Page 3 of Night and Silence

The arkan sonney in the trash can made a sad whining noise, somewhere between a pig’s squeal and a songbird’s hum. “I’m not calling your father anything that implies overt familiarity,” I said. “The last thing I need right now is for him to make another stab at taking you away from me.”

Quentin cast a quick, uneasy look at Danny, who was scanning the nearby bushes for signs of another arkan sonney. My squire’s status as Crown Prince is supposed to be a secret, and while more people know about it than is probably ideal—his fosterage was meant to be completely blind, keeping the rest of us from knowing his family—we’re still not advertising it. Fortunately, Danny didn’t seem to have noticed. That, or Danny was politely pretending he had no idea he was standing only feet away from a fairy tale cliché. Either one was fine by me.

“Hey, Quentin, tell your knight she needs to talk to her boyfriend,” said Danny.

I groaned. Audibly groaned, drowning out the sorrowful whine of the arkan sonney. “I said I didn’t want to talk about this.”

“See, if there’s one thing I’ve learned for sure since you called my cab and pulled me into your weird world of monsters an’ shit, it’s that you never want to talk about anything that seems like it might be hard.” Danny sounded perfectly matter-of-fact, like this was something I should already have realized for myself.

“You’re a Troll, Danny,” I said flatly. “You’ve always lived in a weird world of monsters and shit.”

“Yeah, but before you, they were always paying customers.”

Danny drives a taxi. I’m pretty sure he has a medallion, since he spends about half his time ferrying mortal customers around the city, and San Francisco has strong opinions about independent contractors taking money away from people who’ve actually paid for the privilege of letting strangers into their cars. At some point a very long time ago I did a favor for his sister. As a consequence, he’s sworn to help me with whatever I need, forever. I try not to take advantage. It’s bad form to abuse the kindness of your friends. But wow, are there times I wish I paid to ride in his taxi, just so he couldn’t say that kind of thing.

Lacking the moral high ground, I scowled at him.

Then Quentin spoke. “I think Danny’s right,” he said, voice small and worried. “Not about this being a good time to talk about this sort of thing—I think that part is sort of stupid and maybe we shouldn’t be doing this—but talking at all needs to happen, and it’s not. Happening, I mean.” He paused before he added reluctantly, “Raj is really worried, and so am I.”

Raj is Tybalt’s nephew, and one of Quentin’s best friends. Raj is also the Prince of Dreaming Cats. With Tybalt not fully capable of performing his duties, Raj was being called upon to spend more and more time in the Court, covering for the fact that his uncle wasn’t taking care of everything he was supposed to handle.

It was a mess. It was a big, convoluted, complicated mess, and I didn’t know how to deal with it, and I wanted it all to go away. I wanted everything to be back the way it was supposed to be. I wanted to get out of bed one afternoon and find Tybalt in the kitchen, eating toast and arguing with May about the right way to poach an egg. I wanted my life back.

I had no idea how to make that happen.

Because, see, once upon a time there was a girl named October, and her mother was a princess out of a fairy tale. Only that turned out to be a little more literal than I could ever have dreamed: my mother, Amandine, is the youngest daughter of Oberon, which makes her Firstborn among the fae, terrible and powerful in ways the rest of us can never fully understand. She raised me to believe I was Daoine Sidhe, like Quentin, when the truth is, I’m Dóchas Sidhe, the second one ever born, and no one, not even her, can say exactly what my magic is capable of. That’s the first big problem.

The second big problem came when she forced her way into my house and took Tybalt and Jazz—May’s live-in girlfriend—as hostages against my good behavior. She had wanted me to find her first daughter, my older sister, August. She had informed me, in no uncertain terms, that unless I could bring August home, I’d never see my loved ones again.

