Maida slumped, still on the floor, still clutching her transformed son and holding her dying husband’s hand. For a moment, I felt almost like I could see what it was like to collide with the daily chaos to which we had all become accustomed, where this sort of thing happened before lunch five times a week and we just had to figure out how we were going to deal with it before we could finish ordering our pizza. This was all new and shockingly terrible for her.
And she had thrown her only son into it. Poor woman. “Fiac, will the court believe you when you say the attack was carried out using contact poison on the High King’s desk?”
“They will,” he said gravely. “Adhene can lie, but they know that we find it abhorrent, and this court has no cause to doubt me. And if the High King lives, there will be no question at all of the Queen’s innocence, or of recalling the children from their distant fosterage.” He had to work not to look at Quentin, who was still hugging his mother.
Good man. “I’m sure Penthea would prefer to remain where she is until it’s safe for her to come home,” I said. Fiac had to know by now who the Banshee boy clinging to the queen was, but if I could talk around it, I would. “I know Quentin is happy with his current arrangement.”
“That’s all I had ever hoped for them,” said Fiac.
“Who benefits from throwing the High Kingdom into chaos?” I turned to Walther. “And how long before you know whether you can fix this?”
“I’m not a magician trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat, I’m an alchemist trying to come up with a counteragent for a novel poison that seems to be more iron-based than it has any business being,” said Walther. “You’ll forgive me if it’s not the fastest process ever.”
Cassie gasped, eyes still fixed on what looked to me like absolutely nothing.
“Ash and Oak,” she said. “The Kingdom fell, and no one came for the people who lived there. Look for their signatories, look for mistletoe and Virginia creeper and holly. They brew their poisons on what remains of a blighted land.”
“Of course, they do,” said Walther, grabbing several more small jars and adding their contents to his mixture. For all that he spoke like there was no urgency to his task at all, he moved like it was the most urgent thing in the world, like he could never have done anything less.
The contents of his beaker changed colors, going from pale gold to a rancid slime green that glittered from within with tiny specks of captive gilded light. Walther sniffed the mixture and wrinkled his nose. Given some of the things he’d given me to drink in the past, that didn’t speak well for it.
“Toby, I need some of your blood,” he said.
“I thought we just established that my blood doesn’t counteract poison,” I said. “See, the High King’s right there, and he’s still all poisoned, despite being doped up with my blood before he could die.”
“Yes, but your blood will let him heal himself, and the poison has done—and is still doing—a considerable amount of damage to his body,” said Walther, producing a scalpel from inside his kit. He offered it to me. “If you don’t want the High King to need dialysis for the rest of his life, bleed for me.”
“Every time I think my life couldn’t get more like a horror movie, something like this has to go and happen,” I grumbled, taking the scalpel and using it to lay open the side of my hand. Walther moved his beaker into position, holding it there until he’d gathered what he judged to be a sufficient quantity of my blood. Which was reassuringly not all that much since I was pretty tired of bleeding.
I tossed the scalpel onto the desk and wiped my bloody palm on my jeans. Quentin wrinkled his nose.
“You know Tybalt’s going to notice that,” he said. “If you wanted to bleed without getting caught, you’d keep it off your clothes.”
“If I wanted to bleed without getting caught, I’d wash my hands and put on some perfume,” I said. “Don’t teach your grandma how to conceal forensic evidence, kid. You know it never ends well for you.”
“Both my grandmothers are dead,” he said, somewhat sourly, and glanced back at his father.
Walther had finished reheating and stirring his mixture. He held it carefully in front of him as he approached the High King, eyes on Maida. “This should counteract the poison in your husband’s system,” he said. “I believe I identified and isolated all of the compounds doing him harm. Fortunately, to be stable enough to linger on surfaces and be absorbed through the skin, the potion couldn’t be overtly magical, and had to rely on its contents to do the most damage possible. Unfortunately, that reliance involved a great deal of cold iron. I can’t promise this will be enough to save him, but I can promise you there’s not an alchemist in this Kingdom who could have done a better job.”
Fiac neither moved nor spoke, clearly accepting Walther’s words as truth. That was reassuring. That reduced the odds of his being arrested if this didn’t work.
“May I give this to the High King?” Walther paused respectfully, waiting for Maida’s answer.
When it came, it was in the form of a laugh that bordered on hysterical. “Can you save my husband?” she asked. “The man who gave me everything I have, the man without whom I don’t know what to do or how to do it or even where I’d go, where I’d live, where to find my children, can you save my husband?” Her laughter died, replaced by a look of bleak despair that chilled me to the bone. “Please. Try.”
Maida had been a changeling when she met Aethlin. I knew her father, her fae parent, had died in one of the wars. Her mortal family would be long since dead, the farm where her parents had lived sold to other hands. She knew the knowe and the throne and nothing else. Did she have friends? Did she have people like Stacy and Kerry, or even Julie, who could take care of her if the High King was gone?
Sweet Titania, was she a prisoner here even though she was supposedly in charge?
