A Red-Rose Chain

by Seanan McGuire

  “I’ll go let them know everything’s fine,” said May, pushing herself away from the bathtub and heading for the door. She patted Tybalt on the shoulder as she passed him, causing him to raise an eyebrow. Laughing, she made her exit, and closed the door as she went.

  “I may never understand that woman,” said Tybalt, walking toward the tub where I sat. “Then again, I may never understand any woman.”

  “Not even me?” I asked.

  “Especially not you,” he said, leaning forward to kiss my forehead. I tilted my chin back, and he kissed me again, this time on the lips. It was a glancing thing, but it made me feel better. “If I understood you in more than the most basic of principles, it would be a violation of the laws of nature, and the cosmos would be quickly thrown into disarray. What is that smell?”

  “Bubble bath, two kinds,” I said. “May was making sure I couldn’t smell anything else.”

  “Ah. She is a wise one, your incomprehensible Fetch.” Tybalt took a step back, leaning against the nearest wall and watching me. “You realize this has all been orchestrated, do you not? Even down to our places at the table.”

  “Yeah, I picked up on that.” I grabbed a sponge from the side of the bathtub, beginning to scrub off the last of the sticky film from the goblin fruit. “I can’t tell whether it was a test or a carefully designed humiliation, and I’m not completely sure it matters. The end result was the same.”

  “Ah, but you see, it does matter,” said Tybalt. He sat down on the rim of the bathtub, picked up another sponge, and began washing my back. “They only had one chance to do what they did today. You cannot forever be having things spilled upon you, or it becomes intentional offense. The glass was aimed at your clothing, to test your poise and self-control, but not at your face. Why not? That approach has worked in the past.”

  “Yeah, but with you right there, and Walther in the room, I wouldn’t have had the chance to really hurt myself,” I said. “We know blood stabilizes me, and I know you want me to be safe more than you want to not be bleeding. I would have stabbed you in the arm and used your blood to stay on an even keel until Walther could hit me with some alchemy.” He’d done it before. I had every faith he could do it again.

  “So they knew they could not reacquaint you with your old addiction—not in any way that would serve them—and with the false Queen having experienced your magic firsthand, they must also have been aware of the risk that you would simply become stronger in an effort to overcome the fruit.”

  I twisted to blink at him. “Say what?”

  Tybalt leaned over and tapped the point of my left ear. “A person would have to be blind of both the eye and nose to have missed the changes you’ve undergone these past several years, October. You have traded away slivers of your humanity for many things, all of them worthy, and I’d be lying if I claimed I was not glad. I prefer you among the living, and the more fae you become, the longer you’ll stay alive. But that is no matter. Every trade you make increases your power. You think they want that? The idea was never to addict you. It was to shame you, and to remind you that this place is not yours, it is theirs. Their blood is purer than yours, and things which can destroy you cannot hurt them.”

  “Gosh, Tybalt, if this is supposed to be a pep talk, you need to take a refresher course on inspiring the troops.”

  He smiled. “Ah, but you see, they neglect to remember that the opposite is also true. What can destroy them cannot hurt you, for you are fae and human at the same time, and your power is not theirs to claim.”

  I blinked at him, taking in his words. Then, slowly, I began to smile.

  The rest of the bath passed quickly, despite the natural distraction that Tybalt represented, and soon, I was out and dry and ready to face the rest of my day. Quentin and Walther were waiting when Tybalt and I emerged from the bathroom, Tybalt only slightly damp, me clean and peppermint-scented and wearing the clothes May had grabbed for me. She hadn’t bothered to pick up any trousers, but the blouse was long enough to hang to my knees; I wasn’t worried about showing anything I didn’t want people seeing.

  Walther was pacing when I stepped into the room. He stopped when he saw me, visibly relaxing. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Damp and cranky, but I’ll survive,” I said, heading for the wardrobe. “Quentin? You okay?”

