“Why didn’t you bring this up before?”
She looked flustered. “To be honest—and I can’t be anything but honest—I forgot. It’s been so long since anyone has used them for anything, and they were always such a small magic. They didn’t seem worth remembering.”
That was sadly easy to believe. “What would I need?”
“To make the ring, intent, the right materials, and a small amount of power—a trickle, really. The ring itself is the key. The ring is what magnifies and intensifies the ritual. That’s how a simple spell could hold someone captive for a hundred years. Look.” The Luidaeg leaned over and plucked four spears of asparagus off the platter, holding them up like they were the most important thing in the world. “Plants work well, although fungus works better. Toadstools were traditional, but daisy chains were almost as common, at least for a while. Take the material you’re planning to use, plait it together . . .” Her fingers were quick and clever as they twisted the asparagus into a rough crown. She dropped it onto the table.
“Once your ring is done, you can activate it whenever you like.” Pressing a forefinger against the ring of asparagus, the Luidaeg murmured a string of hissing, rolling syllables that didn’t sound like anything else I’d ever heard. The air around us chilled, dropping in temperature until it felt like we were standing on the shore just as the tide rolled in.
Karen shivered. The Luidaeg raised her eyes.
“Patrick, if you would?”
Patrick nodded, picking up a piece of potato from his own plate. He weighed it briefly in his hand before lobbing it across the circle. Rather than flying straight into the Luidaeg’s lap, it stopped in midair, frozen above the asparagus. The Luidaeg looked pleased with herself.
“It’ll stay there until the spell wears off—ten, maybe fifteen minutes, since I didn’t put much power into it—or until something disrupts the ring. Like so.” She picked up her fork, leaned forward, and stabbed the asparagus. The piece of potato promptly fell to the table, where it rolled to a stop against her water glass. “As temporary prisons go, you won’t find any finer. As useless things in this modern world go, well, they’re tops at that, too.”
“Except that someone has apparently been able to set at least three, maybe more, and use them to catch people unawares. It’s like marshwater charms.”
Tybalt frowned at me. Patrick asked, “What?”
“I used to use a lot of marshwater charms—mixtures of herbs and intent that would help me see through illusions, or keep an eye on a target even when someone was actively trying to counteract my tracking spells.” I shook my head. “I didn’t understand my own magic that well, and I was a lot weaker. I needed every advantage I could get. I always thought the purebloods were stupid for not using the little tools—I’d keep a spray bottle full of mint and pond scum in my glove compartment and think it made me so much smarter than them, and I still started forgetting about those things as soon as I, personally, didn’t need them anymore. Don’t you see? Something that small won’t hold much magic, so even if the spell was cast by someone powerful, they won’t leave enough of a trace for me to track. It’s perfect if you’re a murderous bastard who needs to be stopped.”
“Your priorities are, as always, genuinely unique to you,” said Tybalt.
I elbowed him lightly; he took the blow with good grace. “I’m serious. Whoever’s doing this has already attacked us—whether I was the target or not, they knew harming anyone who was likely to be in that room would make me stop investigating. And it wasn’t Duke Michel.”
That got Patrick’s attention. “How are you so sure?” he asked.
“For one thing, Dianda’s not dead,” I said. “People like him don’t start with murder and back off to misdemeanor. It’s either one or the other, or misdemeanor turning into manslaughter by mistake. For another thing, he was way too willing to let the High King ride his blood. Sure, he wasn’t thrilled about it, but if he’d broken the Law, he would have fought more, because there’s no way he wouldn’t have been thinking about the murder when his blood was drawn. It’s the old ‘don’t think about pink elephants’ problem. If you have something you desperately don’t want people to know, that’s all you’re going to be able to think about when the time comes.”
“So we have two separate miscreants,” said Tybalt. “We know the Duke was trying to suppress the elf-shot cure. What does this second assailant want? October and King Antonio have little to nothing in common with one another.”
“Could be the same thing,” said the Luidaeg. “This changes the status quo a lot.”
I frowned. “The status quo . . .”
Quentin’s frown mirrored mine. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that sometimes we make things too complicated,” I said. “King Antonio was all about power, right? Not necessarily using it for anything; just having it.” But he had been using it for something. He’d been using it to protect his family, for all the good that had done him. “This wouldn’t be the first time someone assumed I do the things I do because I want to support the monarchy blindly as a concept, rather than because I think they’re actually what’s right. Me, Quentin, Tybalt—any of the three targets you could reasonably hit by setting a trap in my room would undermine the local status quo.” That was before taking into account Quentin’s position as Crown Prince. If someone knew about that . . .
“Dianda doesn’t affect the status quo on the land,” said Patrick. “She’s well-inclined, because she married me, but she has few standing alliances, apart from Goldengreen.”
“And being allied with a County doesn’t do much if you’re not also allied with the Kingdom it’s in,” I said. It was tempting to view the attack on Dianda as related, especially given that Quentin and Dean were dating—but I didn’t think that was common knowledge yet, and again, for Quentin to be the common factor would require people to know about his heritage. We weren’t seeing any sign of that. Quentin was vulnerable while he was with me; none of the attacks had directly targeted him. “So, yeah, we’re definitely looking at two different people here. But have all the attacks been about opportunity, or was the attack on King Antonio planned?”
