Death's Mistress dbd-2

by Karen Chance

  “That’s different! I know what went into everything I sent you. It was safe—”

  “And ineffective.”

  She frowned. “Anything could be in there. I have no idea what ingredients Pip used. The recipes differ widely from family to family, which is why you get so many varieties of this stuff. And Pip never left any notes lying around.”

  “More’s the pity.”

  “You don’t get it, Dory. Drugs—and this can definitely be classified that way—often have a cumulative effect. Even the fey experience some mild side effects over time—”

  I laughed. “Mild for them, maybe. I’m not a fey.”

  “That’s my point! This is a controlled substance on Earth because it brings out latent magical abilities in humans. Before it addicts them and drives them insane!”

  “I’m not human, either.”

  “You’re half.”

  “Which is why I’m careful.”

  Claire’s eyes narrowed; something must have come through in my tone. “What have you been experiencing?”

  “As you said, some mild side effects.”

  “Like what?”

  “Heightened memories, mostly. With sharper sensations, Dolby surround sound, the works.”

  “Like hallucinations?”

  “Like heightened memories, Claire. It’s no big deal.”

  She didn’t look convinced. “And you can control them? You can snap out of these memories whenever you want?”

  “Yes,” I said easily. “Now, do you want to eat, or do you want to lecture me some more?”

  The look on her face said this wasn’t over. But her stomach growled, momentarily overruling her head. I flopped onto the love seat, passed around oyster pails, paper plates and chopsticks and we dug in.

  “God, I missed this,” she told me a few minutes later, her mouth full of chow mein.

  “What?”

  “Greasy human takeout.”

  “They don’t have the equivalent in Faerie?”

  “No. They also don’t have TV, movies, iPods or jeans.” Her hand ran over the threadbare denim covering her knee. “Damn, I missed jeans.”

  I laughed. “I thought you’d like being waited on hand and foot—”

  “And having servants follow me everywhere, and having to dress up every damn day and having everybody defer to me but nobody talk to me?” She rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah. It’s been great.”

  “Heidar talks to you, doesn’t he? And Caedmon?” Heidar was Claire’s big blond fiancé. Caedmon was his father, the king of one branch of the Light Fey.

  “Yes, but Heidar’s gone half the time, patrolling the border, and Caedmon’s holed up in high-level meetings deciding God knows what while I’m supposed to hang around and, I don’t know, knit or something!”

  “You don’t knit.”

  “I’ve been so bored, I’ve been thinking of learning.”

  “Sounds like you need a vacation.”

  She chewed noodles and didn’t say anything.

  I tugged off my boots and chucked them by the door, enjoying the feel of the smooth old boards under my feet. They’d absorbed a lot of heat through the day, and were giving it off in steady warmth that contrasted nicely with the cooler air. A few moths fluttered around the old ship’s lantern overhead, which was swinging slightly in the breeze.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” I finally asked, when Claire had finished most of her whiskey and still hadn’t said anything.

  She’d been staring out at the night, but now she shifted those emerald eyes to me. “How do you know anything is? Maybe I decided to take that vacation.”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “You keep odd hours sometimes—”

  “With no shoes, no luggage and no escort?”

  She frowned and gave it up. “I don’t want you involved in this. I only came this way because I didn’t have a choice. The official portals are all guarded since the war.”

  “The ones we know about,” I agreed.

  “I mean on the fey side,” she said, as if it were obvious that her own people would be trying to prevent her from leaving.

  “Okay, back up. You came through the portal in the basement—”

  “Because nobody knows about it. Uncle used it to bring in his bootlegging supplies, so he kept it quiet.”

  “And you needed to slip away unnoticed because…?”

  “I told you, I don’t want—”

  “I’m already involved,” I pointed out. “You’re here. You’re obviously in some kind of trouble. I’m going to help whether you like it or not, so you may as well tell me.”

  “I don’t want your help!”

