A Red-Rose Chain

by Seanan McGuire

  “Yes, we are,” I said. “I doubt we’ll beat you there, but if we do, we’ll wait.”

  “I am a man beset by devils of my own making,” grumbled Tybalt. “Well, Sir Alchemist? Are you ready to call upon your aunt and change the world? Because I am ready to have this errand set and done.”

  “Coming,” said Walther. He grabbed his valise as he moved to stand next to Tybalt. “All you have to do is get me to the clearing.”

  “Let’s get out of here so Tybalt can ward the door.” I leaned up, kissed Tybalt on the cheek, and started for the exit. Quentin followed. I only looked back once, my eyes meeting Tybalt’s for a brief, painful moment. He didn’t like letting me go alone: that much was obvious to anyone who knew either of us. The fact that he was allowing me to walk away without him for backup twice in one day said more about the direness of our situation than anything else.

  May had been elf-shot. Walther was being watched for signs of treason. We couldn’t run back to the Mists, or war would follow—and now that I’d seen the way Rhys treated his changeling subjects and responded to any possible threat to his power, I knew the war would be brutal beyond imagining. Even if we rallied every possible ally to our side, called in the Undersea and the Court of Cats and Kingdoms both near and far, people would die. Elf-shot would rain down from the heavens, and there would be no escaping the carnage.

  Quentin offered me his arm as we left our temporary quarters, dressed for court, with our vials of countercharm tucked into our clothes. He was shaking a little, his nerves getting the best of him. I slid my right hand into position, using my left to gather my skirt enough to make walking easier. Doing this revealed my tennis shoes. Quentin glanced at them, blinked, and then snorted.

  “Really?” he asked. “You can’t even wear heels when your life is on the line?”

  “I can barely walk in heels,” I said reasonably. “I certainly can’t run in heels. Given a choice between shoes no one can see, but that don’t leave me at risk of a broken ankle, or tiny torture devices strapped to my feet, I’ll go with sneakers every time.”

  “Your mom didn’t do you any favors when she skimped on the early etiquette training,” he said.

  “No, no, she did not,” I agreed. “But on the plus side, if I were a more polite person, I wouldn’t be able to associate with most of my friends.”

  Quentin snorted, but didn’t say anything. We were well past the safe zone now; we had to assume Rhys was listening to everything we said, and watching everything we did, waiting for one of us to show weakness. It was an uneasy, awkward way to exist, and I had to wonder how his people could bear to live this way. I would have expected a lot more of them to follow the trail blazed by Walther and Lowri. Then again, maybe it had already been too late by the time most of them realized how bad it was getting. There were loyalty potions in the water, and no one was going anywhere without consent of the King.

  It was a good way to run a Kingdom without conflict or risk of political upheaval. How could anyone challenge your leadership when they were no longer capable of thinking for themselves?

  “Ever notice how the tenser Tybalt is, the more he sounds like he just escaped from a Jane Austen novel?” asked Quentin.

  “How many Jane Austen novels have you read?” I asked.

  Quentin shrugged. “A few. Enough. All of them.”

  “Got it. Yes, I’ve noticed. I think it’s endearing. Although it can get a little difficult to understand him sometimes. If you wind him up far enough, he stops making any sense at all.” I slanted a tight smile toward Quentin. “Wait for the wedding. I plan to get him so freaked out that he sounds like a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Emma.”

  Quentin snorted again.

  People began appearing in the halls around us as we drew closer to the dining hall. I kept my face turned forward but stole glances at them out of the corners of my eyes, trying to get an idea of what we were walking into. My ball gown would have been too much for a dinner at Shadowed Hills or in Arden’s Court, but here, I fit right in. Some of the women were wearing dresses infinitely more complicated than mine. Their outfits were made of feathers, stitched-together moth’s wings, snakeskins, and other, stranger things. I saw three separate women in gowns made of rose petals held together with tiny loops of silver wire, like floral chain mail. Several of the men were wearing vests of the same manufacture, making me suspect that this was a local fashion brought on by idleness and access to too many rose goblins. It was also, in an odd way, an insult to Ceres: no matter how hard she worked to grow her gardens, they would be decimated over and over again by courtiers looking for a new outfit.