“I don’t know,” said Quentin.
“Neither do I,” I said. “On the plus side, I might have a way of finding out who does. Dinner can wait. Can you pass your steak knife?”
Quentin handed me his knife. Tybalt narrowed his eyes.
“If you’re about to do what I’m certain you’re about to do, can you please do me the immense favor of not slicing your palm through the center?” he asked plaintively. “I know you heal with ridiculous speed—although you did not, I should remind you, the first time you decided slicing your hand open was an expedient way of getting what you wanted—but it still makes my teeth hurt to see you treat yourself so.”
“I’ll skip the palm this time, I promise,” I said, and pressed the knife against the top of my wrist, pushing down until the edge bit into the soft skin. I gritted my teeth. “You’d think healing fast would come with reduced pain sensitivity.”
“Nope,” said the Luidaeg. Her voice was soft. I glanced up. She looked at me with sad, driftglass-colored eyes, and said, “Those who heal the fastest have always had to hurt the worst. It’s the cost of being able to handle so much trauma. The pain will always be eager to remind you that it has a claim.”
“Swell,” I muttered, and yanked the knife toward myself, angling my wrist so I wouldn’t bleed on my dress. The skin parted and blood welled to the surface, bright and coppery and smelling of secrets. I wanted it. The sight of it revolted me, but I wanted it all the same—a paradox that had been becoming increasingly common since my heritage had been shifted more toward the fae. Quentin stiffened. So did Patrick. Daoine Sidhe were blood-workers too, even if their talents didn’t quite match my own. I offered the two of them an encouraging smile, lowered my mouth to my wris
t, and drank.
The taste of blood filled my mouth and chased away everything else. As always, it made me feel stronger, more prepared to face the world around me. It was my blood: it should have had no strength to offer me that I didn’t already possess, and yet somehow, it did. Magic is weird. Magic has always been weird.
The smell of cut-grass and copper began to rise in the air around me, the copper trending, as always, more and more toward the bloody. One day I was going to lose the metallic aspect entirely, and just smell like a pastoral crime scene. I knew people were stopping to stare. I closed my eyes to shut them out, drinking deeper, looking for the place where the present would drop away and I would fall into the red haze of my own blood memories.
You’re trying too hard, I thought. This should be easy. I’d done this . . . well, not hundreds of times, because there wasn’t that much call for my specific skill set, but quite a few times. Often enough that it had started becoming easier. Never easy. Easier was a matter of degrees: it was no longer like clawing my way uphill through an avalanche, no longer like drowning, no longer a matter of risking my life every time I tasted blood. It was still difficult.
You’re trying too hard, I thought again, and let go, falling down into the red. The sounds of the tables around us went away, replaced by the sounds of the gallery from earlier. This was my memory, not someone else’s: it was crystal clear, with none of the confusion or disassociation that I was accustomed to encountering when I rode the blood.
High King Aethlin was speaking. I ignored him in favor of looking at the crowd, trying to find some hint of tension or surprise. I couldn’t do anything I hadn’t done the first time—this was a memory, not a dream—but I had looked at the crowd the first time. I just hadn’t known what I was seeing.
Several of the gathered nobles looked confused by what was going on. Confusion seemed to be the order of the day. But the King and Queen of Highmountain looked angry. Actively, furiously mad, like something had disrupted their plans. And their handmaiden, that sad-eyed, downcast Barrow Wight, looked openly terrified. She was staring at me, her eyes wide and her jaw slack. How had I not noticed her the first time?
The answer followed the question without pause. I hadn’t noticed her because she was just a servant, and I’d been focusing on the purebloods as the important ones. I’d done to her exactly what so many of them had done to me. I had ignored her.
I’d known I was losing my humanity, but that was the moment when I realized I was never going to get it back.
I broke out of the blood memories with a gasp, pulling my mouth away from my wrist. The wound there had long since healed, leaving only a smear of drying blood to mark where it had been. I looked wildly around, searching the nearby tables for the King and Queen of Highmountain. Someone pushed a napkin into my hand. I wiped my mouth, and kept looking.
“What did you see?” asked Tybalt.
“Not sure yet,” I said. My table contained a Firstborn and a Duke on a hair-trigger. The last thing I wanted to do was trigger an international incident if I could avoid it. I kept scanning the room. “Is anyone missing? Do you see any holes?”
“Someone’s always missing,” said the Luidaeg. “That’s the nature of the beast.”
“Where’s the King of Highmountain?” asked Quentin.
“Show me where you’re looking,” I said. He pointed. I followed the angle of his finger to a table on the other side of the room, where the Queen of Highmountain sat surrounded by a group of minor nobles. She was laughing, a goblet in her hand and an expression of studious unconcern on her face. She looked like every other carefree monarch in the place. It was amazing how many of them were smiling and clearly content, despite the seriousness of the situation. They wanted to be released from their captivity, but apart from that, this was exactly the sort of world that they expected to be waiting for them. Fancy meals, beautiful rooms, and every need met without their being required to lift a finger.
