★★★★☆ Seek Sweet Safety, by Seanan McGuire
When Evening Winterrose took over the Mists, version 2.0
Seek Sweet Safety
Seanan McGuire
When Evening Winterrose took over the Mists, version 2.0
Seek Sweet Safety is Seanan McGuire’s October 2025 Patreon reward novella. She introduces it as follows:
(IMG: Four cats on an orange duvet, against a blue blanket. One, a tortoiseshell, looks half-asleep. Another, a fawn colorpoint, is awake and looking at the pillows. The blue tabby and the orange tabby are both asleep.)
During Titania’s false Faerie, very few people had a good time. After all, that world had been designed to make most of Toby’s allies utterly miserable. But for Arden Windermere, it became an escape from crown and kingdom, a way she could live her own life and not the life she had been born for.
This is the story of another Arden Windermere, the life she led in a world where her parents had been allowed to admit who they were to each other, where she had always expected to be Queen in the Mists...and never would.
Arden and her brother Nolan were the unacknowledged children of Gilad, who was King in the Mists until his assassination in 1906. The assassination occurred at the time of the famous 1906 Earthquake that destroyed San Francisco, just south of Gilad’s Knowe, and it is darkly hinted that Evening Winterrose somehow caused the quake to facilitate her takeover of the Mists. I am not sure if we have ever heard that story in full—I didn’t find it in Arden’s page on the October Daye Wiki.
Seek Sweet Safety is not that story. It is, instead, the illusory version of the story created by Titania when she created her alternative ideal reality, the one we inhabited in Sleep No More and The Innocent Sleep. So, instead of working at a bookstore in the Bay Area, this story ends with Arden and Nolan where we found them in the two Sleep books: as guests of the Golden Shore.
I enjoyed this. Arden is one of my favorite characters in the October Daye series.