A Red Rose Chain

EIGHT

WE DIDN’T KNOW HOW long we would have before we were summoned back into King Rhys’ presence, and so we focused on the only thing about our situation that we had any hope of controlling: ourselves. Quentin had hauled his suitcase into the small side room that would be his, leaving the door open in case I needed him. Meanwhile, Tybalt and I began unloading our things into the wardrobe.

There was something pleasantly domestic about unpacking together, like we were going on vacation or moving in together for real, not just through slow osmosis. I liked it.

“I hope I was not too forward before, in introducing myself as your betrothed,” said Tybalt, hanging a pair of his ubiquitous leather trousers over the rod at the center of the wardrobe. “He would have separated us had I not, claiming that it was in recognition of my ‘status’ within the Divided Courts. I could not allow that to happen.”

I gave him a sidelong look. “What, do you think I’m ashamed of you or something?”

“No.” He looked amused. “I know you well enough to find it much more likely that you would declare yourself unworthy of my unstinting affections, and attempt to part yourself from me ‘for my own good.’ At which point, I assure you, I would follow you about like a lost kitten until you came back to your senses. It is simply that our alliance may not be advantageous for you in all political arenas.”

“And won’t that be fun for them to deal with after we’re married?” I asked. “If you’re a political liability, let’s elope. Get me out of this gig even faster.”

“Get a room,” called Quentin.

“Shut your door,” I called back. I hung the last of my dresses and stepped back, eyeing the wardrobe like it was a venomous snake. It brimmed with gowns I couldn’t fight in and shoes I didn’t want to wear, and I didn’t have a choice about any of this. Arden had sent me to fight for her on a battlefield I didn’t understand and couldn’t twist to my own advantage.

Or maybe I could. I fished my cellphone out of my pocket as I took another step back, bumping my thighs against the overstuffed mattress. I sat down, dialed, and waited.

I didn’t have to wait long. There was a click midway through the first ring, and the familiar, slightly artificial-sounding voice of April O’Leary, Countess of Tamed Lightning, came on the line with a “You do not call me often. Is something wrong?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Probably. Okay, yes. And hello to you, too.” April was originally a Dryad, before her adopted mother—the late Countess January O’Leary—spliced her tree into a computer server to save her life. I didn’t really understand it, but the process had worked, resulting in April becoming the world’s first cybernetic tree spirit. Her grasp of social niceties wasn’t the best, which was something she shared with her Dryad relatives: most of them spent more time with trees than they did with people, and they didn’t necessarily know how to make conversation about things that didn’t photosynthesize. April was willing to fake pleasantries with people she didn’t know. She rarely bothered with her friends.

“What is wrong? Is this related to the notice I received from Queen Windermere that a war was being beta-tested, and might be cleared for release? I do not have time to allow my coders to be slaughtered. It seems very inefficient.”

Leave it to April to get right to the heart of things. “I’ve been sent to the Kingdom of Silences as a diplomat, because Arden wants to skip the whole ‘war’ thing if possible.”

“Oh.” April hesitated before asking, “Are you the most qualified for this assignment?”

“Nope, but neither is anybody else, so we’re faking it,” I said. “Anyway, we’re in the royal knowe of Silences, and we think we may be being listened in on. Any ideas about what we could do about that?”

“Why do you ask me?”

“You live in a magic electrical network. I thought it was worth a try.”

“I see.” There was a pause. Then April said: “Please put your phone down and cover your ears. Do not hang up.”

“Got it.” I dropped the phone on the bed and stood, moving away. “Everybody cover your ears,” I said, following my own instructions. Tybalt glanced at me, looking confused, but clapped his hands over his ears anyway.

Good for him: almost at the same time, my phone began to emit a high-pitched screeching sound that made my teeth hurt as it resonated through my skull. Spike hissed and ran into the wardrobe. Quentin slammed the door to his bedchamber. The door to the master bedroom slammed open as May and Walther piled through, both of them trying to cover their ears and get inside at the same time. I mouthed “sorry” at them, but didn’t try to speak. The noise April was somehow generating would have prevented them from hearing me, anyway.

The sound lasted for no more than thirty seconds before cutting off as abruptly as it had started, leaving the faint smell of ozone hanging in the air. I cautiously uncovered my ears. When the screeching didn’t resume, I leaned over and picked up the phone again. “April?”

“No one is listening to you now,” she said serenely.

“Yeah, because if they were, they’re probably deaf,” I said. “What did you do?”

