She beamed and turned the ledger around, opening it and reading aloud, “ ‘I, High King Clement Pemberton of Europa, do certify and attest that the High Kingdom of the Westlands has successfully petitioned for their independence as a noble demesne, to be ruled by their own power and to set their own laws and demands upon their citizenry. They shall no longer be subject to our law, nor heir to our kindnesses, but shall endure alone, and upon their own power. We guarantee to them as a condition of this decree that Europa will not make war upon them or seek to encroach upon their domain for a term of one hundred years as measured in the mortal world, unless there has been some disruption to the royal line as declared and agreed upon here.’ ” She looked up. “That’s fancy pureblood jerk talk for ‘we swear to leave you alone unless you depose the King we decided was a good idea. If you do that, we can do whatever we want.’ ”
“I picked up on that part,” I said dryly. “Is the whole thing like that?”
“Pretty much. You think the nobility is into being overly flowery today, you should go digging in the historical records.” She cleared her throat, then resumed, “As has been agreed upon by the Convocation of Crowns, the former regional Kingdom of Maples is henceforth to be dissolved and replaced with the High Seat of the Westlands, to be initially held by High King Oakley Sollys, with the throne to be passed along his descendant line according to the custom of our kind until such time as his line is sundered by either war or a failure to provide issue. In the event that High King Oakley is unable to perform his duties, and no male heir is available, the crown and throne will be passed to King Absalom Shallcross of Ash and Oak, who would have been named High King on this day had his land not been deemed unsuitable by the gathered Seers of the newly-formed Westlands, whose word was to be heeded . . .”
“Okay,” I said. “So if the High King died right now, it wouldn’t matter that Quentin isn’t here. He’s too young to inherit the crown, which means the line is broken, and the crown of the Westlands passes to Absalom Shallcross.”
“King Shallcross was the second candidate for the role,” said Fiac stiffly.
Something rustled in the stacks behind us, telling me my timing had been about as I’d hoped.
“Yes, but it’s bad wording.” I flashed Quentin a wry look. “It doesn’t cede the crown to his line; it cedes it to him in specific. Probably because Europa figured things would either go well or fall apart completely in pretty short order, and all the players they knew would still be on the board when the first High King Sollys got assassinated or caught syphilis or died from a staph infection or whatever they were into dying from in the Revolutionary days. So they bet on a horse they already knew and tried to prevent a crisis of succession in the process.”
“I fail to see the relevance,” said Fiac.
“Of course you do,” I said. “As long as you succeeded in assassinating the High King, you’d get to take over the Kingdom on the authority of the High King of Europa, and without an available heir, that would be the next best thing to Oberon himself stepping in and saying you were supposed to be in charge.”
Fiac blinked, staring at me for a moment like he couldn’t understand what I was saying. Then he sputtered, saying, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t I?” I shrugged. “I know the King’s seneschal was replaced, and I haven’t seen the Queen’s chatelaine at all, even though she should be glued to her side during a crisis like this one. She’s one of the only people who doesn’t look suspicious if she starts following the royal couple around, which means her absence indicates some difficulty in replacing her. Yenay, do you know what the Queen’s chatelaine is?”
“Honey?” she asked, voice blank with confusion. “She’s a Centaur.”
“That’s what the High King said, too. A Doppelganger couldn’t replace her if they wanted to. But they must have tried for someone other than Nessa in a high position. So who do you replace? Not the High Queen herself, she’d be caught in an instant. The Court Seer who everyone knows can’t be in the presence of falsehood without losing his shit, though? That’s a great cover.”
Fiac glared at me. I smiled sweetly.
“And you’re sort of stuck right now, because if you were Fiac, you’d be attacking me if anything I said was untrue, which means either you’re Fiac and I’m right, you’re also King Shallcross of Ash and Oak, or you’re not Fiac and it doesn’t matter if I’m lying, because you don’t have his magic, either in the positive or the negative sense. You’ve been faking it pretty well, but that’s not the same. So which is it?”
