Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(116)
Sometimes I wonder whether it’s like that for the older ones, too. My father was over three hundred years old when he died. Would he have forgotten us eventually, if he’d been able to live and stay King in the Mists until Nolan and I grew up? It might explain a few things. Memory is a funny thing. It can be worn away if it’s revisited too often, smudged and warped and winnowed down to symbols when it used to be about people, real people, living real lives. If the older fae don’t remember what happened to them when they were young, it makes sense for them to be distant and cold. They have no emotional connections to the world.
I don’t want to be like that. I still don’t know what I want to be, except for maybe a bookstore clerk, and that door is closed to me now. But I was going to find out.
The cork came free of the bottle with a soft popping sound. The smell of roses wafted out, making me want to sneeze. It was almost like the smell of Countess Winterrose’s magic, but not quite right; it was too warm, too comforting, too friendly. This wasn’t a charm that had been designed to hurt people. It only wanted to help.
“I hope you’re okay with this,” I said. “I guess eighty years isn’t as bad as a hundred. I guess I’m not being selfish by waking you up now. I guess . . . I guess I’m lonely, Nolan. I’ve been talking to you for eighty years, and you’ve never answered. I’d like that to change. I’d like you to answer.”
Last chance. I could put the stopper back in, put the bottle in my pocket, and walk away. No one would question me deciding to let my brother sleep out the rest of his enchantment. Well, maybe Toby would. She doesn’t really have a lot of respect for the fact that I’m the Queen and thus technically the boss of her. I’d be upset by that, if not for the part where she doesn’t have a lot of respect for anyone, including the Luidaeg. So it’s not like I’m special. She treats me the way she treats everyone else.
After a decade or two of queening, that will probably offend me. Right now, it’s a relief. No matter how far I rise, there will always be someone standing there to laugh at me.
It didn’t have to be just one person.
“I’ve been so lonely,” I said, and lifted the bottle to Nolan’s lips, pushing down until his mouth opened enough to let me start dripping the cure through, one drop at a time. I didn’t want him to choke.
He swallowed. It was the first time I’d seen him move in decades. I pulled the bottle away and stepped back. The cure worked, I knew that—I had seen it work repeatedly, from Madden to Dianda. Nolan was special to me, but that didn’t make him special to the rules of magic that governed Faerie. If the cure worked for one, it would work for all. He was going to wake up. He was. But with every second that passed without him opening his eyes, I became a little more convinced that something had gone wrong.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I tucked the bottle into my skirt before reaching out and touching his shoulder as gently as I could, like I was afraid of waking him. But that was silly, wasn’t it? I wanted to wake him. I wanted to wake him more than I’d wanted anything in years.
“Nolan,” I said. “Hey. Can you hear me? It’s your sister. Wake up.”
He made a small noise deep in his throat; a sound of protest, a sound of displeasure. Hearing it woke a hundred “just one more minute” memories, images of a younger Nolan begging me to let him stay in bed when it was time to get up and get the night started. I smiled as tears rose in my eyes. Memory wasn’t as complicated as I’d feared. It was still there. It was all still there. It just needed to be woken up. Like my brother, it just needed to be woken up.
“Come on, Nolan. You’ve been asleep long enough. It’s time to open your eyes.”
“Ardy?”
His voice was the creak of a rusty gate, ragged and shallow and worn. I could have mistaken it for a dream, something I wanted so much that I was imagining it, if it hadn’t been followed by his lashes fluttering against his cheeks before finally—finally!—his eyes opened and he was squinting up at me.
He blinked, and frowned. “Ardy?” he whispered again. “When did you get so old?”
Laughing through my tears, I fell upon my brother and gathered him in my arms, and for the first time since our parents died, I felt like I was on my way home.
THREE
The only person left in the sleeper’s tower was Duke Michel, who had been elf-shot for committing a crime: for the first time in a hundred years, there were no innocent victims of elf-shot in the Kingdom in the Mists. We were free of Eira Rosynhwyr’s poisonous gifts—and more, I was free of the injunction not to use magic in proximity of the cure, which was somewhat unstable, according to the alchemist who’d created it. He was still tinkering, and he promised to have something more reliable by the end of the year, but that was later, and this was now. Nolan’s head resting on my left shoulder, I used my right hand to inscribe a wide arc in the air, opening a portal.
As always, using my magic openly sent a little thrill through me, like I was getting away with something. My powers had never been suppressed, although I’d considered it a few times. There were always underground alchemists working in San Francisco—lean, hungry fae who thought they were going to rival the sea witch one day. They would have been delighted to sell me blocking potions, keeping me from accessing the powers I got from my parents and hence potentially giving myself away. And they would have remembered my face, filed away the scent of my magic, maybe even gone to the Library of Stars to compare it to the census.