A Red Rose Chain

TEN

I WALKED DOWN THE DESERTED hall toward King Rhys’ receiving room with Tybalt on my arm and Walther following two paces behind. Quentin was off with May, exploring the knowe. As my squire, he could be reasonably expected to be running around and doing the tasks I didn’t want to bother with, and as a pureblood, he was going to be in less danger than a changeling manservant would have been. I’d still insisted he take some of Walther’s powder with him, just in case somebody tried to force him to have a friendly cup of tea or something. The thought of Quentin being dosed with a loyalty potion was enough to make my skin crawl.

“I wonder how big this Court really is,” I commented mildly, looking at one of the blank walls. I’d never been in a knowe this size with so little decoration. It was like Rhys had ordered the whole thing from Castles R Us, and then never bothered to swing by the local Bed, Battlements, and Beyond for the accessories he’d need to make it believable.

“In what regard, my dear?” Tybalt’s tone was artificially plummy and tolerant, like he was speaking to a child he suspected of being slightly slow. I wrinkled my nose, resisting the urge to burst out laughing. We were almost certainly being listened to, and speculating about the size of the Court, while rude, wasn’t seditious or otherwise inappropriate . . . except in that it could be considered speculation about the size of Rhys’ army.

“Well, I know about how many purebloods there are in the Mists, not counting the Selkies or the Undersea,” I said. It was always easy to forget, embroiled as I was in the courts, how few purebloods there actually were. Humans outnumbered them by a factor of tens of thousands. Changelings could have outnumbered them, too, if we’d ever cared to pull away from our human friends and pureblood masters and become an organized force. Luckily for the status quo, most of the changelings I knew were too busy keeping body and soul together to waste their time on sedition. “Silences is a smaller Kingdom, isn’t it? So maybe that explains why the halls are so empty.”

“Silences is a smaller Kingdom, but Portland is the biggest city in Silences,” said Walther. “I know a lot of the local fae don’t necessarily take part in Court. That’s true in the Mists, too. I think what you’re seeing is just the effect of a high turnover in the higher social classes during the war. People who used to be held in good standing aren’t always anymore, and some of the nobles who managed to keep their places did so by keeping their heads down and not drawing attention to themselves.”

“Oh,” I said, and looked thoughtfully around the hall again, trying to fill in the spaces between his words. I knew people, like Walther and Lowri, who had come from Silences; purebloods who had chosen to move to other Kingdoms rather than stay where they were. But I didn’t know anyone who had chosen to move to Silences. All the mobility seemed to be in the wrong direction.

Idly, I wondered whether King Rhys had one of the still-missing hope chests. If he could turn changeling children into pureblood fae, he might be able to solve his population problem. Of course, he’d have to deal with the fact that his populace had all started out part-human, which might be a bit much for him, given his prejudices, but who knew? Maybe he could adjust.

Two men in full Silences livery were standing outside the receiving room doors when we walked up. One of them looked me up and down, not making any effort to hide his dismay at my blue jeans and bodice. I thought I actually looked pretty good, all things considered. They were dark jeans—the only formal way to wear denim, according to my ex-boyfriend, Cliff, who had worn jeans every day while we were together—and my bodice was a lovely shade of wine red, holding everything in place without turning my breasts into the stars of the show. It seemed more inspired by mortal ideas of the Middle Ages than by actual pureblood fashion, and I appreciated that, too, since the entire point of the outfit was reminding them that they weren’t dealing with their own kind. They were dealing with me, and I was done playing around.

“Sir October Daye, Knight of Lost Words and diplomatic representative for Her Majesty Arden Windermere, Queen in the Mists,” I said, without preamble. “I am accompanied by King Tybalt of the Court of Dreaming Cats, and attended by my alchemist, Walther. I would like to see your liege now, if you would be so kind as to open the doors for us.”

The guard who had been sneering at my clothes blinked. Apparently, whatever he’d been expecting me to say, it hadn’t been that. “King Rhys is otherwise occupied,” he said.

“Does he get to do that?” I raised an eyebrow as I glanced to Tybalt, my tone making it clear that my question wasn’t really a question. “I don’t think he gets to do that.” I turned back to the guard. “I am the diplomatic representative for Queen Arden Windermere, recognized by High King Aethlin Sollys as rightful ruler in the Mists. Your King has declared war on her Kingdom, which makes her sort of cranky. That’s why I’m here. We’re hoping this can be resolved without resorting to actual bloodshed since, well, blood is so messy, don’t you think?” I took a step toward the guard, who shrank back.