Quentin moved closer to me, eyeing Fiac sidelong, uncomfortable. He knew me well enough at this point to know that once I start breaking down the reason someone should be on the wrong side of my suspect list, I’m probably about to get stabbed.
Fiac scowled. “What leads you to this conclusion?” he asked.
“No competent seer would allow the King they served into a room with a known assassin present while searching for an imposter. There’s bad advice and then there’s ridiculously misguided advice that could lead to someone getting seriously hurt—as this did. You already knew the Doppelgangers were willing to use both physical weapons and poisons, and you still allowed the High King to leave himself underdefended in the face of the unknown. I’m told you’ve served both loyally and long, so tell me, how did that decision make sense?”
Yenay moved closer to me. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Gloating, a bit,” I said. “Antagonizing him, mostly. If I can get him angry enough, there’s a chance he’ll do something stupid, and then the fun begins.”
“You’re trying to get him to attack you?” Yenay sounded horrified, and more than a little confused.
“I’d like to wrap this up, so yeah, it’d be nice.” I smiled at Fiac. “Centuries of planning, time and resources and breeding, sweet Oberon, the breeding, doing exactly what your Firstborn commanded you to do, marrying a good Daoine Sidhe woman and getting yourself a crown, getting yourself within an assassination and a badly-worded founding document of the highest office in the land, and it gets fucked up by a changeling who wouldn’t be able to out-deduct the kids from Scooby-Doo. How does that feel? Bet it feels pretty lousy. Bet it makes you wish you’d chosen a different inciting incident, instead of waiting for the arrival of a convenient king-breaker. With the resources you have, you could have pulled this off, if you hadn’t been searching for someone to blame.”
Fiac’s eyes narrowed. Then he snapped, both verbally and literally.
“I have enough men still in this knowe to take it even with your meddling,” he said, reaching for his belt, which seemed bare, but nonetheless provided him with a knife when he pulled his hand away. It was a nice trick that I didn’t have time to fully appreciate. “The High King will die, and you’ll go down in the process of attacking the young Librarian who could have given your horrifying deception away.”
“Leave me out of this,” said Yenay, taking another step toward me. Apparently, she thought being closer to me was also worth being closer to Fiac. “I’m not a part of your power struggle.”
“You wouldn’t have been, if she hadn’t insisted on involving you,” snarled Fiac, gesturing for me with his knife. His face twisted, seeming to warp around the edges as he scowled. “This didn’t have to be so difficult, you know. If you’d been properly focused on getting married, like you should have been, I could have killed you all and spread the blame across the kingdom. No collateral damage. No need for anyone to suffer.”
“Mmmm, no,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I’m suffering if I’m dead. What do you think, sweetheart?”
“I think baiting a treasonous bastard into attacking you is a poor wedding gift,” said Tybalt, voice garbled from the effort of speaking around more teeth than his mouth was currently shaped to contain. He reached out and settled a hand on the air about two feet above Fiac
’s visible shoulder, tightening his fingers around an obvious obstacle.
“Pureblooded Cait Sidhe can see through illusions when they focus,” I said cheerfully. “Just in case you forgot that little tidbit.”
“I knew you were masked, but assumed it was cosmetic until I heard my lady’s line of questioning,” said Tybalt, tone reasonable. “I looked more closely once I realized there might be something to see.”
Fiac—who wasn’t Fiac at all—laughed. Actually laughed. “I heard the news about your mother,” he said. “It was carried all the way to the East Coast, faster than news ever travels. A new Firstborn! What a cause for celebration among those who’d never met her, what a cause for mourning among those who had.”
“If you think making fun of my mother is a good way to get under my skin, you’re dead wrong,” I said. “Making fun of my mother is a good way to make friends.” My hand inched toward my knife. I wouldn’t say that I was aching to stab something, but it would certainly have been a nice bonus to the situation.
“How shamed she must have been, to carry a mongrel child,” he continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “How painful for her to know that her bloodline, the flesh of her flesh, was trapped in a mortal vessel, doomed to die.”
