A Red-Rose Chain

by Seanan McGuire

  Marlis’ head snapped around, eyes narrowing as she focused on him. “My name is Marlis,” she spat. “As for King Rhys, he is preoccupied with the preparations for war, and as he had no need for me, he generously allowed me to come and see my old nursemaid. Now rise, and answer for your trespasses!”

  “No,” said Walther mildly. “Eat a cookie. We saved the saffron ones for you. I know those were always your favorite. Here.” He reached for the tray of yellow cookies. It was only because I was so close to him that I saw the light dusting of powder fall from his hand to mingle with the thin layer of powdered sugar atop the cookies as he picked up the tray and held it out toward his sister. He was using the countercharm.

  Ceres was as close to him as I was: she must have known what he was doing. She didn’t say anything about the powder. She just took another sip of her tea and said, “You’re too tense, my darling. Have a cookie. Stop threatening my guests, who are here by my invitation, and not for any other reasons.”

  Marlis hesitated. At least she took her hand off the hilt of her sword. I appreciated that.

  But Ceres wasn’t done. “If you do not have a cookie, I’ll have to assume that you don’t respect my hospitality, and remember that slight when next you seek solace in my chambers. I love you, Marlis, but you’re not the girl I raised. You haven’t been since that outland King came and took your open eyes away.”

  “I don’t believe this,” muttered Marlis. She strode across the room and snatched two cookies from the tray—one in each hand. Taking a large bite of the first, she chewed with an exaggerated motion meant purely to make sure we all knew that she was eating the cookie. Ceres watched without comment.

  Marlis swallowed.

  “See? You always feel better when you have a cookie.” Walther picked up one of the purple cookies. Following his lead, I snagged a pink one and took a bite. Candied rose. Naturally.

  Marlis looked at him blankly. There was an open confusion in her face that hadn’t been there a moment before, like some thin, undefinable veil had been stripped away.

  “Have another cookie, dear,” said Ceres, her voice holding the note of command that has been used by parents and teachers since the beginning of time.

  Automatically, Marlis put her second cookie in her mouth. This time, her chewing was less exaggerated and more mechanical, like she didn’t know exactly what she was doing. Ceres glanced to Walther.

  “What did you do to your sister?” she asked.

  “Isn’t that a question that should have been asked before you fed her the second cookie?” I asked. “As, you know, a thought?”

  “Walther has never poisoned Marlis before, so it seemed unnecessary,” said Ceres.

  I really didn’t have an answer for that. I sat silently for a moment, trying to come up with one, before I finally shrugged and reached for another of the rose cookies.

  “Do I know you?” Marlis was still staring at Walther, making no effort to hide her confusion. “Do I . . . you look like my cousin.”

  “It’s me, Marley.” Walther put his last cookie down and stood. They were almost the same height. She was a tall woman, and he was of relatively average height, for a man. Expression sheepish, he spread his hands, and said, “I go by Walther now—that’s my name—but you used to call me ‘Waltrune.’ If that helps.”

  “Truny?” Marlis squinted at him, like she was trying to confirm what he was saying to her. “But that’s silly. Truny was my sister.”

  “And now I’m your brother,” said Walther. “Technically, I always was. I just needed some time to get that sorted out properly. I thought you were going to run. I ran, because I thought you were going to run.”

  “I couldn’t leave the rest of our family behind; I told you I was going to run because I didn’t want you to wait for me,” said Marlis. “You were my baby sister. It was my job to look out for you. That meant getting you out of the Kingdom before the new regent took—Waltrune, really? Are you really Waltrune?”

  “Not anymore, and always,” said Walther. He offered her his hands, smiling. “It’s good to see you, Marley. I’ve missed you.”

  “I . . .” Marlis took his hands, and frowned. “What did you put in the cookies?”

  “Standard anticompulsion charm. If you were being compelled by King Rhys—and of course you were being compelled by King Rhys—it would cancel out the potion. Who does he have making his tinctures, Marley? I thought the whole family was asleep, except for you.”

