Page 5 of Once Broken Faith

“Patience,” said Arden, and kept climbing.

Most of the responses I wanted to offer to that would have been inappropriate, especially considering that she was the Queen and I didn’t want to be banished. Again. I bit my tongue and kept climbing, following the curve of the stairs up, up, up, until we came to a short landing. The stairs continued upward. Arden ignored them, opening the door on the landing and revealing a wooden walkway wending off into the trees. I inched close enough to see that we were at least fifty feet above the ground. The forest floor was a distant, far-off dream.

“Nope,” I said, taking a step backward.

Arden turned to me, raising her eyebrows. “What?”

“I said, nope,” I said. “Not going out there. No. Would I survive a fall from that height? Sure. I’ve done it before. I’d just lie there screaming while I waited for my bones to knit back together. No big deal, except for the part where no way in hell am I going out on that thing. That’s what, three feet across and made of untreated redwood? In this fog? That’s going to be as slippery as a Merrow’s ass, and I’m not going to do it.”

“I need you to come with me,” said Arden. She seemed puzzled, like she couldn’t understand why I wasn’t jumping to obey.

“You’re getting better at this whole ‘monarch’ thing, but no,” I said. “I know my sense of balance, I know how often I get hurt, and I know it’s not a good idea to tempt fate. I’m not going out there.”

“Oh, for the love of Maeve,” muttered Arden. She took a step toward me. I braced myself for the inevitable attempt to haul me through the door. Instead, she waved a hand in the air before shoving me backward, through the portal that had opened behind me. I stumbled, caught off-guard—

—and emerged in the middle of the treetop walkway. As I’d feared, the wood was slick from the fog hanging around us, and my sneakers slipped slightly before I managed to catch my balance and go still. Standing dead center, there was only about a foot of wood to either side of me. It would be so easy to fall. So very, very easy to fall.

Arden stepped through the portal, which closed behind her, and looked at me. “There,” she said. “They say the first step is the hardest, and so I’ve spared you that much. Now will you come on?”

I gaped at her. “Root and branch, you can’t be serious right now.” I waved one arm as much as I dared, trying to indicate the area around us without attracting the attention of gravity. “Bridge! Very long drop! If you can teleport me here, why can’t you just teleport us to where Walther and your brother are waiting?”

“Because Master Davies says the potion he’s brewed to counter the effects of elf-shot is delicate, and if we want it to have the best shot of working, we shouldn’t do any magic in the room,” said Arden. “No illusions, no gateways, nothing. I want them awake. That means we’re not doing anything to endanger that.”

“If you drop me off a bridge, I’m pretty sure Walther is going to be a little reluctant to wake up your brother!” I don’t have a fear of heights. I have a healthy respect for heights. I really, really respected the fact that a fall from this height would hurt like hell, even if it probably wouldn’t kill me. My particular bloodline came with accelerated healing, to the point that I’d survived being stabbed in the heart, and had probably drowned on at least two occasions. That didn’t mean I didn’t feel pain. If anything, it meant I felt pain more, since I could heal from my initial injuries before I finished receiving the next ones down the line.

“I’m not going to drop you off the bridge,” said Arden. She was starting to look seriously annoyed. “Calm down and follow me. This is a perfectly safe walkway. No one’s fallen since I took over.”

“So people fell before you took over?”

She sighed. “My father had a lot of Cornish Pixies on his staff. They fell because they liked it. Look, you’ll have to walk the same distance to get back to the stairs as you will to get to our destination. But if you turn and walk away from me, you’ll have traveled that distance while also pissing off your regent. Do you really want to do that?”

“Dirty pool, Windermere,” I said, narrowing my eyes.

“Madden is my best friend. Nolan is my brother. Those two, those two sleeping men, they are everything I have. You’re the reason I had to give up my mortal life, remember? No more job at the bookstore, no more coffee with Jude and listening to Alan grumble about cleaning up after customers. I am not,” she held out her hands, palms toward me, “running away from my responsibilities again. You said I got one shot at trying to quit, and I took it, and you were right. I can’t do that again. But I have no one who knows me, October. Lowri is doing a fine job as my stand-in seneschal, but you know what she calls me?”

“Going to go with ‘Your Highness,’” I said cautiously.

“Sometimes she gets informal and shortens it to ‘Highness,’” said Arden. “I’m a crown to her, not a person. She doesn’t know what I like to read, or care about how I made a living while I wasn’t in charge. My time among the humans, it’s like . . . it’s like she thinks it’s some weird kind of zoological expedition. I went out, I watched them, and then I came back home where I belonged. And she’s the best of them! She’s just about the only person who even bothers to pay attention to things like how uncomfortable I get when Court goes for more than six hours. I’m not threatening to run again, I’m not, but I don’t know how long I can do this without someone around here who can call me on my bullshit.”

“I’m calling you on your bullshit right now,” I said. “I really don’t want to plummet to my death today.”

“You’ll get better.”

“I’m still not a fan of plummeting.”

Arden sighed. “We’re not friends, Toby. Maybe we can figure out a way we can be. Maybe we can’t. You’re always going to be the woman who hauled me back into this world.”

“And barring death, dismemberment, or abdication, you’re always going to be the queen,” I said. “I get it.”

“No, you don’t,” she said. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to go from a life where things aren’t perfect, but you’re always surrounded by people who care about you, to being alone? Even when I’m surrounded, I’m alone.”

I went cold. “I think I have a better idea than you know,” I said.

In 1995, I was engaged to a human man named Cliff Marks. He and I had a two-year-old daughter. I was working as a private investigator, mostly taking on fae clients who wouldn’t realize how little training I’d actually had. I had friends. I had a family. I had a future planned out, stretching ahead of us like a road to peace and prosperity. And I lost it all in a single moment, when Simon Torquill—my liege lord’s brother, my mother’s husband, and technically my stepfather—transformed me into a fish and left me in the Japanese Tea Gardens to be forgotten. He’d been trying to save my life. I’d remained there for fourteen years. Not long, by pureblood standards. Not even that long by changeling standards. But for humans like Cliff? For little girls like Gillian, who didn’t even know she had fae heritage? It was forever. They had never taken me back.

Maybe the life I had now was better than the one I would’ve had if not for that day. There was no way of knowing, and honestly, it wasn’t a question I liked to dwell on. I’d found a new family for myself, and I was happy. But before I was happy, I’d been very, very miserable.

“Then you should understand why I have to do this,” said Arden. “I’ve been patient. I kept thinking he’d tell me to go ahead, that he’d say, you know, Master Davies is a citizen of the Mists who was traveling to Silences on official business, and if it was okay for him to wake up the citizens of Silences, he should be allowed to do the same at home before we start talking about bottling up and hiding his cure. But he didn’t say that, and I can’t wait any longer.”