The Luidaeg would have been so proud of me in that moment. Her little troublemaker, all grown up and complicating lives on a grander scale than ever.

“So here’s how this is going to go,” I continued, not giving the guard a chance to speak. “You’re going to open the door. You’re going to let us through. You’re going to remember that we’re here under the rules of formal hospitality, and that barring our way could be viewed as an act of aggression against the Mists. Do you really want to do that? Aggress against us when we’re in that polite three-day period between you being dicks and us being allowed to kill you for it?” I was bluffing. I wasn’t sure aggressing against us was a bad thing at this stage, since Silences had declared war—it seemed a little unrealistic to expect them to worry about our feelings when they were planning to march in and start slaughtering us.

Thankfully, the guard didn’t call my bluff. He fell back another half step, shooting a glance at his compatriot, who seemed to be doing his best to ignore what was going on. I guess when you’re not the person being advanced on by the scary changeling, there’s very little motive to intervene.

“Apologies,” said the first guard. He stepped to the side, grabbed the door handle, and pulled.

I didn’t say anything. I just offered him a thin smile, placed my hand back on Tybalt’s arm, and proceeded onward.

The receiving room was the room where we had been taken upon first arriving in Silences. Velvet and tassels threatened to strangle the walls. The hardwood floor was polished bright as a mirror. I had to take extra care not to slip as we made our way across the room to the dais where Rhys waited. The last thing I needed was to fall on my face in front of him. He presented exactly the picture I’d been expecting, seated proudly on his golden throne. What I hadn’t been expecting was the woman who sat beside him on one of the dignitary’s chairs, although in retrospect, I should have been: the false Queen wasn’t the sort of woman who would allow herself to be left out of a war of her own devising.

Marlis was standing at attention to the left of the dais. As we approached, she said, loudly, “Sir October Daye of the Mists. King Tybalt of the Court of Dreaming Cats.” Walther, it seemed, did not deserve an introduction. I searched her face, looking for any flicker that she recognized the man she was failing to announce. It wasn’t there.

“Ah, Sir Daye, how lovely to see you again,” said King Rhys, before allowing his eyes to travel the length of my body. He raised his eyebrows slightly, as if surprised. “Were you unable to pack sufficient clothing for your trip? My court tailors would be happy to help you with any deficiencies in your wardrobe. Simply send your lady’s maid to them, and they will provide whatever your heart desires.”

“I’m good,” I said. “It’s sort of hard to do much in the kind of dresses people keep trying to put me into, you know? Jeans are much more convenient.”

“Convenient, yes; respectable, no,” said the false Queen. She leaned back in her chair and snapped her fingers, a cold smile on her face.

The changes I had made to her blood had echoed through her flesh and into her magic. Some of those changes were good ones. She could no longer command people with her voice, could no longer compel us to attack our loved ones or forget our places in the world. Some of those changes were less positive. A cloud of mist enveloped me, so sudden and thick that I found myself separated from Tybalt even though I would have sworn that I hadn’t moved at all. I realized, to my dismay, that I didn’t really know what Sea Wights were capable of. They were technically Undersea fae, and I had never encountered a pureblood.

“He’ll leave you before this is done, you know,” murmured the false Queen’s voice, from deep inside the mist. The air smelled of rowan and tasted of the sea, an indefinable flavor that was salt and rot and petrichor and a thousand other things, all of them mingled into a single element. “He’ll leave you to drown, and he won’t be there to save you.”

“I’ve never needed to be saved before.”

“Oh, my dear. My dear, my delusional darling, no. That’s where you’re wrong. You have never been the golden-haired girl in skirts of green, and you are always the one who must be saved.”

As suddenly as it had come, the mist was gone. My hand was back on Tybalt’s arm, and he was frowning at me, eyes narrowed in anger and suspicion. I forced myself to keep my chin up, not allowing myself to look down at my clothing. I could already tell, from the feeling of fabric hanging around my legs, that it had been changed.

“You know I hate it when you do that,” I said, eyes fixed on the false Queen. She was reclining in her seat, a smug expression on her face. There was a time when that look would have caused me to compare her to a cat, but I had gotten to know the Cait Sidhe a lot better since then—all sorts of Cait Sidhe, not just my childhood friend, Julie—and I knew no cat could ever match her for underhanded treachery. They could be deceitful, sure, but it wasn’t the same thing.

When the Cait Sidhe came to kill you, they did it with tooth and claw, and they did it in the open. They didn’t do it with words and dresses and slander.