No, bad Toby. Fix the feudal system later, after you’ve prevented its current round of victims from dying. Walther pressed the edge of the beaker to the High King’s lips. Aethlin stirred, making a noise that was neither loud nor strong enough to be classified as a moan, but not shrill enough to be a squeak, either. “I know, it smells terrible,” said Walther, in a soothing tone. “You still have to swallow it, because if you don’t, I’m going to pour it in your hair.”
Aethlin didn’t react.
“I’m pretty sure the smell won’t ever come out. You’re going to have to shave your head.” Walther’s tone never varied, and his hand didn’t shake. “The choice is yours. Swallow this or wear it.”
“Can he hear you?” asked Maida.
“If he can’t, we’re past the point where I can help him, and the kid’s not howling yet,” said Walther matter-of-factly. “He can hear me.”
Aethlin made the sound again, stronger this time, and I saw his throat move as he swallowed whatever of the mixture had managed to trickle into his mouth. “Good man,” said Walther, and tipped the beaker a little further forward. He still wasn’t pouring very fast—the liquid would be entering the High King’s mouth at barely above a drip—but now that he knew Aethlin wasn’t going to choke, he could focus on getting it into him as quickly as possible.
“Human hospitals use IVs,” said Quentin.
“So do I, when the issue is dehydration, or when I’m working with a changeling kid who needs human-developed medication delivered over a long period of time. When it’s hormone replacement or a painkiller, I usually use a syringe.” Walther kept his attention on the High King as he spoke, eyes scanning Aethlin’s face in quick, sharp motions that looked far more urgent than anything else he was doing. “When you’re dealing with an alchemical tincture, direct injection is almost never the answer.”
“Why not?”
Walther glanced at Quentin, a wry, frustrated smile twisting at his mouth. “Because most of the things in this beaker are technically poisonous whether ingested or injected,
but the magic that goes into the brewing process renders them inert when administered in the correct way. There may be an alchemist somewhere who’s been working on applying more mortal means of draught completion, but I am not he, and I still use traditional methods. Which say swallow.”
“So you’re giving my—my king,” Quentin caught himself clumsily, barely managing not to glance at Fiac, who surely had to know his identity by now. He’d been in the room when Aethlin demanded to see his son, after all, and Maida was clinging to Quentin like a lifeline. “Poison to get rid of poison? How does that make sense?”
“Most medicine is poison,” said Walther. “It’s just poison that kills you more slowly than whatever’s been making you sick.”
High King Aethlin groaned again. An actual groan this time, strong enough to be worth the name. Maida sat up straighter, pulling Quentin along with her as she clutched at her husband’s hand.
“Aethlin?” she asked—pled, really, voice dripping with the desperate need for him to reply. “Sweetheart, can you hear me? Are you awake?”
He groaned again, louder this time, and raised his free hand to bat weakly at the beaker Walther was still holding to his lips.
Walther, though, was resolute. This was a man who gave pro bono medical care to any changeling kid who stumbled across him—something that happened with increasing frequency as word spread—who brewed elf-shot cures for the nobility of the West Coast, and who, maybe most importantly, was often charged with putting me and my allies back together. A little feeble struggling from a High King was nothing to him.
“Nope,” he said, almost cheerfully. “Sorry, Your Majesty, but I’m going to need you to finish drinking the whole thing before I can let you stop. It’s like reciting a proclamation. If someone interrupts you in the middle, technically whatever you were trying to decree isn’t finished.”
Something about that sounded important. He was right, though. Interrupting ranking nobles with a coup when they were in the middle of declaring something—usually land rights, titles, or the naming of a formal heir—was a time-honored way of disrupting the political structure.
“Hey, Fiac, you know a lot about the founding of this Kingdom, don’t you?”
“The Librarian would know more, or Hiram,” Fiac looked around the room as if the absent historian might still be lurking there. “But I know a great deal,” he continued. “I know if the High King dies while the lines of succession have been somehow muddled, we shall have to break the seal on the Princess’ fosterage, and even that might not be enough to save the kingdom.”
“Cool, cool,” I said. “Do you know the wording of the founding decree?”
Fiac blinked at me. “Not precisely,” he said. “I know where they’re stored, if you feel they matter for some reason.”
“They might,” I said. “Walther?”
“Almost there.” He tipped the beaker a bit further and smiled encouragingly at Aethlin. “You’ll be finished soon, Your Majesty, and then you can yell at me for making you drink something so nasty.”
“Will he live?” demanded Maida.
“Oh, sorry, didn’t I say? If he was going to die, this would have killed him already.” Walther stepped back, taking the now-empty beaker with him. “He’s going to be fine. Exhausted for a while, because his body’s not built to heal itself the way October’s is, and twice in one day is probably pushing things, but the poison has been counteracted, and the damage is being repaired even as we speak.”
High King Aethlin gasped, opening his eyes and sitting up in the chair—or trying to, anyway. He seemed to get caught partway into the motion and sagged back into his slump. The color in his face was improving at an unnatural rate, the waxen pallor removing itself like a film running in reverse.
“Is it that weird to watch me put myself back together?” I asked Walther, in a low voice.
“Weirder, since you’re usually doing it without help, and with half your blood on the outside of your body,” he said. “We’ve had time to get used to it.”