  “I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to plot regicide,” he said. My squire was obviously fighting to control his voice, which seemed to be on the verge of breaking. He had mostly finished puberty, but sometimes little reminders of how young he was would find a way to slip through. “He laughed, Toby. After you and Tybalt left? Walther and I had to walk out on our own, and he was laughing. Like it was the funniest thing that had ever happened.”

  I didn’t have to ask to know which “he” Quentin was referring to. I changed directions, walking over to the bed instead, where I put my arms around my squire and squeezed tightly. Quentin returned the hug with obvious relief.

  “Let him think that it’s funny,” I said. “It’s going to be one of the last jokes he ever makes.”

  “I still think it’s inappropriate for me to plot regicide,” said Quentin.

  “So don’t.” I let him go. “Regicide is nowhere near as much fun as a good, old-fashioned deposing.” I turned to the wardrobe and began digging through my heaped-up clothes.

  “Are you planning to replace every monarch on the West Coast?” asked Walther. “Not that I automatically disapprove if you are, I just need to know if I’m clearing my calendar for the next few decades.”

  I paused. Was I planning to replace every monarch on the West Coast? I had never thought of myself as the sort of person who reshaped the political landscape . . . but then again, I’d been doing it all along, hadn’t I? Even getting knighted was an act of political rebellion, in its way. I’d accepted the title because I’d wanted to be safe from the sort of people who thought changelings were all disposable. But it hadn’t stopped there, and I had already toppled one queen who didn’t deserve her throne.

  She wasn’t the only one in Faerie who didn’t deserve a throne. King Rhys of Silences had been hand-picked for the position he now held. Under him, changelings were worse than second-class citizens. They never had a chance. But that didn’t mean that we could just walk into his house and start questioning whether or not he had the right to keep it.

  “I don’t know that we’re ever going to depose another monarch,” I said carefully. “Right now, we’re here to prevent a war, and that’s what we’re going to focus on. But when this is over, and we’re not all spilling our literal guts out on the battlefield, I think it might be time to take a trip to Toronto and talk to High King Sollys about the validity of Rhys’ claim to Silences. He was given the throne by someone who didn’t have the right to her own crown. It’s possible that a member of the old royal family could just . . . step in.”

  All eyes went to Walther. I took the opportunity to pull my jeans on and tuck my blouse in, creating a faintly old-fashioned, but acceptable level of decency.

  Walther shook his head. “Don’t look at me,” he said. “Even if you deposed the man, I couldn’t inherit. I keep telling you, I’m several steps away from the line of inheritance. I’d be no more legitimate than he is, and besides, I’m on a tenure track. It’s important that I stay in Berkeley.”

  I blinked. “That may be the best reason for not wanting to be King that I’ve ever heard. ‘I’m going to get tenure.’”

  “It’s true.” Walther shrugged. “So what are we going to do now?”

  “The same thing I always do,” I said, selecting a lace-up bodice from the wardrobe and sliding it on. “I’m going to go annoy the crap out of the nobility. Now somebody lace me into this thing.”

  TEN

  I WALKED DOWN THE DESERTED hall toward King Rhys’ receiving room with Tybalt on my arm and Walther following two paces behind
. Quentin was off with May, exploring the knowe. As my squire, he could be reasonably expected to be running around and doing the tasks I didn’t want to bother with, and as a pureblood, he was going to be in less danger than a changeling manservant would have been. I’d still insisted he take some of Walther’s powder with him, just in case somebody tried to force him to have a friendly cup of tea or something. The thought of Quentin being dosed with a loyalty potion was enough to make my skin crawl.

  “I wonder how big this Court really is,” I commented mildly, looking at one of the blank walls. I’d never been in a knowe this size with so little decoration. It was like Rhys had ordered the whole thing from Castles R Us, and then never bothered to swing by the local Bed, Battlements, and Beyond for the accessories he’d need to make it believable.

  “In what regard, my dear?” Tybalt’s tone was artificially plummy and tolerant, like he was speaking to a child he suspected of being slightly slow. I wrinkled my nose, resisting the urge to burst out laughing. We were almost certainly being listened to, and speculating about the size of the Court, while rude, wasn’t seditious or otherwise inappropriate . . . except in that it could be considered speculation about the size of Rhys’ army.