“Do you?” she asked, her eyes widening theatrically. “I don’t believe you ever told me so. Then again, perhaps that’s because in the past, when I gave you the gift of a better wardrobe, I was still recognized as rightful Queen of the Mists. It’s rude to argue with your monarch, isn’t that so? So you must have stayed silent, and now I have overstepped. How terrible. Imagine how this could have been avoided with better communication. Then again, many things could have been avoided with better communication. You could, for example, not have gone looking for an imposter to steal my throne away from me.”

I blinked at her, momentarily nonplussed. To cover the silence, I looked down at myself, finally giving her the satisfaction of acknowledging what she’d done.

My jeans, blouse, and bodice were gone, replaced by a pine-green velvet gown straight out of a pre-Raphaelite painting. It was embroidered with gold heraldic roses around the long, trailing cuffs and square neckline. The underdress was pale gold, a few shades lighter than the embroidery, and had its own line of primroses in heather green stitched across the neckline. I kicked out one foot, sending several skirts rustling out of the way, and revealed a green slipper that matched the gown.

“You always did have an excellent sense of color,” I said, looking up again. “You know it didn’t go down like that. You didn’t leave me any choice.”

“I left you the world, October.” The coy theatricality bled out of her eyes, leaving them icy and filled with the moonstruck madness that had always been her stock in trade. It seemed colder than it used to be, less fragmented and more simply wild. I had done that to her. The weight of it seemed to strike me all at once. So much of who she’d always been was in her blood, in the jagged places where her various heritages rubbed up against each other. And yes, sometimes those edges were sharp enough to cut her, or to cut the people around her, but they’d been hers, and I’d taken them away from her without her consent.

The false Queen wasn’t the first person whose blood I had changed. She wasn’t even the most recent. But she was the only one whose blood I had changed without her consent, against her will, and while I had done it to save both myself and the people I loved, I suddenly found myself wishing there had been another way. There was a time when I would have found another way, because I wouldn’t have had any other choice. Back then, I was too human to have transformed her the way that I had.

Maybe I was losing touch with my humanity after all.

“All I denied you was my Kingdom, and I denied it to you because you pushed too hard,” she said, apparently taking my stricken silence for confusion. “You couldn’t be still, couldn’t be quiet, couldn’t remember your place. I gave you enough rope to hang yourself and more; enough rope to weave a bridge that could have carried you beyond the Mists. But you wouldn’t go.”

“Everyone I know is in the Mists,” I said. My lips felt numb.

Her eyes narrowed. “And everyone I know is not? I have allies in Silences—obviously, or you would not be here now—but they are few and far between compared to the comforts of my own knowe, my own home.”

The knowe she had claimed as her own was standing empty, waiting for Arden or someone else among the nobility to decide what to do with it. The amount of iron in the false Queen’s dungeons made it a dangerous place for purebloods, apart from the Gremlins, and no one was sure they wanted to give them access to that much iron.

“I found that knowe, remember?” I wasn’t sure what I was going to say until I was speaking, and then it was too late. “It was the first thing I ever did for you. I went into the city, and I found you a knowe when your old one was sinking back into the shallowing it had been shaped from. And I think I sort of wondered, even then, how a kingdom as big as ours could have such an unstable royal seat. Because no one had ever told me that King Gilad reigned from someplace different, you know? I thought you were his daughter.”

She glared at me, her eyes all but snapping fire. “I am my father’s daughter.”

“No, you’re not.” I shook my head. “I mean, technically I guess you are—whoever your father was, you’re his child, but you’re not King Gilad Windermere’s daughter. He was a pureblooded Tuatha de Dannan, and you have no Tuatha in you.”

“Because you stole it from me!” She sat up straighter, expression going triumphant. “You reached into my blood and you ripped away my heritage, all so you could give my throne to someone else! Betrayer! I made you a Countess, I elevated you above all others of your kind, and this was how you repaid me. With unspeakable treachery.”

“I see how we’re playing this,” I said. “You keep saying things that are true, because they don’t have any context. Yes, you are your father’s daughter, but your father was never King in the Mists. Yes, I changed the balance of your blood, and I’m genuinely sorry to have done it without your permission, but I did it to save my friends, and what I took away from you was Siren, not Tuatha. It’s not against the Law for us to use magic against each other. Sometimes I wish that it was. We might do a little less damage that way. Since it’s not, under the Law, I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Wait.” King Rhys leaned forward on his throne, breaking into the conversation for the first time since the false Queen had started speaking. “Is what she says true? Did you really lay hands upon her, and take her heritage from one thing into another?”

