Grave Mistake Page 5

  Gwydion stared back at me, his eyes a bit wide. He started to speak, hesitated, then started again.

  "A threat worthy of the Unseelie," he finally said with another, less smug bow of his head. "I suppose that's human gratitude for you."

  "Hey, the demon door thing said I had control issues for a reason," I pointed out.

  Unable to argue with that, he turned and began walking away and, only because I didn't want to be lost in this awful house again, I followed him.

  Chapter 6

  Gwydion led me through the endless shifting rooms of his ridiculous house to the dining room I'd seen before, with its massive enchanted table. Was that only this morning? Felt like a lot longer.

  "You should eat," he said, pulling out a chair for me. "I've experienced the trial of the blue door myself. It's quite draining."

  I sat down somewhat reluctantly. I knew enough about fairies to be wary of eating their food. But the table was still currently empty.

  "You may activate the table if you wish," Gwydion offered, sitting down across from me. "A gesture of good faith. Simply strike it twice and think the words 'table, be set.'"

  Cautious and still a little grumpy from what he'd pulled with the mirror, I knocked twice on the table and thought the words. It instantly filled with food. More than either of us could reasonably eat. Gwydion pulled a dish of something towards himself with no further ceremony. I eyed it all suspiciously, but it looked perfectly normal, and delicious. And I was incredibly hungry. I hadn't eaten since breakfast before we'd come here. The time weirdness of this place had made it evening by the time we arrived at Julius's bar. I wasn't sure how long we'd spent there, and then I'd lost another eight hours behind that awful fucking door. No wonder I felt horrible. I'd given up starvation diets in high school.

  I noticed a bowl of pomegranate seeds glittering like tiny translucent gems and pulled it towards me with a sigh. If I was gonna go out, I might as well go out on a cliché. I put one in my mouth, savoring it for a moment, then carefully checked myself for any sign of enchantment or transformation or whatever else. When I couldn't find anything, I hesitantly tried another seed. Then I gave in and grabbed the mac and cheese.

  "Where are Cole and Ethan?" I asked as I filled my plate.

  "The guest suite," Gwydion replied. "The mutt's accursed nose appears to be immune to the disorienting effects of my home. I kept sending them off to get lost and they kept finding their way back and bothering me again, so I gave them enough alcohol to drown a Roman legion and sent them off to bed."

  "Handy trick," I said dryly. "I'll have to remember it."

  "If your list of insecurities was anything to go by," Gwydion said, smiling at me over a platter stacked six deep with fresh lobster, "you will be pleased to know they took separate beds."

  I opened my mouth to respond, then snapped it shut again, at a loss. Red in the face, I focused on my food. Maybe it really was enchanted. My exhaustion was melting away with every bite. By this hour, I was usually long since asleep, and I'd done a lot more ridiculous running around today than I usually did. And yet, after just a few minutes of eating I felt positively energized.

  "Sincerely though," Gwydion continued, pouring himself wine from an elegant glass decanter. "That was a... fairly significant list of concerns."

  "I have a lot on my plate right now," I said, deadpan, as I ladled cranberry sauce over my turkey and mashed potatoes. Puns aside, that little recitation had barely touched on all the things I was terrified of lately.

  "So I gathered," Gwydion replied, sitting back with the wine glass in his hand. "Do you want to... talk about it?" He looked at me sideways, his free hand open in a gesture of helplessness, clearly aware he was offering something outlandish.

  "Not really," I said, reaching for the wine. "Not with you."

  "Fair," Gwydion conceded, handing me the decanter. He looked relieved. "I am probably not the best person to rely on for sympathy or what have you."

  "No shit," I said, with an exaggerated expression of surprise.

  "Sarcasm suits you," he said with a slightly bitter look. "But crass language at the dining table does not. With a family as old as yours, I would assume you were taught some manners."

  I pointedly planted both elbows on the table surface, picked up a piece of turkey with my fingers, and shoved it gracelessly into my mouth.