  “Well, I know about how many purebloods there are in the Mists, not counting the Selkies or the Undersea,” I said. It was always easy to forget, embroiled as I was in the courts, how few purebloods there actually were. Humans outnumbered them by a factor of tens of thousands. Changelings could have outnumbered them, too, if we’d ever cared to pull away from our human friends and pureblood masters and become an organized force. Luckily for the status quo, most of the changelings I knew were too busy keeping body and soul together to waste their time on sedition. “Silences is a smaller Kingdom, isn’t it? So maybe that explains why the halls are so empty.”

  “Silences is a smaller Kingdom, but Portland is the biggest city in Silences,” said Walther. “I know a lot of the local fae don’t necessarily take part in Court. That’s true in the Mists, too. I think what you’re seeing is just the effect of a high turnover in the higher social classes during the war. People who used to be held in good standing aren’t always anymore, and some of the nobles who managed to keep their places did so by keeping their heads down and not drawing attention to themselves.”

  “Oh,” I said, and looked thoughtfully around the hall again, trying to fill in the spaces between his words. I knew people, like Walther and Lowri, who had come from Silences; purebloods who had chosen to move to other Kingdoms rather than stay where they were. But I didn’t know anyone who had chosen to move to Silences. All the mobility seemed to be in the wrong direction.

  Idly, I wondered whether King Rhys had one of the still-missing hope chests. If he could turn changeling children into pureblood fae, he might be able to solve his population problem. Of course, he’d have to deal with the fact that his populace had all started out part-human, which might be a bit much for him, given his prejudices, but who knew? Maybe he could adjust.

  Two men in full Silences livery were standing outside the receiving room doors when we walked up. One of them looked me up and down, not making any effort to hide his dismay at my blue jeans and bodice. I thought I actually looked pretty good, all things considered. They were dark jeans—the only formal way to wear denim, according to my ex-boyfriend, Cliff, who had worn jeans every day while we were together—and my bodice was a lovely shade of wine red, holding everything in place without turning my breasts into the stars of the show. It seemed more inspired by mortal ideas of the Middle Ages than by actual pureblood fashion, and I appreciated that, too, since the entire point of the outfit was reminding them that they weren’t dealing with their own kind. They were dealing with me, and I was done playing around.

  “Sir October Daye, Knight of Lost Words and diplomatic representative for Her Majesty Arden Windermere, Queen in the Mists,” I said, without preamble. “I am accompanied by King Tybalt of the Court of Dreaming Cats, and attended by my alchemist, Walther. I would like to see your liege now, if you would be so kind as to open the doors for us.”

  The guard who had been sneering at my clothes blinked. Apparently, whatever he’d been expecting me to say, it hadn’t been that. “King Rhys is otherwise occupied,” he said.

  “Does he get to do that?” I raised an eyebrow as I glanced to Tybalt, my tone making it clear that my question wasn’t really a question. “I don’t think he gets to do that.” I turned back to the guard. “I am the diplomatic representative for Queen Arden Windermere, recognized by High King Aethlin Sollys as rightful ruler in the Mists. Your King has declared war on her Kingdom, which makes her sort of cranky. That’s why I’m here. We’re hoping this can be resolved without resorting to actual bloodshed since, well, blood is so messy, don’t you think?” I took a step toward the guard, who shrank back.

  The Luidaeg would have been so proud of me in that moment. Her little troublemaker, all grown up and complicating lives on a grander scale than ever.

  “So here’s how this is going to go,” I continued, not giving the guard a chance to speak. “You’re going to open the door. You’re going to let us through. You’re going to remember that we’re here under the rules of formal hospitality, and that barring our way could be viewed as an act of aggression against the Mists. Do you really want to do that? Aggress against us when we’re in that polite three-day period between you being dicks and us being allowed to kill you for it?” I was bluffing. I wasn’t sure aggressing against us was a bad thing at this stage, since Silences had declared war—it seemed a little unrealistic to expect them to worry about our feelings when they were planning to march in and start slaughtering us.

