“Why would you say that?” asked August. “My sister. He put his hands on my sister while I was distracted. He had no right.”
“Faerie says he had every right, Aug,” I said. “He’s a pureblood, I’m a changeling, I wasn’t sweeping fast enough, and he disciplined me. Without you or our parents there to tell him not to, he had every right. Please don’t yell at my friends because he did something you didn’t like, but broke no rules.”
“Maybe they’re bad rules,” August grumbled. “I still want to know what she meant by saying this was for the best.”
“Only that Toby had clearly not eaten in quite some time, and his bad behavior has allowed us to feed her,” said Kerry. “And it meant I got a break, which I appreciate, even if Meriel likely doesn’t. She’ll take it out of me tomorrow morning, when the big party begins. Will the two of you be in attendance?”
There was a caution to that question, even if she seemed to have otherwise relaxed. For me to attend the party Uncle Sylvester was hosting, someone would have to be committed to staying with me at all times. Otherwise, this could happen again, or even worse.
August shook her head. “I don’t think so this year.” She turned to me. “Have you eaten enough?”
My bowl was almost empty, and my bread was long since gone. I paused to focus on my stomach. It no longer rumbled but felt full and content. “I’m good,” I said.
“Excellent. Uncle Sylvester wanted to see us both before we returned home.”
That could be a very good thing, or a very bad one. Uncle Sylvester’s moods were famously unpredictable, calm and reasonable one moment, raging at nothing the next. Still, Kerry released my wrist as August stood, beckoning for me to follow.
“I’ll see you soon,” I told Kerry, and followed my sister out of the kitchen.
With her, I walked the main halls of the knowe, not the hidden servants’ corridors. It would have been unseemly for her to use them, and besides, she would have made the actual servants uncomfortable. Purebloods like the Hobs and the knowe’s single Bannick were one thing; they were staff. August, though . . . she might have no title of her own, but everyone knew she was going to inherit the Duchy someday. Uncle Sylvester had no other heirs.
She kept her hand tucked into the bend of my arm as we walked, making sure anyone who saw us knew that I was under her protection. “I’m sorry, Toby,” she said, once she was sure we were alone. “He’s never been that bold before.”
“He’s never been a squire before, either.” We walked a bit farther in silence before I asked, “Do you know why Uncle Sylvester wants to see us?”
“No,” she said. “I was looking for you when Sir Etienne popped in with a message. He seemed dismayed that we weren’t together.”
“Maybe he knows his new squire’s a jerk.”
“You know, you’re right. What did he see in the little weasel?”
“You were the one going on about flirting with him to watch him blush, remember?”
“Yes, but I’m a sheltered young girl of good breeding and little experience. I’m allowed to be wrong about boys. Etienne, on the other hand, is teaching the weasel how to swing a sword and uphold the rules of etiquette and all that other knight-and-squire nonsense, and he should have better judgment than that. One day, just imagine. Sir Quentin.” August shuddered theatrically. “He’ll have a family name by then, and with a name and a knighthood, he might be good enough to petition Father for my hand.”
“Thinking highly of yourself today, aren’t you?”
“Worrying about my sister,” August countered. “I’m it for the Dóchas Sidhe. You know I’ll be expected to marry long enough to have children, and you know your future depends on me taking you with me when that happens. If they marry me off to the weasel, I can’t take you. He’d have you dead inside the year.”
I grimaced. “Father would never.”
“Depending on his family, once it’s revealed, Mother might.”
I couldn’t really argue with that, much as I might want to; August was right. Titania’s edicts said the pursuit of political power was as much the duty of the Firstborn as the creation of descendant lines and the birthing of changelings. If that bastard Quentin turned out to come from a powerful family, Oberon forbid, Mother might think he’d make a good match for August, and I could wind up in a household with a man who loathed me when he had power enough to assault me in the open rather than hiding his malice away behind closed doors.
It was a terrifying thought, and thankfully, I didn’t have long to dwell on it before we were rounding a bend in the hall and approaching the tall oak doors of Uncle Sylvester’s receiving room.
“He’s lucid today,” said August, touching my arm with her free hand. “I think he’s in one of his good patches. I’ll bet you a sink of dishes next time Mother’s away that he can tell us apart.”
“Is that a fair bet, if you’ve already seen him today?”
She dimpled at me. “Maybe I just want an excuse to do the dishes.”
I laughed, and was still laughing when she pressed her palm against the door and it swung smoothly open. It looked as if it should have creaked, like the hinges should have squealed and protested, but looks can be deceiving. Melly would never have tolerated such signs of disrepair in her own home, never.
I stopped laughing.
August gave my arm a reassuring squeeze and stepped into the receiving room, pulling me with her.
The receiving room had been constructed during a time when Uncle Sylvester thought he would eventually court and marry, building a household filled with laughter and with love. My grandparents had apparently been the loving kind, genuinely devoted to each other, compassionate and caring where their children were concerned, and that was the model both their living sons had looked to live up to. But while Father had been fortunate enough to find a wife who cared less for power and station than she did for warm soup and a loving spouse, Uncle Sylvester’s attempts at courting had been thwarted again and again, until he had stopped trying and fallen into a deep depression.
He had been in that deep depression for several hundred years now, and seemed to like it there. He sought no lovers, looked for no one to share his demesne, and as long as his Court operated smoothly, the Queen of the Mists left him alone. Depressed Dukes in backwater Duchies weren’t likely to raise armies against her or attempt revolutions, after all, and she had her hands full with the rest of the nobility.
In addition to being large enough to contain an entire Court that never came, the receiving room was dark, the windows shrouded by layer upon layer of gossamer-thin cobweb silk. Each of those curtain panels was worth enough to have bought a commoner like me anything we could possibly have wanted, but they were a compromise here; before installing the curtains, Uncle Sylvester had apparently tried to dim the light through the windows with actual spider webs, sending the household staff into absolute fits. I almost wished I could have seen that. Except not, because an angry Hob is a terrifying thing.
The floor was black-and-white checkerboard marble, pristine, even as the light through the curtains turned the white squares a grimy gray. The door slammed shut behind us as August and I started across that floor. Neither of us jumped. We were both well accustomed to Shadowed Hills and its theatrics. Instead, we walked toward the far end of the room, where a dais in deepest shadow held a single central chair.