BUT BY DEGREES #9
We didn’t have to travel far, but as I was running through a freezing void while trying not to exhale, I think I can be forgiven for sucking in a great gasping breath and starting to cough when we emerged into a warm, low-ceilinged room filled with bright neon lights and chiming electronic notifications.
I staggered to a plastic picnic table and collapsed onto the bench, wheezing.
Raj watched this with vague disinterest, then walked over to a boxy coin-changing machine, feeding it a bill. Silver tokens clattered out of the dispensing chute into the coin catcher below. “Want to play a few games?” he asked. “I can spot you.”
I lifted my head and looked around, taking in our new surroundings, then turned to look at him, narrow-eyed. “You have an arcade?” I asked.
“Technically, the Court of Cats has an arcade. I don’t know how it still has power, but I know I’ve got the high score on Street Fighter, and there’s a whole working Dance Dance Revolution cab in the far corner,” he said.
“Don’t ask me how someone lost a whole arcade.
I’m guessing it was sometime during the reconstruction of Market Street, but I can’t look too deeply without finding this place, and I like it too much to do that to myself. ”
“Right,” I said, and stood, moving to join him at the token dispenser.
The Court of Cats is built of the world’s lost places, all of them daisy-chained together to give the Cait Sidhe a domain of their own.
Some of the places it contains have been lost for centuries, while others slid out of memory more recently.
According to Tybalt, when human historians and archeologists uncover a formerly lost place, it can disappear from the court, becoming found again and thus inaccessible.
I didn’t know whether Raj verifying the origins of this arcade would be enough to sever it from the court, but it wasn’t my place to take the gamble, either.
The space around us really did look stolen straight out of the 1980s, with brightly blinking game consoles and a carpet with such a busy pattern that it was difficult to look at it directly without getting dizzy.
There was even a Skee-Ball machine against one wall, although I didn’t think the tickets could be exchanged for anything anymore.
“So why are we here?”
“So we can talk. You said you wanted to talk.” He tipped a fistful of tokens into my hand. “Talking is easier with video games.”
“I thought you weren’t allowed to bring people into the Court of Cats.”
“It depends on the people. It’s not encouraged, that’s for sure, and you’ll never find me bringing Chelsea anywhere, since once she’s been somewhere, she can always find it again, and that sort of goes counter to the idea of having a private kingdom made from lost places, but if I’m going to be the king around here, I’m going to bring my friends to play Frogger when I want to.
Also, this place is new enough that it doesn’t have a court function yet, and it’s clearly still connected to the mortal world, or we wouldn’t have electricity, so it’s not going to get a court function until the lights go out and we rewire it to run off of magic somehow.
Until then, this is sort of a twilight space.
Mine enough that I can claim it, on the edge enough that no one can get mad at me for using it. Pick a machine.”
I looked up and down the nearest row of cabinets, then moved toward the Tetris machine, feeding a token into the slot and starting up a single-player game.
Raj stood nearby, watching me in silence for almost two full minutes while pieces appeared at the top of the screen and dropped down to complete rows, one chasing close after the next.
Finally, in a subdued tone, he said, “I’ve been really worried about you, Quentin, and it hurts my feelings to know that it took the sea witch ordering you before you came to talk to me. It makes me worry that you don’t trust me anymore.”
I jerked, startled, and almost missed my next piece dropping into place. Catching my breath, I rotated the next, and said, “I trust you. It’s me that I don’t fully trust anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Lady of the Flowers created a version of Faerie where all the ‘undesirable’ elements had been stripped away or reduced as much as possible without causing the whole edifice to collapse inward upon itself. She sealed the Undersea and told us all that it had been lost, and did the same to the Court of Cats. I don’t know where the other animal fae were banished to; I know some of them wound up on the Golden Shore, but it was far from everyone.
And she made changelings an integral but degraded part of our society.
She made bearing them the duty of anyone of noble birth, told us to make them and raise them to serve, to turn our own children into a class of people who existed only so we’d have something to feel superior to.
