I’d learned that I was easy to placate with the promise of a place and people who would at least pretend to love me. But then, I’d always known that about myself, on some level.
The Luidaeg’s collapse had been related to the amount of iron in her body and the amount of magic she’d forced into her circle, not to the ending of Titania’s spell. Carrying her out of the Summerlands had been one of the most terrifying parts of the whole ordeal, although we’d finally been able to find the back door to her apartment in the swamp behind Amandine’s tower, and when we’d knocked, Poppy had been there to let us in, one of the missing, now restored. Seeing her earnest orange face had been one of the first real indicators that this was almost over.
Oberon had spent the entire spell locked in with Poppy, and now flinched when people mentioned mortal television in his presence. Served him right.
August and Simon had returned to the Undersea as soon as we were sure the Luidaeg was going to be okay, diving back into the embrace of the Lorden family. Simon hadn’t been back to the surface since, and I wasn’t entirely sure he would ever come back again. August, on the other hand, had started showing up every other weekend, learning how to bake scones from May and spending time with Raysel, who was struggling to set aside enough of her fear of Simon to allow him to visit us at the house after his grandchild was born.
I was honestly proud of both of them. They were trying to fit into a world that had changed completely while they weren’t looking, and while it wasn’t easy, they at least knew what they needed to do.
All the Brown children had woken up after the spell dissolved. Unlike most of the people Titania had enchanted, they had no memory of the parts they’d played in her fantasy world, and none of us were in a real hurry to fill in the blanks. They’d each been given a role to play. They’d all suffered from trying to do it correctly. They’d hurt other people in the process, and it hadn’t been their fault. If we could spare them from that guilt, we would do precisely that.
The part of the false Queen had been played, not by an enchanted Brown, but by the actual Queen. She was now back in custody, and Arden was giving serious thought to elf-shooting her, just to keep her from turning up again, like the bad penny she was.
Tybalt carried me through the national park and up the path on the hillside, until the air changed around us and we emerged in the Summerlands, in sight of the gates to Arden’s knowe. I finally pushed against him then, struggling to sit up.
“Put me down,” I instructed, and he did, setting me gingerly on my feet.
I leaned up to press a kiss against his cheek. “Let’s go visit the queen.”
“As long as it’s only this one,” he said, sourly, but he smiled as he looked at me, and his touch was gentle as he reached up to brush the hair away from my eyes. “No more Summer Queens for us.”
“No,” I agreed. “I quite like the one we have. Come on.”
He took my hand in his, and side by side, we walked into the knowe, neither of us looking back, neither of us letting go. Safe, in a world once more restored to the way the world was meant to be, and close enough to home that we could feel it in the air.
Titania had tried to create perfection, but she could never have succeeded, because this was perfection, flaws and all. Anything else would have been a lie.
Read on for a brand-new novella by Seanan McGuire:
CANDLES AND STARLIGHT
Pinch him, fairies, mutually;
Pinch him for his villainy;
Pinch him, and burn him, and turn him about,
Till candles and starlight and moonshine be out.
—William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor
ONE
June 13th, 2015
THEY ACTUALLY PREPARED A room for me.
May had told me so during the drive from Muir Woods to the house where I was going to spend the next year of my life. In the mortal world, not the Summerlands; October had never been willing to move back there after leaving her mother’s tower, and so my father had given her one of his investment properties as a home to call her own. It was one of the older homes in the City, built shortly after the earthquake, and he had purchased it when it was new, preserving it from the subdivision and reconstruction that had befallen many of its neighbors. In a sea of what May referred to as “condos” and “duplexes,” it remained a single-family home.
All this information was imparted to me in the back seat of a Bridge Troll’s hired conveyance, the man behind the wheel pretending not to listen as May did her best to reassure me that I was expected, I was wanted, I had been planned and prepared for. After everything I’d done or tried to do to this family, they had still gone out of their way to ensure my comfort once I was allowed to wake.
I hadn’t been sure how to feel about that. I still wasn’t. But she’d spoken kindly and earnestly and with all apparent sincerity, and I hadn’t been able to decide how I was supposed to respond to that before we’d been pulling up in front of the house and she’d been coaxing me out of the vehicle with little gestures of her hands.
May seemed to think I would find her unnerving. And in some ways, she was unnerving, and always would be: Fetches are meant to be temporary things, here and gone in a matter of days as they predict the deaths of the people they’re connected to. Well, she’d been incarnate for four years now, and showed no signs of disappearing any time soon.
At the same time, she had the face October had worn when I was a child, before my abduction, before—well, everything. She looked like the woman I remembered as my friend and the mother of my playmate, and not like the increasingly fae stranger October had become since we’d both returned from exile. May looked like an October I had never done material harm to, and that was soothing. Looking at her was like looking at a portal to the past, like a second chance I’d never deserved to have. So maybe she was unnerving, but she was also an offer to let me try again.
The car had driven off, May waving, and then she’d turned to walk me to the door, one hand on my shoulder, guiding me along, keeping me from running away. Not that I wanted to: this was my escape, the place I was running away to, not from. I’d stay here for as long as I could. It wasn’t going to be easy. I knew that. Perhaps ironically for one of the fae, I had no illusions. But after everything I’d done, I deserved a little difficulty. Asking for a chance at safety and healing wasn’t unfair of me. Asking for absolution would have been.
“Toby sets the house wards, and while we’re all allowed to bring visitors, she’s going to need to be the one who adjusts them to see you as a resident so you can come and go without someone accompanying you,” she’d said, as she unlocked the door and tapped the doorframe six times, in what I assumed was the pattern that told the house she had a guest. Then she’d gestured me inside, into a place like none I’d ever seen before.
Shadowed Hills was a place of constant tidiness, where the small army of domestic staff swept through on an almost-hourly basis to ensure that my parents wouldn’t be embarrassed by any sign that people actually lived there. This was very much the opposite. The front door opened on a small vestibule containing racks for both coats and shoes, with a honeycomb-gridded mat on the floor designed to catch any mud that people happened to track inside. May had paused to shrug out of her coat and hang it up before turning to me, hand outstretched, and catching herself.