  "Charming," Gwydion said. He was trying for disapproval, but I could see the corners of his mouth turning up in amusement, though he tried to hide it.

  "Keep it up and I'll put my feet on the table next," I warned him. "I'll do the electric slide across this thing with my top off if you test me."

  "Don't threaten me with a good time," Gwydion said, sipping his wine.

  "People who intentionally try to get their guests lost in their dangerous as hell puzzle-house and then hypnotize them with magic mirrors don't get to lecture anyone about manners," I said, wiping the gravy off of my mouth with one of the fine napkins that appeared as soon as I thought to look for one. Spiteful displays of bad manners were one thing. Sitting around with food on my face was another.

  "What a strange equivalency to draw," Gwydion said, swirling his wine as he looked at me. "What bearing does any of that have on table manners?"

  For a moment I thought he was teasing, but he seemed to be serious.

  "They're both rude," I said.

  "Rude is such a vague term," Gwydion said, nose wrinkling in mild distaste. "To breach any rule of etiquette is rude. But the rules of dining and the rules of caring for guests outside of a dining scenario have very little cross over. And humans will call most anything rude, whether it's codified in etiquette or not. I've seen humans called rude for obeying the etiquette of their home culture while dining with humans whose cultural mores happen to differ. I have seen that same happen when the latter are guests in the country and home of the former, which is utterly baffling on any number of levels. The other day, I saw a woman struggling to open a ketchup packet at a restaurant when it burst and splattered all over her. She looked at the entirely inanimate ketchup wrapper, which she had so badly mishandled, and loudly declared it 'rude.' It's no wonder humans lack an equivalent to Courtly law when they are so frivolously loose with their definitions."

  I put my glass down, the better to put a hand over my mouth and muffle my laughter. I couldn't stop imagining the woman and the ketchup packet. Jesus Christ. It was almost funnier imagining Gwydion looming in the corner of some fast food joint like a misplaced extra from a Peter Jackson film, watching in scandalized horror as this ketchup-splattered woman anthropomorphized her troublesome condiments.

  "If only humans could replicate the perfect stupidity of their legal system to every other aspect of life," Gwydion carried on. "That woman would have had three incredibly specific Latin phrases to describe that ketchup packet, depending on degree of splatter and whether it was fancy or spicy, a laundry list of charges to bring against it, written into law decades ago specifically for the prosecution of errant condiments, and in all likelihood an entire judicial court dedicated to pursuing justice in cases of non-lethal food explosions."

  I'd started to get a grip on my giggles when 'errant condiments' set me off again.

  "So, I'm guessing you're not a fan of human law?" I asked when I could control myself.

  "Are you joking?" Gwydion looked at me blankly past his wine. "I love it. It's the wonder of the nine realms. There is nothing as magnificent or absurd in all the Other Lands."

  "I'm not sure I can believe that," I said with a small laugh. "I can think of a few things in this room that are more 'magnificent and absurd' than like, traffic court."

  "It's a matter of perspective, I suppose," he said with a shrug. "What you call magic is a common as dirt to me. But the esoteric minutiae of human law? Fascinating."

  "Do all of the Court Fae get that worked up about law?" I asked.

  "No," he replied, pouring himself more wine. "Not human law, at any rate. You might as well ask man's
opinions on the law of ants. If the person you asked happened to be an entomologist, you might receive some interesting answers. But anyone else would either assume the ants had none or respond with an explanation so reductive and infantile it might as well be given in song by goggle-eyed puppets."

  "Not sure how I feel about being called an ant," I said with a frown. "I assume you're the entomologist in this scenario?"

  Gwydion waved his hands dismissively and sloshed a little wine on his shirt.

  "Analogy," he said with clear disdain, waving a napkin like he could shoo the whole conversation away before he tried to blot the wine out of his coat. "There's only one part of an ant that concerns the common man, and that's the sting."

  "You mean the jaws?" I corrected. "Ants don't sting. They bite."

