Adaon smiled thinly. “You guess right.”
So he brought us to the throne room, which was justas autumn-themed as the clearing. More so, really. But it wasn’t about the end of the growing season or being sad that summer was over. It was more a harvest celebration. There were cornucopias, is what I’m saying, spilling over with gourds, apples, pears, corncobs. There were hay bales, which is kind of funny since nobody in that throne room has, I promise you, ever baled hay. There were pixies with fiery butterfly wings, circling the ceiling.
The Queen was, not surprisingly, on her throne. She wore a dress that, I swear, was entirely made of glittering green scarab beetles sewed together. Her hair was like an explosion of red-gold flames around her face. She doesn’t look sickly or emaciated anymore, like she did when we last saw her, and she exuded a power she’d been lacking then.
The usual groups of faeries were scattered around the room—courtiers, I assume—gossiping, tittering, sitting around being louche. So everything seemed normal there. They barely paid attention to us, only craned their necks over, realized we weren’t interesting, and got back to lounging.
I expected the Queen to immediately start insulting us, but she was actually fairly cordial. Not warm. But not unfriendly, either. Of course, she did want to be complimented on the décor first thing. She waved her hand around and opened with, “You choose a fair season to visit us.”
“It’s cheerier than last time,” Emma said.
“And yet you have chosen to return,” the Queen said,as though she was pleased about it, “despite the…lack of cheer at our last encounter.”
“It has been a long time since we saw our friend Adaon,” I said. “We sought the pleasure of his company.”
“Sayest thou such?” said the Queen, which I suspect is Faerie-speak forWell, that’s obvious bullshit. “As you must know, it is not outside the realm of my knowledge that your brother is the consort of the Unseelie King.”
“Only one of his consorts,” Emma pointed out.
The Queen ignored her. “Surely you’ve anticipated that I would suspect you of visiting with, let us say, a secondary agenda. One you would not want to disclose.”
“We are not here for the Unseelie King,” I said. “We are, rather, here regarding our interests in the Seelie Court. Indeed, our family is connected to the Seelie Court in several ways. As you know.”
The Queen ignored this. “Your best defense, it seems to me, is that you are such obvious choices, surely Kieran Kingson [I think this was meant to be an insult to you, me, or both of us] would be cleverer than to choose you as his agents.”
“That too,” Emma said.
“Well, then,” the Queen said. “Spin me a tale. What is your purpose here?”
I felt like we had nothing to lose with the truth—we really weren’t doing anything the Queen should care about. So I gave her the whole story: we inherited a house in London; the house is cursed; we want to undo the curse.I emphasized that neither the house nor the curse were fae-related at all. (I did not bring up Round Tom, as I thought it would be distracting.)
I went on. Breaking the curse requires that (among other things) we get our hands on this fish slice; we’ve learned the fish slice is or was in the possession of Socks MacPherson the phouka; we’ve come to bargain with MacPherson for the fish slice; and we arranged an invitation through Adaon because we had no way to contact MacPherson directly.
“All we need to do,” Emma said, “is meet with MacPherson to barter with him. We could do it right here in the throne room, if he was summoned.”
The Queen looked very interested all of a sudden. “You are willing to do the business here, and depart, and not dally in the rest of the Court?”
Emma frowned. “I don’t think we’re interested in dallying here at all.”
The Queen gave her a dry look. “Faeries don’t always mean ‘sex’ when we say ‘dallying,’ my girl. Sometimes dallying is just dallying.”
“Let us not dally further,” I broke in quickly. “We strongly share your desire for us to depart as quickly as we can. We need only carry out our one errand first.”
She looked skeptical, but after a moment she called over one of the courtiers and murmured to him. “The phouka will be sent for,” she said. “Prince Adaon, when the Nephilim have concluded their negotiation with him, you will escort them back outside and see them off.” Adaonbowed his assent. “And now,” she said, and her eyes flicked over to one side, “I must beg your pardon, as I see that I am needed.”
We stepped aside to let her descend the throne. I saw that a man had come in who I didn’t recognize—but he was clearly someone of importance given how differently he was dressed than anybody else present. Rather than garb appropriate to court, he was in a gray-green hooded cloak, and his face was obscured by a mask like a falcon head. His clothes were more appropriate to hunting in the woods than anything else, but they were perfectly clean. I didn’t know what to make of him—but I thought I had better pass along his description to you. You said to look for anything new or out of place, and it felt to me like he was both.
We waited around and chatted with Adaon for a couple of minutes, and then Socks MacPherson showed up. We’ve met a couple phoukas before—one of them is the gatekeeper at the LA Shadow Market, as you might remember—and I had thought maybe MacPherson would turn out to be one of those, but no, totally different guy. He was wearing a huge round fur hat that his ears stuck through. It was a lot of hat.
He seemed surprised that the Queen had left us alone, and said he was sorry if we had been harassed on his account. I said she had probably meant to loom over us but had been called away unexpectedly. MacPherson shrugged and said, “She thinks everything is a move in some gameof five-dimensional chess she is playing. But sometimes, someone only wants to trade me something for a kitchen tool. Speaking of which, I have the fish slice.”
He took it out of a kind of carpet bag he had brought with him, and immediately the Ghost Sensor went off like crazy and he kind of jumped away and hid behind one of the groups of courtiers. Although we could still see his hat. (And his ears twitching above the hat.) We had to carefully approach and explain that it was just a device that detected the cursed objects we were looking for and that the noise was good because it confirmed that the fish slice was the one we wanted. The courtiers shooed us away; they had some important luxuriating to get to that we were delaying.
Socks grumbled that of course “that miserable Spoon” gave him a cursed fish slice. “I don’t know why I took the deal,” he said. “I don’t have any use for this thing. I’m a vegetarian.”
Finally he asked what we were offering. We told him the offer was a favor from you, and explained how it was we were qualified to offer such a thing. He said it sounded good to him, and without further incident we took home the fish slice.
To sum up: Socks MacPherson is protected by the Seelie Court but didn’t blink at accepting a favor from the Unseelie Court. The Queen remains suspicious, both in the sense that she suspected us and in the sense that her behavior was itself weird. The Seelie Court is definitelyhiding something, given how relieved the Queen was the minute she realized we were willing to stay in the throne room. I have a feeling, based on nothing but a hunch, really, that it’s not a something but a someone that they’re concealing. If it was an object surely they could just hide it somewhere that visitors would never go? But again, it’s just a feeling.
