Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(117)

The fae world is an easier place to be anonymous than the human world. There’s no question of that. But that doesn’t mean it’s safe.

Nolan lifted his head, blinking at me in confusion. He only seemed to have two expressions at the moment—confused and bewildered, which were subtly different. I couldn’t have distinguished them on anyone else, but he was my brother, and his face was so much like mine that it was like looking into a mirror.

“Ardy?” he said blankly.

“Hey,” I said, smiling to cover my increasing distress. Madden had been back to normal within seconds of waking. Dianda had come to swinging and ready to murder people—which, for her, was also back to normal. So why was Nolan taking so long to recover?

He’d been asleep so much longer than they had. This was probably perfectly normal. Master Davies had just forgotten to warn me, that was all.

“Where are we?”

My smile froze, turning rigid. “Nolan, we’re home. This is home. We got it back.”

His confusion wasn’t going away. If anything, it was getting deeper. “Home?”

“Come on.” I stood, pulling him with me. He stumbled in the process of getting his feet under him, but in the end, he did it. I had to take that as a good sign. It was a good sign, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?

Nolan let me pull him through the portal, which closed behind us with a faint pop. He looked around the new room, eyes skipping over the bed, wardrobe, and writing desk without recognition. He turned to me, and in the same blank tone, asked, “Where are we?”

“Home,” I repeated. His tone might be staying the same, but mine wasn’t: the desperation was creeping in around the edges, coloring everything I said. Something was really wrong. “This was your room when we came to visit Mother at Court, remember? That’s your bed.” Like all Coblynau furniture, it was enchanted to grow with its owner; the bed he’d slept in as a child was still long and wide enough to cradle him now that he was an adult.

“Bed,” Nolan breathed, showing his first sign of recognition since he said my name. He pulled away from me, less walking under his own power than staggering drunkenly to the bed.

I watched in horror as he collapsed onto it, falling facedown into the pillows. “Nolan?”

He didn’t respond.

“Nolan!” I ran to his side, rolling him over, so his face was turned toward the ceiling and he wouldn’t suffocate. His chest was rising and falling like a normal sleeper’s, without the slow, drugged tempo of the elf-shot. I shook him. He didn’t open his eyes. I shook him harder, and still, he didn’t open his eyes.

“Nolan?” My voice cracked, becoming young and shrill in my throat. I felt like the girl I’d been when I found him in the bushes, the arrow in his chest and blank serenity on his face. I hadn’t felt like her in years. She’d been so innocent. She’d truly believed, deep down, that we’d suffered enough; that the world would start being kinder. The world still wasn’t being kinder.

I took a step backward, my hand sculpting an arch in the air behind me and opening a portal to the veranda. Madden was there, going over the household records and trying to figure out what we had too much of versus what we didn’t have enough of. It was one of his tasks as Seneschal, at least until I hired a Chamberlain—something I’d been in no hurry to do. Madden knew me. Madden understood me, and that was something I couldn’t put a price on.

Madden wouldn’t judge me.

Taking one last look at my slumbering brother, I whirled and fled through the portal, stumbling from the sweet-scented air of the bedroom into the cool Summerlands night. Globes of witch-light lit the veranda, bobbing a few inches below the living, mossy canopy that kept the area dry even during heavy rainfall. Madden sat at the largest of the three round tables, a pair of comically small spectacles balanced on the tip of his nose. His head snapped up when my foot hit the floor; by the time I had reached the table, he was on his feet, arms up to catch me.

“Ardy, what’s wrong?” he demanded.

Hearing my nickname from one of the two people in the world allowed to use it brought tears to my eyes, where they hung, stinging and hot, refusing to fall. “Something’s wrong with Nolan,” I said, burrowing into Madden’s arms, allowing myself a split-second where I wasn’t a queen; I was just Arden Windermere, the girl without a kingdom, without a crown, without a brother to comfort her. “I woke him up, but he’s not awake. He barely knows me. He barely knows where he is.”

“Where is he now?”

“In his room.” Madden knew where that was: he’d helped me prepare it once we knew it was both possible and permissible for me to wake my brother. We’d wiped away dust and cleared away cobwebs, and—for a little while—I’d allowed myself to dream of a future where things started going right for me. My lips twisted into a bitter line as I continued, “Asleep. Again. He was awake less than five minutes before he passed out. What did I do wrong?”

“I don’t know.” Madden didn’t do anything to soften his words. He didn’t need to. He was my best friend and my seneschal and the only person who’d known who I was before October came along and ruined everything. He’d never cared that I was a princess, and now he didn’t care that I was a queen. He just cared that I was his Ardy, and I was in pain.