Page 39 of The Innocent Sleep

“Your service is compelled, then.”

“He has always been good to us, up until this past year,” said Eion. “Our daughters, Ashla and Gable, were born at his request. He had been called upon to hold to Titania’s Law, and wished to wait for the moment when love came to him before he went seeking solace in mortal bowers. So he asked us, and we were glad to serve. They were lovely seedlings, and well beloved of all the Court, but as they grew into saplings, he began to withhold his favor, and now, as they strain toward full growth, he begins to speak of the fullness of his household, how it can’t be expected to stretch to feel unnecessary mouths forever. I . . . I sought the Library in hopes of finding some book of custom that would compel him to let us remain, at least long enough for both of them to be of age. Once they reach their majority, we can leave as a family if we have the need, but while Ashla is underage, to remove her from the Duke’s halls would be considered theft of property, and they would be within their rights to hunt us down.”

“I know of no such book of custom,” I said, as gently as I could manage. The man’s pain was evident, and the other side of the coin I was carrying for myself. He only feared for his family. “But if you have the time before your daughter’s birthday, if you have the spine to stand up against the long nights between here and there . . . Moving Day approaches. Surely there’s somewhere safe that you could go?”

I wouldn’t recommend Devin’s. Not to a man with concern for his young daughters foremost in his thoughts. The city wouldn’t suit them, anyway. They’d be unable to find new trees to bond to before the Duke could lay axe to the roots of the ones they already had, and they would be lost.

“Golden Shore is known to accept changelings who find themselves without a patron,” he said. “They have good, fertile land there, and the trees they do grow high.”

“So bide your time, and when Moving Day arrives, you can leave for the Golden Shore,” I said, well aware of the irony of telling him to wait for the same term I had refused to wait myself. “I regret that I have no better path to offer you. The Library is open, if you want to look for better answers.”

“I hope you’ll take no insult when I do,” he said, shifting as if to move past me to the door.

“None at all. Children are precious, and you’re doing the right thing by taking care of yours.”

He paused, glancing back at me. “You’re a father?”

“I am.” Raj was son enough to me for my answer to be an honest one, even with my pregnant wife far away from me and under an enchantment I couldn’t touch.

“Is there anything that would be too much to do, for your children?”

“No.”

And that, at the end of everything else, was why I could leave October where she was—why I would leave her where she was, much as it pained me to do so. She was safe. She was fed. She was within the bounds of Titania’s enchantment, and while she had few rights there, she had Simon and August to protect her. Simon Torquill was a man inclined to make poor choices, absolutely, but always in service of his family.

I couldn’t protect her. If I pulled her out of the dreamworld she’d been cast into, I would be doing nothing but subjecting her to the risks of a reality where she had few rights, I didn’t exist, and my people couldn’t do anything to aid either one of us. Worse yet, if I ripped her from the life she thought she knew, I would be subjecting her to the stresses of abduction by a stranger, frightening her, and leaving her with cause to hate me. I couldn’t do that. Not to her, and not to me.

Leaving her where she was was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. And I hated it as I had hated very little else in my life.

I stayed outside in the starlight, waiting for the world to change again. Maybe this time, for once, it would change into something I could live with.

Maybe this time it would change into something kinder.

ELEVEN

AFTER THAT FIRST TRIP to the Library, I fell into an uneasy dance of waiting and gathering information. Garm and Grianne returned to their duties at Shadowed Hills, the one excited to be part of a conspiracy, even if he didn’t fully understand what we were hoping to achieve, the other willing to help both her friend and me, for reasons she had been characteristically silent about, but for whose aid I was deeply grateful all the same. Between the two of them, I would know everything that happened in the duchy, and be able to react if things seemed to be going badly.

