Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(19)
I elbowed Quentin. “Hey. Is there a car there?” As a Daoine Sidhe, he was better with illusions—both casting and detecting—than I was.
“What?” He looked up. I pointed. He followed my finger, squinted, and said, “No, it’s empty. Except for that big pile of dog poop. Humans don’t clean up after their pets as well as they should.”
“Neither do fae,” I said, pulling forward. “Sylvester’s Afanc crapped all over the walking path the last time I was at Shadowed Hills. I had to throw those shoes away.”
“Oh, yeah.” Quentin quieted again as I finished parking. He’d been quiet for the entire drive, not even objecting when I turned the radio to the local oldies station. Normally he would have argued with me about that, but not today.
I killed the engine and turned in my seat to look at him. “All right, spill,” I said. “Before we get to the knowe and have to deal with every petty noble Arden could scrape out of a crevice, you’re going to tell me what’s wrong.”
“I look like my parents.” Quentin didn’t look at me as he spoke. His attention remained focused on his hands. “I have my dad’s hair, and my mom’s eyes, and her jaw. How are these people not going to know who I am? I might as well be wearing a sign.”
“Oh. I thought you were worried about something major.” I tried to keep my tone light, even informal. It was still a real concern. As the Crown Prince of the Westlands, Quentin would one day be the regent of every single person we were about to go observe. That made him something to be courted and cosseted. More, it made him a target. Take out the primary heir to the throne and maybe they’d get lucky: maybe his little sister wouldn’t have been prepared for her birthright, and they could enjoy a few years of relative freedom from supervision when she took the throne. Of course, that assumed Aethlin and Maida would be stepping down any time soon, which didn’t seem to be their plan, but things could change. Assassinating heirs was a good way to kick-start the process.
I was also worried about the local nobles realizing Quentin could be useful to them and trying to take him away from me. He was my squire and semi-adopted little brother, and I wasn’t going to let him go without a fight. Not even if the people who were trying to remove him from my care were his parents. Not unless they had a damn good reason for doing it.
Quentin gave me a sidelong look. “This is something major.”
“I know. That’s why it’s not something you need to be worried about right now.” I indicated him with a sweep of my hand. “Look at you. The secret son of a pureblood noble line. If this were a human fantasy novel, of course you would be a prince in disguise. Nothing else makes sense. But this is real life, and more, this is pureblood politics. Anyone who looks at you and thinks ‘gosh, he looks a lot like the High King’ is going to follow the thought with ‘but he’s squired to a changeling, which gives him no political advantage, and could actually hurt him when the time comes to take the throne; there’s no way High King Sollys would be that bone-numbingly stupid. I guess he’s a distant cousin or something.’ Maybe you’ll find yourself in a funny Prince-and-the-Pauper situation, where you have to try to hide the fact that you don’t have a convenient identical double, but nobody’s going to finger you for the prince. It just doesn’t make sense. And they’re used to you! They see you all the time. You’re furniture to them. Annoying furniture with bad taste in friends.”
“Do you really think so?” he asked, starting to look hopeful.
“Kiddo, I know so. If you’re really worried, eat a plate of salad with your fingers or something. Your absolute lack of table manners and social graces will convince anyone who happens to be watching that you can’t be the Crown Prince.”
Quentin looked horrified. Even years of exposure to me hadn’t been enough to cancel out his early socialization, which said he needed to be poised and polite at all times, or at least whenever he was in front of people who never saw him five minutes after he rolled out of bed. He was an ordinary teenage boy when we were alone, but put him in front of someone with a title and he was Martha Stewart reborn with pointy ears.
I was still laughing as we climbed out of the car and into the cool evening air. I wasn’t wearing a human disguise: I didn’t need one. Between the storms and the warding spells, no humans were going to come within a mile of Muir Woods tonight, unless they were being compelled by some outside force. I was wearing a nice pseudo-medieval blouse that May had dug out of the back of my closet in my mother’s tower; it was black spider-silk and red samite, and while I felt like I was in danger of having my clothes wear me, rather than me wearing my clothes, May had insisted. Instead of jeans, I had black spider-silk pants that clung like they were made of Saran Wrap. I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with that. I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with any of this. Just to gild the lily, my jewelry was tarnished silver and garnets, and all of it was real, estate sale stuff Jazz had found in the back of her store. No amount of dispelling my illusions would change a thing about my clothes.
Spider-silk is expensive. I was wearing the equivalent of more money than most changelings would see in their lifetimes. It made me seriously uncomfortable—although there was something to be said for the amusement factor of standing me next to Quentin. He was the pureblood, but he was wearing blue linen trousers, a white peasant shirt, and a vest in the pale shade of daffodil favored in Shadowed Hills. His attire was a quiet reminder of who technically held his fosterage, even as mine was a reminder that I was my mother’s daughter, and bleeding around me would be unwise.