A jagged hole in my shirt exposed a wide swath of equally blood-caked skin where I’d been stabbed, and my hands were covered in dried blood. I didn’t look like I’d eaten, slept, or bathed in roughly a decade, rather than having been safe at home in my mother’s tower less than two days before.
Arden, who had entered the room behind me, paused when she saw me staring at the mirror. “You can probably take the time to wash up—I’ll run interference if anyone tries to stop you,” she said. “Might be better not to go in front of the Queen when you’re looking like that. Assuming you want her to listen to you and not shoo you out to go and tend the cattle.”
“Do you ever take anything seriously?”
“I try really hard not to.” Arden’s reflection shrugged broadly. “Last time Nolan or I took anything seriously, a bunch of people died.”
I turned to gape at her. “Windermere. I knew I knew that name!”
She grimaced, glancing down. “Yeah, well, Nolan didn’t want me to change it, so here we are.”
“But you’re dead!”
King Gilad and Queen Sebille Windermere had been the rulers of the Kingdom in the Mists in 1906, when a terrible earthquake hit the mortal world hard enough to echo into the Summerlands. That was when we’d lost all contact with the Undersea. Prior to that, relations had been strained, but there had still been ways to pass between the Kingdoms. Then the earthquake had shattered their tenuous connections to the land, and their knowes sank so deep that we’d never been able to reach them again.
Titania had mourned, of course. Most of the denizens of the sea were descendants of Maeve and thus not to be fully trusted, but the Merrow were born of one of Titania’s own daughters, and she’d loved them dearly. Their loss had hurt her so badly that the rest of Faerie had moved inland in order to honor her grief, no longer living directly on the coasts. When I was a kid, August used to tell me stories about the abandoned knowes along the shore, falling slowly into disrepair, haunted by the shadows of the people who’d left them behind.
They’d given me bad dreams that kept me awake for days, until Father had ordered her to stop torturing her baby sister, and she’d gone looking for other ways to torment me.
The Undersea wasn’t the only thing we lost in the Earthquake. An assassin named Oleander de Merelands had somehow managed to break the wards on the royal knowe, slipping in while everyone was distracted by the shaking of the ground and murdering the king and queen in their beds. As far as I knew, no member of the royal family had escaped alive, not even the children. That was why Titania, in her wisdom, had left the choosing of our next monarch to the Rose of Winter, and why we answered to our current Queen, who was a distant relative of the Windermeres, born of a distaff line but close enough to claim the crown.
“We’re not, and since we’d like to stay that way, we stick to the Golden Shore unless we have no choice, like tonight, when we heard from one of our informants that a changeling had popped out of nowhere into an alley, been assaulted, and fought back, killing a pureblood in the process.” She shrugged, stricken look fading to be replaced by smugness. “So we nipped over and picked you up, and now you get to be alive and take a bath and put on some clean clothes before the Queen I actually answer to comes and kicks my ass.”
“But why?” I asked.
Arden sobered. “Do you remember what happened to the woman who killed my parents?”
“They found her dead, both arms missing just above the elbow, throat slit,” I said.
“The Law applies to purebloods killing each other outside of openly declared times of war, you know, meaning that she was as much a murder victim as my parents were.” She shrugged. “I’ll go get you something to wear.”
She turned and left the room before I could ask if she’d just admitted to killing Oleander, her departure clearly indicating that the conversation was over. A moment later, the door made a soft chiming sound, announcing that wards had been set from the outside.
Okay, so I was locked in. At the moment, that wasn’t all that worrisome—after all, I was locked in with the bathtub, which was what I wanted more than anything else. Except for maybe a drink, and something to eat, and those could come along in their own time.
Of all my oddly fitting mortal clothes, my jacket seemed to have weathered the day’s adventures the best; it was as filthy as the rest of me, but it was nothing a soft cloth wouldn’t be able to fix, and when I’d been stabbed, my assailant hadn’t hit the leather. I shrugged out of it, gave it a shake to knock off a layer or two of the least-attached grime, and folded it in half before placing it gently on the counter. I let my fingers linger on the lapel for just a moment. I didn’t know why I felt so possessive of the thing, but I did, and right now, I was holding on to that.
Removing everything else was a relief. The trousers, especially, were so caked in blood and filth that they clung to my skin, forcing me to roll them off a few inches at a time. There was no hamper in this room, sadly; I’d have to pick them up to take them to a laundry. Folding them wasn’t going to make that experience any more pleasant, so I took a certain bleak pleasure in tossing trousers, shirt, and undergarments onto the floor, then kicking everything into a heap in the corner before I turned my attention to the bathtub.
It had been empty when I stepped into the room, I was sure of it. Now it was filled almost to the top with steaming, apple blossom–scented water, and I wondered idly whether it chose the scents for guests based on some magical read of what would make them comfortable, or whether it was apple blossoms all the time. What would happen if someone whose magic smelled like apple blossoms came to visit? Or someone who had a lifelong feud with someone whose magic smelled like apple blossoms?
I was curious, but not curious enough to stay out of the tub, which was deep enough to require me to take two steps down before sinking fully into the water, letting it cover all but my face. I could almost float, it was so large, and I relaxed that way for a while, the water softening the worst of the muck on my skin until it fell away. I worried, very briefly, about marinating in my own filth, before I realized the water was turning clear again as quickly as it clouded.
Whoever maintained this knowe’s hearth magic probably deserved a medal of some sort. I sat up and turned around, unsurprised to find shampoo, conditioner, and a bar of soap waiting for me on the rim of the tub, along with a rough cloth to scrub myself down with. I had been indolent long enough. I set myself properly to the business of getting clean.
In reasonably short order, I felt almost like myself again. I rinsed the last of the conditioner out of my hair, then stood, looking up toward the ceiling.
“Thank you,” I said, formally. “I know we can’t thank each other, but I asked my father once, and he said we’re allowed to thank the knowes. So thank you, for letting me be clean and safe for a little while. It’s more than I could have asked from you.”
There had been long stretches while I was in the bath where my eyes were closed and couldn’t see the bathroom. That meant it was equally unsurprising when I found a towel waiting next to the now spotlessly clean leather jacket. The clothing I’d left on the floor was gone, along with the mess it had made.
“I would have swept that up,” I said, half-apologetically, as I touched the jacket with my right hand, clutching the towel to my chest with my left.