Chapter Text
I don’t like being lied to, and I don’t like lying. You can probably blame my mother for that, especially the first part. I was going to add something about the reason why, but, honestly, it’s a pretty long list so I just circle around to placing the blame for it in general on her. I don’t love placing blame like that either, but it is what it is.
If you’re wondering how I can explain my own stint as a Faerie Bride it’s partly because I truly meant it to be a life spent together – but even though I say that I’m not entirely sure it’s true. I couldn’t fully let go of the world that would take me from them. True or not, in the end I failed, and that was another piece of evidence to add to the pile of ‘lies are a bad idea’. That includes lies that could be called ‘omissions’ instead.
There were times when I felt as if my friendship with Robin – the man who was once known as Tam Lin and had played a central role in the destruction of what Faerie had been – was a pretty big omission. Not when it came to Cliff – Robin had his own omissions there, but those were more about things that couldn’t be believed, and it didn’t feel the same. Maybe that’s hypocrisy – but considering my relationship with Cliff, the hypocrisy balance out. But when it comes to not saying anything to my other friends?
The worst part was that I wasn’t sure of my own motivations. I might be keeping quiet because I believed that Robin didn’t deserve the Faerie ‘justice’ in all its petty viciousness that he was likely to receive if anyone else know. It might be because I could acknowledge that he had become one of my friends, too, even after all the time I’d spent trying to keep him at a distance. It might be because I needed everything that he brought with him. That my friends – my family – saw the last part and so encouraged me to hold on made the deception feel worse. I had lost Connor. In a way I’d lost Gillian to humanity, but I hadn’t lost Gillian.
It was the last thing I’d expected when I’d brought her back to the home she’d asked for. It was the last thing I’d expected since she had asked me to stay out of her life all those months before.
I don’t know if she remembered something of that dream we shared or if the magic in her blood had made her more uncomfortable in my presence or if it was something that I couldn’t understand because of all the years I’d never known her. I didn’t care.
Gillian had called me, not long after her kidnapping. She called me directly, not sending Robin as an intermediary as she so often had before. She asked me why I had left, and I told her as much of the truth as I could, wondering if she felt that she’d heard it before in her dreams. She didn’t accept me into her life as her mother, but she accepted me as part of her life and acknowledged me as her mother. It was a careful balance that was very easy to accept.
I didn’t see her often, but that was mostly because she was busy with college. I met up with Robin, who liked to dramatically retell how she’d vanished into work. Hell, Cliff even offered an invitation for dinner one of the nights she was there. Both he and Gillian placed weight on the part where I’d saved our daughter – and the part where I’d brought her back, and maybe the bit where I’d stayed away when she asked – and it gave us a strange new foundation. I felt guilty about that considering I was the reason she’d been kidnapped in the first place, but not so guilty I was about to reject them.
Connor was dead and Rayseline was sleeping away the next century and as much as I tried to keep it together when it came to my work for Faerie, I was apparently doing badly enough that everyone found it a relief that they could encourage me in my adventures in crossing over to my mortal life. All I can say is that May is a much better person than I am, because she managed to look happy about it, even though I couldn’t give her more than secondhand stories. I don’t think I could’ve managed that.
I even took Quentin to visit with me one time – which was partly because everyone was not-so-subtly trying to keep an eye on me, but also because it was something that I could do. I’d never expected that, or what it would feel like to see them together. He gave me several looks when he realized what they thought I meant by ‘Uncle Sylvester’s foster kid’, but he’d been around me long enough even before becoming my squire that he rolled with it. He’d been with me long enough to give me pointed looks in the first place. He talked about college with Gillian – doing a great job at not letting it slip that it had been years since he’d gone to high school – and went off to do the dishes with her while the adults got to lounge around taking advantage of free child labor, as Gillian put it. She smiled when she said it.
As part of that same policy of ‘look after Toby’, Tybalt took to coming with me to the theater. Robin managed to resist making any comments on our relationship – as I’d told him about Connor – but he and Tybalt resumed their long discussions of the theater, which seemed all they needed for an odd sort of friendship. The first time they’d met neither had known each other’s secrets. Now, Robin knew that he was dealing with a Cait Sidhe – at least he said he hadn’t known before, and I believed him. He kept trying to get me to ‘casually’ get more firsthand information about Tybalt’s relationship with various playwrights. Tybalt still didn’t know that Robin had ever been anything but Robin. Maybe there was a time when I would’ve thought there was something funny in that, but that would’ve been a long time ago.
When Etienne came to me about his surprise changeling daughter and Tybalt was almost gutted – and I actually was gutted, several times – and we ended up making out… not for the first time, but the first time I acknowledged what it actually was… both Robin and Cliff ended up learning about it. The ‘I’m dating Tybalt’ part, not the gutting bit. I told my daughter who gave Tybalt sideways looks and muttered something about how certain people spoke but seemed happy for me in a way that wasn’t connected to old concerns about what my single status might mean.
