Chapter 142 Incidents in the Gipsy Palace
POV: Tom the Cracksman | Seelie Court, Arcadia
The Seelie Court did not exist in a fixed location, which was its first and most important defense. It existed in the space between locations, accessible through doors that weren't doors in the material sense, through thresholds that read intention rather than physical presence. Tom had been navigating fae thresholds since he was twelve years old, when the touch had first shown in his hands and a Seelie scout had found him picking pockets in Petticoat Lane and brought him before a minor court functionary for assessment.
He was thirty-one now. He knew how to walk through a door that wasn't there.
The Court presented differently each time he visited. Today it was a vast hall with a ceiling of living branches, woven so tightly overhead that no sky was visible, and the light that came through them was golden-green and sourceless, the kind of light that existed in Arcadia as a permanent ambient condition rather than something that required a sun. The floor was grass that didn't bend underfoot. The walls were suggestions.
He found the old wolf by smell before he found him by sight.
Brennan's packmate, the one who had bargained his seventy years in exchange for releasing Callum from the fae debt, was seated in a stone alcove at the hall's eastern edge. His name was Edmund, though most people in the Rookeries had called him Old Ed for so long that the other name had gone dusty from disuse. He had been sixty-one years old when he walked into the Seelie Court's presence and made his bargain.
He looked about eighty now.
Tom sat beside him without being invited. Edmund didn't react beyond a slight shift of his shoulders.
"Three months," Tom said.
"Three months." Edmund's voice was still his own, still the same dry quality that had made him useful in planning sessions. But it came out slower, like words required more effort than they used to. "Time moves differently here. You know that."
"I know that seventy years of service at Arcadia's pace isn't seventy years. It's more." Tom looked at the old man's hands, the new lines there, the way the joints had thickened. "You won't survive it."
"Probably not."
"Then let me take the contract."
Edmund turned to look at him. Properly look, the way old people looked at young ones who were about to do something irreversible, the particular combination of affection and exasperation.
"No," he said.
"You made the bargain to protect the crew. I'm part of the crew. It's my debt to carry."
"It's my choice to carry it." Edmund's voice was firm under the new slowness. "I made the bargain because I'm old and I've lived my life and the cost made sense on those terms. You're thirty-one. The math doesn't work the same way for you."
Tom opened his mouth and Edmund held up one of those thickened hands.
"I know why you came. I appreciate it. The answer is no."
Tom stayed quiet for a moment, looking at the ceiling of woven branches. The golden-green light didn't shift. Time in Arcadia had a quality of being held rather than passing, which was comforting until you thought about what that meant for someone aging through it.
A Seelie functionary appeared at the edge of the alcove, the way fae appeared, which was without transition, simply present where they had not been a moment before. This one was tall and pale in the particular fae way, with eyes that were too light to have a color name in any human language. It looked at Edmund with the professional courtesy of someone managing an asset.
"The human's visiting hours are concluded," it said to Tom, pleasantly.
Tom ignored it and addressed Edmund directly. "Let me speak to the Queen. Request a formal review of the contract terms."
"The Queen granted the terms he requested," the functionary said. "Review requires a counter-petition of equal value."
"I'll make one."
Edmund grabbed Tom's wrist with surprising strength for a man who looked eighty. His grip was still a wolf's grip. Some things took longer to go.
"Tom." His voice was quiet and very clear. "I chose this. Stop trying to undo what I chose."
Tom sat with that for a moment. It was difficult to argue with someone's right to sacrifice themselves for something they believed in, even when the sacrifice was this slow and this costly and happening right in front of you.
"Then I'll visit again," Tom said. "Monthly."
"Visiting hours are limited," the functionary said.
"Monthly," Tom repeated, to Edmund, ignoring the functionary entirely.
Edmund nodded. Something in his face that might have been gratitude, settled over with the same resignation that covered everything else about him now.
Tom stood to leave. The functionary stepped aside. The hall was very quiet except for the sound of the branches overhead, which made a sound that wasn't quite wind and wasn't quite breathing.
Then the light changed.
It went from golden-green to something cooler, silver-edged, and the temperature in the hall dropped by several degrees in the space of a single breath. The Seelie functionary went very still. Edmund looked up.
At the hall's western entrance, where the wall had been a suggestion, the suggestion had resolved into an archway. And through the archway came a figure that the Seelie Court's body language recognized immediately and badly, the collective stiffening of people in the presence of something they could not control.
The Unseelie King did not look like a king, exactly. He looked like the space between things. He was tall in a way that didn't quite translate to a specific measurement, and his face was clear enough to look at but difficult to hold in memory, the kind of face that description slid off of. He wore dark clothing that moved like water and he walked through the Seelie hall as though it were a corridor he'd borrowed and intended to return slightly damaged.
He looked at Tom with something that might have been interest.
Then he looked at Edmund.
"This is the wolf who bargained his lifespan for a debt that was not his," he said. His voice was the cool version of the temperature the room had become. "I've been watching this contract for three months. I find it interesting." He tilted his head slightly. "Seelie courts do not own all bargains in Arcadia. If the Seelie will not release him on grounds of sentimentality, I will purchase his contract. For a price."
The Seelie functionary said, tightly, "This court does not sell its contracts to Unseelie."
"Everything sells," the Unseelie King said pleasantly. "The question is what I'm offering." His eyes moved back to Tom. "And what the wolf's friends are willing to give."