“Queens fight to win,” she hissed, from behind me, and shoved what felt like a blade of ice into my kidney.
The pain was immediate and electric, racing through my body, paralyzing me where I stood. I dropped to my knees again, the sword clattering harmlessly from my hands. Jocelyn darted forward to grab it, her eyes once more shrouded in rings of glittering fairy ointment. She was smirking. Of course, she was smirking. Somehow, I had come to represent everything she’d never been able to have, and she was seeing me cut low. This was probably one of the best moments of her life.
I tried to reach behind myself and grab the knife I could feel jammed into me, freezing and burning me. My hand passed right through where the hilt should have been. The false Queen kicked me again, in the back of the head this time, and I went sliding across the dais.
“No human hand will ever touch a Folletti blade,” she said, sounding smug. “You should have been quicker at cleaning out my armories if you didn’t want them to be used against you.”
We had cleaned out the treasury, the main armory, as many of her storerooms as we could find. But the knowe had already been folding inward on itself, shutting down and fading in the absence of an owner to keep its doors open, and none of us had been interested in claiming it. Arden had the knowe in Muir Woods, her father’s knowe, and she had been determined to move the seat of the Mists back where it belonged, away from the pretender’s throne. Looking for hidden secondary armories hadn’t been on anybody’s list of things to do.
Belatedly, I realized the false Queen had a dungeon full of iron to go with whatever other delights she might have hidden around the place—and that Jocelyn’s fae blood was weak enough to let her wield iron without any immediate consequences. If the false Queen remembered that little fact, I was going to be in even more trouble than I already was.
But I was still bleeding. There was still a chance my plan, hurried and incomplete as it was, might work.
Come on, Tybalt, I thought, gasping and shivering as the ice lanced deeper into my flesh. Everything was freezing, and everything hurt. Come back for me. I pressed my forehead against the dais, hair dangling in the blood that surrounded me.
“Do you feel like being a good girl now, October?” asked the false Queen. “I think Jocelyn has been patient for long enough.”
“Fuck you,” I managed.
Someone’s foot—I wasn’t sure whose—caught me solidly in the ribs.
“You’ll do it!” snapped Jocelyn. “You’ll make me perfect!”
I struggled to lift my head, squinting at her through my blood-tangled hair. “She had a hope chest the whole time she had the throne,” I said, voice raspy and weak. “She could have shifted your blood any time. She could have made every changeling in the Mists fully fae. She didn’t. She never even offered. So maybe if you want to be mad at somebody, you should try being at least a little bit mad at her.”
Jocelyn paused, confusion written on her face.
And behind me, the Baobhan Sith screamed.
It was a haunting, triumphant sound, the cry of a predator that had finally broken free of a trap. It echoed through the room, spreading until it seemed to come from every direction at once. A hand grasped my hair, yanking me up until I was looking at the wide-eyed, horrified face of the false Queen.
“What did you do?” she demanded.
“Nothing,” I said. I closed my eyes. The dark was soothing and tempting. This would all go so much faster if I never opened them again. “Tybalt, on the other hand, may have freed your pet. Bet she’s not happy about you bringing people to her den.”
The Baobhan Sith howled again, much closer this time, and the false Queen was ripped away from me, going ass-over-teakettle as she rolled off the dais. I pushed myself to my hands and knees, prepared to bolt—
—and froze as Jocelyn pointed my own sword directly at my face. Well, shit.
EIGHTEEN
“NO,” SHE SAID, anger and fear battling for dominance in her voice. “You stay right where you are. You have to fix me.”
“I’m not going to change the balance of your blood,” I said, unable to take my eyes off the blade. I’ve died at least twice, probably more, but I’d never died of brain trauma. Would it grow back? Would I still be myself if it did? Or would I be someone new, someone like May, who had most of my memories but no longer saw them the way I did, who could hold herself at arms-length from my life and not miss what she’d never really had.
“You have to,” she said, sounding like a child on the verge of a tantrum. “You owe me.”