“Home.” That’s a funny word, especially given the way Amandine had invaded mine and what she was trying to do. The children of Faerie take many forms. There are the ones like me or May, who can almost pass for human in the right light; for us, fitting into the mortal world is a comparatively simple thing, especially when compared to what someone like Danny has to go through. No matter how many illusions he spins to change the color of his skin and the composition of his features, he’ll always weigh more than the average car, and no matter how short he makes himself appear to human eyes, low ceilings will always be his bane.

Then there are the people like Tybalt, and Raj, and Jazz. Shapeshifters, skin-changers, equally at home in fur, or feathers, and skin. When Tybalt is in his humanoid form, he looks a lot like a Daoine Sidhe, if you’re willing to overlook his vertical cat-slit pupils and the black stripes in his brown hair. When Jazz sheds her cloak of feathers, she looks like any beautiful human woman, assuming you overlook her bird-bright eyes. Neither shape is their “natural” one: they’re meant to switch back and forth at will, transforming to suit their whims.

That’s how it used to be. That’s how it was supposed to be. But Mom forced them both into their animal forms and locked them there, denying them the freedom to choose. Shapeshifters locked too long in one shape can start to lose themselves, forgetting who and what they’re really meant to be. I’d located August as quickly as I could, fear and anger driving me to do in a matter of days what Mom and all her power had failed to do for more than a century . . . and it hadn’t been enough. By the time I regained what she had taken, both Tybalt and Jazz had gotten stuck in their animal forms.

Freeing Jazz had been difficult but doable. Freeing Tybalt had been . . . harder. His magic was stronger than hers, and when faced with what it viewed as another attack, it had resisted.

I’d been able to do it—it turns out one of the strengths of the Dóchas Sidhe is a certain understanding of how magic can be unraveled—but it had come with consequences. Tybalt is one of the strongest, canniest men I’ve ever known. I would trust him with my life. I have trusted him with my life, over and over again, until falling in love with him had seemed like the most sensible thing in the world, until agreeing to marry him had been the only right and reasonable thing to do. And since I’d recovered him from my mother, he had been sinking deeper and deeper into his own fear, unable to break himself free, unwilling to let me help. That stung. It would have stung more if he’d been willing to reach out to anyone else, but he hadn’t been willing thus far to even admit there was a problem.

Tybalt was drowning, and every time one of us tried to throw him a rope, he batted it away like we intended to strangle him with it. So far as I was aware, he hadn’t changed forms once since I’d brought him home. He was a shapeshifter living in a single skin, and it was slowly but surely destroying him.

Quentin and Danny were right to be worried. I was worried, too. I was terrified. But I couldn’t see a way to fix it. Not when Tybalt left every time I tried to start the conversation, until we had reached the point where he wasn’t coming to see me at all. How do you tell your fiancé “I think you’re killing yourself” when they’re not willing to slow down long enough to listen?

Given how often he’d accused me of having a death wish, it was hard not to see the irony there.

The arkan sonney whined again, louder. An answering whine echoed from a nearby bush. I straightened, pointing with one hand while gesturing to Danny with the other. He nodded, creeping toward the sound with all the stealth of a man big enough to punch through walls. I leaned forward and shook the trash can, making our captive’s cries even louder.

The second arkan sonney burst into the open, wings spread in fury, ready to fight for the safety of its companion. Danny dropped his net, leaned down, and grabbed it with both hands, pinning its wings to its sides in the process. The arkan sonney squealed, kicking at him with its hooves and slapping him with its tail. Quills broke against his stony skin, unable to puncture it. Danny grinned.

“Aw, they’re adorable,” he said. “Think I can keep ’em?”

“The Barghests may not like that, but as far as I’m concerned, sure,” I said, scanning the bushes. There was a third one around here somewhere. My head felt strangely light, as if a weight had been lifted when we’d been forced to let the subject of Tybalt drop.

I shouldn’t feel that way about the man I’m going to marry. I knew that, and it hurt just knowing that it was even possible for me to be grateful for the subject change. If he would only let me help . . .

“Danny, shake the pig,” I said.

“Thought you said they weren’t pigs.”