Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(113)
No one could have been prepared for the earthquake. It came out of nowhere, shattering the Summerlands and San Francisco in the same blow. When it ended, my brother and I were orphans. It was just the two of us and Marianne, who was old and tired and hadn’t signed up to be our replacement mother. She did the best she could. She taught us to run, and hide, and keep our heads down. She honed our illusions until we reached the limits of what our blood allowed.
It wasn’t enough. There were people who remembered her from my father’s Court, people who’d heard the rumors about Gilad having children and were starting to put two and two together. She had to go. Staying would have gotten us all killed. I knew that, and still I cried the night she said good-bye. Nolan was even worse. He’d been so young when the world fell down. Ten years old when we were orphaned; fourteen when Marianne walked away. He cried until she had to charm him into sleep, because otherwise he would have betrayed our position.
He hit the ground like a sack of potatoes, like he was dead, and I was going to throw myself after him when Marianne grabbed my arm and said, “Wait.”
She’d been my keeper and companion since I was nursing. One of my first memories is her smiling down at me, a rag soaked in milk and honey in her hand. I stopped moving and looked at her, letting the habit of obedience guide what happened next.
Marianne smiled sadly. She was Coblynau; I never knew how old she was, but her face was a maze of wrinkles, and her sorrow showed all the way down to her bones. “Here,” she said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a handful of driftglass beads strung on a braid of unicorn hair. “I got these from the Luidaeg when you were a baby; they’ve kept you safe until now, and they’ll keep you safe hereafter.”
I gasped. I couldn’t help myself. The Luidaeg’s gifts were never things to take lightly, or to request without dire need. “But Marianne, the cost—”
“Was paid long ago, and I never begrudged it. Here.” She pressed them into my hand. “This is all I have. This is all you have. Be careful, Arden, and never forget that I love you as much as I love my own children. Never forget to stay safe, for my sake, for your sake, for the sake of the Mists.”
Then she was gone, and I was alone with my brother, too young to be a woman, too young to be a surrogate mother to a confused boy still getting the hang of his own teenage years. The Princess who would never be a Queen. My father taught me about ruling, and my mother taught me about hiding, and my nursemaid taught me about running away, and of the three of them, Marianne’s lessons were the ones that served me the best for years, and years, and years. Her lessons got me through the time I spent alone, after Nolan was elf-shot by the false Queen’s forces. She kept me safe.
Until October. Until the challenge, and the crown, and this great barn of a knowe, where the air still sometimes tastes like my mother’s perfume when we let the ghosts out of rooms that have been sealed for more than a century. Until I left my mortal life the same way I left my fae one: not walking away but running, fleeing into a different future. I was born a Princess in hiding. Technically, I grew up the same way. But the way I hid as a child was a glorious game, and the way I hid as an adult was a constant threat, and they are not the same.
The girl I should have grown up to be is never going to sit on the throne of the Mists. That girl died with our mutual mother, in the 1906 earthquake, when palaces that should never have shifted tried to shake themselves to the ground. That girl has neither grave nor night-haunt mannequin to remember her. She only has me, and I hate her sometimes, because she would have been so much better at this than I am. She would have had tutors and secret allies and an army preparing her for the pressures of queenship. She would have been a committee.
I didn’t get any of that. I got good at disposable identities and confusion charms, at lying until potential employers believed me, at moving my elf-shot brother under the cover of night, going place to place in pursuit of the lie of a safe haven. I got a bookstore and a best friend and barely time to catch my breath before October barged in like a changeling battering ram and took it all away.
I’m sure there are people who’d say it was worth it to lose everything and gain a throne, but since I stopped wanting the throne decades ago, I’m not one of them. I want to make my parents proud. I want to keep my brother safe. I can do those things better from the throne of the Mists than I could from the basement of Borderlands.
But some days, most days, that basement felt more like home than this knowe did.
The conclave—my first major political event—had been a success, and they’d left me alone, all of them after it was over and we’d finished waking the majority of the sleepers. October had walked away clinging to her squire and her alchemist and her Cait Sidhe fiancé, checking every five minutes to be sure they were all awake. It would have been funny if I hadn’t been on some level fiercely glad to see it. Sometimes it feels like she doesn’t know how to lose. Maybe it’s small and petty and human of me to want her to understand what it’s like for the rest of us, but I’ve spent more time with humans than I’ve spent with my own kind. I guess a little had to work its way in.
Waking Duchess Lorden had been a more involved process, and had involved finding a way to restrain her without hurting her. We couldn’t afford to offend her any more than she already was—I mean, being elf-shot is pretty damn offensive—but she was likely to wake up swinging, and that woman can hit. In the end, we’d resorted to binding spells to hold her down while Queen Siwan of Silences administered the cure and Dianda’s husband, Patrick Lorden, stood in full view at the foot of the bed. As we’d hoped, the sight of him stopped her from either hurting herself or figuring out how to break the bonds and hurting the rest of us.