“Countersurveillance charm. We use them internally to prevent leaks from inside the company to competing firms. Elliot says I am perhaps overly cautious, but I prefer to think of myself as profit-oriented.” April’s County was also a working computer programming company. I wasn’t clear on exactly what they did to make their money, and I didn’t really want to know. “Any charms or spells designed to record or transmit the things said within the room you currently inhabit have been suspended for a period of no more than twenty-four hours. If the charms are self-renewing, they will reassert themselves at sunrise, and you will need to either call me again or find another avenue.”

I paused, trying to work my way through the complicated twists of April’s vocabulary. Then I said, “So no one can hear us in this room?”

“Correct. Please come visit me after you have prevented this war. I have missed your company, and the company of your associates. My remaining mother sends her regards.” April said the last as if by rote, and I had no doubt that Li Qin, January’s widow, had in fact told her daughter that whenever I happened to call, I should be given her regards.

“Tell Li Qin hi,” I said, unable to keep myself from smiling. “Open roads, April.”

“Good-bye,” she said, and hung up.

I lowered the phone, turning to the others. Walther and May were still standing by the door, looking shaken and disheveled. “Okay, first, close that,” I said. They did, although May’s expression turned dangerously mulish. If I didn’t explain myself soon, I was going to be in a world of trouble. “I’m sorry about the loud noise. April didn’t exactly explain what she was going to do.”

“You called April?” asked May, her frown melting first into confusion, and then understanding. “Did she clear up the listening devices in here?”

“She says she used a countersurveillance charm, and since I know nothing about that sort of magic, I put it to all of you: do we trust that it worked? April says we can talk freely in this room for the next day.”

“I think that if we’re being spied on—which we almost certainly are—then King Rhys will be smart enough not to let us know right away,” said Walther slowly. “Coming in here to recast his charms would be a giveaway.”

“I trust April,” said Quentin, cautiously pushing his door open and sticking his head into the room. “She does stuff no one else does, mostly because we’re all made of meat, so we don’t think the way she does. I know she’s paranoid about security, and if she says the charm works, the charm works.”

“May? Tybalt?”

“I trust her,” said May.

“I’m playing the game of your politics for the sake of peace and nothing more,” said Tybalt. “If there’s any challenge that could cause us harm, I’ll have the lot of us onto the Shadow Roads before a single blow can strike home.”

“Then we’re trusting her. All right.” I turned to Walther. “What do you mean, she’s your sister?”

May, who hadn’t seen the note, looked confused. Walther just sighed. “I mean exactly what I said. Marlis is my older sister. We have the same parents. My father’s brother married the old Queen of Silences when she was still the Princess, and their son, Torsten, was heir to the throne when the war happened. Marlis and I were never in the line of succession—if anything happened to Torsten or his mother, the throne would have either gone to his mother’s brother, or back to his grandmother, who had stepped down after her daughter came of age. I knew Marlis hadn’t made it out of Silences after the war, but I thought she’d been elf-shot, not pressed into service for the new King. The fact that she’s his seneschal is . . . worrisome. He shouldn’t trust her this much.”

“Wait, you never looked for her?” May turned, looking at Walther like she was seeing him for the first time. “She’s your sister. You should have tried to find out where she was.”

“I spent the first twenty years after the war running, hiding, and making sure no one could find me,” said Walther wearily. “Marlis and I agreed when we split up that we wouldn’t look for each other, because it would be too dangerous. If either of us had been caught, we didn’t want to be able to give the other away.”

“Looks like she never ran,” I said.

Walther shook his head. “That’s the problem. I know she ran.”

I frowned. “Okay. Explain to me why this means we need to be on guard.”

“Because if she’s here, working for the man who took our aunt’s throne, and if he trusts her enough to make her seneschal, something is compelling her loyalty.” Walther shook his head again, harder this time. “I’m going to refine one of the potions I brought with me. You need to sprinkle it over everything you eat and add it to everything you drink. It’s the only way to be safe.”

It took me a moment, but I caught his meaning. “You think she’s drugged.”

“I think a Queen with Siren powers put a Baron in charge of a Kingdom of alchemists,” said Walther grimly. “Mind control is hard, even for the best of us, but suggestibility is easy, and so is memory suppression. Scramble things in someone’s head enough, and keep dosing them regularly, and you can bend even the strongest will to your hand.”

“Memory suppression would explain why she didn’t seem to recognize you,” I said. “How long before that potion is ready?”

