Chimes at Midnight

“Okay,” said Quentin. He bowed—not as formally as Dean had, but with a goodly measure of propriety. “It is a pleasure to meet you, milady.”

“This is my squire, Quentin,” I said. “Let me know if he bothers you. I’ll slap him upside the head until he stops.” I paused before adding, “Raj is also sort of my squire, but mostly, he’s Tybalt’s heir. I also have slapping rights where he’s concerned.”

Raj wrinkled his nose. Tybalt looked amused.

Dean, meanwhile, rubbed the back of his neck, and said, “This all seems a little, well. Lighthearted. If we’re actually doing what I think we’re doing.”

Marcia stepped back into the room. I hadn’t even seen her leave. “I’ve prepared a room for the Prince,” she said. “My Lord, your parents are on their way. They should be here shortly, if you wanted to receive them in the cove.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Dean. He rubbed the back of his neck one more time before asking, “Tybalt, can you . . . ?”

“I will join you by the water,” said Tybalt, and turned, following Marcia out of the room. I watched him go. Nolan’s head banging against the middle of his back only detracted a little bit from my customary admiration of his ass.

I turned back to the others. Dean met my eyes and grimaced.

“You really don’t have a plan, do you?” he asked.

“Not as such,” I admitted. “But I have a Princess, and that’s better than I was doing a few hours ago. Let’s go see your folks.”

The walk to the cove-side receiving room was less disorienting this time, since it was no longer totally unfamiliar. Raj and Quentin, on the other hand, gaped. They’d both essentially lived in Goldengreen while it was mine, and they’d done more exploring than I had, since, well, they were teenage boys and I wasn’t. For them, the existence of an unfamiliar hallway was both a delight and an insult to their skills.

Arden walked more slowly than Dean and the boys. I fell back to pace her, walking alongside her in silence for a little while before I asked, “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she said. Then she laughed unsteadily. “No. No, I am not okay.”

“You want to talk about it?”

She waved a hand, indicating the walls. “When I got up this morning, I wasn’t planning my return to Faerie to be quite this . . . now. Or ever. You’re all very nice, and I’m sorry if this seems rude, but you haven’t shown me anything that makes me think we can take the throne. You’ve got what, a King of Cats, a couple of kids, and some changelings? No offense.”

“None taken,” I lied. Ahead of us, Dean stiffened. He’d clearly heard Arden lumping him in with the “kids.” “Look. We’re sorry to drag you into this. But aren’t you tired of hiding?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “That doesn’t mean I’m tired of living. The one seemed like the best way to accomplish the other.”

I sympathized with her, I really did. There was a time when I did my best to get the hell out of Faerie—and my best was never anything close to Arden’s, which removed her from our world for the better part of a century. Maybe longer, depending on how involved she’d been before Nolan got elf-shot. Faerie is huge and complicated and frankly scary if you’ve been living in the mortal world, where the laws of physics don’t change from hour to hour and the inanimate doesn’t take sides.

But that didn’t mean I’d let Arden walk away from her duty. Maybe that was ironic—me, October Daye, the woman who once said destiny could go screw itself if it insisted on trying to make me play its reindeer games—but I didn’t care. Arden was the Princess in the Mists. Unless she took the throne, nothing was going to change, and I was going to be banished. Neither of those things was okay with me, and that meant she was going to do her job.

I didn’t scold her. Instead, I said, “We have more allies than you think. I sort of collect them. You might be surprised by how much of the Kingdom will side with us once they know who you are.”

“You’re going to need an army,” said Arden, a note of well-worn bitterness in her tone.

Her voice carried. As we stepped off the stairway into the receiving room, Dianda Lorden, Duchess of Saltmist, stood from where she’d been sitting at the edge of the water. The scales covering her tail fell away, replaced by legs wrapped in blue canvas trousers. She was dressed like a pirate preparing to board a merchant ship. No romance here; just solid, serviceable clothing. Patrick stood next to her, his own clothes quietly echoing hers . . . and behind them stood what looked like a regiment of sea-folk. Merrow and Selkies, Cephali and Naiads, and beyond them in the water, the vast forms of the Cetacea.

“Will this army do?” asked Dianda.

Arden’s widened eyes provided all of the answer we needed.

ELEVEN