  “Yes, except for me,” she said bitterly. “I do all his blending and brewing and binding. Just me, in Mother’s workroom, enspelling a Kingdom for the sake of a man who should never have sat this throne.” She gasped then, yanking one hand free and clapping it over her mouth. “Oh, sweet Oberon, those words just left my mouth. Truny, what have you done? What have you done to me? He’ll know! I’m his seneschal, his eyes are everywhere, and he’ll know! My disloyalty will be punished!”

  “His eyes are not here,” said Ceres calmly. “His eyes have never been here. I am on these lands at his sufferance, or so he pretends, but he knows full well that he’ll never move me if I do not wish to be moved. My roots are deep in this land. I support his kingship solely to retain access to the castle where my charges sleep. They deserve more than to have me desert them before they wake and remember me.”

  “But his eyes are everywhere else.” Marlis lowered her hand. “He’ll know. He’ll know.”

  “Only if you slip up,” I said, finally interposing myself into the conversation. I pushed my chair back and stood, offering Marlis my hand. “Hi. I feel like we didn’t really meet before. I’m Toby, I’m a friend of your brother’s, and I’m here to keep the man who’s been drugging you from leading your Kingdom to war against mine.”

  “Marlis,” she said, taking my hand and shaking. Then she laughed bitterly. “And he only drugged me once. Maeve knows who mixed the potion for him, but it was strong, and it worked well, and my resistance disappeared like sugar on the snow. I’ve been drugging myself to make him happy ever since.”

  I couldn’t quite conceal my wince. It was an elegant solution to the captive alchemist: drug her into loyalty and then tell her that the thing you wanted most was for her to drug herself better. “All right. Do you remember what you did while you were drugged?”

  She grimaced and turned her face away without answering me. Which was an answer in itself.

  “Walther tells me you weren’t in line for the throne of Silences, but that you were more sort of . . . throne adjacent. That means you learned the manners and the dances and the rules right alongside your cousins, because you were always going to wind up being seneschal, or court alchemist, or whatever, right? Well, that means you know how to play a role. That’s all court politics are. A great big game of let’s pretend where winning means you don’t get your head chopped off this round.”

  Marlis slowly turned back around to look at me. “Go on,” she said.

  “Just play the role of a good, chemically modified seneschal,” I said. “No one in this room is going to get mad at you for pretending Rhys is still the boss of you. It’s the only sensible thing to do.”

  “But the only reason for me to go back to him, to not flee the Court at once for fear of discovery, is to foment revolution,” said Marlis. “Are you asking me to join a conspiracy against my King?”

  I grimaced. “Not in so many words, but sort of, I guess. I’m here to prevent a war, through whatever means necessary.”

  “Trust October to feel that dethroning a monarch to prevent a small border skirmish falls under ‘whatever means necessary,’” said Tybalt, sounding amused. He was still seated, as was Ceres. I shot him a look. He smiled at me, and took one of the saffron cookies.

  “Cats,” I muttered, looking back to Marlis. “You don’t have to help us. I’d ask only that you not work against us too enthusiastically. The woman who has the Kin
g’s ear was never rightful Queen in the Mists. She has no claim to the throne.”

  “But she gave our throne to Rhys,” said Marlis hotly. “If she had no claim to her own, how could she have given ours to him?” The way she said “our” made it clear that she meant her family’s throne, and not just her Kingdom’s.

  “At the time, she was Queen, and no one was questioning her, maybe because we’d just had half our Kingdom fall down and catch fire in a giant earthquake. That sort of thing makes people pretty tired,” I said. “After that, she had just been in charge for so long that nobody questioned her about whether or not she had a right to be there.”

