“Let the girl stand,” said Chrysanthe, in a faintly chiding tone. “She’s still recovering from everything she’s been through. You may rise, October.”
Grateful and afraid, I straightened, dropping my kirtle as I did, and looked down at the steps of the dais, not wanting to risk giving offense without intending it.
“Mmm, ‘girl’ is a bit dismissive, I think, upon seeing her better,” said Chrysanthe. “Woman, then, but still allowed to stand up straight in our presence. You may look at us, October. We don’t demand that you avert your eyes.”
I glanced up, too startled not to. Chrysanthe was smiling. Theron looked a bit more dubious, but both of them were settled comfortably in their thrones, showing no signs of displeasure at my presence. That was something of a relief.
Not as big a relief as the presence of my family. “Forgive me, Majesty, but how is it that my father and sister are here?”
“Ah. That is a tale, and not theirs alone; they came with companions, who we have ignored for too long already.” Chrysanthe gestured to the other people who’d been in the room when we arrived.
I looked at them for the first time.
My first impression, that they were a small group, was accurate; there were four of them, and only two were familiar. Those two were knights in my Uncle Sylvester’s service: Garm and Grianne, a Gwragen and a Candela, respectively. They stood next to two strangers. The man was staring at me with such intensity that I half-expected him to claim offense against me for the simple crime of breathing in his presence; the woman was also watching me, but more wearily, with a sloping cast to her shoulders that implied she’d been running hard even longer than I had.
I had never seen either one of them before, I knew I hadn’t, but something about the man made me feel as if I ought to recognize him. It was an odd feeling, quickly chased away by the look he was giving me. I didn’t want to recognize someone who looked at me like that.
“October,” said Garm, sounding dryly amused by the whole situation.
Both the strangers clearly belonged to the same unfamiliar descendant line, with narrow, vertically slit pupils sketched down the center of their vividly colored eyes. Their ears were pointed, but not along any angle I knew. The man had black stripes in his dark brown hair, while the woman’s hair was white at the roots and deepened into a rich orange as it grew out. She wore it loose to brush her shoulders, straight and fine. Both of them were dressed as if they’d raided a court’s lost and found, clothing mismatched and somewhat ill-fitting.
The man began to step forward. The woman’s hand on his arm stopped him, and he stilled, stare never wavering. If looks could kill, I would have been as dead as the man in that alley.
Not the most soothing thought, perhaps, but as they had been given implicit permission by the Queen on the Golden Shore, all four of them were moving toward us now. I took a half-step back, stopping when my shoulder brushed my father’s chest. He would protect me, if it came to that.
August, meanwhile, was putting herself in front of me, her own wariness evident.
“We came here with you,” she said. “We listened to your wild stories and we let you convince us to come, even though it really, really sucked. Now you’re looking at my sister like you want to hurt her. You’re going to stop that right now, or we’re leaving.”
“How were you intending to do that?” asked the strange man, his voice low and husky and tightly controlled. “It took both of us to bring you here. Garm would never have been able to make the journey if not for Grianne. How do you plan to escape our company?”
“Their Majesties have their snatchers,” said August, more boldly than I would have expected, even from her. “There have been rumors about them for as long as I can remember, and now we know those rumors are true. I’m sure they would be happy to take us back to Shadowed Hills, in exchange for a pledge of silence. The Golden Shore needs to keep its secrets.”
“Charming as it is to sit here and listen to you coordinate a somewhat ill-considered blackmail plan against us, I’m afraid we need to be seeing to the banquet now that our guests of honor have arrived,” said Theron. “I’ll send one of those ‘snatchers,’ as you so quaintly put it, to collect you when it’s time to eat. Please try not to get any blood on the floor.” He and the queen both rose, then, and walked away, their hooves making little ringing taps against the polished oak.
“August,” I said.
“We’ll leave if we want to leave,” said August, not to be dissuaded. “And if you don’t stop looking at my sister like that, we will want to leave.”
“August!” I repeated, more sharply. She turned to look at me, hurt and surprise in her eyes. I forced myself not to look away. It was harder than I’d anticipated. “I can’t go back with you.”
“But . . . we came here to . . . Of course you can,” she protested. “Mother doesn’t know what’s happened, but she won’t be angry. None of it was your fault. It’s still Moving Day, and we’d be traveling by Tuatha, so there’s no chance we’d be stopped. Of course you can come home. Where else would you go?”
I looked to Father, helpless in the face of the pleading note in her voice. She was my sister. I existed to serve her, to be her friend and companion and plaything and helpmeet and all other things she asked of me. I didn’t exist to make her look at me like her heart was breaking.
Thankfully, he understood. “August,” he said gently. “What your sister has been accused of is a serious crime.”
“But she didn’t do it!” she said. “She can’t have done it! She doesn’t know how to fight, much less how to kill someone! They’re—they’re confused, and they’re pointing fingers because she was an unclaimed changeling in the wrong place at the right time, and they want it to be her. But she didn’t do it.”
“Stupid girl,” growled the strange man. “She disappeared from a sealed holding cell belonging to the Queen of the Mists. You really think it matters whether she committed the crime they’ve accused her of? They’ll have her tied to the Tree in the blinking of an eye. Escaping was disrespectful to their precious pureblood authority.”
“Tybalt,” said the woman, tone chiding.
He shrugged off her hand and turned to stalk away while I was still gaping after him.
No wonder he’d looked familiar: he was the man from my blood memories, the one who’d looked at me with such open adoration, the one I’d supposedly married in some other version of the world. I hadn’t recognized him in part because I hadn’t been expecting to see him in the real world, and in part because I still couldn’t reconcile the way he’d been looking at me now with the way he’d been looking at me then. What could I possibly have done to upset him so badly?
“He’s not wrong,” I said meekly. “I was locked up for a crime, and I fled before I could stand trial. If I set foot back in the Mists, anywhere in the Mists, the Queen will have me arrested for violation of the Law—and even if I were to be found innocent, the fact that I defied her would be enough to see me convicted. It’s not a crime to kill a changeling. She might still let me die on the Tree, in recognition of my family’s stature, but I’d die. I can never go home.”