BUT BY DEGREES
How poor are they that have not patience!
—William Shakespeare, Othello
DEAN WAS ASLEEP, DEAD to the world with his face pressed into the pillow and only a thin whistling noise betraying the fact that he was still breathing.
He didn’t snore, not exactly, but he exhaled with a deep serenity that would never have survived the waking world.
I rolled onto my side, careful not to disturb him, and stared up at the ceiling.
Four years of contemplation had rendered every crack and dimple in the plaster familiar to me, creating a map of past earthquakes and old water stains. Four years—almost a quarter of my life, under this ceiling. Sometimes it was difficult to believe that I’d ever slept anywhere else.
But I had. I’d spent longer in Toronto, but I’d been younger then, and my memories of the nursery ceiling weren’t as clear as my memories of this ceiling, this room.
I’d spent almost as long in Shadowed Hills, sleeping and waking under a ceiling of rough oak, the beams exposed to the open air, the space drafty and dauntingly unwelcoming, even when I’d been sure that I belonged there.
I still wasn’t sure I agreed with Toby when she said the knowes were self-aware, but if they were, Shadowed Hills had always known I wasn’t there to stay.
That knowe had never been my home, and so it had never provided me with a place that felt like it wanted me around.
There had been ceilings before this one, but somehow, this was the one that mattered, the one that kept me company through the long days when I couldn’t sleep but couldn’t get out of bed without worrying Toby.
She didn’t need that. She had enough on her plate without needing to be afraid that her squire was melting down.
I remembered all the ceilings, but the worst one was the one that didn’t exist, the one that happened at the point where my memories split, when one version of me—the one everyone said was really real, the one who got to keep existing, the one who counted—met a changeling knight and started asking questions about the things he’d always believed about his world, while the other one moved to a nicer room, closer to the ducal quarters, and began to settle more deeply into the life he’d always believed he was born to lead.
Only one of me was real. But I remembered being both of us, and sometimes when I looked at Toby, my knight, my mother in every way that mattered, I felt myself recoiling from the truth of her human heritage.
I wanted to be the Quentin who had chosen a changeling for his knight, who’d fought for the right to learn from her even as she resisted his attempts to get closer, pushing him away out of fear that he’d end up broken.
That was the real me. That was the person I’d chosen to be.
But was it? It had been so easy for Titania to turn him—to turn me, even if it didn’t always feel like it—into someone else, distorting everything I thought I knew.
Some people had managed to fight her spell, to one degree or another.
Etienne, the most rule-abiding knight I knew, had been able to keep his human wife and changeling daughter through the transformed reality.
They’d been hidden away from the rest of Shadowed Hills, but still, he’d been resistant enough to the changes that Titania hadn’t been able to take them away.
He’d kept his family despite everything, and I?
I had turned into the kind of pureblood asshole I would normally have refused to give the time of day to.
The spell had taken my entire family away from me, and worst of all, I hadn’t even noticed.
I’d been so comfortably certain of my own superiority that I hadn’t even stopped to question what made me so much better than everyone else.
I was pureblooded Daoine Sidhe. Wasn’t that enough?
It wasn’t. It never had been. I hadn’t thought that way since I was fourteen and Toby came crashing into my life like a very targeted meteor. But now the memories of those thoughts haunted me, and made it hard to look the people who loved me in the eye.
Dean was going to catch on soon, was going to figure out that I kept talking to his chin, and he was going to get angry, really, really angry, and then he was going to leave me, and that wouldn’t be any less than I deserved.
He’d weathered Titania’s spell trapped in Blind Michael’s lands, and thinking about that made me feel even worse.
How could I be envious of the fact that she’d thrown my boyfriend into the lair of a monster?
Maybe because he’d still been himself when he came out the other side, not someone he was disgusted to know he had the potential to become.
I rolled away from him, careful not to drag too much of the blanket with me, and swung my feet around to the floor, standing slowly.
Dean made a soft grunting sound but didn’t otherwise react to my sudden absence.