  “Wow,” muttered Quentin, as a man walked by wearing a tailcoat that appeared to have been made entirely from evergreen boughs. “How does he get that to lay flat?”

  “Don’t know, don’t want to know, not going to ask,” I said, still watching the crowd.

  There was a homogeny to them that was even more unnerving than their attire. There were no changelings, and more, there were no visible mixed-bloods; no Centaurs with feathers in their hair, or Glastigs with white hair inherited from their Coblynau grandparents. Everyone in sight was pureblooded, and most of them were either Tuatha de Dannan or Tylwyth Teg. There were a few Daoine Sidhe scattered through the crowd, and seeing them made me realize what else was wrong: none of them had animal features. There were no Satyrs, Hinds, Fauns, or Huldra in the crowd. There weren’t even any Cornish Pixies or Harpies. Everyone fit the same basic mold of tall, bipedal, and pretty.

  It was weird, it was disturbing, and it made me wonder whether Lowri hadn’t been allowed to leave. Maybe all the part-animal fae in Silences had been “allowed” to leave, possibly with encouragement from their King. “We need to see those bodies,” I said, very softly.

  Quentin shot me a startled look, followed by a small nod. Even if he didn’t know what I was talking about, he was willing to go along with it. I appreciated that. He was a good squire, and he deserved better than me.

  There was a soft rushing sound beside me, like air being displaced, accompanied by the faint scent of musk and pennyroyal. I let go of Quentin’s arm and reached calmly out to my other side. As expected, Tybalt’s arm was right there, ready for my hand.

  “All is well?” I asked.

  “I don’t believe that statement can apply to our current situation, but my errands have been run, and I have nothing more to do apart from accompanying you to our repast,” said Tybalt.

  At the word “repast,” Quentin snorted for a third time. It was starting to become a habit.

  Tybalt blinked, looking around me to Quentin, who was once again staring innocently forward. I offered him a sunny smile. Tybalt shook his head, and turned his attention to the hall.

  It was a good thing, too: as we got closer to the dining room, the crowd grew even denser, until it seemed like everyone in Silences was there with us. Despite that, there weren’t that many people present—a quick count gave me somewhere between fifty and sixty warm bodies. That was a lot for a dinner party, but for a Kingdom that was pulling out all the stops to impress a visiting diplomatic detachment? It was about the same size crowd that Arden could have scraped up on short notice, and while she had an established Kingdom, she was severely understaffed where her actual Court was concerned. Once again, I found myself wondering just how small Rhys’ circles really were.

  Then again, if he was winnowing people as severely as he seemed to be, it probably shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise. If anything, the surprise was that he still had this many people he was willing to allow inside his knowe.

  “Be alert,” hissed Tybalt, next to my ear.

  “Way ahead of you,” I murmured, and stepped into the dining hall.

  The layout was very similar to the one from lunch, with long tables set up at the center of the hall in a neat square. No benches this time; instead, there were ind
ividual chairs, making it easier for the women to sit in their elaborate gowns, some of which could have taken an entire bench all by themselves. Once again, King Rhys and the former Queen of the Mists were seated behind a short table on the dais. There were no servers. Tables laden with platters of cold food, braziers of hot food, and pitchers of drinks had been arranged around the outside of the hall. No one was going near the food. Everyone who had arrived before us was milling around the tables, apparently waiting for someone else to sit first.

  Fine. If someone had to start the cascade, it might as well be us. I marched to the table closest to the dais, bowed deeply to King Rhys, and plopped my butt into the first open chair I saw, which just so happened to put me where I could keep an eye on our host and his companion. Smirking, Tybalt settled on my right, while Quentin took the seat to my left. King Rhys raised an eyebrow as he watched me sit. I smiled sweetly back at him, and waited to see what would happen next.

