Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(115)

“I wish you could tell me what to do.”

Nolan, saying nothing, slept on. After a long pause, I stretched out on the bier next to him, the bottle still held tightly in my hand, and closed my own eyes. Maybe everything would be clearer on the other side of a nap.





TWO


Everything was not, in fact, clearer on the other side of a nap. I opened my eyes, and for one dizzying moment, I had no idea where I was. The room was round, ringed with windows to let the fresh air in. It smelled like redwood sap and rain. I don’t know how the bedding around me stayed so dry; with the fog the way it was in the trees, everything should have been damp all the time. The ceiling was a mural of blackberry vines twining around several small, sleeping animals. A fawn, a rabbit, a unicorn, a bear. The usual menagerie.

I sat up. The bottle was no longer in my hand. My breath sped up and my chest grew tight as I looked around me. It was gone. It was gone. I’d failed him again, I’d lost it somehow, and now he was going to sleep for another twenty years whether I wanted him to or not—

Light glinted off bias-cut glass. I leaned over the edge of the bed. The bottle was on the floor, nestled against the bedpost. I leaned farther down, snatching it off the floor, feeling its reassuring weight settle in my palm. The sky outside the windows hadn’t changed; it was still twilight, the sky painted purple and rose, like a darker version of the liquid that would wake my brother. It’s almost always twilight in the Summerlands.

Carefully, I slid off the bed and walked to the nearest window, pushing the curtains aside. The sky was cloudy, but there were patches where the stars shone through, gleaming bright. Once, this sky was all I knew. These days, I sometimes think I’d trade it all for the light-polluted mortal stars of San Francisco. At least they’d be familiar.

“I’m scared,” I whispered. Nothing answered me, not even the distant jingle of pixie wings. That was probably for the best. Queens aren’t supposed to be scared. Queens are supposed to be calm and steady and prepared for anything. They make the choices. My choice should have been simple. Give the potion to my brother. Open his eyes twenty years early. Let him see how far we’d come, that we didn’t have to run anymore; that we were safe. It would be simple. It would be easy.

So why couldn’t I do it?

I turned away from the window and toward the bed where Nolan slept, silently waiting for me to make my decision. He looked like he’d looked for the past eighty years: peaceful. He had our father’s dark hair, same as me, black in shadow and glinting purple in the light. If he opened his eyes, they’d be mismatched: one the almost-golden color of pyrite, one metallic gray, like liquid mercury. He hadn’t seen the sun in decades, but his skin was still tan, with olive undertones. No one who met me could look at him and not see him for my brother. There had never been any chance of us repudiating each other.

“Would you have been better off without me?” I asked. He could have run, if I hadn’t been there counseling caution and holding him back. He could have made a home for himself in some far-away kingdom, one where no one knew what King Gilad Windermere looked like, one where he could start again. Two children with a dead king’s bone structure and coloration were a target. One was a curiosity. One could disappear where two couldn’t.

And I was the one who’d been old enough to scar instead of healing. I was the one who’d found our mother’s body with a canyon where her throat should have been. Nolan had been with Marianne. He’d always known how Mother ended, but he’d never seen it. It was a little thing in the grander scheme, and yet. He’d never been forced to go to sleep with our mother’s murdered face watching him from behind his eyelids. He’d never walked through the world understanding what would happen to us if we put one foot wrong. He’d known, because I’d told him—over and over and over again—but knowing and understanding aren’t the same thing. Maybe they never can be.

Nolan didn’t answer. Nolan couldn’t answer. Nolan had passed beyond answering decades ago, and if he was going to start answering again, it would either be because I’d dithered for twenty years, or because I’d forced him to drink a potion I couldn’t make and didn’t fully understand.

“I could wait, you know.” My words fell into the silence, filling it, softening its edges. I wanted to open the door and call for Madden, or for Lowri, or for any other member of my court. I wanted someone to tell me what to do. I wanted someone to tell me whether waking my brother was right or wrong.

And that was why I couldn’t ask. I was the Queen now. I had to make these decisions on my own. I walked back to Nolan’s bed, perching on the edge.

“Eighty years is a long time. Twenty more on top of that is nothing. I haven’t even been Queen for a full year, you know? Nine months. That’s not long enough to know what I’m doing. I keep waiting for Jude to call and say my vacation’s over and I need to come back to the store.” Not that she could. I’ve changed phone numbers, addresses, and names. No one from my old life could find me if they wanted to.

I held up the bottle. “So what if I let you sleep for another year, or another five, or whatever, while I get my feet under me? I’ll be a better sister if I’m not busy trying to learn how to queen while I teach you about the Internet. It would be better for both of us if I waited.”

Nolan didn’t answer. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure I remembered what his voice sounded like. Elf-shot is supposed to be the kinder option during wartime, and I guess it is, since it just takes our loved ones away for a century, instead of forever. But a hundred years was long enough to make us into strangers to one another. I’d been less than thirty when he’d gone to sleep. Sometimes I felt like he was more of an idea than an individual.