“Not dying any time soon,” I said. “You made bad choices when you decided to use us as your scapegoats. I am not your excuse for regicide.”
“Oh, but you are. You just don’t realize it yet.” Fiac’s outline shimmered, growing taller, slimmer, altogether elongated, until his visible shoulder was settled firmly into Tybalt’s grasping palm, until nothing about him so much as resembled the Adhene Seer he had been masquerading as.
He was a beautiful man. Of course he was: all Daoine Sidhe are beautiful. Eira would have tolerated nothing less. His hair was the deep burnt orange shade of the perfect jack-o-lantern in waiting, and his eyes were only a few shades lighter, inhuman and compellingly bright. His clothes transformed with the rest of him, becoming the livery of a kingdom I didn’t recognize but assumed must be the lost, inconsistently lamented Ash and Oak.
He was wearing a crown. It was a nice touch, given everything else that had just happened.
“You have no idea what you’re toying with, little girl,” said the man—King Absalom Shallcross of Ash and Oak, I presumed. Yeah, making guesses doesn’t always pan out, but everything I had so far pointed to the man, and I like betting on the sure thing when I can.
“Neither do you,” snarled Tybalt, and whipped King Shallcross around so that they were facing each other. Tybalt’s illusion of civilization was slipping. His eyes had gone fully feline, pupils narrowed to hairline slits, and his mouth bristled with teeth. The stripes traveling along his cheeks and down the sides of his throat betrayed his tabby nature with perfect clarity. He looked like he was on the verge of losing control.
I wasn’t the only one who saw it. Yenay stepped forward, the precious ledger clutched to her chest like a teddy bear. “Please don’t get blood on the books,” she said, in a gasp. “They don’t deserve that.”
“Ask him where the Seer is,” I said.
Tybalt tightened his hand further on King Shallcross’s shoulder, claws breaking the other man’s skin. The smell of blood snaked its way through the room, savory-sweet and far more appealing than it had any right to be. I refused to turn my face away. This was part of my job more than it was part of Tybalt’s. This was my squire’s family and the throne I was ultimately sworn to.
“Your people have been replacing the loyal members of this household,” said Tybalt, and as he spoke his voice leveled out, teeth shrinking back toward their normal size. I guess now that I wasn’t in immediate danger of taunting my way into getting stabbed again, he didn’t feel the need to be quite as threatening. That was almost flattering. “Have they been killing them?”
“Not for the most part, and never directly,” said King Shallcross.
“The Doppelganger who replaced Nessa had set some pretty deadly traps in her quarters,” I said.
“Bah,” said King Shallcross. “Traps are not the same as murder, under the Law.”
I stared at him. “People died.”
“Yes, but they pulled the trigger themselves.” He turned toward me, expression unnervingly triumphant. That smug smile made me want to punch him right in the middle of his pretty, pretty face. “No one can be said to be responsible.”
Faerie doesn’t so much have a definition of “negligent homicide,” and I didn’t so much have a reason not to be punching him. Sure, he was a King, but he had no Kingdom, and I had an assortment of people with crowns who’d willingly pardon me for assaulting the man.
The feeling of his nose crunching under my fist was surprisingly satisfying. Tybalt actually let him go as he reeled backward, knocked off balance by the blow. Blood cascading down his face, King Shallcross lifted his head and stared at me.
I smiled at him, making deliberate eye contact as I raised my hand and licked the blood off my knuckles. It tasted of spruce and hazelnut, echoing the magic that eddied around the man when his illusions were released, and when I closed my eyes, I could see myself through his eyes, plain, unassuming knight of a backwater kingdom, named hero for political reasons, with a reputation all out of proportion to anything I could possibly have achieved. All those stories of me deposing corrupt monarchs and consorting with Firstborn were just that—stories, and the people who took them seriously deserved to be exploited and overthrown.
“What’s wrong with her?” demanded Absalom. “A changeling should never lay hands upon their betters!”
