“Your Majesty,” I said to Queen Shiverlash with Caveat translating. “I’ve not yet managed to reach an agreement with Tjuan, but I’m afraid that will have to wait. I’ve just received word that King Winterglass knows our location. He is on his way here, and he is not alone.”
“Do you think he means to attack?” she said, her oil-black wings rustling.
“I’m not sure which of us he’s after. We’d best split up. Can you get away from here unseen? A personal cloaking spell doesn’t work on me, so I’m safest if I stay put.”
“He will not detect me,” said Shiverlash, and immediately launched herself into the air.
“Well,” I said, turning to Brand. “That was surprisingly easy.” Then I noticed his murderous expression. “Uh-oh.”
“So he’s coming here, is he?”
“Brand,” I said firmly. “I know he sort of . . . exploded you. But to be fair, you were trying to kill Caryl. Please don’t attack him.”
He bristled, looming over me. “Give me one damned good reason.”
“Because you want to see Naderi, ever again?” I said, holding my hands palm out and backing away. “Also, he could kill you?”
“Or I could kill him!”
“And if you do, who the fuck gets his scepter?”
“Me!” said Brand with a grin. “I’d be a great king!”
“Even if that were anywhere in the same zip code as true, you’re Seelie now. You can’t use that scepter.”
He sat down heavily on the sand, exhaled in frustration. “Shock, then! He’s all right.”
“Shock doesn’t want to be king, never has, and, P.S., don’t attack Winterglass. Because it’s rude to attack someone who comes in peace, because you’d probably just get exploded again, and honestly mostly because I fucking said so, and I’m in charge of whether you get to see your Echo again.”
“I promise I won’t attack Winterglass,” said Brand. “But let the record show that I’m killing him in my mind.”
It took about an hour for them to reach us, and when they did, I hardly had time to process the horror that was King Winterglass in his native form before Caryl ran to me and threw her arms around me, kissed me squarely on the mouth.
Okay, so we were doing this. Publicly. All right.
I kissed her back if for no other reason than to spare her public humiliation, one hand on the back of her head, the other arm wrapped firmly around her. But I kept my eyes open, checking out Shock. He was watching us with a slightly sad smile that suggested he and she had already had a Conversation about this.
Winterglass, I couldn’t read at all. Flaming-eyed owl skulls are not really known for their subtle ranges of expression.
When I finished kissing Caryl, I kept my arm around her and looked to Winterglass.
“I’ll have you know,” I said to him, “you just got me out of a very awkward conversation with Shiverlash.”
“Where is the Vessel?” he asked. Oh, wow. I had never heard his natural voice before, and it was at least eight kinds of Nope. I was so disturbed by the warped, nightmarish rattle of it that it took me a minute to realize what an alarming question that was.
“Oh,” I said. “I, uh . . . it’s gone.”
“Gone where?” said Caryl, pulling away from me and leaping straight to about a level 8.
“Gone . . . from existence. I got cornered at the abyss and it sort of . . . fell into the void.”
Caryl crumpled to the sand. Winterglass stood for a moment like an extremely creepy statue, then began to advance on me.
Brand stepped between us, bristling. Winterglass came to an abrupt halt; even when Brand had been Unseelie he’d shrugged off royal commands, since the manticore was older than the scepter itself. Winterglass had learned the hard way not to fuck with Brand, and he didn’t know I’d made him promise not to attack.
For a long moment Winterglass said nothing at all. And I’d have lost a ton of money if I’d wagered on what his next words would be.
“Thank you,” he said.
“I— What?”
“You have freed me entirely from the Arcadia Project’s control,” he said. “There is now nothing left in either world that could convince me to make even the smallest agreement with any human again.”
“Father . . . ,” Shock began. But Winterglass put up a hand, and he fell silent.
“I won’t try to stop my son or any of my other subjects from cooperating with you. But I have my own troubles to attend to, namely the Beast Queen that you unleashed.”
“The Arcadia Project could help you with that,” I said.
“Oh?” His native form didn’t have eyebrows, so he had to redouble the sarcasm in his nightmarish voice. “You will send armies of humans to stop the teeming masses of Unseelie commoners who salivate waiting to rip my people limb from limb?”
“Probably not that, no.”