  I didn’t have to wait long. Rhys raised a hand in a seemingly casual gesture, and one of his servants all but materialized next to him, stepping out of the shadows behind the throne so quickly that if I hadn’t known better, I would have taken the girl for one of the Cait Sidhe. King Rhys murmured something to her, glancing meaningfully to me. The serving girl nodded, bobbing a curtsy at the same time, and stepped down from the dais.

  I didn’t say anything as she approached, but I sat up a little straighter, watching her approach. For what, I wasn’t sure, but when she finally reached me and spoke—in the small, trembling voice of a child who had been beaten too many times to ever truly believe in the absence of pain—I knew that I wasn’t ready.

  “The King requests the pleasure of your company at his table.”

  Oh, oak and ash. I glanced to Tybalt and Quentin. Both of them looked back at me, their expressions as close to blank as they could get them. If I didn’t know them as well as I did, I would have missed the tightness around Quentin’s lip and the fractional narrowing of Tybalt’s pupils. They knew this was a trap, even if none of us quite knew what sort of trap. And they knew, just as well as I did, that there was no way for me to avoid it.

  “I would be delighted,” I said solemnly, and rose, gathering my skirt in both hands to keep my fingers from shaking. The servant girl smiled in relief before turning to escort me to the dais.

  We were almost there when I realized the true nature of the trap. I couldn’t refuse to eat while I was in the King’s presence; it would be a grave insult to his hospitality, and the sort of thing that was just rude enough to be unforgiveable. At the same time, I couldn’t season my own food while I was sitting at the King’s table. It would be an insult to the King’s kitchens, and while that wasn’t quite as bad as insulting his hospitality, it sure as hell wasn’t good. I was stuck.

  Walther can make a counteragent, I thought, and stepped up onto the dais, where King Rhys’ smile was waiting to greet me.

  “Hello, Sir Daye,” he said. “I thought we could use this opportunity to talk—in full sight of your friends, naturally, since I doubt they would trust me to speak with you alone. I wanted to apologize again for the error involving your friend. I understand now that she wasn’t acting against the throne, but these are dangerous times.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, as neutrally as I could manage. “Dangerous times, indeed.” I sank into the seat at the end of the table, my mind racing as I tried to calculate doses and safe margins. Some potions were so potent that a single drop could be enough—like goblin fruit, where the smallest taste was enough to addict a changeling. Others required a higher dose. If I ate only sparingly, and restricted myself to things that I saw Rhys and the former Queen putting in their mouths, I might be okay.

  “You look nervous, October.” The former Queen leaned forward to smile at me around the King of Silences, her eyes narrowing in a way that was anything but friendly. “Is there something you had wanted to say to the King, perhaps? It’s never good to keep secrets from royalty. They always find out, in the end.”

  “Funny, that’s almost exactly what High King Sollys said when we presented Queen Windermere before him,” I said mildly. “He was really surprised to learn that King Gilad had had children before he died, and that we had plenty of proof those children existed. I guess he figured someone should have told him.”

  The former Queen’s eyes narrowed further. “I am a guest in these halls.”

  “Yes, and I’m a diplomat—which I’m sure you can agree is pretty ridiculous, since I’m about as diplomatic as a kick to the face, so hey. We’re all learning how to do new things.” I looked to King Rhys. “Of course I’m nervous, Your Majesty. This is a Kingdom of alchemists, and I’ve left my personal alchemist in our rooms to avoid offending you, after the little dustup we had earlier today. I didn’t want him getting arrested again. I’m sure you understand.”

  “I do, indeed,” said Rhys. “It seems you are lacking in certain defenses that one might have expected you to bring to such a formal and important meal.”

  “If you mean I can’t counter anything you decide to put into my food, you’re right.” I was tired. I was angry. I was done candy-coating things for this man, who seemed more amused by my attempts to be diplomatic than anything else. “I’m starving, and I’m afraid to eat.”

  “Well, we can’t have that,” he said. “It speaks poorly to my hospitality, and I’ll not have your mistress, however illegitimate her claims to my lady’s throne, say that we treated you poorly. May I assume your alchemist has provided you with a counter to anything I might have put in your meal?”