And I didn’t tell Tybalt about Robin. He didn’t ask anything about Robin, but that wasn’t something I’d accept as an excuse. Maybe it was a better excuse to say by then I honestly didn’t think about Robin as anything other than Robin. Tybalt had been someone else too, once upon a time. I’d been someone else, once, and I was a lot younger than both of them – something I generally tried not to linger on.
I didn’t know if I thought that truth would matter to Tybalt.
I never pretended to myself that it wouldn’t matter to the Luidaeg. Robin never tried to claim he thought it wouldn’t matter to the Luidaeg. It was basically the opposite of that, actually. He never begged me not to tell her, but he didn’t have to. He didn’t even make a joke about his relationship with her mother, though that was probably more because he liked to avoid what he considered – or knew I considered – his less than finest moments.
I went to the Luidaeg as I always went to the Luidaeg. I went to her as a friend, however complicated that friendship felt at times. I went to her when the Queen of the Mists tried to exile me. That situation ended up with me kind of overthrowing her and helping establish the true monarch, which felt pretty fair to me. I could lie while the Luidaeg couldn’t. I didn’t think I actually ever did lie, as even though I found myself still talking to her about Gillian – after learning about her children I thought it might be unkind, but she was always the first to talk about unfairness – but we’d never talked about her stepfather.
My sort-of-Christmas-present was learning about my stepfather.
I didn’t plan on bringing it up with Robin. We generally didn’t talk about my life in Faerie. He wasn’t a big fan of it in general, and he liked to avoid uncomfortable topics. I had somehow found myself with a household of people I could talk to about that uncomfortable revelation.
We were actually in the middle of talking about books. Gillian’s a fan of fantasy – which I managed not to cringe about, even if I couldn’t make myself read them myself – so it was something that had always come up, and I remembered that he had just published another book himself – which I also wasn’t going to read.
I’ve never felt like writing, and I’m not sure that I knew any other writers, so I couldn’t say whether his gloominess around publishing time was normal.
“One of my books was recommended as fantasy that wasn’t like other fantasy.” He said, staring moodily out a window. “In a ‘not genre fiction’ way. I like genre fiction. I won’t say I love that I’m not sure anyone I really know likes my books, but I think I might prefer no one liking my books over getting that review.”
“Simon Torquill is my stepfather,” I said. As a distraction, it did work.
He looked away from the window – I knew he was also moody because he felt that snow would be more dramatic, but he’d chosen to move to San Francisco, and I didn’t feel like I needed a snowy day. “The guy who turned you into a fish?”
“No one told me.” It was a sign of something that he didn’t say anything about how it was always a relief to hear about worse stepparents.
“Huh. I guess your uncle must have known. Oh, so he’s literally your uncle. In legal terms, I mean. As much as you have those.”
“Yeah, it turns out that it’s not just a sign of affection.” And Luna was my aunt, whether or not there was any affection left there. And Rayseline was my cousin. January had been my cousin. Li Qin –
Robin coughed, so I’d probably started staring at the wall. “That sounds rough?” He hazarded. But I hadn’t told him because I thought he’d understand why I felt it was a betrayal.
“He turned me into a fish to save my life because he’d been commanded to kill me by his… First.” Eira Rosynhwyr might be asleep, but there were some people whose names you shouldn’t throw around, and I was pretty sure she was one of them. I don’t know if I expected any real response. Maybe that was why I had told him. So, I was caught off guard when he blinked and sat up more.
“He’s one of the pretty, brightly colored ones, right?” It was probably less insulting than, ‘oh, he’s one of the cat ones’, though they were probably meant to be the same level of insulting. “And their ‘first’ is the snow named even though she’s the Summer Queen’s?” Robin didn’t like to throw around names, either. It wasn’t an inaccurate summary, even if it involved massive understatement.
“How do you know that?” Robin has always been clear about living only in the Winter Court, though his insight on the Faerie I would never know was mostly just details about various dalliances, of which there was no shortage of.
“I did eventually get around to asking Jenny how she managed to stop the ride. It wasn’t like I’d been able to tell her how to do it, though that does make a better story. She filled me in on the details enough that I could line her up with stories the Winter Queen’s children spoke of. They weren’t very nice stories.”
I’m not sure what I felt learning that Eira Rosynhwyr had a hand even in that. As Robin said, there were a lot of not very nice – and very true – stories that she’d played a role in. Was there a point when it couldn’t really get worse because it was already so bad? I didn’t know. Robin mostly looked satisfied, because it was another point for his – I couldn’t say unreasonable – argument that it was dramatic to paint Janet as a looming villain when you thought about it. Janet who was my grandmother, which I’d basically accepted even before the Luidaeg’s hints basically confirmed it.
My mom had never said anything about it, but there was a lot my mom had never said anything about.
“I want to tell Tybalt about you.” It felt like something I wanted to do before we got married, and I was very interested in getting married.
Robin winced, sinking back down in his seat. “Will you tell him about the ride bit first?” But he didn’t ask me not to. He wasn’t my grandfather, but we shared a daughter. And, even now, he was keeping his word about not bringing up debt.
“I won’t tell him that you called him ‘one of the cat ones’.”