to weave his pile of pilfered ingredients into a small wicker loop.
“And my second question?” I asked.
“Yes.” Simon shook his head, not looking at me, still weaving. The smell of smoke and rotten oranges began to rise from his pores, tainting the air around him.
I took a step backward. He didn’t seem to notice.
“King Gilad Windermere was a good man. I think that may be what people say about him the most. Not that he was a brilliant ruler, not that he was a kind king, but that he was a good man. Good men with crowns are difficult to find. The fae soul was not meant to have so much power over others without becoming harder, colder, less capable of charity. We have too much time to spend. It makes us miserly with it, in a way all out of proportion to its plenty. But he knew time was short. His parents had been assassinated when he was young, you see, and the throne thrust upon him. His princehood was a brief, cruel thing, not long and rich and palatial. He understood that things change. He understood that brief was not the same as nonexistent. So he encouraged the acceptance of changelings in his Court. He allowed mixed-bloods to inherit from their parents—before him, titles passed only along purified bloodlines. So far as he knew, the Mists possessed no hope chest, and my Amy refused to reveal herself solely for the sake of becoming someone else’s tool, and so when love rose between fae of different worlds, their children were allowed to exist untampered with. My niece, January. You met her, I believe?”
“I did,” I said quietly. It hadn’t been a long acquaintanceship: Jan died shortly after we met. I hadn’t been able to save her. Oh, I had tried, and sometimes it still ached to know that I had failed.
“There are places, even still, where the fact that her mother was Daoine Sidhe and her father was Tylwyth Teg would have worked against her. Where she would have been expected to live as one thing or another, forsaking half her heritage.” His fingers continued moving, tying smaller and smaller knots. “But it was her mixed blood that gave her the alchemy that enabled her to do the marvelous things she did. Tylwyth Teg are more resistant to iron than many of us. She used that to her advantage, and she was happy. She was always such a happy girl.”
“She has a daughter,” said Quentin, and watched Simon to see how he would react.
To my surprise and relief, Simon smiled. “I know. I hope I have the opportunity to meet her someday.” He used his little loop of woodland rope to tie my sandals together. “Regardless, there were those who did not care for Gilad’s egalitarian approach to the monarchy, and feared he was making those changes because he thought to take a wife who did not share his bloodline. The woman who would become my keeper, she already disliked having a Tuatha de Dannan family sitting upon such a prominent throne. All thrones, she felt, belonged to her.”
“But the false Queen was a mixed-blood,” I protested. “She had at least three different Firstborn.”
“Yes. That was my keeper’s little joke that no one else understood, perhaps because it wasn’t funny. The imposter was the worst possible manifestation of certain peoples’ fears: someone whose heritage was so mixed that she couldn’t possibly bring stability to the land, whose magic was unpredictable, too weak and too strong at the same time. Someone they couldn’t judge based on the slope of her ears.”
“That sounds sort of racist,” said Quentin.
“It is, and it isn’t,” said Simon. “Similar fears fuel it. But in the case of Faerie, the blending is not so much race, although we use the word, as it is species. Some of us are not meant to mingle.” He waved his hand above my sandals, focusing the scent of his magic. Then he snapped his fingers.
The wicker rope expanded to cover my footwear, wrapping it tight before falling away to reveal a pair of black leather ankle boots, the sort that seemed designed to wade through lava without being scorched. Simon offered them to me with a flourish.
“This will do you better,” he said.
“I hope so,” I replied, dodging the forbidden “thank you” as I took them. They fit my feet perfectly. “These are great.”
Simon beamed. In Faerie, praise is often a suitable replacement for gratitude. “The spell should hold, if you don’t pick at it before it has a chance to settle.”
“Swell.” We started walking again. “Do you really think Oleander killed the king because she wanted your body?”
“No. She killed the king because she was ordered to. But the timing . . . it was an intricate thing, the timing. August announced that she was undertaking a quest, that she was going to find the doors to the deeper realms of Faerie and open them. That Oberon had always wanted us to find our own way home, and she seemed to know what she was talking about—she seemed to know a bit more than she should have. She had been speaking to someone. When I asked if I could help, she said no.” Simon took a deep breath. “She said I wasn’t a hero, and I wasn’t Firstborn, and I couldn’t help her.”
“I saw her with a candle in your memory,” I said. “Do you know why?”
“She was going somewhere,” he said. “On the Babylon Road.”
That was a road I had taken myself. I frowned. “Do you think maybe the woman you worked for told her where to go?” August could be a tree in Acacia’s forest, enchanted to save her from Blind Michael. That would explain why she had never come home. Trees aren’t all that migratory.
“Maybe,” said Simon. “I’d rather not wake her up to ask.”
I shuddered. Then I sneezed.
“What the . . . ?” I looked down. My foot was buried in the heart of a puffball mushroom, filling the air with glittery spores that swirled around us in a silver-and-blue cloud. I blinked. That didn’t help. My vision seemed to get more blurry every time I closed my eyes, even if it was only for an instant.
I yawned. So did Quentin.
“Uh-oh,” I said, and fell down.
The last thing I saw before I closed my eyes was a figure coming toward me through the glittering cloud. It was either very small or very far away, and it didn’t really matter either way, because I was gone.
TEN