Needing to pee wasn’t such a strange occurrence that either of us panicked when the other got out of the bed.
I retrieved my pajama pants from the floor and eased them on, grabbing a T-shirt from the drawer I always left half-open so the cats would have somewhere to sleep, and crept across the room to the door, pausing there to look back at Dean.
Even asleep, he was a beautiful man, and I wasn’t sure how I’d been lucky enough to catch his eye. His specific blend of Daoine Sidhe and Merrow heritage gave him a sharp, endlessly enchanting bone structure, and lent a unique angle to the taper of his pointed ears.
I could spend years trying to decide whether his hair was dark brown or pale black, which any goth can tell you is not the same as gray.
Either way, it was streaked with deep, piney green.
His skin was easier to describe, being almost the same medium brown as his mother’s.
I wasn’t humble enough in either version of myself to pretend that I wasn’t beautiful enough to be his equal: I’m Daoine Sidhe.
We’re built for beauty, and if we weren’t, I doubt our First would have taken the time to raise us.
We’d be one more lost line, removed from the annals of Faerie before there were enough of us to matter.
No, I’m plenty beautiful enough to make a pretty picture when I stand next to my boyfriend, and by the standards of most of my line, he’d be the one who was lucky to be with me, since he’s born of two descendant lines blending together, something our First ordered us to never do.
But those Daoine Sidhe don’t matter. I matter, and since Titania’s enchantment, I’d been having more and more trouble believing I had any right to shelter in his arms.
Turning my back on my boyfriend, if not on my own self-loathing, I eased the bedroom door open and stepped out into the hall.
The house was quiet. That made sense, since it wasn’t even noon yet, and most of us hadn’t gone to bed until somewhere around six a.m., throwing up our silencing spells to block out the sounds of the morning commute and drawing our curtains tight against the sun.
Dean wouldn’t be up for hours. I expected the same would be true of Diva and Chelsea, who had chosen to make the trek up to the guest room on the second floor rather than sleeping on the living-room couch.
Mindful of their presence, I descended the stairs as quietly as I could manage, which felt loud only because I lived with a King of Cats, and turned toward the kitchen.
The door was shut: the light was on. I moved quickly in that direction.
I might not be in the mood to have—or be—company, but if I was correct about the rhythms of the house, May would be the only one awake, and I might be able to scam some scones before retreating to the back porch to brood.
Which makes me sound sort of like Batman, and let’s be honest, if I were Batman, I would have a whole different assortment of problems. Problems that would be a lot easier to punch. I would like them better if they were easier to punch.
I opened the kitchen door. As I had anticipated, May was there, standing by the counter as she kneaded a great beige wad of dough into submission.
Less expected was her girlfriend, Jazz, sitting at the kitchen table with a mug cupped between her hands and a drowsy expression on her face.
Both of them looked around when I entered, and I saw that May had Miranda strapped to her chest in a baby swaddle.
Miranda’s eyes were closed; she was sleeping soundly. Must have been nice.
“Can’t sleep?” asked May sympathetically.
“Sleep is for other people,” I said, moving toward the coffeemaker. “I’m Canadian. We survive on coffee, maple syrup, and barely suppressed irritation.”
“You forgot anxiety and Tim Hortons,” said May.
I gave her a supercilious look. “I am only forgiving you for saying that because you’ve lived with me long enough to hear me make the same joke a few thousand times.”
It was oddly easier to interact with May than it was with Toby these days, maybe because May hadn’t existed at all under Titania’s spell.
In her world, Toby had never been a hero.
If Toby hadn’t been a hero, there was no reason for one of the night-haunts to have sampled her blood, and without that moment, May would never have been created.
To avoid being unraveled by Titania’s enchantment, May had taken refuge in the Library of Stars and remained there, unchanged, exactly as she was meant to be.
She’d never seen the bigoted, selfish boy the Summer Queen had turned me into: there were no shadows in her eyes when she looked at me.
I could still joke with her, and not worry that she’d take something I said as proof that I was still that version of myself, under the skin, where no one else could see.