Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(17)

The other part of her agreement had been, of course, the fact that the request was coming from Eira Rosynhwyr, the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn, whose every wish was her descendants’ command. If Maida didn’t want to bring that up, I wasn’t going to do it either. I still paused. No household, no staff, and those scars on her face . . . “Forgive me if I’m overstepping my bounds right now, although you did promise not to have me arrested for treason, so there’s that, but . . . um . . .” I stopped, realizing I had no idea how to address the High Queen without taking us back toward the overly formal.

“Maida,” she prompted. “You can use my name when I’m talking to you as the mother of your squire. If anything, in this social context, I should be the one using your title.”

“Please don’t,” I said. “All right, um, Maida, forgive me if this is a delicate question, but I’ve never heard of a pureblood catching smallpox. It’s usually a human disease. Was your mother human, by any chance?”

She smiled radiantly. “Oh, I told you we’d found a good knight for Quentin, didn’t I?” she asked, glancing at her husband. “She’s smart, and she makes him do the dishes. Our son is in excellent hands.”

“Yes, dear,” said the High King. I swallowed a laugh. Under the circumstances, it could have been misconstrued, and I was still trying to dodge that whole “treason” thing.

Maida looked back to me. “Yes,” she said. “She was a local girl. Father had purchased her from one of the other nobles, who had snatched her to be a nursemaid for his children.”

“Ah.” I nodded. Using humans as nannies and wet nurses is an old fae tradition that thankfully never managed to get much traction on the West Coast. Grab a human girl and make her take care of your kids during those messy, inconvenient parts of childhood, then dump her fae-struck and confused back into the mortal world. Fairy ointment is used to keep the kidnapped women connected to the fae world. Wipe it from their eyes before they’re sent home and they’ll have no way of explaining what happened to them. It’s cruel. It is, in every sense of the world, inhumane. But then, everything the purebloods do is inhumane, because they were never human to begin with.

“It wasn’t like that,” she said. “He bought her so he could set her free. He didn’t think it was right to keep slaves. And she refused to leave. She’d been in the Summerlands for fifty years by that point; everything she’d ever known was dead and gone, and she was still young because of the spells she’d been under. She was happy not to be beholden to a cruel master. She didn’t want to go and live among the humans. So she took over running his household, and eventually they fell in love, and I came along. I was his first child. He made me his heir.”

“I thought changelings couldn’t inherit,” I said.

“They can’t,” said Maida. “Father didn’t care. He was going to do right by me. He fired half his staff when he realized my mother was pregnant, and he fired the rest after I was born. I grew up surrounded by the people he thought of as family, and none of them ever cared that I was a mortal child. But then the pox came.” She touched the side of her face, looking briefly self-conscious. “Mother died. I lived, but barely. Father became withdrawn and quiet. He’d found the love of his life, and while he’d always known that he’d outlive her, he’d been expecting more time. So much more time.”

“I was a United States Senator when all this happened,” said Aethlin. May and I looked at him blankly. He chuckled. “It was part of my training to be King. I had to wander the whole continent, meet all sorts of people—Quentin will be expected to do the same, once he becomes a knight errant.”

“Right,” I said. Because he was going to be High King someday. He couldn’t learn the whole country if he stayed in California forever. We were many things, but we were not absolutely representative of the people he would be expected to rule.

Aethlin continued: “Part of my duties involved calling on every noble with a holding large enough to offer me hospitality. I’d already visited the King of Endless Skies, and both Duchies; there were no Counties at the time, so I came to a Barony, and met the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.”

“I had pox scars on my face and chicken shit in my hair,” said Maida.

“You hit me with a broom,” said Aethlin. “No one had ever hit me with a broom before.”

“You scared my chickens,” said Maida.

I looked between them slowly, finally focusing on Maida’s hair. It was pure silver, with no hints of tarnish. Changelings could inherit a lot of things from their fae parents, but signs of mortality always showed through. I knew Quentin had no human blood. His mother didn’t appear to either. “You have a hope chest,” I said, looking back to Aethlin.

He nodded. “I do. Well, I do now. It belonged to my parents, back when I brought Maida home to meet them.”

“They told me the cost of marrying their son would be my humanity, and I was glad to pay it,” she said. “The human world held nothing for me, and the fae world was promising me everything I could have ever wanted. My father came to the wedding. He still holds his Barony. He says my mother would be proud of what I’ve become, and I believe him.”

“It’s not every human woman’s daughter who can become Queen of a continent,” I agreed. “Does Quentin know?”