“I didn’t, and stay quiet, because if I lose this blood memory, I’ll have to hit you again,” I said calmly. “I may do that anyway, for the fun of it.”
He stopped talking.
“He heard we were coming because it wasn’t a secret, and he’s been waiting for a while for an opportunity,” I said, not opening my eyes. “Please understand that by ‘for a while,’ I mean ‘since the fall of Ash and Oak.’ Man’s been hiding in the royal kitchens for decades. They need to vet their people better.”
Especially considering that he couldn’t have done it without illusions and enchantments to make himself look like something other than one of the Daoine Sidhe. Even assuming no one in the knowe would have recognized the former king, which was a pretty big assumption, no one would ever believe a pureblooded Daoine Sidhe’s greatest aspiration was to serve under a Hob in someone else’s kitchen. It went against everything Eira had decreed for her descendants. He’d been hiding for well over a century.
The thought brought another rush of memories, feeling thwarted, overlooked, relegated to a place well below what he deserved by both the fall of his kingdom—brought about by its human occupants, and not his fault, no, not his fault in the slightest—and the knowe policy of hiring courtiers and guards from among the ranks of the nobility. He couldn’t even serve as a page without a household to support him, and so he’d been forced to clear tables and serve people whose station was below his own.
His rage and resentment, which had been building for years, had been given plenty of time to swell, curdle, and sicken him, destroying any vestige of the man who had once been noble enough to be considered for the high throne. Even his lady wife, the lovely Vesper, had left him alone in the wake of his kingdom’s fall, slipping away in the night without a—
I gasped, breaking free of the memory and opening my eyes. Tybalt was staring at me, visibly concerned. He had hold of Absalom again, one hand clasping each of the man’s shoulders. Absalom’s nose had stopped bleeding.
That was too bad. I needed more blood.
“Are you all right?” Tybalt asked, eyes never leaving my face.
“I’m fine, but I need more blood,” I said. “I lost the memory, and what I saw—I need to see more.”
“Very well.”
“No, not ‘very well,’ ” snapped
Absalom. “I am a pureblooded descendant of Eira Rosynhwyr! I demand to be treated as my position demands!”
“You are a king who ignored the warning signs when iron poisoning began to seep into your people, who allowed far too many to die when they could have been saved,” I said. “You are a small man rendered corrupt by power, only to see that power stripped away when you failed to protect it as you should have done. It’s not enough to convince people to put their faith in you. You have to keep earning it every day. You have to be good enough tomorrow for the people who chose you yesterday to know they were right and make the same choice again. You lost everything when Ash and Oak fell, and I can’t say yet whether I’m sorry or not. But people have died here, in this knowe, because of actions you took and choices you made, and I’d be a poor hero if I didn’t press on and verify the scope of the harm you’ve done. You will bleed for me. The only question is how voluntarily—and how much.”
Tybalt shifted his hand from one shoulder to wrap around Absalom’s throat, claws pricking against the skin. Absalom swallowed hard and thrust one arm out toward me, wrist turned toward the ceiling.
“Do as you must, filth,” he spat.
“Not sure I’d call me that with Tybalt holding onto you like that, but sure, you do you.” I drew my knife as I stepped forward, reaching out to take his hand. Carefully—more carefully than he deserved—I pressed the edge of the blade against the place where his hand met his arm, slicing shallowly across. Blood welled to the surface, and I pulled my knife away.
This time, I got a mouthful, and the memories washed over me in an immediate, bloody tide. As always, they carried a certain confusion with them—was I October Daye, daughter of Amandine, or Absalom Shallcross, son of Vitus? And did it matter, either way?
She is lovely, my lady, framed against the moon in the window of her bower, and I would die for her. I would kill for her—I have killed for her, a dozen men, to see the crown safely settled on my brow and its twin upon hers. She carries it as a queen should, my Vesper, my lady of the evening hour, with her pearly skin and her hair as black as polished coal, her manners finer than silk, her touch more precious than pearl—
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