Free Once Broken Faith by Seanan McGuire

human disguise. I blinked, schooling my expression. They weren’t wearing cosmetic illusions, either, and the left side of the High Queen’s face was covered in small, pitted scars, like the aftermath of a bad case of acne. She was pureblooded Daoine Sidhe. Daoine Sidhe don’t
get
acne.
    Almost as if she’d read my mind, Maida smiled, shrugged, and said, “Fae may be immune to most human skin conditions, but it turns out we’re not immune to smallpox.”
    â€œOh,” I said. There didn’t seem to be another good response. May, who was sitting on the other side of the table, gave me a pointed look. Right. I couldn’t standhere silently forever. “So, um, to what do we owe this not at all terrifying honor?”
    â€œWell, as you may have noticed, we were in the neighborhood,” said Aethlin. He chuckled at his own joke. May mustered a sickly smile.
    Maida sighed and planted her elbow in her husband’s ribs. He made an exaggerated “oof” noise. Rolling her eyes, she looked to me, and said, “We wanted to come and see where Quentin is living, and talk to you a bit, as his parents, rather than as the High Monarchs of the Westlands. Do you think you can try to make that separation? For me?”
    She sounded so earnest—and more importantly, so sincere—that I took a deep breath and said, “I’ll try. But you have to promise not to charge me with treason or something if I complain about the way he never wants to do the dishes.”
    â€œHe’s going to be High King someday,” said Aethlin. “He’ll never have to do the dishes.”
    He’d said something similar the first time we met, during their visit to the Mists to confirm Arden as Queen. Believe it or not, I was much more relaxed with them now. “Which makes it all the more important that he do the dishes
now
, while he can still learn something from it,” I said. “Plus I’m really bad at doing the dishes, and why do I have a squire if not to make him do menial household chores?”
    â€œDishes build character,” said Maida. “Is he happy? Healthy? Is he eating his vegetables and making friends and having a
normal
life?”
    I paused, looking between the two of them before I settled on Maida and said, “I’m guessing you’re the one who married into the royal family, huh?”
    She smiled. “Is it that obvious?”
    â€œPretty sure he,” I gestured to Aethlin, “has never done the dishes voluntarily in his life, so yeah, it’s that obvious.”
    â€œI was a Baron’s daughter in the Kingdom of Endless Skies,” she said. Kansas, in other words: a Kingdom so broad and so flat that in the end, they’d had to go with “we have no mountains” as a name. “No household to speak of, and my father didn’t want me treated differently by his staff, so he let most of them go after I was born. I did dishes. Also milked cows and fed chickens and learned how to wash my own clothes. It’s part of why I was willing to agree to the proposal that Quentin be put into a blind fosterage. It was important to me that he understand the people he would eventually be ruling from the bottom up, and not just from the top down.”
    The other part of her agreement had been, of course, the fact that the request was coming from Eira Rosynhwyr, the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn, whose every wish was her descendants’ command. If Maida didn’t want to bring that up, I wasn’t going to do it either. I still paused. No household, no staff, and those scars on her face . . . “Forgive me if I’m overstepping my bounds right now, although you
did
promise not to have me arrested for treason, so there’s that, but . . . um . . .” I stopped, realizing I had no idea how to address the High Queen without taking us back toward the overly formal.
    â€œMaida,” she