  “I don’t care.”

  Claire glared at me. She had one of those faces that could really only be appreciated when she was animated. Ivory pale, with an aquiline nose humanized by a wash of freckles and a strong chin, it was pretty enough in repose. But with emerald eyes flashing, color high and that glorious mop of hair blowing around her face, she was beautiful.

  She was also one of the few people I knew with more of a hair-trigger temper than me. It was always possible to get the truth out of her, if you made her mad enough. “I’m here to save the life of my son. All right?” she snapped.

  CHAPTER 4

  I focused on the little boy. He was the usual pink-cheeked, chubby-limbed baby as far as I could tell. He was currently poking at a couple of chess pieces, trying to get them to fight each other.

  He had taken them out of the game and put them in the circle made by the round wicker bottom of the table. He was watching them avidly through the open side of his makeshift combat ring, waiting for some mayhem, but they weren’t obliging. One had hunched down to clean his sword, and the other was having a smoke. Tiny rings wreathed its head for a moment, before the wind pulled them away.

  “They’re friends,” I told him. He’d accidentally picked up two trolls instead of one of each.

  Puzzled blue eyes looked up at me.

  “They’re allies,” Claire said harshly, and a flash of comprehension crossed his features.

  A chubby hand rooted around in the game and plucked out an ogre, its small tusks gleaming behind a metal faceplate. He put it into the ring and immediately both trolls fell on it. He frowned and pulled one of them off, making it an even contest.

  “He doesn’t know the word ‘friend’?” I asked, a little appalled.

  “In Faerie, you have allies and enemies,” Claire said, getting up to get a refill. “Friends are a lot more rare.”

  Stinky had joined the little prince, and they had their heads together, one shining blond, one fuzzy brown with pieces of egg roll in it. I picked them out as Claire came back with what looked like a double. “He looks healthy enough to me,” I commented. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Nothing! And it’s going to stay that way.”

  “Why wouldn’t it?”

  “Because he had the bad luck to be born a boy,” she said bitterly.

  “Come again?”

  “The fey don’t allow women to rule—at least, our branch doesn’t—so a girl wouldn’t have been a threat.”

  “A threat to who?”

  “Take your pick! Everyone at court has had hundreds of years to make plans based on the idea of the king being childless. Then, a century ago, he had Heidar, but no one cared because he can’t inherit.”

  I nodded. Heidar’s mother had been human, and he’d inherited his heavier bone structure and more substantial musculature from her. It was the same blood that ensured he could never take the throne. The law said that the king had to be more than half fey, and Heidar was a flat fifty percent.

  “But then I came along,” Claire said, after taking a healthy swallow of her drink. “And I’m slightly more than half fey. So when Heidar and I announced that I was pregnant, everyone did the math and freaked out. Courtiers who’d hoped their daughters would snag the king realized that Caedmon had no more need to marry now that h
e had an heir through his son. The daughters in question, the male relatives who’d hoped to inherit if he died with no legitimate heir, the people who had spent a fortune sucking up to said relatives—they were all furious.”

  “But murder—”

  “The ‘accidents’ started almost as soon as he was born,” she said, quietly livid.

  “What kind of accidents?”

  “In the first month alone, he almost drowned in the bathwater, was set upon by a pack of hunting dogs and had the ceiling of his nursery collapse. And things only got worse from there.”

  “And Heidar didn’t do anything?”

  “The maid was fired, the dogs were put down and the ceiling was reinforced—none of which helped the fact that my son was surrounded by a bunch of killers.”

  I sipped my own drink for a minute, trying to think up a tactful way of putting this. It wasn’t easy. Tact was Mircea’s forte, not mine. “Is it at all possible that at least some of these things really were accidents?” I finally asked.

  “I’m not crazy, and I’m not hallucinating!” she snapped, her spine stiffening with a jerk.