  "Inconsequential," Gwydion said with sudden intensity, setting his glass down hard and pinning me under a stare. "The only thing that interests the Fae about human law is the fact that humans can make law at all. We are incapable of breaking our laws, or creating new ones, even if they kill us. It is law for some Fae that when someone scatters mustard seed at their feet they are compelled to remain there and count every grain, and no force on earth or heaven can move them until they've finished the task. You could walk up to them with sword of iron and drive it into their hearts and they would not be able to stop you. They would not even be able to look up from their work, however much they longed to fight or run. They would die still counting mustard seeds with their last breath."

  "That's horrifying," I said, a little stunned. Cole had mentioned something about this before, but I hadn't even remotely processed the implications.

  "Imagine our wonder then," Gwydion said. "To find a race for whom the law was as soft as clay. You can make new laws. Imagine being able to simply make another force of nature like gravity or time. It's magical to us. Stranger and more terrible yet, you can append our laws. You managed to shut us out of this realm almost completely. Almost. There are few as skilled at navigating law as the Courts. But still, no other people, no other realm in all those known, has ever managed to do such a thing. It's that power that terrifies and fascinates the Fae in equal measure and fills every one of them with seething jealousy."

  "I guess I can kind of see why," I said, still trying to fully process it. "Is that why you and Gil are on Earth instead of in the Other Lands? Because you wanted to study law?"

  Gwydion scoffed and found his wine glass again.

  "No," he said. "That would imply a level of willful intention that never occurred to either me or my idiot twin. Your too-clever friend, the little blackbird that deals with demons, he already figured it out, if you had paid attention. It was the first thing he said to me. He is too clever for his own good. If he keeps being that clever around my kind, he's likely to end up dead, or wishing for death."

  I thought back to the morning, which felt like months ago, struggling to remember what Cole had said to Gwydion. Ethan had been in his wolf shape, sitting on Gwydion to keep him from running away, and he'd been threatening to blast us all with lightning or something. And Cole had more or less said that if Gwydion were capable of that he would have done it already, and that he was probably banished or in hiding.

  "You were banished?" I asked.

  "As good as," Gwydion said with a dismissive shrug. "If Gilfaethwy were to return to the Summer Court, they would destroy him. Shatter him across the length and breadth of a star until no two particles remained of him. And since we share a soul, I would die as well."

  "And you can't go back to your Court either?"

  An angry, bitter look flashed across his face, brief as summer lightning, reminding me of the wild, terrifying anger Gil had shown when I'd dared to interrupt his fight with Gwydion. It was not directed at me but at whatever memory I'd called up, but it still made me shiver.

  "It was Gilfaethwy's error," Gwydion said evenly, finally putting his wine glass aside. "My only crime was that I did not want to die for it. But by the judgment of Court law, saving my own life by sparing his was treasonous. If I were lucky, they would just kill me. But it is more likely they would torture me, and Gilfaethwy through me, until he showed himself to them. Then they would barter him to the Summer Court for a substantial favor. The Summer Court would, as previously stated, smash him into disparate atoms, and I would die as well. At that point, I would likely welcome it."

  "The Fae really don't fuck around, huh?" I said, saying a final goodbye to my mental image of adorable pixies and Liv Tyler in gauzy wings.

  "Indeed not," Gwydion agreed. "Human courts are not so different, in my experience. Clawing for power through acts of extreme violence and shameless backstabbery are the way of all nobility. But as the Courts are all nobility, stem to seed, every beggar lord and vernal count all the way to the queens themselves. And therefore, our power plays and the violence that accompanies them must naturally be magnified to biblical proportions."

  "Fun," I said, not meaning it. But I was interested in learning more about the Courts, and him, and even more interested by the fact that he was telling me at all. I'd thought he was more cagey than that normal. Maybe it was the wine. "Are there any kings?"

  "Oh dozens," Gwydion waved lazily at the air as though a cloud of kings had descended on him liked midges. "Varying in skill and importance from barely competent to utterly useless. But there are no reigning kings for the last many thousand years."