May and Magdaleana were still confined to the Library of Stars, as trapped in their own way as my people were in the Court of Cats. If they left, they risked being absorbed by Titania’s illusions—or unmade, in the case of May, since we were still unsure what would happen if the memories she’d taken from October were stripped entirely away. Mai had been a very pleasant person, as night-haunts went, but that didn’t mean May wanted to go back to being her. Simon was a frequent patron, forcing me to keep away and May to conceal herself in the deepest stacks lest he ask why she had stolen his daughter’s face.

Eion proved to be a stroke of luck, in his own anxious way. He was a courtier in the service of the Duke of Wild Strawberries, mostly serving as a messenger and scribe, and as such was allowed in almost any room he chose to occupy, so long as he seemed busy while there. His wife and sister served with him, and all three were intending to take their children and leave for Golden Shore at the very start of Moving Day.

The holiday, for all that it was confined to a single night in proper measure, extended over the course of an entire week, and during that time, even changelings were allowed to move freely, seeking a new demesne in which to dwell. If they were quick, they could make Golden Shore before the time ran out. I would have offered to aid them, but Hamadryads are uniquely ill-suited to the Shadow Roads. Their roots freeze in the cold, and the shock can be fatal.

Until then, we had a source of information from that Court as well, and once Moving Day arrived, things, which were presently happening with an unpleasantly glacial slowness, would begin to happen very quickly indeed.

There were still things to be accomplished in the meantime, of course. May remained firm on not wanting me to search for Jasmine, preferring to believe that her love was safe when there was nothing she could do to bring them back together any more quickly. The Courts were stable, for now, although Rajiv and Ginevra were occupied at all hours of the day and night seeing to their needs; I felt somewhat guilty at staying away as much as I was, but told myself it would be good practice for the day when I stepped down entirely. There was too much to be done for me to return for any true length of time.

The next few days and nights slipped by in a haze of work and study, slipping into the Courts to aid with food distribution and trash removal and any matters that needed my personal attention, then heading for the Library to dig deeper into the history of Titania’s past transgressions. The previous times when she had done something of this sort had been geographically restricted, at least according to the Library records, limited by her power and petulance. How long was she willing to punish a swath of Faerie over what would almost always prove to be the actions of one, maybe two people?

In the past, she hadn’t been looking to make her changes permanent, or maybe she’d just been aware she’d never succeed, not with Oberon and Maeve both set against her. Now Oberon was missing once more, and Maeve was as yet unfound—not only unfound, but near-erased from Titania’s rewritten history. According to Garm and Eion, Maeve had knowingly invited the breaking of her Ride, betraying all of Faerie and confining us to the Summerlands when we should have been free to travel as we would across the Realms. Oberon’s actions in locking the doors had been omitted, and all the blame placed on Maeve.

The summary execution of the shapeshifting fae had been justified by claiming that we couldn’t help siding with Maeve if Faerie went to war; it was in our nature. And so a Wild Hunt had been called, and the fae with more than one form to their names had been hunted down, executed for the crime of deviating from Titania’s perfection. I’d been forced to take a walk after Garm told me that slice of their history, and only the fact that it had supposedly happened so long ago that I knew it hadn’t happened at all had been enough to keep me from attacking him in misplaced rage. The Court of Cats and May’s placement proved that Titania’s spell had simply picked up anyone whose existence it denied, shuffling them out of the way so they wouldn’t be a problem.

If she managed to anchor her illusions into the Heart of Faerie, that would change. Once the spell was connected to a better battery, it would be able to spread, and none of us knew what that would mean. The kindest interpretation was that all the impossible people would find themselves locked away like the Cait Sidhe were, trapped in skerries and shallowings, unable to reach the Summerlands. They might also remain free but turn imperceptible, masked by illusions so strong that they might as well not exist. None of the possibilities were good ones. None of them were things I wanted to see.

That was why I was standing in Ginevra’s chambers at the Court of Cats, trying not to fuss as I watched her collect herself.

“You fidget like a kitten, Tybalt,” she said, shooting me a weary, half-amused look.