“Wait,” I cried, “don’t tell me you know—” But I cut myself off before the thought even got started. That Millie would not only know what kind of fey Jake was but also know him personally was obvious, and not even particularly surprising; if they knew the Queen of the Seelie Court, why not Seattle’s Warder? So I said instead, my brow furrowed, “You guys let me rent this place with you because of Millie, didn’t you?”
It wasn’t entirely a question, and as soon as I’d asked it, I knew from Millie, Carson, and Jake’s expressions that I was right. “I did promise Aggie I’d watch out for you,” said the Warder woman, “and I could trust a
myobu
to live in the same house with you and look after you when I couldn’t.”
“It was the condition she gave to me for permitting me into the city,” Jake said solemnly, “and it was a duty I willingly assumed.”
“Um, what’s a
myobu
?” This came from Jude. Now that she was sitting down, my friend drooped as though exhaustion was finally catching up with her, and only the teacup she held seemed to give her something to focus upon to keep awake. She cradled it between her palms without drinking, as if to let her hands soak up the heat from the cup’s clay sides.
Christopher sat beside me on the couch, drinking sake with tentative care. Up till now he’d seemed as informed as Millicent on things from the world of the weird, but he gave me a baffled little shrug when I glanced at him. “Out of my ken,” he admitted.
“A
myobu
,” said Carson, “is one type of what the Japanese call
kitsune
. But Jake had best just show you what he is; that’ll work better than any of us trying to explain.”
“If you will all pardon me for just a moment.” Jake lithely rose from one of the extra chairs he and his partner had brought in from the dining room, padding away on bare, silent feet down the hallway. The boys’ half of the house was a mirror image of mine; he might as well have been heading to my own bathroom or bedroom, except in the opposite direction.
It took a few minutes before he returned, minutes in which Jude, Christopher and I swapped puzzled looks. None of the others seemed inclined to clue us in. Carson waited placidly, his face as uninformative as the older Warder’s impish, secretive little grin. As for Amelialoren, most of her attention seemed taken up with me. She watched me with an unwavering regard that I found myself unable to meet for more than a few seconds at a time, and only half my hesitation was born out of unwillingness to lose myself in a Sidhe’s eyes for a third time tonight. The rest came from the contradiction of vast time and timelessness intermingled in her gaze; meeting it was like looking eye to eye with something almost as primal and ancient as Azganaroth. Like, oh, say, nature.
When Jake rejoined us he’d shucked his kimono, but that wasn’t the shocking part. The shocking part was that he came back into the living room on four feet instead of two, sporting a princely plume of a tail, a sharp slender muzzle, and ears now significantly pointier than the Queen’s or mine. His fur was a dazzling, flawless white, and he was the biggest fox I’d ever seen.
Fort took one look at him, yowled, and dived under the couch. And the rest of us, at least those of us who hadn’t known what was coming, were just as startled as the cat. I felt my jaw go loose; Jude and Christopher nearly dropped their cups. Millicent snickered, and the huge white fox that had just minutes ago been my housemate Jake shot the room at large a vulpine edition of the wry grin on his partner’s face. “I’ll assume y’all get the picture now,” Carson said cheerfully.
“He’s a fox,” I said, absolutely stupefied. Now I’d seen everything.
The fox—Jake—padded over and sat down before me on his haunches, his tail draped neatly about his feet. Black eyes that looked hauntingly familiar even in a white-furred fox’s face gave me an almost shy regard, and I automatically lifted up a hand to his ears before pausing, unsure whether it was kosher to scratch the head of an animal who also just happened to be one of my best friends. Jake answered that question by nudging my fingers with his furry nose. Years of Fortissimo’s training had taught me the meaning of that particular little nudge. So I scritched him between the ears, peered over at Carson, and tried to rally under the impact of a whole new volley of weirdness I’d have to absorb before I’d make it to a bed and to sleep.
“Questions?” Carson asked us all.
Millicent promptly gestured at the Seelie Queen. “Got one for Her Majesty here. Care to explain why the Seelie are involving themselves in the affairs of the
myobu
—and why I haven’t been informed about this?”