  So much for my attempt at diplomacy. “I never said you were. You want to protect your child, and a mother’s instincts are usually pretty good. But you were born here. Heidar was brought up there. If he doesn’t think there’s a problem—”

  “Oh, he knows damned well there’s a problem! Everybody does, after tonight.”

  “What happened tonight?”

  “They tried again. And this time, they almost succeeded.”

  I sat up. “What happened?”

  She took a breath, visibly steadying herself. “I was on my way to dinner, but at the last minute, I decided to check in on Aiden. He was fussy—he’s teething, and he gets like that sometimes—and walking calms him down. So I took him for a quick stroll, and when I got back… God, Dory. The blood. It was in his room.”

  “Whose blood?”

  “Lukka’s,” she whispered. “I found her lying across the threshold of the nursery. They’d cut her throat and the puddle… It had run down the tiles, into all the crevices. Almost the whole floor was wet with it.”

  “Lukka was his nurse?”

  Claire nodded, her lips pale. “She was so young. I wasn’t sure, when they first brought her to me, but she was really good with him. The fey love babies and she couldn’t—” She swallowed. “She loved him,” she said simply. “And he wasn’t even there, and they killed her anyway.”

  “Who did?”

  “I don’t know!” She gestured tiredly. “It could have been anyone. There’s no shortage of people who think they’d be better off if Aiden had never been born.”

  “But it must have been someone Lukka could have identified, or there would have been no need to kill her.”

  “That’s what I realized, after. But then I just turned around and ran. I didn’t stop until I got to Uncle’s portal—”

  “That’s why you showed up with no shoes.” That was one mystery solved, at least.

  She nodded. “It’s over a mile from the palace, in the middle of some pretty thick woods. I lost them on the way.”

  “Doesn’t the palace have its own portal?”

  “Yes, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’d planned to come here anyway, and I guess it was stuck in my head, because I was halfway there before I even thought about it.”

  “You planned to come here?”

  “Yesterday, when we found out about Naudiz.” She said that like I should know what it meant.

  “I hate to sound like twenty questions, but—”

  Claire got up and started pacing back and forth along the porch. “It’s this rune. It isn’t even well carved, just a piece of stone with some crude scratches on it. Caedmon showed it to me once, told me it was part of a set that’s mostly lost now. Nobody seems to know where it came from; everyone I asked just said ‘the gods.’” She made a face. “But the fey always say that when they don’t know.”

  “And it’s important why?”

  “Because it’s been used for… well, pretty much ever, as far as I can tell, to guard the heir to the throne. He’s supposed to get it in a ceremony on his first birthday, or as soon as he’s able to withstand its magic. The legend says that whoever wears it can’t be killed.”

  “But it’s gone missing?”

  She nodded. “Aiden’s only nine months old, but he’s a big boy. So I petitioned to have the ceremony moved up. There was some muttering about protocol, but considering the number of ‘accidents,’ I managed to get my way. And then, the very next night, the relic vanished, right out of the family vault.”

  “Who had access to this vault?”

  “It was spelled. No one who wasn’t a close blood relative could get in.”

  “And how many would that be?”

  “Normally only two: Caedmon and Heidar. I couldn’t even go unless one of them was with me.”

  “Normally?”

  “Before Efridís came to court,” Claire said savagely. “She’s Caedmon’s own sister, and yet—I should have known. She’s Æsubrand’s mother!”

  I repressed a shudder. Æsubrand was a fey prince with a sadistic streak who had almost killed me the last time we met, playing what he’d considered a fun little game. I heal quickly—one of the few perks of my condition—yet I still bore the shape of a hand, faint and scar- slick, burned into the flesh of my stomach. His hand.

  Of course, the fey hadn’t given a damn about that, as human life, or what passed for it in their eyes, was hardly a valuable commodity. But they had cared very much whensubrand had tried to kill Caedmon. His father was king of a rival band of Light Fey, and I suppose he’d hoped to unify their two lands under one ruler someday. Or maybesubrand was just tired of waiting for his old man to kick off and decided to go conquer himself a country. Either way, Caedmon hadn’t been amused.

