Seanan McGuire - Ashes of Honor

“Come on,” I said, starting for the dining room. That was where the clutter reached its peak, since it had bookshelves and a table to gather on.

May was sitting at the dining room table, across from an uncomfortable-looking Etienne, when we entered. It was hard to say what accounted for his discomfort: the mess, my Fetch, or the simple fact of being in my house to begin with. I could tell that May had made an effort to clear the table before sitting down. To someone accustomed to the housekeeping at Shadowed Hills, it probably looked like the whole place needed to be condemned. They both turned at the sound of our footsteps. May smiled, clearly relieved. Etienne started to stand. I waved him down.

“Don’t get up.” I kept walking, heading for the stairs. “Hi, Etienne. Nice of you to drop by. This is exactly what I needed tonight.” Etienne winced. I tried to dial back the sarcasm as I said, “I’m going to change into something less bloodstained and get some coffee. That should give you time to figure out what you’re going to tell me that you weren’t willing to tell Tybalt.”

“Who you brought home with you,” said May. “Hi, Tybalt. Welcome back.”

“May,” said Tybalt, with a courtly nod. “Etienne.”

“Tybalt,” said Etienne neutrally. It’s not that Etienne dislikes Tybalt. Etienne just dislikes chaos, and Tybalt causes almost as much commotion as I do. Sometimes more, when he really sets his mind to it, although my chaos is a little more destructive, if I do say so myself.

It says something about my life that this is the sort of thing I have to think about—and be proud of. “Be right back,” I said.

“October—” began Etienne.

I didn’t stop walking. “I just got home from the police station, and prior to that I was shot multiple times in an alley,” I said. “That means I get to put on clean clothes and make myself a cup of coffee big enough to give me caffeine poisoning before I have to have whatever serious conversation you’re here to have. Does anybody else need anything?”

“I’m good,” said May.

“No,” said Etienne.

“I’d like some coffee,” said Tybalt.

I gave him a sidelong look. “Since when do you drink coffee?”

“Since I had to learn how to make it or risk your endless wrath.”

I had to smile a little at that. “You can fix your own.”

It only took me a few minutes to climb the stairs to my room, drop the disguise that made me look human, and shuck off my blood-drenched clothes, throwing them into the wastebasket next to the door. One more pair of jeans down the drain. I’d need to get one of the hearth-spirits I knew to do something about the holes in my leather jacket. I was willing to get rid of a lot of things, but not that.

I washed the blood off my hands and face in the master bathroom. My reflection was overly pale, even for me; regenerating that much blood had done a number on my system. There was no blood in my hair, for once. I swapped my bloody jeans and T-shirt for clean ones that weren’t full of bullet holes. Then I went jogging back down the stairs and through the dining room to the kitchen, where Tybalt was watching with evident amusement as my half-Siamese cats, Cagney and Lacey, cornered Quentin.

My squire was spooning wet food into cat dishes. He wasn’t doing it fast enough for their liking, because both cats were yowling. Cats are like that. Tybalt cleared his throat. Cagney and Lacey went silent. They turned to face their King and sat, wrapping their tails around their legs. Quentin looked up, relief written across his face.

“Good one, Tybalt,” he said.

“A cat may look at a King,” Tybalt replied, waving away Quentin’s almost-thanks without commenting on it.

“Greetings, Squire,” I said, and ruffled Quentin’s hair. I didn’t have to get on my tiptoes, but it was close. After one more growth spurt, he’d be looking down on me. I guess that’s what you get when you take a teenage boy as your sworn squire. “Is there coffee?”

He looked at me solemnly, doing an admirable job of concealing his annoyance over my hair ruffling, and said, deadpan, “We didn’t want you to kill us all, so May told me to start a fresh pot when Tybalt left to get you.”

“I have the smartest Fetch in the whole world.” I snagged a coffee mug from the rack. “Do you have any clue what Etienne is doing here?”

“I know as much as you do.” Quentin bent to set the cat dishes on the floor. “He just showed up saying he needed to talk to you, and he wouldn’t tell us why.”

There was an anxious note in Quentin’s voice. I paused in the act of filling my mug, glancing back at him. “He can’t take you back to Shadowed Hills,” I said gently. “It’s against the rules, and if there’s one thing Etienne would never ever intentionally do, it’s break the rules.”

“I know,” said Quentin miserably. “I just…”

“I wouldn’t concern myself if I were you.” Tybalt plucked the coffeepot from my hand, topping off my mug before half-filling his own. “I’ve had sufficient dealings with the Divided Courts to know there would be much more pointless discussion before we reached that point. Unless she has been found guilty of some dire crime and has neglected to tell the rest of us, you can no more be removed from her custody than I can sprout wings and fly off to take tea with the Swanmays.”

“Don’t say that where the Luidaeg can hear you, or she’ll take it as a challenge.” I got the milk out of the fridge. “Quentin, you have my word: I will be your knight until your fosterage ends or you’re ready to graduate to a knighthood of your own. And the only people who get to decide when that is are me, Sylvester, and whoever the hell your parents are.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, smiling.

I rolled my eyes as I dumped milk and sugar into my coffee. “Do the dishes,” I said and turned to leave the kitchen. Tybalt paused long enough to fill his mug the rest of the way with milk before following me, chuckling.

When I met Quentin, he was a fourteen-year-old courtier in service to the Duke of Shadowed Hills. Since then, his association with me has gotten him shot, nearly marooned him in Blind Michael’s lands, and made him an accessory to jailbreak from the Queen’s prison. Somehow, this all made me the best choice to stand as his knight. He’s pureblood Daoine Sidhe—a fact his teen-heartthrob looks, bronze hair, and sharply pointed ears makes difficult to disguise even with magic—and he’s been sent to the Bay Area on a blind fosterage. That means I don’t know who his parents are, and he doesn’t tell me. If a couple of unfamiliar Daoine Sidhe ever show up on my porch and start throwing punches, I think I’ll have a pretty good idea why.

May and Etienne were still at the dining room table when Tybalt and I returned with our coffee. “All right, then,” I said. “So what’s so important?”

This time Etienne did stand. “I need to speak with you alone.”

“Um, why?” I asked. “May lives with me. She’s going to hear whatever you say eventually.” Tybalt didn’t live with me, but I had cats, and that was almost the same thing, as far as gossip goes. Anything Cagney and Lacey overheard would be carried straight back to their King.

Etienne sighed. For the first time, I really looked at his face. I’d been right when I read his expression as discomfort, but I’d been wrong when I assumed he didn’t approve of our housekeeping. There was probably some of that in there, too, but it wasn’t everything. “I know you’ll tell your allies what we discuss,” he said. “Just, please. Let me tell you this alone.”

“Sure, Etienne. Sure.” I turned to Tybalt. “Can you wait here until we come back down? I’d like to catch up a little.”