  Thankfully, the guard didn’t call my bluff. He fell back another half step, shooting a glance at his compatriot, who seemed to be doing his best to ignore what was going on. I guess when you’re not the person being advanced on by the scary changeling, there’s very little motive to intervene.

  “Apologies,” said the first guard. He stepped to the side, grabbed the door handle, and pulled.

  I didn’t say anything. I just offered him a thin smile, placed my hand back on Tybalt’s arm, and proceeded onward.

  The receiving room was the room where we had been taken upon first arriving in Silences. Velvet and tassels threatened to strangle the walls. The hardwood floor was polished bright as a mirror. I had to take extra care not to slip as we made our way across the room to the dais where Rhys waited. The last thing I needed was to fall on my face in front of him. He presented exactly the picture I’d been expecting, seated proudly on his golden throne. What I hadn’t been expecting was the woman who sat beside him on one of the dignitary’s chairs, although in retrospect, I should have been: the false Queen wasn’t the sort of woman who would allow herself to be left out of a war of her own devising.

  Marlis was standing at attention to the left of the dais. As we approached, she said, loudly, “Sir October Daye of the Mists. King Tybalt of the Court of Dreaming Cats.” Walther, it seemed, did not deserve an introduction. I searched her face, looking for any flicker that she recognized the man she was failing to announce. It wasn’t there.

  “Ah, Sir Daye, how lovely to see you again,” said King Rhys, before allowing his eyes to travel the length of my body. He raised his eyebrows slightly, as if surprised. “Were you unable to pack sufficient clothing for your trip? My court tailors would be happy to help you with any deficiencies in your wardrobe. Simply send your lady’s maid to them, and they will provide whatever your heart desires.”

  “I’m good,” I said. “It’s sort of hard to do much in the kind of dresses people keep trying to put me into, you know? Jeans are much more convenient.”

  “Convenient, yes; respectable, no,” said the false Queen. She leaned back in her chair and snapped her fingers, a cold smile on her face.

  The changes I had made to her blood had echoed through her flesh and into her magic.
Some of those changes were good ones. She could no longer command people with her voice, could no longer compel us to attack our loved ones or forget our places in the world. Some of those changes were less positive. A cloud of mist enveloped me, so sudden and thick that I found myself separated from Tybalt even though I would have sworn that I hadn’t moved at all. I realized, to my dismay, that I didn’t really know what Sea Wights were capable of. They were technically Undersea fae, and I had never encountered a pureblood.

  “He’ll leave you before this is done, you know,” murmured the false Queen’s voice, from deep inside the mist. The air smelled of rowan and tasted of the sea, an indefinable flavor that was salt and rot and petrichor and a thousand other things, all of them mingled into a single element. “He’ll leave you to drown, and he won’t be there to save you.”

  “I’ve never needed to be saved before.”

  “Oh, my dear. My dear, my delusional darling, no. That’s where you’re wrong. You have never been the golden-haired girl in skirts of green, and you are always the one who must be saved.”

  As suddenly as it had come, the mist was gone. My hand was back on Tybalt’s arm, and he was frowning at me, eyes narrowed in anger and suspicion. I forced myself to keep my chin up, not allowing myself to look down at my clothing. I could already tell, from the feeling of fabric hanging around my legs, that it had been changed.

  “You know I hate it when you do that,” I said, eyes fixed on the false Queen. She was reclining in her seat, a smug expression on her face. There was a time when that look would have caused me to compare her to a cat, but I had gotten to know the Cait Sidhe a lot better since then—all sorts of Cait Sidhe, not just my childhood friend, Julie—and I knew no cat could ever match her for underhanded treachery. They could be deceitful, sure, but it wasn’t the same thing.

  When the Cait Sidhe came to kill you, they did it with tooth and claw, and they did it in the open. They didn’t do it with words and dresses and slander.