Fifteen #2
There was a soft scraping sound as she handed the phone off, and then a friendly male voice was speaking in my ear. “Borderlands Café, this is Madden, how can I help?”
“Madden, it’s Toby,” I said. “I’m at the knowe, and the guard on duty doesn’t want to let me in to see the queen. If I give her the phone, can you explain why she’s making a massive tactical error?”
“The new guard, and female—do you mean the Cobylnau with the rainbow hair, or the Gwragen with the possum?”
“The Gwragen,” I said, shooting a look back over my shoulder at the guard. She was still leaning heavily on her spear, and her eyes were literally closed, shutting us out entirely.
“Right,” he said, sounding exasperated. “Give me just a second. Hey, Tom!”
His voice got muffled then, as he put his hand over the receiver and talked to one of the other staffers.
Several seconds ticked by. I was just starting to get impatient when I heard his hand being removed from the phone, and he said, “Sorry about that. I needed to get someone to cover the counter. Can you put me on speaker?”
“Sure,” I said, taking the phone away from my ear and hitting the appropriate button.
“Dame Elvia,” he said, half a beat later. His voice boomed from my phone, suddenly much more serious and authoritative than it had been only a moment before. He sounded like the Queen’s Seneschal, not like a man who would happily make a cocoa-powder smiley face on top of your mocha latte.
The guard snapped to immediate attention, the motion jostling her possum, which made a grumpy chittering sound and adjusted its position inside the basket of her hair. “Sir,” she said, voice crisp.
“Is she standing up all straight and formal now?” asked Madden.
“She is,” I confirmed.
“Good. Dame Elvia, this is your Seneschal. Sir Daye informs me that you’re barring her from accessing the knowe. Is this true?”
“Sir, it’s almost noon, she doesn’t have an appointment, and the queen has retired for the day,” she said, talking very quickly, almost frantically. “I didn’t let her in because she shouldn’t be here right now.”
“Sir Daye is both a Hero of the Realm and the one responsible for freeing us from the dream spun by the Lady of the Flowers. She comes and goes as she pleases, and none of us shall bar her from our lady’s door. Do I make myself quite clear?”
“You do, sir, you have my full apologies, and I’ll admit Sir Daye straight away.”
“Wonderful. Toby? That good?”
“That should be fine, Madden,” I said.
“Cool. You can take me off speaker now.”
I raised the phone back to my ear.
In a more-normal tone, he said, “Be nice to her, okay? She’s still getting used to how we do things here. She came down from Silences after the big spell broke, and she doesn’t really know how to be relaxed about things. Not with the way they used to run things up there.”
“Right,” I said, managing, barely, not to wince.
Silences had been overthrown in the war, years and years ago, their royal family elf-shot or killed and replaced by a puppet king in the control of our own nameless puppet queen—who had been controlled in turn by Eira Rosynhwyr.
It was assholes all the way down, and while Rhys had been running things in Silences, a mistake of etiquette could have been enough to cost someone literally everything.
“Talk to you later?”
“Yeah, Madden,” I said. “I appreciate you.”
“Just doing my job,” he said, and the line went dead. I tucked my phone back into my pocket and walked back toward Elvia, who watched my approach with unblinking wariness.
“Can we go inside now?” I asked.
“You are welcome in the royal knowe of Her gracious Majesty, Queen Windermere in the Mists,” she said, through what sounded like gritted teeth.
“Not the question, but still cool,” I said. “Come on, Chelsea. We have work to do.”
Chelsea followed close behind me as I walked to the door and through it into the receiving hall, where the carvings had all changed again.
I stopped where I was, scanning them as quickly as I could.
They seemed to know everything that happened in the Mists.
Maybe they would have some idea of what had happened to Raysel.
There were four entirely new panels that I could find.
One showed me and Tybalt by a fire, speaking to Eutychia, who had been rendered so precisely that her parents might have been able to identify her by the slope of her chin, the angle of her eyes.
Another showed us in the Luidaeg’s kitchen, bleeding into her bowl, and a third had us walking through a dark, tangled wood.
The eyes peeking out of the underbrush on that one were unnerving, since I had no doubt that they were accurate.
We’d been watched, and we’d never even realized it.
The fourth panel was the one that gave me pause.