  I certainly hadn’t. Not until she’d forced my hand. Even then, all the questioning in the world wouldn’t have done me any good if not for the Luidaeg, who had stepped up to make sure I knew Arden wasn’t dead. A lot of factors had combined to see the nameless Queen relieved of her throne. As I watched Walther and his sister starting to reconnect, I wondered how many of those factors were combining right in front of me. Silences was a corrupt house. It needed cleaning.

  “If you keep doing this, monarchs will cease allowing you to enter their demesne,” murmured Tybalt, voice low enough that I knew his words were intended for me alone.

  I snorted. “This is the first time I’ve ever left the Mists. I don’t think it’s something we need to worry about becoming a habit.”

  “Everything about which you have ever said, ‘oh, this will not become a habit, no, not for me’ has become a habit—even me,” said Tybalt. “My little king-breaker.”

  I twisted to wrinkle my nose at him. Before I could say anything, Marlis said, “She’s already got that reputation.”

  “What?” I looked back to her, blinking. “What do you mean?”

  Marlis shrugged. “Rhys speaks freely in front of me. He knows I’m too deeply enspelled to turn against him, and I think it amuses him to stand before the last waking member of the royal family—however removed from the throne—and speak of things I’ll never have, or even remember wanting. When the Queen in the Mists sent notice that she was dispatching a diplomatic team, and that you’d be leading the group, he went white as whey and started whining about what you’d done in the Mists. He’s afraid of you. It’s why he orchestrated that spill at breakfast. He wants to get you out of here as fast as possible.”

  So Rhys had been lying about being surprised by my arrival. Somehow, that wasn’t all that shocking. “All he has to do to get me out is agree not to go to war against the Mists,” I said. “It’s that simple.”

  She shook her head. “Even if it were that simple,” and her voice told me it wasn’t, not really, “he wouldn’t do it. He seeks the favor of your deposed Queen. He took this throne for her. And for power, of course—some men will do anything for power—but the power he wanted was the power of sitting at her right hand, in his homeland, not being exiled to kingship in our damp and forested lands.”

  “Careful, Marley,” said Walther. “You’re starting to sound like you agree with him.”

  Marlis turned to look at her brother. There was no anger in her eyes: only bone-deep exhaustion, and the quiet resignation that comes with too many defeats. She had the eyes of a woman who’d never won anything in her life, who’d simply stepped through the patterns that were demanded of her, all the while praying she could survive them. “A hundred years,” she said softly. “More than a hundred years. I held our mother down while his people stabbed the arrow into her shoulder, less than a decade past. You got away. You became the man you’d always wanted to be. You grew up. I didn’t. I stayed here, with the man who overthrew our family, and I learned to be a pet. You were my little sister, but if we compare the things we’ve seen, the things we’ve done . . . I’m the little sister now. I can’t say whether I agree with him or not, because I haven’t been allowed to have my own ideas about anything in a hundred years.”

  Walther paled. “Marley, I’m sorry. I didn’t . . . I didn’t think . . .”

  “Why should you? You’re the one who got out. Did you ever even look for me? Or did you just assume I was in hiding somewhere, because if you really looked, you knew you’d find me here?” Marlis shook her head. “I’m not mad at you for getting away. I could never be mad at you for that. But I’m disappointed that you’re so quick to point fingers at me for echoing the only opinions I’ve been allowed to have for a century.”

  “Okay, let’s all take a breath.” I stood, taking a step forward—not quite putting myself between them, but making myself much harder to ignore. “I’m sorry, Marlis. This has been a long night, and it’s not over yet. We didn’t know how bad things were here.”

  “Silences keeps to itself,” said Marlis bitterly. “We always have. We were that quiet alchemist’s Kingdom before Rhys took over, and now we’re just quiet because we have nothing to brag about. All our friends and allies left us. The Cu Sidhe. The Huldra. All of them turned and walked away, and left us. All the ties we worked so long to build have been severed. Everything our family built has been broken.”

  “Maybe we can put it all back together,” I said. “We have glue. You said they made you help put the members of the royal family back to sleep when the elf-shot wore off?”