“Then there is nothing you can do to help me in the struggle I must wage, and your demands will only serve to distract me. Whatever Third Accord your Project hopes to make, you will have to make it without me.”
I looked to Shock, to Caryl. Caryl was sitting on the sand, chewing one of her knuckles, tears in her eyes. Shock stood looking at his sneakers, resigned. Neither of them had anything much to say.
“I’ll give you this advice for free, then,” I said. “Shiverlash will stop at nothing to see the spirits freed. The best thing you could do for yourself would be to start befriending commoners rather than doubling down on exterminating them. Talk to your son there. Actually listen to him. He can help you kick the spirit-slavery habit.”
Winterglass turned his skull toward Shock. The kid kept his eyes on his shoes.
“There are just too many commoners,” I said. “Every enemy you make is a new body for the siren’s army, and since she can cancel magic, it’s going to be bodies against bodies.”
“Why are you telling me how to fight the only ally you have left in the Unseelie Court?”
“Because I would rather that ally have been you. I love Caryl, and she loves you, and so I wanted to love you too. I still haven’t given up hope that one day you might look past your fear of change and see us as worthy allies.”
Caryl moved to him, touched his skeletal arm with gloved fingers. So she was skittish about closed spaces, but had no trouble cuddling skeletons. Okeydokey.
“You can’t really be leaving the Arcadia Project,” she said in a tone of hurt disbelief.
He raised one bony hand to cup her cheek. “If you had any sense,” he said with surprising tenderness for a nightmarish demon lord, “you would too. Dame Belinda will not be gentle with you when this is all over. Come with me now, and I will keep you safe.”
“I cannot abandon the Arcadia Project!” she said, her eyes overflowing with tears. “It is necessary for human progress. For fey progress as well! The White Rose could not have been built without it, nor your palace at Nullhorne. Without it we would all be wild creatures scrabbling for survival, never dreaming of anything more. Everything you attribute to the sidhe, as part of their innate superiority? It’s because of their relationship with us!”
“I don’t believe that,” said Winterglass. “The sidhe have always been the best of either world. And Shiverlash is trying to destroy that. If you came with me, you could destroy her, you could rule there.”
“I don’t care what happens to the Unseelie Court!” Caryl blurted with such vehemence that Winterglass stepped back. “I wish I had never seen the place!”
Winterglass stood for so long that I thought maybe he really had turned into a statue this time. A monument to an Unseelie King, dead of a broken heart.
“I’m sorry,” Caryl said. “I shouldn’t be unkind to you. It wasn’t your fault.”
He reached out to touch her hair once, briefly, then let his hand fall.
“If you must go home,” he said at last, “then I will ensure that you get there safely.”
“No,” said Caryl resolutely, though her voice still shook a little. “I know what that means—it means you’ll enslave another spirit to hide us. I will never allow that to be done in my presence again. For any reason. Deciding there were exceptions to that rule lost me my best friend.”
“You haven’t lost me,” said Elliott. I started. He was on my shoulder now. Not really, of course. He had no here in Arcadia. But that was what he chose to project.
Caryl put both hands to her mouth, starting to sob in earnest. “Elliott . . . ,” she said brokenly. “I thought Unseelie couldn’t forgive.”
“You are Unseelie,” he countered logically. “Did you not forgive me for leaving you, for making myself vulnerable to Shiverlash?”
“I am part human,” Caryl said.
“Then so am I, perhaps. Let me be the spell that will see you safely home.” He showed himself fluttering over to land on her shoulder, wrapping his tail around her neck, just like old times.
“Hey,” I said. My voice was hoarse for some reason. “Can Brand and I come too? The Seelie guards are still looking for us.”
“Can you make a spell that will hide all of us?” Caryl said to Elliott. “Even with her iron?”
“Hmm,” said Elliott. “An interesting challenge.”
After a few experiments, he determined that if he used Brand as the base for the spell, he could weave an enchantment that radiated outward for twenty feet or so, creating a null space that most would feel subtly compelled to look away from.
Caryl mounted Brand behind me, wrapping her arms around my waist and leaning her head against my shoulder. Shock kissed her hand farewell.
“Though you will never fully return the admiration I hold for you,” he said, “I hope that you and I shall remain friends. I hold no true power in the Unseelie High Court, but I will do what I can to assist the Arcadia Project with what talents I do possess.”