“I haven’t,” said Cassandra, staring raptly at the High King.
Aethlin coughed and tried again to sit up, succeeding this time, although the effort appeared to exhaust him. He clutched at Maida’s hand, seeming to realize she was there for the first time as he slumped against that side of the armchair. “Maida . . .”
“I’m here, love, I’m here.” She laughed, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I’m here with you, you foolish man.”
“Told me not . . .” He stopped, running out of breath, and just leaned.
“Yes, I told you not to hold the interrogations in the room where you spent so much of your time. I didn’t anticipate poison—I was hoping to keep the space from being tainted by association—but I was right all the same.” Maida didn’t let him go, not even as Quentin pulled away from her to keep himself from being crushed. He glanced to me as he did, something pleading in his eyes. I couldn’t tell whether he was begging me for rescue, or to understand why he didn’t want to be saved.
Eventually, he was going to have to decide where he wanted to be on his own, and I wasn’t going to begrudge him that decision. I also wasn’t here to come between him and his family.
“You stay here,” I said, focusing on Quentin. Then I glanced back to Fiac. “Are you free to come with me? I need someone to show me the way to the library.”
Fiac blinked. “The library?”
“You said the Librarian would know the exact terms of the kingdom’s founding paperwork. I need to get a look at that.”
Fiac frowned slowly, tilting his head. “You think you know something,” he said, sounding confused.
“I suspect I may have found the start of why this is happening,” I corrected. “I don’t know anything, except that when I get that feeling that tells me something is important, it usually is. And I feel like the wording is important in this case.”
“We already know who’s doing this,” said Quentin sourly. “Shallcross.”
“Absalom Shallcross hasn’t been seen in years,” said Maida. “Not since the 1950s at least.”
Almost seventy years of silence from a human would have meant they were no longer a concern, and we could start looking for someone else. Seventy years of silence from a Daoine Sidhe King who’d lost his throne was the equivalent of a long nap followed by a sulk in the corner of the playroom. They think in a different time scale than the rest of us do. Sometimes it’s possible for me to forget that, to pretend they have the same number of years to plot and plan and get things right and get things wrong as I do, and I guess they do, since I could have forever if I would just go ahead and get rid of the last traces of my mortality. But in the here and now, the chances that the original King Shallcross was still out there were pretty decent.
“And I’m pretty sure no one knew where the Luidaeg was when she left the East Coast, until she resurfaced in San Francisco,” I said. “Doesn’t mean she didn’t exist while she was out of sight, or that she wasn’t doing Luidaeg things.”
“Luidaeg things?” asked Aethlin, managing to sound weak and amused at the same time.
“You know, the things she does when no one’s keeping tabs on her. Brew horrifying potions. Harass the Selkies. Eat really weird ice cream with too many ingredients listed on the carton. Cookies and cream makes sense, sure, but cookies and cream and gummi bears and chocolate peanuts and Twizzlers and strawberries and marshmallow and M&M’s and graham crackers? There are limits to how far you can push things while still having them taste even halfway decent.”
Aethlin and Maida were both staring at me by the time I finished. Maida turned to Quentin, asking delicately, “Is she always like this?”
“Pretty much,” said Quentin. “Sometimes she gets a little weird.” He shrugged broadly. Given that he had turned himself into a Banshee to be able to attend my wedding in his parents’ house without getting ca
ught, and they seemed to decorate entirely in the kind of giant uncut crystals that belonged in a New Age catalog for really wealthy Wiccans, I wasn’t sure any of the three of them got to judge how weird I was or wasn’t.
But none of that was relevant. “So yeah, we know who’s behind all this, and we know it’s Shallcross,” I said. “What we don’t know is whether it’s the original model throwing a fit because he lost his throne and thinks he deserves a consolation kingdom, or a descendant.”
“Absalom and Vesper Shallcross never had children that I’m aware of,” said Fiac. “And while Absalom was seen after the fall of Ash and Oak, Vesper was not. Most have assumed her body lies in the harbor along with so many others.” He bowed his head, expression going solemn.
I wondered if the fae of Maples thought New York had fallen along with Ash and Oak. “If she died there, either she’s joined the night-haunts, or her body was buried by the humans who still live in Manhattan,” I said delicately. “And since there wasn’t a huge blow-up about aliens or fairies or whatever moving among the humans of New York, I’m going to say the night-haunts were able to come as normal.”
Quentin looked unfazed. Maida and Aethlin both looked nervous. Which made sense; they weren’t used to casual dismissal of the death of hundreds. Quentin, on the other hand, is basically immune to terror at this point.
“Fiac, my point stands,” I said. “I need to talk to your Librarian. Please.”
“The alchemist will remain here,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
I nodded. “The alchemist and the seer will both remain here.”
“The boy?”
I glanced at Quentin. “Will go where he chooses,” I said. Maida scowled, but didn’t argue. She knew she couldn’t, not without confirming aloud what Fiac already knew.
“Can you ask my guards to return if you see them?” asked Aethlin wearily. “Caitir is an excellent guardian, but she can’t do it alone.”
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