  "Rise of feminism among the fairies?" I joked. Gwydion shook his head.

  "No, The Summer Queen Titania slew King Oberon in a fit of jealousy the hundredth time she caught him dallying with someone she had previous designs on," he said as though that were typical. "Which caused chaos in both courts, of course. It was assumed that Winter Queen Mab would have no choice but to do the same to King Morozko, for the law demands not just balance but that the Courts mirror one another. At least in the broad strokes. But while murders in the Summer Court are passionate flashes in the pan, begun and ended in a moment, death moves more slowly in the Winter Court. And the Seelie are impatient by nature and believed Mab was delaying intentionally to give the Unseelie an advantage in the never-ending war. She may have been. And it's possible she even hesitated out of some genuine affection for her husband. Oberon and Titania's marriage was rocky, characterized by flares of furious passion followed by periods of equally furious rivalry—"

  "One of those on and off couples," I gathered, and he nodded in agreement.

  "But Mab and Morozko were a low, steady flame," he went on. "The kind that can burn all winter without being relit. They were not passionate people, and it is a subject of debate whether the Monarchs are even capable of love—"

  "I know a couple of countries that would really love to hear that debate," I said with a grin. Gwydion rolled his eyes.

  "The Queens and their Kings are as different from the other Court Fae as the Court Fae are from humans," he tried to explain. "Whether they can love in the mundane fashion is a genuine question. But I do believe Mab cared, in her way. Unfortunately, we are all of us slaves to the law, even the queen."

  "So, she did kill him eventually?" I asked. "Or did the Seelie do it?"

  Gwydion contemplated the question for a moment, picking at an orange.

  "If I tell you, you must promise not to interrupt until I'm done," he said. "I'll keep it short, but when speaking of mythic events and of the death of kings, it is better to do it with respect."

  "I promise," I said with a shrug. "It's not like I have anything better to do."

  "She would have done it in due time," Gwydion said, beginning to peel the orange slowly. "But even if she had expedited it as much as Unseelie custom allows, she would not have been ready to move before the Summer Queen sent an assassin to dispatch King Morozko for her. Morozko survived the attack, and I think Titania knew he would and just hoped Mab would take the opportunity to finish him off. Monarchs rarely die except at one another's hands or on the swords of great heroes. And even then they often live ag
ain by the turning of the seasons. But Titania had destroyed Oberon with a terrible thoroughness. We do not believe he will ever return. Morozko would need to be similarly destroyed, and Mab would not make the strike. Instead, he made her carry him deep into the Black Forest, where its roots touch the shores of Avalon. She carried him for days, the Court following like a funeral march, desperate to see what would happen. The land of the Forest slopes always down, and the trees grow ever taller the further in you venture. Finally, when they had walked so deep that none among the Court could fly high enough to see the tops of the trees and the snow drifted up around the Queen's hips, there was an earthen mound, a burial place, and in it a wooden ship of the kind the Norse used to lay their honored dead in. But the ship was turned upside down and shored up with stones so that there was a dry, hollow place beneath and a stone altar. She laid King Morozko here at his behest and wept, and everywhere her tears fell snowdrops grew, which her retinue gathered and laid on the King's chest. Before night fell, he slipped into a deep and ancient sleep from which we suspect he will not wake until Titania takes another king who can equal him."

  I waited a moment to be sure he was done speaking before I said anything. When he finished peeling the orange and ate a section, I figured it was safe.

  "Sounds like—" I stopped myself before I said the words 'that sounds like a fairy tale.' "Sounds kind of beautiful. Melancholy, but, you know, kind of lovely."

  "Austere beauty is the specialty of the Winter Court," Gwydion said with a touch of pride. "The Seelie generally prefer things dripping in as much tacky flash and sparkle as possible. But the Winter Court is a place of taste and reserved artistry."

  I looked pointedly around at the secret gilded mansion Gwydion was hiding inside the real and already very nice historic colonial he lived in. Gwydion got my meaning and frowned.