Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(7)
“I’m not going to drop you off the bridge,” said Arden. She was starting to look seriously annoyed. “Calm down and follow me. This is a perfectly safe walkway. No one’s fallen since I took over.”
“So people fell before you took over?”
She sighed. “My father had a lot of Cornish Pixies on his staff. They fell because they liked it. Look, you’ll have to walk the same distance to get back to the stairs as you will to get to our destination. But if you turn and walk away from me, you’ll have traveled that distance while also pissing off your regent. Do you really want to do that?”
“Dirty pool, Windermere,” I said, narrowing my eyes.
“Madden is my best friend. Nolan is my brother. Those two, those two sleeping men, they are everything I have. You’re the reason I had to give up my mortal life, remember? No more job at the bookstore, no more coffee with Jude and listening to Alan grumble about cleaning up after customers. I am not,” she held out her hands, palms toward me, “running away from my responsibilities again. You said I got one shot at trying to quit, and I took it, and you were right. I can’t do that again. But I have no one who knows me, October. Lowri is doing a fine job as my standin seneschal, but you know what she calls me?”
“Going to go with ‘Your Highness,’” I said cautiously.
“Sometimes she gets informal and shortens it to ‘Highness,’” said Arden. “I’m a crown to her, not a person. She doesn’t know what I like to read, or care about how I made a living while I wasn’t in charge. My time among the humans, it’s like . . . it’s like she thinks it’s some weird kind of zoological expedition. I went out, I watched them, and then I came back home where I belonged. And she’s the best of them! She’s just about the only person who even bothers to pay attention to things like how uncomfortable I get when Court goes for more than six hours. I’m not threatening to run again, I’m not, but I don’t know how long I can do this without someone around here who can call me on my bullshit.”
“I’m calling you on your bullshit right now,” I said. “I really don’t want to plummet to my death today.”
“You’ll get better.”
“I’m still not a fan of plummeting.”
Arden sighed. “We’re not friends, Toby. Maybe we can figure out a way we can be. Maybe we can’t. You’re always going to be the woman who hauled me back into this world.”
“And barring death, dismemberment, or abdication, you’re always going to be the queen,” I said. “I get it.”
“No, you don’t,” she said. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to go from a life where things aren’t perfect, but you’re always surrounded by people who care about you, to being alone? Even when I’m surrounded, I’m alone.”
I went cold. “I think I have a better idea than you know,” I said.
In 1995, I was engaged to a human man named Cliff Marks. He and I had a two-year-old daughter. I was working as a private investigator, mostly taking on fae clients who wouldn’t realize how little training I’d actually had. I had friends. I had a family. I had a future planned out, stretching ahead of us like a road to peace and prosperity. And I lost it all in a single moment, when Simon Torquill—my liege lord’s brother, my mother’s husband, and technically my stepfather—transformed me into a fish and left me in the Japanese Tea Gardens to be forgotten. He’d been trying to save my life. I’d remained there for fourteen years. Not long, by pureblood standards. Not even that long by changeling standards. But for humans like Cliff? For little girls like Gillian, who didn’t even know she had fae heritage? It was forever. They had never taken me back.
Maybe the life I had now was better than the one I would’ve had if not for that day. There was no way of knowing, and honestly, it wasn’t a question I liked to dwell on. I’d found a new family for myself, and I was happy. But before I was happy, I’d been very, very miserable.
“Then you should understand why I have to do this,” said Arden. “I’ve been patient. I kept thinking he’d tell me to go ahead, that he’d say, you know, Master Davies is a citizen of the Mists who was traveling to Silences on official business, and if it was okay for him to wake up the citizens of Silences, he should be allowed to do the same at home before we start talking about bottling up and hiding his cure. But he didn’t say that, and I can’t wait any longer.”
I took a deep breath. Held it. Let it out. “All right,” I said finally. “Lead on.”
As long as I kept my eyes on the back of Arden’s head, I didn’t have to think about how high up we were, or how close I was to falling every time I took a step. For all that she’d spent most of her life in the mortal world, she moved along the impossibly long walkway without hesitation or visible distress. Being a teleporter probably had something to do with that. If she fell, she could open a portal and land in her own bed, cushioned by feather pillows, entirely unbruised. I didn’t have that sort of safety net.
We reached the next tower in surprisingly short order. Arden opened the door and held it while I stepped through. Moving past me, she offered a strained smile, said, “That wasn’t so bad, now, was it?” and started up another stairway, identical to the one we’d left behind.