“I don’t owe you anything.” The Folletti knife was still embedded in my kidney, freezing me slowly from the inside out, and the Baobhan Sith was no doubt going to lose interest in the false Queen eventually, choosing to go for the juicier meal—me. I needed to move. “You hurt my daughter. You woke a despot. If anyone’s in debt here, it’s you.”
“I didn’t wake her,” said Jocelyn, looking startled. “I wouldn’t even know how to start. She got in contact with Mom. She said she wanted to be my godmother, to make everything better for me. Mom pulled some strings with the residence hall to get me moved into Gillian’s room. Mom got paid, and I’m going to get a new life, a better life. The life I should have had from the beginning. But I didn’t wake her. Her friend did, the man with the green hair.”
I stared, the bottom dropping out of my stomach as everything suddenly, horribly, started making sense. I only knew one man with green hair who would have any reason to work with the false Queen . . . a man who smelled like cinnamon and cardamom.
Sweet Maeve forgive me, but I’d thought he was dead.
I was still staring when Tybalt stepped out of the mist behind her, reached down, and wrenched the sword from her grasp. Jocelyn cried out in pain. It looked like the act of breaking her grip may have also broken a few of her fingers, or at least sprained them.
Good. Anyone who pulls a sword on me deserves to hurt. Doubly so if the sword they’re holding is my own. That’s adding insult to potential injury, and I won’t stand for it.
“How many of your bones shall I break, kitten, to make clear that no one threatens my lady without some payment being demanded?” His hand engulfed both of Jocelyn’s, pinning her in place. He was making no effort to seem human, or even Sidhe: his pupils were wide ovals, consuming more than half of his irises, and when he spoke, he showed canine teeth too long and sharp to belong to anything but an apex predator. Stripes slashed down his cheeks and across his forehead, his tabby coloring carrying over onto the skin.
That was a bad sign. That was a very bad sign. Tybalt is powerful enough that he experiences that sort of slippage only when under extreme stress, and seeing it made me want to run to him and pull him away from her before he could do something he’d regret. Killing Jocelyn wouldn’t be a violation of Oberon’s Law. It would still hurt him, deep inside, and while I might not care about her life, I cared way too much about his.
And I didn’t know whether Gillian was alive. If she wasn’t, my ability to intercede on Jocelyn’s behalf might go way, way down.
The false Queen was still screaming somewhere in the fog. That was a good sign, in that the Baobhan Sith hadn’t torn her throat out yet. I wanted her alive to stand trial for her crimes. She may not have broken the Law, but all that meant was that I couldn’t demand her life. I could demand a hell of a lot else. I was planning to do exactly that.
Later. Right now, I had bigger problems. Like Dugan. Oh, Oberon, Dugan. “Tybalt, you have to let her go,” I said, struggling to my feet in order to make it easier to attract his attention.
He turned to me, and there was almost no rationality in his eyes. He looked like a feral creature, like he was ready to bolt with his kill.
“She hurt you,” he said, as if I might somehow have failed to notice.
I nodded. “I know. I was there. But I need you now, and she’s not going anywhere. Sh
e couldn’t get out of here if she tried. The doors won’t open for her without someone to help her. Let her go.”
He hesitated. “I came back,” he said finally.
“I know. I’m so grateful. But I’m kind of in a lot of pain right now, so if you could please let her go and take care of me . . . ”
Tybalt blinked, some of the blankness fading from his expression. “October?”
I turned, intending to show him the knife protruding from my back. The motion left me dizzy, and my legs buckled, sending me crashing toward the dais. I was almost getting used to hitting it face-first. I braced for impact.
Tybalt’s arms wrapped around my waist and pulled me back, scooping me against him. He searched my face with wide, worried eyes. “What have you done to yourself now?” he asked, voice low.
I blinked. He was blurry. “Jocelyn . . . ?”
“I didn’t kill her.”
“Good. She’s . . . patsy. Queen not working alone.” I closed my eyes. “There’s a knife. My left kidney. Can’t touch it. Still too human. Can you . . . ?”