There was an open seat next to her. The King wasn’t there. Neither was the sad-eyed handmaiden.
“What do you know about them?” I asked, without taking my eyes off of her.
“Verona and Kabos,” said Quentin. He didn’t hesitate. This was the sort of thing he didn’t have to think about. “He founded the Kingdom, she became Queen when she married him. They’re traditionalists. Highmountain predates most of the demesnes around it, because they’d been trying to get away from the ‘decadent’ coastal kingdoms.”
“Fae puritans, got it,” I said. “No surnames?”
“They’ve never needed one. No heirs, either. They’ve been married for three hundred years with no kids. Daoine Sidhe, both of them, and supposedly Kabos was in consideration for the throne of North America before it was given to Viveka Sollys, mother of Aethlin Sollys, third in line for the High Crown of Albany.”
It took me a moment to puzzle through that. Then: “You’re saying they’ve been in charge in Highmountain since before the United States was founded, and they don’t like change.”
“Yes,” said Quentin.
This conclave was the ultimate expression of change. Changelings and the untitled were being allowed to speak as if they were equal to monarchs. The fact that we were speaking about something that would impact us all didn’t matter as much as the fact that we were opening our mouths. King Antonio had been an asshole according to the people who knew him, but he hadn’t enforced the classic lines of status and standing: he’d allowed people to be whoever they wanted to be, providing they were able to fight for and maintain their positions. He’d been a populist, in a lot of ways. If no one knew he had an heir waiting to claim the throne—if the assumption was that when he died, someone else would be able to take Angels and run it as a more traditional monarchy—
I stood so fast that the legs of my chair scraped against the floor. Antonio had been an excellent target because he’d been alone, but the attack had happened at mealtime. If I was right, this was the same setting, and another attack could be imminent. If I was wrong, the King of Highmountain was alone somewhere, and could be in danger. We had a wealth of potential targets, and either way, he was a person of great concern.
“Quentin, Patrick, find King Kabos,” I said, scanning the ballroom again, this time trying to think like a bigoted pureblood who hated change. Who were the best targets? Chrysanthe and Theron seemed obvious, but in a weird way, that was what would keep them safe. They isolated changelings by removing them to Golden Shore and keeping them out of the way of the purebloods of the world. What they were doing was good and valuable and necessary, and yet it was almost the expression of a pureblood dream—sending all the changelings away to live on a farm and not bother anyone.
Arden was sitting on the dais with the High King, High Queen, and Queen Siwan. She’d been able to ascend to her throne because of a changeling and a King of Cats, and her upbringing hadn’t prepared her to enforce the sort of rules most nobles found to be second nature. She thought more like a changeling than like a queen. But attacking her would mean risking the High King and High Queen. Maybe this would go that far. Maybe it wouldn’t. I just didn’t think she’d be the third target. Not when they still thought they could get away without being caught. Siwan was protected by the same logic.
I heard a sound like tearing metal, close enough that it seemed to fill the world. Once again there was a faint, distant scent I couldn’t quite identify: attenuated magic, so bleached and thin it was like a ghost of itself. I whipped around. Karen was behind me, wide-eyed and pale, with little red dots on the white fabric of her dress. Little red spots, as if from arterial spray. She wasn’t hurt; the blood wasn’t hers. It wasn’t mine, either. I would have noticed.
The world seemed to slow down. I knew I wasn’t malingering, no matter how much I didn’t want to see, but it felt like it took forever for me to turn and look at Tybalt, who was staring down at the stake protruding from his chest w
ith wide-eyed shock. His gaze moved to me, pupils thinning to slits, before he collapsed.
Someone screamed as he hit the floor.
It may even have been me.
EIGHTEEN
“JIN!” THE NAME was ripped out of me, unthinking. A second name followed it: “Siwan!” Tybalt was bleeding; Tybalt was dying. Being a King of Cats made him sturdier than he had any right to be, but he wasn’t me. He couldn’t walk to the edge of death and come back none the worse for wear.
If his heart stopped beating, it might not start again. I could lose him.
I should have been screaming for him, not for the Queen of Silences, but it was her name I howled again and again as I fell to my knees and gathered my wounded lover in my arms, trying to stop the bleeding with the heels of my hands. It was hurting him, I knew it was hurting him, but that didn’t matter, because he didn’t have enough blood to keep on losing it. He needed to keep what little he had left.
Blood . . . it frothed at the corners of his mouth, a clear sign that the spike had pierced his lung, just like the last one had pierced mine. His breathing was labored and he was struggling to keep his eyes focused. They were fixed on my face, never wavering, like he was greedy for the sight of me.
“I need a fucking medic!” I shrieked. My throat felt like it had been stripped bare, like I wasn’t giving it time to heal between screams. Tough.
There was a popping sound, and the smell of blackberry flowers and redwood sap. I looked up. Arden was in front of me, her dress disheveled, her hands locked around the upper arms of Queen Siwan Yates of Silences. Siwan’s eyes widened as she realized what she was looking at. She’d been on the other side of the ballroom only an instant before. She must have heard the commotion, but she hadn’t understood what it meant.
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