Ashes of Honor

“Oh,” I said, opening the office door. “Sorry about the mess.” I clicked on the light before taking a seat at the card table I was using as a makeshift desk. “I promise the chairs are safe. I mean, they haven’t broken yet, and Danny sat in one of them.”

“Where did you find them?” asked Etienne, amazed disgust actually breaking through his shell of discomfort as he stared at the two rickety wooden camp chairs.

“Girl Scout yard sale,” I said. “I’m going to replace them, I just haven’t been able to get to Ikea yet.”

“Ah.”

“Anyway. Take a seat, and tell me what’s up.” I took a gulp of coffee. “You wouldn’t have come all the way out here if it weren’t major.”

“Yes. Major. Yes, I suppose it is, when you put it that way.” Etienne sat on the closer of the camp chairs, running a hand through his brown-black hair. “It’s not as if I drove.”

“Teleporting counts,” I said. Like all Tuatha de Dannan, Etienne could teleport short distances—longer if he was moving between knowes, the hollow hills that conceal the majority of Faerie’s incursions into the mortal world. Traveling from Pleasant Hill to San Francisco would have been a drain, even if it wasn’t a major one. “Look, if you don’t want to talk about whatever this is, that’s fine. I can wait until you do. But I’m going to want to go downstairs and make myself a sandwich.”

Etienne sighed deeply. “October, please. This is hard for me. I know it’s in your nature to needle, but please, just this once, can you try to restrain yourself?”

“I do better when I know what I’m restraining myself for, Etienne,” I said. “If you want me to help you, you need to talk to me.”

“I don’t know how.” He closed his eyes, tilting his head back until his face was almost pointed at the ceiling. “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

“That’s a start. What kind of mistake?”

Etienne was silent.

I bit back a groan. “Do we have to play hot and cold, here? You came to me, not the other way around. I didn’t force you to be here.”

Etienne was still silent.

“Look, did you kill somebody? That you didn’t intend to kill, I mean. Because I would count that as a mistake.”

“What?” His chin snapped down, eyes opening. “No!”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. Did you steal something? Piss off a member of the nobility? Break an oath?”

“Perhaps the last.” He rubbed his face with his hand. “I may have endangered my oaths, if not broken them entirely. I don’t know yet.”

I gaped at him. “Root and branch, seriously? When?”

“The spring after you disappeared.”

That was more than sixteen years ago. I nearly dropped my coffee, but saved it at the last moment as I demanded, “What?!”

“If I broke my oaths, I did so the year after your disappearance, when the Duchess and her daughter were… lost to us.” Etienne spoke slowly. “The Duchy was in chaos. The Queen offered no succor, and the Duke…the Duke was…”

“Mad,” I said. “He was mad, Etienne. I’ve heard the stories.”

“I endured them,” he snapped, anger kindling in his voice. “You weren’t here during Luna’s absence, October. I was. You didn’t see Sylvester at his worst. I did. I served as his Seneschal during those dark years, Oberon help me, and I did it out of loyalty, and duty, and love. Do you understand that much?”

“I would have been there if I could,” I whispered. The “dark years” of Luna’s absence corresponded to my own imprisonment as an enchanted koi in Golden Gate Park’s Japanese Tea Gardens. Not a place I ever meant to wind up.

Etienne took a deep breath, composing himself. When he spoke again, his voice was steady. “I know. Please believe me when I say I do not blame you. What happened to you was horrible, and we should have found a way to bring you home long before you escaped on your own. That doesn’t change the fact that you weren’t here. You never saw Sylvester raving at shadows, all but grieving himself to death, while the rest of us fought to keep Shadowed Hills alive and healthy long enough for him to find his own way home.”

I shuddered. Sylvester’s more than my liege. He’s my friend. Even knowing how bad things were for him when Luna and Raysel were missing, hearing it from Etienne hurt more than I would have guessed possible. “Okay. I get your point. I wasn’t there.”

“Sometimes…” Etienne paused, sighing again, before he pressed on: “Sometimes, when it got to be too much for any of us to take, Jin would brew something to make him sleep. Never for more than a day or two. Just enough to let the rest of us recover our strength and brace against the storms we knew were yet to come.”

“You drugged him?” I asked, almost before the thought finished forming. “Etienne, that’s…that’s…”

“It was necessary for the health of the Duchy and the health of the Duke,” he said. “He knows everything. He gave us his forgiveness long ago.”

I took a breath, trying not to dwell on the thought of how bad things must have been. For Jin to even consider it…it must have been a relief for everyone in the Duchy when their Duke wasn’t awake to terrorize them. I loved him too much for that idea not to break my heart. “Fine,” I said, pushing the images away. “So Jin would knock him out long enough to let the rest of you get some sleep, is that it?”

“We didn’t just sleep. We lived our lives.” Etienne rubbed his face. “I never stayed in the Duchy while the Duke slumbered. I ran. Like a coward, I ran. Grianne knew where to find me and could send her Merry Dancers if I was needed home, and I needed…I needed to be away from all the madness. If only for a little while.”

“Something was rotten in the state of Denmark,” I said quietly.

Etienne laughed a little. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. “If you like. In order to serve properly, I needed time to refresh myself, and I took that time in neutral territory. Places where no Duke or Duchess would take my presence as an insult or an invitation to battle.”

Neutral spots are rare in the Bay Area. I could only think of two big ones. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you didn’t spend much time in Golden Gate Park.”

“No,” said Etienne. “I didn’t.”

That left Berkeley. An idea was nibbling at the edges of my mind, making me uneasy. “What happened?”

“I spent a great deal of time in the coffee houses around the University, where no one seemed to notice, or care, if I didn’t match the social norms. I was trying to reeducate myself about modern humanity, so I could travel farther abroad without attracting attention.” Etienne’s lips twisted in what looked like an involuntary smile. “That’s where I met Professor Ames.”

“Professor Ames?”

“Bridget. She taught folklore, and she liked to argue with people, about, oh, everything. I think she would have argued about the color of the sky if anyone had been willing to engage her in that particular debate. I don’t even remember how our first argument started—something about some ballad or other, or maybe over the last scone in the case—but it was infuriating and elating at the same time. I found myself looking forward to our arguments. Then I found myself simply looking forward to seeing her.”

“Oh, Etienne.” Playing faerie bride—being fae, and loving a human—is never easy. Doing it while serving as the Seneschal of a madman would be virtually impossible. “What happened?”

“What always happens.” His smile turned bitter before fading. “I fell in love with a human woman. I did what I had always looked down on others for doing. I wasn’t sorry then, and I’m not sorry now. I’m only sorry it had to end. Sylvester was getting worse. Jin was having more difficulty getting him to take the sleeping draughts, and it got harder to slip away. Bridget was understanding at first, and then she was angry, and finally, she stopped answering her phone. I went to the campus during her office hours once, to apologize—I knew better than to think I could get her back, not at that point—and there was a sign on the bulletin board saying she was on sabbatical and would be back the next year.”

“And was she?”