“Not long,” said Walther, with an odd grimace. “It was one of the potions I was using the dawn to finish. I just need to boil off the excess liquid, flash-freeze, and powder the results. Say an hour? That should be long enough to make a supply for all of us.”

“Won’t the King be offended when we start adding things to our food?” asked Quentin. “I mean, the chefs in Quebec get angry if you ask for salt. I can’t imagine a royal kitchen ranks below a French restaurant for snootiness.”

“He might be, but he won’t say anything,” said Walther. “Silences has declared war. It’s perfectly reasonable for a diplomat from Mists to bring along an alchemist to guarantee there’s no poison in the food, since even if the King is perfectly respectable, polite, and law-abiding—”

Tybalt snorted.

“—there could still be loyalists in the Court who wanted to curry favor by being the first to kill a citizen of an enemy kingdom,” continued Walther, without missing a beat. “As long as we don’t actually say that I’m protecting you from mind control, my presence will continue to seem like a sadly necessary evil.”

“I hate politics.” I sat back down on the edge of the bed. “Seriously, this stuff was easier when I was living with Devin. If you were our enemy, we just came over and beat the shit out of you. No declarations of war, no pretending everything was normal while we plotted your death, just a bunch of street kids with knives and brass knuckles handing you your own teeth.”

“You are truly a charming example of what the Divided Courts can produce when given sufficient motivation,” said Tybalt, the fondness in his voice sapping the sting from his words.

I shrugged. “I’m one of a kind.”

“Thank Oberon for that,” muttered Quentin, while May just laughed.

The mood in the room seemed lighter now that we knew we had at least one spot where we could talk with reasonably little fear of being overheard. “Any thoughts on when Rhys is likely to want us to come for breakfast?”

“It’s a royal court, which means most people probably went to bed sometime shortly after dawn,” said Quentin. “If you figure sleeping for eight hours, and then taking an hour or so to become presentable, I’d guess they’re having breakfast right around now.”

“We’re clearly not being summoned for that, so I guess it’s not an ‘official’ meal,” I said. “When do you guess they’ll have lunch? Go nuts. Make a prediction.”

“Um, probably in like four or five hours? That gives Rhys time to figure out what he’s going to do with us.”

“Great. That means we can go out and get the lay of the land before we need to be properly formal.” Part of me wanted to crawl into that big bed and have a nap, since I rarely got to sleep once things really started moving. The rest of me knew that it was a bad idea. For me, anyway. “Quentin, why don’t you grab a few more hours of sleep. I need you fresh.”

“No nap for me,” said Walther. “I need to finish that potion before we go anywhere near the table. Don’t worry—I mix my own energy drinks.” His smile was tight but confident. He was an excellent alchemist. He wasn’t going to poison himself by mistake.

Well. Probably not.

“I have an idea,” said May. The rest of us turned to look at her. She shrugged. “I’m officially here as a lady’s maid, and the servants never get to sleep in as long as the nobles. That’s just not how things are done. So I figure if I can skip on the sleeping, I can go and get some gossip about the shape of this place before we have to discover it on our own. But, Toby, you should sleep.”

“May’s right,” said Walther. “Right now, there’s nothing you can do, and my magic isn’t a substitute for real sleep. It doesn’t restore the body the way actual unconsciousness would. We need you at your best.”

“My best still isn’t equipped for this situation,” I said.

“And yet here we are,” said May. “I’m going to get the lay of the land. Walther’s going to do alchemy. The three of you, nap, and I’ll be back in two hours to help you get ready for dinner.”

“Look at it this way,” said Walther. “You’re going to be working harder than anyone once things really get moving, so we’re not doing you any favors. We’re just equipping you to run a little bit faster when the monsters come.”

“I hate you all,” I groaned, and flopped backward on the bed.

Laughing, May left the room, with Walther close behind her. Quentin remained, standing awkwardly near the door to his private chamber. I raised my head enough to peer at him.

“You okay, kiddo?”

“Can I take Spike with me?” he asked. “I don’t want to sleep in here, but I’m not comfortable being alone in a Kingdom I don’t know.”

I pushed myself up onto my elbows. “Of course. Spike, go with Quentin.” The rose goblin, which had settled itself atop one of my suitcases, stood, rattled its thorns, and trotted over to rub against my squire’s ankles. Quentin bore the thorny intrusion with a minimum of wincing. “We’re right here if you need us.”

“Cool,” said Quentin. “Sleep well.”

“You, too.”