“As the sword from the stone,” he said, and rolled me over in his arms. I went limp, allowing him to move me. I trusted him. Out of everyone in the world, I trusted him.
The blade sliding out of my kidney was an indescribable pain, followed by an absence that ached for a moment before the agony of thaw set in. I think I screamed. I know I convulsed, and only Tybalt grabbing me and refusing to let go kept me from taking yet another tumble.
When I was done screaming, when the cold had died to a manageable level and my legs were willing to hold me, I shuddered and leaned against Tybalt, trying to open my eyes. That was when I heard the silence, or rather, didn’t hear it.
The false Queen wasn’t screaming anymore. Neither was the Baobhan Sith. The only sound was Jocelyn sobbing somewhere nearby, the thin, reedy wails of a child who had been denied her favorite toy.
Unsteadily, I pushed myself away from Tybalt and looked around. The cut in my back still ached, healing slowly—assuming it was healing at all. The existence of one thing that could hurt me for more than a few seconds implied the existence of other things, things that might be a little more permanent than the bite of the Baobhan Sith.
“That’s why I have two kidneys,” I muttered, mostly to myself.
The mist covering the floor had grown higher, turning everything not on the dais into a sea of eddying white. I turned slowly. Jocelyn was standing in the shadow of the false Queen’s throne, cradling her hand against her chest and weeping. I dismissed her. She didn’t have a weapon, and judging by the glassy expression on her face, this was the first time she’d been seriously hurt in her entire life. She would be processing her way through the pain for a while. Once she did, she might become a threat again. Until then . . .
I stooped to retrieve my sword, taking a careful step in the direction where I’d last seen the Baobhan Sith. “Hello?” I called. “Is there anyone out there who can talk right now?”
“I call for truce,” said an unfamiliar voice. A woman stepped out of the mist.
Her hair was still the color of gorse, but blooming, yellow and green tangled together until she looked like a meadow going out for a stroll. Her eyes were an odd blend of the two, almost chartreuse. Her skin was clear, and her flesh had filled out until she could have been any woman on the street, assuming the women on the street had pointed ears and teeth like daggers, ready to slice through flesh to find the blood beneath. She was wearing plenty of that blood—maybe even more than I was, which was no small trick—in dried tracks down the front of her winding white gown.
“Why do the blood-workers always wear white?” I asked, almost dazedly. “It makes us look like the sloppiest eaters ever.”
“I was bound and buried, and a shroud is appropriate for that sort of thing,” said the Baobhan Sith, watching me warily. Most of her attention was on my sword. “Is truce granted?”
“For the moment, yes,” I said, lowering the weapon slightly. “You’ll forgive me: I don’t have a scabbard on me. Did you kill her?”
“No,” said the Baobhan Sith. Her lip curled in disgust. “She tried to push me into a violation of the Law, but as it seems I have avoided it, I refuse to waste the crime on her.”
I nodded. “You got a name?”
“Kennis. Yourself?”
“Sir October Daye, Knight of Lost Words. This is—”
“I remember the King of Dreaming Cats, even if we never had direct acquaintance with one another.” Kennis offered Tybalt a polite nod. It was strange, having her converse so calmly when only a little while ago, she’d been trying to kill us both. “The year must not be so very late, if you’re still the one leading the Cait Sidhe of this place.”
She had been emaciated when I’d first found her, as if she hadn’t eaten in years. I gave her a measuring look. “What year do you think it is?”
“I was taken by surprise in my bed, pinned and prisoned while the house burned around me, in nineteen seventy-four,” said Kennis. “I knew my captor by the smell of her, ice and rowan, but I couldn’t fight—not with as much magic as she’d poured into the room before the match was lit. I’ve woken twice since then, once when a man came to me with a cup of blood from a human girl, and again when you entered the room where I was tethered. You have my sincere apologies for what happened next. I was not entirely myself.”
“Meaning the false Queen starved you to use you as a weapon,” I concluded grimly. Not against me, necessarily; in the seventies, I’d still been in the Summerlands, following my mother like a good little shadow, trying to do everything within my power to make her proud of me. But the false Queen had always been fond of her weapons.