And she was moving toward the moment when she could eliminate changelings from the world entirely.
If her Ride had been successful, I think she would have ordered us to slaughter the changelings immediately afterward. ”
My eyes dipped toward the floor, and the game beeped a warning as several pieces fell into less-than-optimal places, endangering my teetering tower of lines and boxes.
“She would have ordered it, and I would have gladly obeyed,” I said, voice barely above a whisper. “We’ve all been trying so hard to move on, to leave her fucked-up funhouse behind, but at the end of everything, when she was ready to seal her spell, she gave me a white horse.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning the magic looked at me and saw me as suitable for sacrifice. She wanted Simon, because Amandine wanted Simon, because killing Simon would hurt so many of the people she hates, but if she couldn’t have him, she’d be happy to take me in his place.
She could have sacrificed me to make her version of Faerie last forever. ”
“You’re unhappy because you were … strong? Because you were suitable?”
He sounded genuinely baffled, and that was the only thing that let me hold on to my temper. I swung slowly around to look at him, letting my hands fall away from the controls. The music played faster and louder as the pieces began to stack up haphazardly, moving closer and closer to collapse.
“To be properly prepared for slaughter, the sacrifice must first be given seven years of paradise,” I said. “Everything they want, everything they could possibly desire, handed to them on a silver platter.”
“Her version of the world only lasted for four months.”
“But while it was happening, we believed it completely. Any memories she gave us would fit the world. She could retroactively place us in paradise. For Simon, that meant giving him an idyllic life with his daughters. August and October, they mattered more to him than anything else—even romantic love. According to Toby, Amandine never touched him during the enchantment. He slept alone, and he still thought he was in paradise, because he had his girls. He had what mattered. That was enough to place him in paradise.”
Raj continued to look at me, expression not betraying what he thought of my words. But I could see a flicker of understanding deep in his eyes, just the beginnings of comprehension starting to break through.
Good. Someone needed to understand why they should all hate me.
“The Lady of the Flowers made a world where my blood did make me better than anyone else, where being a pureblood was enough to open any doors and forgive any offense. The Daoine Sidhe were the children of her most beloved daughter, and we could do no wrong. And I was a prince of our kind, destined for a great throne. If I did something, that was the right thing to do, no matter what it was. She gave me every privilege, every advantage. And I became exactly the sort of spoiled, pampered, arrogant bastard that makes my life with Toby so difficult. I was prejudiced and bigoted, I judged everyone around me against an ideal that no one but another Daoine Sidhe could possibly live up to, and when I heard whispers about the possible extermination of the changeling population, I could only hope that they’d call me to participate. ”
As I had both hoped and feared, disgust began breaking through Raj’s expression.
“What does it say about me that that world—the world she made to place me in—was my paradise? What does it mean that I could embrace it so completely? For me to be an acceptable sacrifice, I must have been happier than I had ever been. I was what she made me, and I can still feel him under my skin, and I’m terrified that he’s going to break loose. I—”
I stopped mid-sentence as Raj lunged forward and locked his arms around me, pulling me into a tight embrace.
I tried to pull away but he held me fast, the smell of pepper and burnt paper radiating off his skin as he fought to keep his magic under control.
I stopped fighting and relaxed into his embrace, my head slowly dipping to rest against his shoulder.
Once I had relaxed that much, I couldn’t stop myself from sobbing, and for the second time in one day, I found myself crying helplessly. If talking to the Luidaeg had lanced the wound inside my soul, this was squeezing it, hard, until poisonous pus spilled out in all directions.
Raj held on to me while I cried, and as the game behind me wailed my failure to the beeping, buzzing arcade around us.
He shifted positions so that his arm was wrapped around me, and guided me back toward the picnic table where I’d initially taken a seat.
I tried to pull away. Again, he held on tighter, until he was pushing me down and thrusting a dusty napkin dispenser into my hands.