  “Tell me they executed that little shit.”

  Claire shook her head. “The Domi—that’s their council of elders—wanted to, but Caedmon vetoed it. Faerie is trembling on the brink of war as it is, and he was afraid that executing the Svarestri heir would tip it over into chaos.”

  “So what happened to him?”

  “They put him in prison, if you think having about twenty servants and the run of a castle qualifies!”

  “What the hell—”

  “It’s a hunting lodge, actually, but it’s as big as a damn castle.”

  “Why isn’t he in a cell somewhere?” I demanded. Preferably one with extra rats.

  “Because the fey don’t have prisons as we understand them. An offender is incarcerated for a short time pending trial, and then punished or executed. They really didn’t know what to do with him.”

  “So they did nothing? He tried to kill you!”subrand had hoped to eliminate his rival before he was even born by attacking Claire. He’d failed; we’d succeeded. So naturally he was the one sitting around in luxury, while I tried to come up with the money to get the roof fixed.

  “They publicly flogged him, and as the wronged party, I had to watch. He stared at me the whole time, with this faint little smile on his face.” She shivered.

  “They flogged him,” I said bitterly. “I’m sure that made a great—”

  I cut off because the porch winked out, between one breath and the next, taking Claire, the yard and the softly creaking swing along with it. For a moment there was nothing but a boiling black void, like the color of storm clouds against a black sky. And then the scene was slashed with light, with color, with alien sounds and smells, and I was standing in the middle of an open field.

  It was a glaringly bright day, the sun a hot coal directly overhead. Before I could get my bearings, rough hands shoved me up some crude wooden steps to the top of a platform. It was so newly built, I could smell the sawdust on the air, and see bits of it caught in the dry grass below.

  In front of me were stands filled with people sitting under bright canopies. The air was still, the sun
honey thick as it poured down, drenching us all in sticky heat. Yet no one moved, not even to wave a fan. There was no murmuring, no jostling, no talking, none of the raucous behavior of every other crowd I’d ever seen.

  But then, I’d never before seen a crowd composed entirely of fey.

  He’d been left in the clothes in which he’d been captured for over two weeks, dirty, bloodstained and rank after all this time. They were finally peeled off him, leaving him naked before the crowd. Like a common criminal about to receive sentence.

  His wrists were unclasped from behind him and secured to the top sections of an X-shaped rack. The muscles in his arms tightened and rippled as he jerked against them, uselessly. He felt the anger boiling up again, a fury no amount of shouting had been able to drain. That he should be here like this, while that thing sat in the stands…

  His legs were pulled apart and secured to the bottom sections of the rack. The rough wood had not been planed properly, and splinters ate into his flesh. Gnats buzzed around his face, crawled over his skin, and he was powerless to knock them away. And on the boards before the rack, placed so that he could see it, the whip lay coiled like a leather snake, waiting to strike.

  He ignored it and looked outward, slitting his eyes against the glare, searching the crowd. She wasn’t hard to find. The pale skin of his exposed flesh was burning, but at least he wasn’t sweating like the mongrel in the family box, perched next to that half-breed of a husband. The canopy over her head was not enough to keep her from staining her pale green gown. She shifted, looking anywhere but at him, her fingers curled tightly into her lap.

  It was a testament to the High King’s lust for power that he had brought such a thing into his court, polluting his line, sapping its strength. And now a full-blooded Light Fey prince was about to be whipped in front of a half-human, half-Dark Fey abomination. It was obscene.

  Soldiers guarded the platform, barring any possibility of escape, watching. The armor on their shoulders and arms, the swords at their sides, the peaks of their helmets all glittered in the glaring sunlight. Pennants and flags of blue and gold hung limp in the breathless air, waiting like everyone else.