Copper Veins(4)

“I assume you have been in hiding since the wars ended?” Micah asked.

After staring at him for a few moments, Dad nodded.

“Were you in this realm, or the Mundane world?”

“Mostly here,” Dad answered. “In the beginning I traveled between the two as my business warranted, but the Peacekeepers kept sniffing out my portals. For the last few years I’ve stayed in the Otherworld.”

“Business?” Mom asked. “You had business that brought you to the Mundane realm up until a few years ago?” What she left out was that he had never found the time to visit us, or even send a message letting us know he was still alive. Her tone and crushed expression made that all too plain.

“Maeve, I couldn’t risk it.” He took her hands in his, lightly squeezing her fingers. “If I’d contacted you and the Peacekeepers had learned of it, they would have arrested you and the girls. I couldn’t risk that, not after what happened to Max.”

“You knew I was in the Institute?” Max piped up, the first time he’d spoken since we sat.

“Who do you think rounded up iron warriors to break you out?” Dad replied. “Forgive me, son, for not planning that better.”

“Is that how The Iron Queen captured you?” I said, remembering how Old Stoney had taunted us just before Micah killed him. Just before Micah almost died.

“Yes,” Dad replied. “She turned me over to the Peacekeepers in charge of the Institute, but I managed to escape.” Dad looked down. “I… I did not want to leave you, Max, but I had to seize the opportunity. I was no good to you locked away.”

“S’alright,” Max said, leaning back with a grin. “Sara sprung me.”

“And Micah,” I said. Call me middle-child, but everyone seemed to be forgetting about Micah, and it was his wedding day, too. “I couldn’t have done it without Micah.”

“Yeah, Sara nearly got captured herself,” Max said, as if he’d been a credible witness to my first botched, deliberate dreamwalking attempt. At the time he’d been nothing more than a drugged-up lab rat. “Good thing Micah talked some sense into her or we’d both still be there.”

I scowled at Max, but before I could fire off a witty comment, Micah asked, “So, Baudoin, why now?”

Dad blinked. “Now?”

“Why return to your family now?” Micah picked up his wineglass and gestured to our entire family. “Even if you did not know the specifics of the Institute’s fall, surely you knew that it was destroyed some months ago. Why did you not investigate the site, if for nothing more than to learn if your son still lived?”

“I did investigate,” Dad said, his ears getting a little red around the edges. “When I learned that Max had escaped, I came out of hiding and returned to the Mundane world. Eventually, my contacts pointed me here.”

Mom made a strangled noise. “You left this world just as we arrived, and it’s taken you this long to show your face?” she demanded. “A simple message would have been enough—no, it would have been more than enough. It would have given us hope.”

Dad turned to her and grasped her hands. “Maeve, it is no longer a simple matter for me to travel to and from the Mundane world,” he said. “Every Peacekeeper knows to look for me.”

I nodded. “Our images are playing on vid chips all over the place,” I said. Well, I’d only seen them playing in the Promenade Market, but I assumed there were other places, too, and maybe a few wanted posters in post offices and such. “Micah had to glamour us so we could get married.”

“Micah,” Dad murmured. “You almost don’t need me with him around.”

“That’s not true,” Mom said softly. “We’ve always needed you.”

Conversation died down after that, what with Dad mostly talking to Sadie, Max’s quiet satisfaction with Dad’s botched jailbreak, and Mom gazing contentedly at her husband. As for me and my husband, we were making plans of our own.

“A copper staircase?” I asked. I hadn’t forgotten about Micah’s promise to let me add a few copper accents to the Silverstrand manor. “A swirling spiral one, three stories tall?”

“And where will this staircase lead?” Micah indulged.

“Maybe to Sadie’s library. Can the bookshelves be copper?”

“Anything you like can be copper,” Micah said, kissing my temple. “This is our home, Lady Silverstrand. It should reflect you as well as me.”

Lady Silverstrand. I suddenly had the urge to take Micah upstairs and make him repeat those words over and over, and after I fell asleep in his arms to whisper them to me in my dreams. Before I could figure out a way to classily demand he take me to bed now (Right then I’d have traded dreamwalking for telepathy in a heartbeat), Dad shoved back from the table.