Page 13 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

“He’s not my dad,” I protested. “Father, yes, but ‘dad’ is different, at least in the human world.”

“Still.”

“It’s okay. We both knew we weren’t coming to a social event before we got here.” I watched Nolan carefully, trying to gauge his mood. He looked reasonably relaxed. “I was talking to your sister earlier.”

“She told you about what’s been going on?”

“She did, and I just wanted to ask you if things have really been that bad.”

Nolan turned to look at me. “No, you don’t. You want to ask me if she’s telling you the truth.”

I shrugged. “So what if I am? I’m almost at term here, Nolan. What could possibly be so important that it can’t wait a few weeks to let me give birth? With the way I heal, you know I’ll be ready for duty by the next morning.”

“Look.” He sighed heavily. “Some of the stuff that’s been swiped, it’s not great. We can’t have it among the populace any longer than necessary, especially not right now.”

“What’s so important about right now?”

He pulled a face, moving to take Simon’s deserted chair. “Based on what I know about you, time was you’d have been the one bringing this to our attention. Weren’t you a part of the changeling underground?”

“Weren’t you asleep back then?”

He smiled a little. “Touch é . Anyway, what I hear says you used to run with the criminal element in this kingdom.”

I bristled. “Those two statements aren’t the same thing. Changelings aren’t automatically criminals.”

“No, but we force them to be, sometimes.” He shrugged.

“When you can’t get a place without either prostrating yourself or violating your morals, it starts to look like your choices are servant or thief.

And thief starts looking better and better.

You can’t ask people to eat shit and pretend it’s gourmet cooking forever. You shouldn’t even do it once.”

I must have looked stunned, because he smiled again, shrugging this time.

“I was a labor man before the elf-shot. Luxury of knowing I would never be king: I had time to worry about what the rest of the kingdom looked like. Changelings weren’t thriving even then, and everything I’ve heard says it’s gotten worse. Am I wrong?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Arden handles the throne, I try to keep an ear on what’s happening that might affect the throne. And the changelings of the Mists are unhappy since the dissolution of Titania’s world. I think they saw how bad things could get, and how much of that inequality was rooted in our current system.”

“Huh,” I said. “No one’s said anything to me.”

“You’ve been out of touch, Sir Daye. I doubt anyone was willing to take the risk in coming to you.”

I nodded, thoughtfully. He looked at my expression, picked up an egg salad sandwich from the refreshment tray, and rose. “Looks like you’ve got a lot to think about. I hope you’re thinking of how to help Ardy. She’s going to need you.”

A wave of his hand opened another portal in the air and he stepped through, leaving me alone.

I picked up my own sandwich and nibbled.

If the changelings of the kingdom were that unhappy, some of the things Arden had said were missing became even more urgent.

One advantage of mortal blood: we’re better at handling iron without taking serious damage.

And with the fount that dispensed a cure for iron poisoning in the mix, someone who really wanted to stick it to the man—or whatever—could be making iron weapons, swinging them around with abandon, and then healing themselves before permanent injury could set in.

While Arden was trying to be a good queen, she was going against decades of poor treatment, and Titania hadn’t helped. Maybe she had even better reasons than I’d thought to be in a rush about this.

I continued nibbling at my sandwich, trying to eat as slowly as I could, so as not to upset my stomach, and was barely a quarter of the way through when someone rapped on the parlor door. I turned toward the sound, but kept chewing rather than saying anything.

The rapping was repeated with a little more confidence when no one yelled at the messenger.

The knob turned, and the door creaked open enough to reveal Lowri, the Silene who was the current head of Arden’s guard.

We’d met while she was still in service to the false Queen, and we were friends, or something like it.

She cocked her head to the side, goat-like ears brushing her shoulders.

“You all right in here, Toby?” she asked, stepping into the room.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Great. You ready to come and face the court?”

I blinked. “I thought I was going to go last.”

“This is going last,” she said. “Everyone else has given their testimony. Given the false Queen’s known and ongoing enmity toward you, and multiple abuses, everyone has agreed that you’ll be the last one to speak before her sentencing. Will you come?”

“Of course.” I set my plate aside and stood.

I must have looked uncomfortable, because Lowri offered me her arm. I took it gratefully, leaning on her to supplement my balance.

We left the parlor, Lowri folding one hand over mine and keeping me steady as I continued leaning on her arm and let her lead me back toward the main receiving room. She glanced at my swollen stomach, lifting an eyebrow, and asked, “Weren’t you planning to wait a little while before you got—?”

“We were,” I said. “To be honest, it takes most fae so long to get pregnant that we weren’t taking any special precautions. Neither of us expected it to happen this quickly, if it happened at all.”

“And what… she … did, it didn’t hurt the baby?”

“Thank the root and the branch, no, it didn’t,” I said.

“My own healing powers are strong enough that she couldn’t get through them to do any real damage, not without trying so directly that she’d violate her own geas and pull Oberon’s wrath down on her head.

” Not that Oberon had been all that wrath-y since I’d known him.

He was mostly a silent, detached, somewhat sullen presence haunting the Luidaeg’s apartment, refusing to get involved with the problems and politics around him.

Which would have been fine, if he hadn’t been the father of us all and a technical living god. We needed his help, and he was happier sulking in the corners and watching his descendants without letting them know he was there.

It’s probably not great for my health to be this pissed off at my own grandfather all the time, especially not when he has the kind of power that can turn continents inside-out, but I’ve never been all that focused on being good for my own health.

“Do you know yet whether it’s a boy or a girl?”

“No,” I said. “Honestly, I’m not even sure I won’t be having a litter of kittens.” I didn’t think it was going to be kittens. The baby had been kicking up a storm for the last few weeks, and the impacts felt distinctly like human feet, no claws. One small thing to be thankful for.

“Don’t you want to know?”

“Not really.” I shrugged. “I just want a healthy kid. One I get to stay with, one that Tybalt gets to help me raise. Nothing else matters half as much as that. Plus I haven’t been to see any human doctors, and Jin doesn’t exactly have an ultrasound machine.”

“I guess you can’t really involve the humans, can you?” asked Lowri speculatively.

“How’s that?”

“I mean, all the prenatal stuff is pretty noninvasive but there’s always the risk that the baby wouldn’t look human on their scans, and they’d expect you to come back when it was time for the birth, and it would be hard to explain the way you heal in the delivery room.

” Lowri shook her head. “Better to stick with the court healers and do it all in Faerie.”

“Yeah,” I said, mind suddenly filled with bloody images of delivery rooms destroyed by my panicking husband when he realized my rapid healing was going to betray the existence of Faerie. “Much better to do it that way.”

Lowri laughed and kept leading me down the hall, toward the inevitable chaos of the court.