A man stood in front of three of Blind Michael’s Riders, carved so precisely that I could easily make out Arden’s arms at his breast. He looked grimly determined, not afraid, and I knew him.
I could pretend I didn’t, but I did, and after confronting Melly, I wasn’t going to let her accomplice go free.
Eion.
Chelsea waited until I turned my face away from the carvings before she started talking again.
“What did you see?”
“A path forward,” I said. “Nothing certain.”
But it had been enough, hadn’t it? The carvings had always been accurate before.
There was no reason to assume that they were lying now.
Although that did raise the question of how anyone could get away with anything, if a magic wall was just going to tattle on them.
So it couldn’t work every time. Arden would have been able to find me faster when Dame Altair took me prisoner if it worked every time.
“Why is Elvia a dame?” asked Chelsea, mercifully shattering my train of thought. “I thought that was a sort of misogynistic term for women used in old detective novels, not something to call one of your guards.”
“Knights are ‘sir’ when they earn their titles through service,” I said. “It’s ‘lord’ or ‘lady’ when they get titles just because they exist. Some female knights choose to be called ‘dame’ because they think it’s sexist that we all have to use the same title.”
“Why aren’t you a dame?”
“Because I worked damn hard to be called ‘sir’ instead of ‘lady,’ and I’m not going to trade that for another title that’s all about what society expects of me,” I said. “‘Sir’ suits me perfectly well. I don’t see any good reason to change.”
“I’ll be a sir someday,” she said, firmly.
“Only if you decide you want to pursue a knighthood,” I cautioned. “It’s a lot of work. You have to train pretty damn hard, and you have to find someone who’s already been knighted to sponsor you as a squire.”
“Oh, but I thought I already had,” she said guilelessly.
I shot her a hard look. “No. That was just me trying to get us inside. That was a ruse, and ruses aren’t binding.”
“Quentin says you’re the best knight there is.”
“Quentin is biased.”
The knowe was quiet around us as we walked, its occupants having gone to bed for the day. Still, I knew at least one person who would be up, both because she needed to be seeing to the daytime operations of the household, and because her class schedule kept her functionally diurnal.
Cassandra Brown was the eldest daughter of my friends Mitch and Stacy, and had always assumed she was a relatively weak changeling, at least until we found out that Stacy was secretly Titania and all the blocks her presence had placed on Cassie’s magic began falling away, leaving her stronger by the day.
Arden hiring a changeling as her Chatelaine had somehow become a lot more acceptable when the truth of Cassie’s parentage became common knowledge among the ranking nobility, and no one really gave her any crap about it anymore.
The people who didn’t know were low enough in the local social structure that they functionally didn’t matter when it came to the inner workings of the Queen’s court.
Anyway, Cassie was a lot less human than we had always believed she was, but was still better at staying awake all day than most purebloods, her consciousness supported by habit and what we now knew was Firstborn stubbornness.
And as Chatelaine, she was in charge of the household, meaning she knew where everyone’s rooms were.
If anyone would be able to tell me where to find Eion, it was her.
Since she was my honorary niece and I represented a fairly hefty chunk of her family support structure, the wards on her rooms had been keyed to always let me in.
I led Chelsea through the knowe, rapidly passing from the public spaces like the entrance hall into the more-private areas that were only ever intended to be seen by the queen’s household.
Chelsea stuck close to me and goggled as we walked, head moving like it was on a swivel.
“Never been backstage at the big venue before, huh?” I asked.
“Everything is so new,” she said. “But it’s old. Isn’t this knowe older than Shadowed Hills?”
“Well, you’ve got that much of your local history down,” I said. “Yeah, King Gilad’s family built this place while the Mists was still being settled. Then they lived here for at least two generations. Arden and Nolan were both born here.”
“So why…?”
“Because after King Gilad was killed, Arden and Nolan ran, and the knowe sealed itself.”
“They can do that?”
“The knowes are alive, Chelsea. They can do whatever they want to do, within reason. That’s why Shadowed Hills rearranges itself sometimes. It doesn’t like the way it’s configured, or it wants something to happen, it just opens a door or moves a hallway.”
“Okay, so … old knowe seals itself off, opens up again, now it’s a new knowe?” She paused, looking perplexed. “Please don’t make me try to say that again. My tongue hurts from doing it the once.”