He stooped to pick Spike up from the floor before retreating into his room, shutting the door behind him. I looked at it for a moment, feeling obscurely guilty. Quentin had learned a lot since I’d first met him. He was going to be a good King someday, when his father chose to give him the throne, and while I wasn’t egotistical enough to think it was because of me, I did believe our time together had taught him to be better than he would have been otherwise. But it had also taught him to be cautious, and that not everything was going to go his way. He would have learned those lessons eventually. They were unavoidable. I still felt bad about the fact that he had needed to learn them from me.

Tybalt removed his boots and unbuttoned his shirt and vest, leaving them discarded on the floor before crawling into the center of the bed. He made the motion look remarkably natural, like bipeds had always been intended to move about on all fours. He stretched, getting comfortable, and then looked at me, raising his eyebrows.

“Well?” he asked. “Time is short, and sleep is precious. I should like to think you’d be allowing the first to expedite the second.”

“Sorry.” I kicked my own shoes off, and squirmed out of my leather jacket, draping it over the bedside table. Only then did I roll over, still effectively clothed, to snuggle against him. The smell of pennyroyal and musk was comforting, and I pressed my face to his chest, breathing it in.

Tybalt chuckled, although he sounded less amused than relieved. “Times are hard, and this is a battle unlike any you have fought before. Take comfort in knowing that you do not fight alone, and allow yourself to rest.”

“I’m trying.” I tilted my head back, looking at him. “I’m not equipped for this. I’m going to screw it up.”

“My dear, your entire life has been a succession of things you were not equipped for, and while you may have, as you so charmingly say, ‘screwed some of them up,’ you have, in the main, come through spectacularly well. You are surrounded by allies, and each of us is, in our own way, uniquely suited to the challenges ahead—as are you, or you wouldn’t be here. Trust Arden to know her people. Trust us to know your needs. Trust yourself to protect your Kingdom.” He kissed my forehead. “And sleep, I beg of you. You were bad enough when you were still drowning yourself in coffee. Now, when you become overtired, you are positively unlivable.”

“I love you, too,” I said, and leaned up to kiss him.

It wasn’t the most romantic kiss. I was fully clothed, he was still wearing trousers, and we were in what was effectively the fanciest guest room bed I had ever seen, with my squire just one thin door away. But his lips were warm and tasted like pennyroyal, and I could feel the purr vibrating through his chest. Sometimes romance is of less importance than the feeling of being absolutely safe: of knowing that nothing and no one can hurt you, because the person who loves you most in all the world will destroy them if they try.

I put my head down on his arm, closed my eyes, and let the world go away for a while. If I dreamt at all, I dreamt only shallowly, and there was nothing there that could hurt me.

Tybalt pulling his arm from under my head rocked me back into wakefulness. I opened my eyes, blinking first at the canopy above me, and then, as I shifted positions enough to look at the rest of the room, at the open doorway. May was standing there, arms folded, a concerned look on her face. She was wearing a dress I’d never seen before, a sedate concoction in gray silk with blue accents, like something out of a Waterhouse painting. I sat up, blinking again.

“Are you awake?” she asked. Her voice was flat, devoid of anything that would tell me how she was feeling.

Tybalt, who had been sitting up and rubbing his face in an effort to wipe his own weariness away, stiffened. I felt him changing positions on the bed next to me, and knew he was moving into a position from which he could maneuver better.

“Yes,” I said cautiously.

“Good. I’ve prepared milady’s dress for the meal. May I enter?”

“Yes,” I said again, even more cautiously this time.

“You are gracious,” said May, and stepped into the room, pulling the door closed behind her. Her posture and expression instantly changed, going limp with relief. “Oberon’s ass, I thought I was going to pull something. It’s worse than we thought out there, and it’s a damn good thing you both got some sleep, because I don’t know when that’s going to happen again.”

“What?” I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands, trying to chase the sleep away. It wasn’t happening fast enough. “What’s going on?”

“Quentin needs to get up.” May strode across the room, her new gown snapping at her ankles, and pounded on Quentin’s door with the heel of her hand before shouting, “Yo! Get your ass up! We have forty-five minutes!”

Her tone did what all the eye-rubbing in the world wouldn’t have been able to do, rocketing me from groggy wakefulness into full alertness in an instant. I hadn’t heard my Fetch sound that panicked since before we’d been separated. Once—and only once—she’d thought I was about to die, taking her with me. She’d sounded like this then.