  Marlis nodded. “Our mother and father; our aunt and uncle, the rightful Queen and King of Silences. And our cousin Torsten, the Crown Prince. If they ever woke . . .”

  “If they woke, they’d be within their rights to try to take back their throne, especially now that we know that the woman who gave it to Rhys didn’t have the authority to make that sort of decision,” I said. “They’re all alive? None of them have been injured too badly?”

  Marlis looked away again.

  I frowned. Walther, on the other hand, seemed to know what her silence meant. “Marley, what did they make you do?” he asked, voice barely rising above a whisper.

  I appreciated the fact that he hadn’t asked her what she’d done—what she had done was have a century of her life stolen from her by drugs that she’d been forced to manufacture—but the message was the same. Marlis dropped her head, looking down at her feet. She stayed that way, silent as a statue, while Ceres rose from the table and walked around to stand behind her, putting her hands on the smaller woman’s shoulders.

  “Your mother was Amandine of Faerie, was she not?” Ceres asked, attention fixing on me. “She must have taught you the importance of blood.”

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea,” I said. Amandine hadn’t taught me much at all about the importance of blood—or the importance of anything else, really. Amandine’s lessons had always focused more on how much of a disappointment I was to her, too fae to be human, too human to be fae. The fact that she’d chosen my father without any input from as-yet-unborn me didn’t seem to be a factor in her judgments.

  “Then you know that some potions work better when they contain it. Some potions wouldn’t work at all without it. And if blood is good, bone could be said to be even better . . .”

  I went very still. Her words made sense, taken individually, but as a whole, they painted the beginnings of a picture that I didn’t want to see.

  Oberon’s Law forbids killing. Just killing: nothing more, nothing less. Elf-shot is allowed. Loyalty potions and brainwashing are allowed. And anything that doesn’t quite kill, well, that’s all right, too. That’s not a death. All he ever told us not to do to each other was murder. Everything else is still on the table.

  “How much, Marley?” asked Walther softly.

  “Uncle Holger’s left hand, to the elbow; Mother’s right foot, to the knee. An inch at a time, over the course of a century. He . . . he likes to talk about how much he wants their eyes, their tongues, all the pieces that could make the potions stronger, but he won’t take them. Not yet, not while anyone remembers the war. He leaves them lying on their biers in the crypt. He says anyone who wants to see the faces of their old oppress
ors is welcome, and he makes me take people down to see them. Sometimes, if they’re trying to curry the King’s favor—and everyone wants to curry the King’s favor, because the only thing worse than having it is knowing that you never will—they spit on them. They spit on our family, Wal—Walther. Even people who should still be loyal spit on our family, because doing anything else risks the King’s wrath, and I just . . . I did it, I didn’t tell him no, and I didn’t even think that what I was doing was wrong, because he t-told me to . . .”

  Finally, at the end of her speech, Marlis burst into tears. Walther put his arms around her and held her close, letting her sob out a century of abuse and frustrations against the fabric of his shirt. Marlis clung to him like she was afraid he was an illusion. I couldn’t fault her for that. After as long as she’d been dealing with King Rhys and his loyalty tinctures, anything that smacked of freedom or independent thought had to feel like a dream—a beautiful one, but not one that could ever possibly last.

  Ceres stepped away from the pair, moving to stand next to Tybalt and me. “If you have any compassion in your bones, you will fix this,” she said mildly.

  I started, glancing up at her. “What?”

  “You are, as your cat says, a king-breaker. You defeated my father. You’ve done impossible things, and I choose to view your presence here as the beginning of one more impossibility. You could free Silences.”

  “I’m not sure how you’d want me to do that,” I protested. “I’m just one person. I don’t have an army.”

  “You have a King of Cats and an alchemist who has spent a hundred years perfecting his craft,” said Ceres implacably. “Even if this were all your resources, here in one room, you would have the makings of a revolution.”