Amelialoren’s gaze unhurriedly traversed the room, stopping on each of our faces for a few moments and simply evaluating. I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t meet her eyes for long. Jude flushed pink and dropped her gaze to her teacup; Christopher shifted nervously beside me and developed a rapt interest in my free hand, taking it in his own and fidgeting with each of my fingers, one at a time. Even Carson avoided looking her way, though he remained otherwise as relaxed and jovial as he’d always been in our home. Only Millicent seemed unmoved, out of Warder experience or just cantankerous age, and it was in reply to her that the Queen finally spoke again.
“We had not yet contacted you, Lady Warder, because as of yet the affairs in question have not crossed the borders of your city. In brief, as with the Seelie and Unseelie, so too is there strife amongst the
myobu
and
nogitsune
of Japan.” With a slim white hand, she indicated Jake. “Tanaka-san is the only representative of his kind residing in the Pacific Northwest, and was called upon by his kin to act as a liaison to my Court and request my presence as a neutral mediator at a gathering of
kitsune
this weekend in the San Juans.”
Jake affirmed this with a soft bark and a dip of his head, a surprisingly human gesture given his current shape, so I risked another, longer look towards the Queen. “Why there? And how do I come into this?” I asked uneasily.
She looked at me with millennia condensed into her eyes, and I had to struggle to keep from feeling small and very, very young. “The San Juan islands are the site of one of the permanent Gates into Faerie,” she said. “As such, they provided easy access to my Court for Tanaka-san and his kin and Mr. Saunders. Moreover”—and she smiled, a tiny bit—”they are of surpassing beauty even for mortal lands.”
Well, I couldn’t argue with that. I might have tried to smile myself, but the Queen’s eyes darkened as she went on, “The warriors Melisanda and Tarrant interrupted our negotiations, Miss Thompson, and brought word of your peril. They spoke of the madness of Lord Malandor, and that he had conspired with an Unseelie renegade to sacrifice a changeling of his own blood to a Power he should never have disturbed.”
“That wasn’t even half an hour ago,” I protested. “Twenty minutes, tops!”
Carson said gently, “The flow of time between here and Faerie ain’t exactly stable, kiddo. Gating back and forth is tough, unless you know what you’re doing, like Her Ladyship here.”
I subsided, thinking
oh
for the second time that night, and Amelialoren picked up where Carson left off. “It was only then that we learned that the changeling Lord Malandor had tried to sacrifice was in fact known to Tanaka-san and Mr. Saunders: you, Miss Thompson.” Her attention never left me, and I had to duck my gaze as she then inquired, “It is apparent by the presence of you and your friends that Lord Malandor failed in his plan, but I should like to know where he is.”
Since I couldn’t make myself look at the Queen, I looked at Christopher’s hand holding mine instead. With Amelialoren sitting so close, his magic was barely an itch along my palm—but his grip was strong and warm and bolstered me enough to answer her. “Um. About that. That, uh, Power he tried to sacrifice Christopher, Elessir, and me to got pissed off and took him instead. She told me to tell my immortal kin, though, that the curse on them would be lifted.”
That last came out of me bleaker than I’d intended, and Amelialoren observed, “You do not sound pleased, Miss Thompson.”
The room went very quiet, still enough that I once again heard the subtle noises coming from the far side of the living room wall. Acutely conscious of six pairs of eyes on me, I thought about what to say. I was beyond exhausted, fed up with Sidhe using my brain as a playground, and still trying to figure out what it was going to mean to my life that half of me wasn’t human. Prudence warned against saying anything rash to a being that could doubtless reduce me to babbling incoherence as Malandor had done—but well, the hell with it. If Amelialoren was Queen of the Seelie she was in theory in charge of the good guys of Faerie, and as far as that frustrated, exhausted part of me was concerned, she could cope.
“I don’t like the idea of babies not being born any more than the next person,” I said, forcing myself to return my gaze to hers. My voice shook a little; I ignored it, along with the wetness prickling at the corners of my eyes. “But from where I sit, it looks pretty plain that if Malandor had left Mom and Dad alone to raise me in peace, there never would have been a curse that needed breaking.”
“That is true.” The Queen didn’t bat an eye; I didn’t seem to have surprised her. I wondered if anything could. “By his actions, Malandor deprived you of your parents. Of late he has robbed you of your will, torn your home asunder, and through his Unseelie ally taken away your means of mortal employment, all to make you more vulnerable to his ultimate intention to sacrifice your life. I have already set the brownies to restoring your home. What other compensation would you demand of the Seelie Court?”