  “You can assume,” I said cagily.

  “Excellent. In that case please, feel free to use it however you like. Coat your cutlery in whatever powder or potion you have with you, and I will pledge, on my honor, not to slip anything into your meal that would be too powerful for a little country alchemist to overcome. I want to you to come around to my way of thinking fairly, Sir Daye, and not through the application of magics.”

  I blinked at him. I’d been expecting a lot of reactions to my sudden bluntness, but “okay, I promise not to drug you” hadn’t been on the list. “I . . . see,” I said finally.

  Rhys looked at me with something that might have been pity. “You don’t. You’re willfully blind, because you do not like my lady, and because you are accustomed to a Kingdom where things are done differently. You judge me by the standards of something I have never been. I’m sure you think me a despot, an uncaring tyrant who refuses to let his people have a voice of their own. You aren’t wrong. But you should also see me as a caring patriarch, someone who understands that he is in a delicate position. The old rulers, the ones who held this Kingdom before they were legitimately overthrown in a just war, they ruled carelessly. Few pureblood children were born, because they made no effort to keep the bloodlines clean. They allowed cavorting between fae of different races, ignoring what this would mean for the powers and stability of the children born to such unions. And changelings! They allowed their mortal-born children to aspire to places far beyond their station—no offense meant, of course, Sir Daye. Your case is somewhat different from the norm.”

  “Yeah, I guess Mom being Firstborn buys me a little bit of leniency,” I said.

  Rhys snapped his fingers. Servants began to approach the table, dishing delicacies onto his plate before serving me from the same dishes. The false Queen got a different assortment, but Rhys was apparently planning to keep his word to me: whatever I ate, he was also eating. I was still going to douse every bite with Walther’s counterpotion. There’s safe, and then there’s sorry. I prefer it when the two don’t meet.

  “You have been allowed to form some inaccurate ideas about the makeup of our world,” said Rhys. “My lady has always been generous to a fault when dealing with those who are of less power and importance than she is, and so she may have allowed you to dream above your station out of kindness, not malice. I can’t say
either way. But you need to understand that changelings are, by nature, transitory; they are here for the blink of an eye and no longer, and their wishes and desires cannot be allowed to shift Faerie away from its true course. Humanity is a disease. It thinks in hot, fast moments—too hot and too fast for Faerie, which requires cool languor to thrive. We can’t make decisions based on an uncertain future. We make them based on a present that will never end.”

  I blinked at him for the second time in almost as many minutes, trying to figure out what he was trying to say. Finally, I asked, “What, do you mean we shouldn’t listen to changelings because they’re mortal?”

  “Precisely so.” Rhys beamed at me like I was a child who had just managed to solve a particularly difficult math problem. “Changelings are temporary creatures, here to go. Fae are permanent. We live forever, and we should plan accordingly.”

  “So where do the prohibitions against crossbreeding come from?” My stomach was a solid knot, which solved my worries about the food nicely. I didn’t think I could eat if I wanted to. “If fae are permanent, shouldn’t you just be happy that they’re choosing to have children at all?”

  “My lady, beautiful as she is, should answer that question for you,” said Rhys. “Had her mother been Tuatha de Dannan, there would have been no way to steal her heritage from her. Anyone who looked upon her face should have known her for Gilad’s daughter, and known her claim to the throne for the valid thing that it was. Instead, her blood was such a jumble that a deceitful soul was able to pretend she had no claim to her own throne. Can you imagine how much easier Faerie would be if we didn’t blend and blur the forms we were intended to have? It would be the shining beacon it was meant to be, and not this . . . hodge-podge.”

  “Is that why there are no fae here with animal parts? Humans are animals, too, you know, and a lot of us sure do look human.” I pulled the pouch of powder Walther had given me out of the bodice of my dress and began sprinkling it over the contents of my plate. Maybe I wasn’t going to be able to choke anything down, but again, it was better to be safe than sorry.