“Wait for me at Nullhorne,” Winterglass said to his son. “I wish to make certain that Caryl arrives safely home.”
The king flew alongside us as Brand sprinted homeward, despite the fact that his wings were all air and bone and would never have worked in a world that made any sense. When we reached the base of the rock formation that held the L4 Gate, Brand crouched down so that Caryl and I could dismount.
“Brand should come with us to the Residence for a little while,” I said, “just until we can get some sort of pardon for what he did to Duke Skyhollow.”
“Very well,” said Caryl.
“Baroness Roper,” said King Winterglass, startling me with the respectful address. “Will you remain with me a moment, to speak privately?”
I turned to Caryl and Brand. “Go on,” I said. “Pretty sure he won’t eat me.”
Winterglass waited until they had disappeared through the Gate, then turned to address me.
“You seem to care for Miss Vallo,” he said, “in the human fashion. If Caryl insists on staying with the Arcadia Project, I place the onus on you to make certain that she is safe.”
I blew my hair from my face in frustration. “How?” I said. “How am I supposed to protect anyone? I’ve fucked up everything. I have no more monarchs on my side than I started with, and I’m probably going to lose Shiverlash. Sure, I took some resources away from Belinda, including you, but she still has two hundred countries’ worth of people she can send at us in various ways. We’re fucking doomed.”
“Not if you take the Seelie Court from her too.”
“Well, yeah. But there’s no way to do that.”
“Submit yourself to their trial,” he said. “Thus far you have only tried to strong-arm Dawnrowan into submission; that is not how the Seelie mind works. If you want her to ally with you, you must play the noble hero.”
“Dude, seriously. I’m an antihero at best.”
“If you want Dawnrowan on your side, you must set aside your conception of yourself. You must act as a hero would act, and hope that the truth follows in the footsteps of the lie.”
Wait. That sounded suspiciously like . . . opposite-to-emotion action. Did King Winterglass of the Unseelie Court just paraphrase my therapist to me?
“Free advice,” he said quietly. “In exchange for yours.”
I sighed, raked back my hair. “But I can’t take your advice,” I said, “any more than I expect you to take mine. There are too many ways I could screw up the trial, end up in prison or dead.”
Winterglass gave a graceful shrug of his spiky shoulders.
“I just want to go home,” I said quietly.
“As do I,” said Winterglass. “That advice was my last gift to you. Having offered it, I take my leave.”
“Wait. Can’t you help me free Tjuan? Please? If you don’t help me,” I bluffed desperately, “I have to go back to Shiverlash. And what she wants in exchange . . . she wants to use me as a weapon against the sidhe. To destroy their estates.”
“I do not think you will do that,” he said. “But if I am wrong, if you do turn your iron against my people, there is nothing in either world that will protect you from the consequences.” And without further ado he launched himself into the air, a skeletal silhouette growing smaller and smaller against the darkening sky.
Just as I was seriously considering bursting into tears, Caveat appeared, hovering in my field of vision without bothering to choose a plausible object to perch on.
“Don’t worry about it anymore,” she said.
“About what?” I said. I was drowning in so many worries I couldn’t pick one out.
“About Tjuan,” she said. “I’ve spoken with Shock.”
“Wait. Are you . . .”
“He’s agreed to link me to the facade. I’ll take it to the police station, stay in it for the length of the prison sentence, and then I’ll return it to Arcadia to be destroyed.”
I tried to wrap my head around this. “You’re going to go to prison voluntarily? For potentially ten years or more?”
“If the Project doesn’t find a way to get me out of there sooner.”
I stared at her for a moment. “That’s . . . that’s awfully heroic, for an Unseelie spirit.”
Caveat took the trouble to manifest a shrug, clearly patterned after one of Tjuan’s. “It’s not altruism,” she said. “It’s balance. I stole a lot of years from him. Now I’m going to give them back.”
“Caveat. We’ll . . . we’ll talk about this more. I want you to be sure. Don’t do anything just yet. Are you going back to the Residence now? Or staying here?”
“Here, until I’m called.”
“Could you . . . could you find Claybriar for me?”
“Of course. What do you want me to tell him?”
I gave the Gate a lingering look, then turned my back on it. “Tell him I need safe escort back to Skyhollow. I’m turning myself in.”