Page 28 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

As almost always happened when I crossed from the mortal world into the slice of Summerlands contained within a private knowe, the world spun around me, a dizzying whirl of up becoming down, down becoming up, and right and left inverting.

I stopped to catch my breath and try to convince my stomach that it didn’t want to lose what little breakfast I’d managed to force myself to eat before I left the house.

Acid rose in the back of my throat, searing and hot.

I swallowed. Then I swallowed again for good measure.

It had been a while since the transition hit me that hard; the more fae I become, the easier it is to slip between worlds.

It doesn’t seem fair. There should be a few advantages to surviving Faerie as a changeling.

The acid receded, and my stomach calmed.

Only then did I straighten and look to Dame Altair, who was watching me with a smug sort of satisfaction, like she’d known it was going to hurt me to make the crossing, and hadn’t warned me because she’d wanted to see me suffer.

I’d never considered her much of an antagonist before—she’d even hired me to do a few jobs, including the monster hunt that ended with Danny taking possession of his beloved Barghests—but the way she was looking at me now made me think I might need to reconsider how much she disliked me.

She was looking at me like I was defiling her knowe just by standing inside it.

I’ve seen that look on plenty of purebloods. Somehow, it never gets less offensive.

Well, if she was going to look at me like I was doing something wrong by doing nothing at all, I was going to show her the respect that she so clearly deserved. I looked slowly around the room, not making any effort to acknowledge her or the expression on her face.

Dame Altair’s d é cor was clearly intended to compliment the mortal exterior of the knowe.

Everything was Victorian, fussy and precise as a BBC documentary.

Tybalt would have been able to point out every anachronism and out-of-period knickknack.

Knowing that made me feel a little better about the oppressive propriety of my surroundings.

She might think she was perfect, but Tybalt would know that she wasn’t with just a glance.

He’d have some fairly scathing things to say if he were here, I was sure of that.

The carpet was the same blue and silver as the house exterior, woven into a complex pattern of silver birch and strikingly blue lilies.

Flowers like that probably grew somewhere in deeper Faerie.

That didn’t mean she’d ever seen them, but it meant her rugmaker might have been working from life.

They were impressively realistic for something we were meant to walk on.

Quentin stopped immediately behind me, where he could easily catch me if I happened to stumble. It was nice to know he was there, even if I was getting well and truly tired of the continual babysitting. I turned to flash him a quick smile, then returned my attention to Dame Altair.

“You have a lovely home,” I said politely.

“I have a lovely demesne,” she corrected, voice as stiff as her posture.

“I know you’re titled,” I said, not mentioning that a dame was of the same rank as a knight, and knights don’t normally get land. “I was unaware that this was a formal holding. My apologies, my lady. May I know the name of these lands?”

The tips of her sharply pointed ears reddened as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

Interesting. “It’s not a formal holding,” she said.

“But when I was granted my title—by King Windermere, well before your time—I was able to open a knowe here, with the aid of my brother and his liege, and the king agreed to let me claim all of Postcard Row as my own. My domain has never been properly named. I would need a baroness’s rank to call my own before that would be a safe decision. ”

“I don’t understand,” I said, frowning. “How would naming the place change anything?”

“A named domain is generally a barony or greater,” said Dame Altair.

“If I declared my lands a barony, I would be inviting any unlanded baron in the Westlands—including that misfit father of yours—to come and claim my demesne as their own. I refuse to have my hard work stolen out from underneath me by some wastrel who couldn’t find their own lands. ”

“Oh.” It was a paranoid way to live, and I suddenly wondered whether King Gilad had done her any favors by allowing her to open a knowe and claim lands she couldn’t control.

But then, there were precedents for lands belonging to people without the titles to hold them.

Amandine’s tower was an example. No one questioned her right to hold it, but she didn’t name it, and maybe that made all the difference in the world.

True, Amandine was Firstborn where Dame Eloise Altair most distinctly was not, but no one had known that for a long, long time. She had her tower, and when Simon had lived there with her, he had remained an unlanded baron.