For three or four seconds the only reaction I could manage was a blank stare; then, as the impact of the question sank in, I blinked and tried to gather my scattered, staggering thoughts. At first my only thought was surprise that I wasn’t angrier that Elessir had indeed nuked my job out from under me. The anger was there, don’t get me wrong. But it was dulled and muted, by having suspected Elessir of meddling with my coworkers anyway, by my weariness, and by the memory of the last look I’d seen on the Unseelie singer’s face.
Letting go of Christopher’s fingers and leaving off scratching Jake’s white fox head, I dropped my head forward into my hands. A nobler, more honorable person might have said that the crimes of one of her number were not the Queen of the Seelie’s fault; after all, if somebody burns down your house, you don’t expect the mayor of their hometown to rebuild it for you. But I was way too tired to be noble, and way too unsettled by what had happened to me over the last two days to turn down an offer to restore some normality to my life.
So I said, sighing and closing my eyes, “Fixing Christopher’s bouzouki and my house is a start. Can you fix what Elessir did to my coworkers and get me my job back, so I can still afford to live in said house?”
“I could attempt to restore a memory another Sidhe mage has stolen from a mortal’s mind, Miss Thompson,” Amelialoren said gravely. “But it would not be easy, even for me, and it would not be swift. Nor would it be without potential cost to the mind in question. Memories are fragile, and to disturb one can lead to the disturbance of all.”
“In other words, you might only make things worse.” I kept my head in my hands, thinking of the dream I’d had about my parents—about the destruction of his most precious memory making Dad lose it. I hoped that I was not so vital a memory that my absence from their heads would drive any of my coworkers over that same edge. But what else would be disturbed if Amelialoren went into their thoughts, even with good intentions? What might be lost in the effort to put me back?
“I might indeed,” was the Queen’s only reply. At the sound of those three quiet words I thought of a clear, calm pool, containing nothing within itself but reflecting my face and thoughts and being back at me. Reflecting, like a mirror. I thought of my bathroom mirror, of the mirror in the ladies’ room at work, and of the countless mirrors I’d seen in that nightmare, each of them showing me some subtly different facet of myself. All of them adding up to
me
, like the names that had wheeled through my head to break me out of the thrall, each of them part of the person I was.
Just taking a moment to thank the good Lord for the woman you are, baby
, Aunt Aggie said in the back of my mind,
and that I think you’ll stay, even if your ears get all pointy like your mama’s
.
The person I was couldn’t risk somebody being hurt for her own benefit.
“Then don’t do it,” I said. “If it might hurt them, don’t do it. And don’t worry about anything else. I just want to be able to sort myself out for a while.”
Christopher touched my shoulder; Jake’s muzzle discreetly nudged my hair and then withdrew. But mostly I noticed Amelialoren saying solemnly, “Justly so, Miss Thompson.” Then her attention shifted. “As the Warders of Seattle have also been harmed by Lord Malandor’s breaking of the Pact between Sidhe and Warder, what reparation from the Seelie Court would the Lady Warder and Warder Second require?”
“As long as you’re asking,” Millicent said shrewdly, “and since I don’t get a fair crack at the bas—er, uh, at Lord Malandor for my broken ankle, I’ll settle for something fit to warm an old woman’s bones on a wet Seattle night. Say, a case of twelve-year-old Glenlivet.”
A low, soft sound like the soughing of the wind through living branches escaped the Seelie Queen: laughter. “The Pact,” she pointed out mildly, “does not require us to provide libations to the Warders.”
“Nope, but as long as your Court’s in the mood for diplomatic alliances, I get real diplomatic-like to anybody who gives me Scotch.”
“So noted, Lady Warder. I will see what I can do.” I looked up just as Amelialoren smiled, her eyes brightening; the sight of it wrung something within me, and for a few seconds all I could think about was Mother’s picture. Then her glimmering regard settled on Christopher. “And you, young Warder Second? Are you of similar diplomatic inclination?”
“If you can’t get Kendis her rightful job back,” Christopher muttered, looking bashful under the impact of that serene smile turned upon him, “then do somethin’ else to make sure she can get by, and I’ll be content.”