There’s no such thing as “plenty of time.” We’d sliced those two months up and devoured them one piece at a time, spending their precious hours on shopping and cleaning, doing odd jobs for Arden and dodging uncomfortable questions from everyone who knew enough about my debts to the Luidaeg to ask them.
Only May, oddly enough, didn’t have any questions. Only May had looked away when I tried, haltingly, to explain what was going to happen, and said, in a subdued tone, “Well, it’s about time this came to an end. I hope you don’t mind if I don’t come with you. I don’t like being in open waters.”
I could have pressed the subject. I chose not to. We all have our secrets, and if May currently has more secrets from me than I have from her, I’m sure that will change with time. Our shared memories end at the moment of her transformation from night-haunt into Fetch. Gradually, they’ll become less and less of who I am now, and I think we’ll both be happier if we’re in the habit of letting each other hold our tongues by then.
Arden had been somewhat less sanguine about the situation. Arden had, in fact, spent most of an evening shouting at me. Surreally, that had been an almost comforting reaction. Arden Windermere, daughter of Gilad Windermere, rightful Queen in the Mists, had been denied her throne for more than a century by Evening Winterrose and the imposter Queen. When I’d first convinced her to take up her birthright, Arden had been fairly sure she’d never be able to live up to her family name, much less do her job correctly.
Watching her berate me for being willing to take orders from one of the Firstborn, I was fairly sure Arden was going to be fine. She was learning the limits of her responsibility. She had her brother back, and while Nolan wasn’t ready to formally take up his position as her heir, just having him around had already proven to be a steadying, stabilizing influence on her.
Going with the Luidaeg to the Duchy of Ships wasn’t the sort of thing that ought to be life-threatening—although Quentin was happy to remind me that I could make a trip to the movies life-threatening when I really tried—but even if something went wrong and we all wound up lost at sea for a year, Arden would be able to keep going without me. She didn’t need a hero. She had a household, and a demesne, and she was going to be okay.
I was trying not to think too much about that whole “lost at sea” possibility. I don’t like water. As in, “I take showers, not baths, and the one time Tybalt offered to take me to the hot tubs for a romantic evening, I damn near had a panic attack.” I blame it on spending fourteen years as a fish, since I certainly didn’t have any issues with water before that happened.
Sadly, knowing where trauma comes from doesn’t magically heal it. Only time and effort can do that. The fact that I was even able to consider getting on a boat said a lot about how much I’d recovered since that initial injury; as long as I didn’t drown or something, this trip would probably help me to recover even more.
Days ticked by, and plans were made as we inched toward Moving Day. May first had a lot of power and significance once, back in the days of the Three. There was a time when they’d formed a stable triad, keeping Faerie safe and secure. But something had changed. Whatever it was had happened early on, before changelings existed, before the Firstborn had children of their own, and it had resulted in Oberon splitting his time between two very different Courts. That was when the Divided Courts earned their name. Starting with their split, on May first, Oberon would kiss Maeve good-bye and return to Titania’s bower. On November first, he’d repeat the trip in reverse.
Of course, that all ended when the Three disappeared. Moving Day has been symbolic for centuries. The smaller inhabitants of Faerie, the pixies and the bogeys and the so-called “monsters,” still respected Moving Days. Even the ones who didn’t necessarily pack up and go would at least rearrange their nests and shift their belongings in symbolic recognition. The larger fae, however, the ones who liked to pretend we didn’t miss the Three, or that we hadn’t been affected by the dwindling of the First in their absence, mostly ignore the significance of the holidays. They’ve been reduced to excuses for feasts and grand celebrations in the modern world, Beltane Balls and Samhain revels, and no one really talks about what those days originally meant, to us or to anyone.
I don’t have many fond memories of my mother these days. I never had a lot of them, but the more I learn about her, the more even the good ones wind up tainted as I realize what she was to me. Still, I remember her waking me early on Moving Days, with scones and jam and bowls of berries in sweet cream. I remember her taking me around the tower grounds, telling the stories of travel, the migratory fae, the way we used to wander the worlds, until one by one, our Firstborn put down roots and wove themselves a homeland. Sometimes we’d go to watch the pixies in flight, but we’d always wind up inside, and spend the bulk of the day cleaning everything we could reach before moving our beds from one side of the room to the other, symbolically renewing the spaces where we lived, making them seem new again.
Those had been good days. Maybe the best days, as I measured the interactions between my mother and me. I lay in my bed three days before the end of April, Tybalt snuggled against me, his breath slow and even and peaceful, and wondered whether whatever the Luidaeg had planned for us was going to result in ruining those last few happy memories of my mother.
If I don’t have a lot of fond memories of my mother, I have even fewer illusions about her. Most of them died a long time ago, and I can’t say I was necessarily sorry to see them go. But it would be nice to still believe she had occasionally cared about me, even if it was only in the way a farmer cares about the dog who herds the sheep back into their barn at the end of the day. Maybe I’d never been anything more than useful to her. Given how much I did know, I wanted that to be enough. Oberon’s eyes, I wanted that to be enough.
My elderly Siamese cats, Cagney and Lacy, were curled up on my pillow, keeping me solidly between them and Tybalt. They liked having him around in much the way I imagined they would have liked having a tame lion around: a larger predator that wasn’t interested in eating them kept them at least a little bit safer, but that was no real guarantee that tomorrow, the lion wouldn’t decide it wanted a meal of domesticated feline. They were technically subjects of the Court of Cats—all cats belong to the Court of Cats—but they weren’t fae, and they couldn’t reason with him the way a fae cat would have.
Cagney purred and pressed herself against my head. Lacey did the same. I closed my eyes, trying to convince myself I could go back to sleep. It didn’t work. I’d gone to bed shortly after dawn, and while it had only been about seven hours, part of me was all too aware that midnight was approaching fast. Once the clock struck twelve . . .
We didn’t have any carriages to turn back into pumpkins, but there were going to be some uncomfortable transformations all the same. Nothing was going to stop them now, short of another kidnapping or murder, and I wasn’t actually sure either of those would be enough to get me out of this. The Luidaeg had been waiting centuries for the chance to avenge her children. She wasn’t going to let something that someone else could handle force her to wait any longer.