How many more traps were scattered throughout the Mists? How many more citizens of Faerie, people like Kennis, were bound and waiting to be triggered, reduced to their basest impulses by hunger, or isolation, or a dozen other factors? We had been careless. We had put Arden on the throne, and not followed the regime change by immediately beginning to ferret out every scrap of danger the false Queen had left behind.
“False Queen?” Kennis asked, eyebrows raised in surprise. “She’s not the rightful holder of her throne? Oh, naughty girl. Have I brought a fugitive to justice, then?”
“You’ve helped,” said Tybalt mildly. “I am sure Queen Windermere will be glad to reward you by not punishing you for attempting to devour a hero of the realm.”
Kennis had the good grace to blush. “I was starving. I would apologize, but I had no control over my actions.”
“You said there was a man,” I said, pulling her attention back to me. “What did he look like? Did he have green hair?”
Tybalt’s head whipped around, eyes narrowing as he put two and two together and came up with an unhappy five. Kennis shook her head.
“Plain. Inconsequential. He stank of Daoine Sidhe beneath his illusions.”
So it could have been Dugan, or it could have been somebody else. Swell. I frowned as I stepped off the dais, wading through the mist until I found the false Queen, curled into a ball with her eyes tightly closed. Kneeling, I felt the side of her neck, relaxing only a little when I found her pulse. “She’s alive. Weak, but alive.”
“I said as much,” said Kennis.
“You also tried to kill me multiple times, so I wanted to confirm it for myself.” I jerked my head toward the sobbing Jocelyn. “Can someone grab her before she runs? I really don’t feel like playing spoiled brat scavenger hunt today.”
“Of course,” said Tybalt. He moved toward her. Jocelyn screamed and tried to dodge. Deftly, he snaked an arm around her waist, grabbing her wrists with his free hand as he pulled her close. “Where do you think you’re going? We need to have a conversation, you and I. It will hurt less if you don’t struggle.”
He grinned, showing the full scope of his inhuman dentition. Jocelyn
screamed again before collapsing in a dead faint. Only Tybalt’s grip kept her from falling to the floor. He turned to look at me.
“Will this do?” he asked.
I nodded. “That’s fine.”
“October—”
“No.” I moved through the mist until I found Quentin’s slumbering form. Kneeling next to him and beginning to go through his pockets, I said, “I don’t want to know. Not yet. As soon as I know one way or the other, I’m going to fall apart, and I can’t do that until we get someone here to take this whole mess over. So I don’t want to know. Even once I do know, we have to deal with the fact that the false Queen wasn’t working alone. I think she had help. I think Dugan was helping her.”
“Dugan Harrow? But wasn’t he—”
“Arrested? Yeah. And then he vanished into the dungeons, and we all figured it had been taken care of. Surprise, surprise. We were wrong.” He’d been with Raysel when she kidnapped Gillian the first time. He’d betrayed his liege, and when he’d tried to assassinate her, she’d locked him away.
Stupid me—assuming that out of sight and out of mind meant no longer my problem.
Dugan Harrow had been a courtier in service to the false Queen, a landless Daoine Sidhe noble sent to the Court from Deep Mists—and since Deep Mists was in Marin, he might have grown up with stories of how once, the royal court had been located in Muir Woods, well away from the human city, in the trees where it belonged. It would certainly explain why he’d been willing and eager to help Rayseline Torquill kidnap both the Lorden boys and my own daughter, holding them hostage in an attempt to start a war. Kidnapping was his go-to move, the only thing he could be absolutely sure would get the reaction he was looking for.
He’d been arrested after drawing a cold iron knife on the false Queen, and when we hadn’t found him in her dungeons, we all assumed she’d just done the inevitable and made her problem . . . disappear. The Law forbids killing. It doesn’t forbid transforming an enemy into a stone and dropping them into the ocean, even if you know that when the spell wears off, they’ll drown before they can make it to the surface. There are always loopholes for people vicious enough to look for them.