“It is as it is,” said Dame Altair, shrugging elegantly. “Now. You wanted to speak with me?”

“I did, and I do, but first I want to sit down,” I said. “Pregnant people need to sit and stand up a lot, or our joints start to hurt. All our connective tissue loosens and gets softer than it would normally be, to help make it easier for us to push the baby out when the time comes.”

Dame Altair paled, looking like she was considering losing her own breakfast. I really hoped she wouldn’t.

If she threw up, I would definitely throw up, and with both of us barfing, Quentin might wind up joining in, and then we’d be dealing with a crisis I was distinctly not equipped to handle.

Better for all of us if we could keep our evening meals on the inside where they belonged.

“Forgive me,” she said, visibly swallowing. “I forget how fleshy and—animalistic reproduction is.”

I frowned. “Forgiven,” I said. “I take it you have no children of your own?”

“No,” she said, with evident horror. “Should I feel the need to get myself an heir, my brother would be much better suited to the production of such than I have ever been. With no hereditary title to my name, I have less to worry about in that regard.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Given that you have no hereditary title, and to my understanding, titles within the Court of Cats aren’t passed along bloodlines, I don’t understand why you would go to all the trouble.”

I blinked. “Um,” I said.

Dame Altair shrugged, turning to walk down a short hall to an adjoining room.

She didn’t gesture for us to follow, but under the circumstances, it would have been rude not to.

So Quentin and I pursued her down the hall and through a door into what proved to be a sparsely appointed parlor that would have made more sense in a hunting lodge than in her Victorian fantasy.

There were two large armchairs and an actual fainting couch, which I made a beeline for, sinking gratefully into the leather cushions.

“Were you going to enlighten me?”

I blinked again, looking at Dame Altair.

She was watching me with a pleasantly composed expression of unruffled curiosity, lowering herself into one of the armchairs with the sort of graceful muscular control that spoke to years of practicing her etiquette.

No one realizes how much core strength it takes for our courtiers to carry themselves with such elegant precision.

They’d be a lot more frightened of women in watered-silk gowns if they knew.

“Enlighten you as to what?”

“Why you would bother with all the mess and trouble when you don’t have a crown to protect or a throne to pass along.

” She waved one elegant hand, indicating the overall shape of me.

“It seems like it can’t help but interfere with your ability to do your job, and I’ve always understood that you prided yourself on your position. ”

There was an insult buried somewhere in all of that, but I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of trying to find it.

Instead, I rested one hand atop my stomach and shrugged.

“It seemed like a good way to pass the next few decades. We weren’t trying , but I wasn’t on any sort of birth control. ”

Of the two of us, me and Tybalt, I was the one who would have needed to take steps if I truly didn’t want to have a child just yet. Fae have notoriously low fertility rates. Being partially human, it was always going to be easier for me to get pregnant than it would have been for Dame Altair.

There are other factors in play, naturally, but with me and Tybalt it had been—it was—easy.

“Interesting,” said Dame Altair. “And you’re sure it’s safe for someone in your… position… to stand as guardian to a child?”

“I won’t be standing as guardian,” I said. “I’m going to be a mother. It’s not the same thing at all.”

Dame Altair made a noncommittal noise. I decided I was done with this line of conversation.

No matter how much I was trying to make nice with the woman, she was one crossed line away from Quentin stealing my phone and calling Tybalt, and that would end with blood on the walls and nothing of any real use accomplished.

“I came here to ask you about your abduction,” I said, shifting awkwardly on the fainting couch in an effort to look slightly less like one of the elephant seals that lounged down on the pier.

Dame Altair’s expression iced over, turning cold and hard. “You mean when your father snatched me from my own knowe?” she asked sharply.

“His own blood absolved him,” I said.

“As if any daughter wouldn’t lie for her father’s sake,” she scoffed.

“I haven’t been his daughter long enough to feel that kind of loyalty,” I said. “But even if I had, I doubt any amount of dutiful daughtering would have been enough to convince Bahey to let me get away with a blatant lie in front of her. Unless you’re questioning the honor of the queen’s Adhene?”