“May?” I slid off the bed, standing. “Seriously, what’s going on?”

“What’s going on is that this Kingdom is fucked up, and it’s our fault.” She rounded on me, eyes brimming with unshed tears. “We knew, Toby. We knew Silences was a puppet government, and we knew the current king got the throne because he was willing to be an asshole to changelings. We knew that meant things here were probably bad. And we ignored it. It was inconvenient, and we ignored it.”

“May, honey.” I reached out and grabbed her hands. Behind her, the door to Quentin’s temporary room swung open and my squire stepped into the room, blinking blearily underneath the tangled fringe of his hair. I ignored him, focusing on her. “You still haven’t told us what you’re talking about. We want to help, but you have to explain.”

“Almost all the staff here are changelings, Toby,” she said. There was something dull, nearly broken, about her voice. May was a pureblood, but unlike most purebloods, she had never enjoyed the privilege of that position. As a night-haunt, she had been exiled to the edges of Faerie, denied the glitter and pageantry of the courts. And when she had finally become a Fetch, she had done so with the memories of two changelings—myself, and Dare—fresh in her mind. Despite her centuries of living, she remembered growing up as a changeling more vividly than she remembered anything else about her youth.

Slow comprehension was dawning at the back of my mind, hampered by an unwillingness to accept what she was saying. But understanding is a cruel beast: it will have its hour, no matter how painful.

“No changeling would voluntarily stay in Silences,” I said. “Being part human doesn’t make you stupid.”

“No. But being born to be put into service makes you afraid to run away.” May shook her head, a tear escaping to run down her cheek, before she stalked over to the wardrobe where I’d stowed my gowns. She wrenched it open, continuing to talk. “Most of them, their parents are on the staff. They were born in the Summerlands. They never had the Choice, because Faerie was all they knew. Service is all they’ve ever known. They think . . . they said . . .” She stopped.

Quentin was staring at her, his face pale and his eyes wide. He’d been my squire for years, and most of his early ideas about changelings had faded in the face of knowing us. It’s hard to reduce people to stereotypes after actually meeting them. But in some ways, I think going from a relatively sheltered boyhood to Shadowed Hills, to me, hadn’t done him any real favors, because he’d never been forced to see the way changelings were treated in the rest of the world—and that included places like Silences, which were part of his father’s greater Kingdom, and would one day be his.

“What did they say?” I asked, stepping over to May and taking the dress gently from her hands.

She sighed, a long, shuddering sound, and said, “They said you were incredibly generous, letting me run around unsupervised when we’d just shown up here, since there was a chance I could offend someone in your absence. Then they explained what that would mean. They beat their servants, Toby. Like this was the middle ages or something. There are children working in the kitchen. Children. They’ve never seen the mortal world. They’ve never been to school. And they flinch if any adult raises their hands above shoulder level, because they’ve been here since they were born, and they know what a raised hand means.”

I stared at her. Then I threw my dress on the bed and put my arms around her, pulling her close. She pressed her face into my shoulder and sobbed.

Growing up as a changeling in the Mists was hard. I had never considered that other Kingdoms might have it even worse.

Tybalt’s hand landed on my free shoulder. I twisted to look at him. His mouth was set in a thin, disapproving line, and I was reminded—not for the first time—that part of the conflict between the Court of Cats and the Divided Courts was the way that we treated our changelings. Cait Sidhe didn’t care so much about blood purity. They cared about strength, and how effectively you knew how to use it. Everything else was secondary.

“I won’t claim to be as angry as I know you must be. That frightens me, because I’m furious, and I can’t stop worrying about what you may choose to do next,” he said. “You must dress. We cannot insult this king at our first meal in his home.”

“I’d like to do more than insult him,” I said. May pulled away, and I let her, turning to face Tybalt instead. “If things here are as bad as May says, something has to be done.”

Tybalt nodded solemnly. “Yes. And yet, nothing will be done if we begin by offending the king. No.” He raised his hand as I was inhaling to object. “I am sorry, but no. This is, for once, a situation that cannot be resolved with blunt force, cannot be reconciled through bullheadedness or refusal to participate. We are here to play their game, to go through the dance steps that define the political waltz of the Divided Courts. We cannot refuse. You must put your dress on. You must dry your eyes. And you must ride to battle of a different sort.”

I looked at him. I turned to look at May, who was still crying, and at Quentin, standing white-faced and silent in his doorway. I couldn’t let them down, no matter how much I wanted to.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get ready to meet the locals.”