“Yes.” There was no point in lying. We didn’t go around advertising the fact that I wasn’t Daoine Sidhe, as I had always assumed, but the more fae I became, the more obvious it was that my heritage had nothing to do with Titania. Everything about me was wrong for one of her children, and perfect for one of the children of Oberon. “When I placed my hands on her, she had three bloodlines in her. Siren, Sea Wight, and Banshee. She was using the abilities she inherited from her Siren bloodline to harm the people I love. I had no other solution that wouldn’t violate the Law, and so I took those abilities away from her.” Oberon’s Law said that we weren’t allowed to kill each other. It never said anything about getting creative with our magic, which was how elf-shot was invented, and why so many of us had passed a few centuries as trees, or boulders, or white stags that only appeared at sunrise.

“And this is something you could do again?” He leaned forward a little more, looking at me with more interest than I was really comfortable with. “You could just . . . change someone?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “But I can only work with what’s already there. I couldn’t make myself part Cu Sidhe, or turn a Tylwyth Teg into a Tuatha. I’m . . . sort of an alchemist, I guess, in a weird way. I can’t actually transform anything into something that it’s not.”

“I haven’t heard this power attributed to the Daoine Sidhe before,” he said, raising one eyebrow inquisitively. “Are you a prodigy of some sort? Or are you a danger? Is this a thing any Daoine Sidhe could do, were they not limited by their own safeguards?”

There was a time when I could pass for something other than what I was, and thus protect my mother’s first big secret: that she was Firstborn, a daughter of Oberon himself, and hence the parent of a whole new race. That time was long past, and if Mom wanted me to keep my mouth shut, she should have given me a reason. “I didn’t say I was Daoine Sidhe,” I said. “I’m Dóchas Sidhe. We’re blood-workers, but our powers run along different lines.”

“I see. Fascinating.” King Rhys settled back in his throne again. “Forgive me if I’m a little slow to fully grasp the implications of these . . . powers . . . of yours. Are you saying you can’t return my lady’s true heritage to her?”

“That’s correct,” I said. “There’s no Siren left in her blood. I can’t create something that isn’t there.”

“If you looked for it, would you even be able to find traces of it? Would there be any sign that it had ever existed?”

“I don’t know,” I said, slowly. “I’ve never had reason to look for a bloodline that had been removed from someone. I think there would probably be signs. She’d have to consent to my looking, though; they’d be delicate and hard to find, and would require her cooperation.” There were watermarks in my blood, showing the places where my fae and human heritages had slid back and forth, fighting for dominance. There was no reason to believe that the false Queen would be any different.

“I see. What about the process of the removal itself? Could it have, ah, ‘washed away’ any of those marks that were made before you laid hands on her?”

Too late, I recognized the trap that I was walking into. “Yes,” I said.

“Then you don’t know that my lady is not King Windermere’s daughter and rightful heir. What makes you so sure that what you did to her had not been done before? Hope chests have always existed. In fact . . .” He turned to the false Queen. “Wasn’t there a rumor that a hope chest had been found in the Mists? In the care of the Countess Winterrose?”

“It’s no rumor, my lord,” she said, with open satisfaction in her voice. “It was brought to me by Sir Daye, and placed in my royal treasury. I don’t know where it is now, of course, denied as I am the right to access my own home and goods. But it was a true thing, and one which I saw with my own eyes.” Her gaze slanted back to me, mouth thinning into a hard line. “Until recent events caused me to realize that I had been deceived as to Sir Daye’s heritage, I had assumed that her growing purity of blood was due to her having used the chest herself, before she handed it over to me. I considered raising the question with her, if I am being entirely honest. The hope chest is a powerful artifact, and should not have been left cavalierly in the hands of a changeling.”

“Doesn’t make it yours,” I said, as calmly as I could. “According to the official records, it was given to the care of the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn by Oberon himself. I guess that means it should be held by the Daoine Sidhe, if by no one else. Since you’ve never claimed to be Daoine, and at the time I thought I was, I would have had more right to keep the thing than you did. And I didn’t. I handed it off to the Court of Cats while I finished dealing with the business at hand, and then gave it to the woman who stood as Evening’s liege—you. I never used it.”

At least, I hadn’t used it on purpose. The delicate balance of my blood had been disrupted when I’d touched it: there was no denying that, and it would have been foolish to try. My whole life had been a ride from one end of my heritage to the other, with forces—the hope chest, my mother, the goblin fruit—tugging me first one way and then the opposite. I was finally in a position to do the tugging for myself, and if that meant I was choosing to stay exactly where I was, well, that was my prerogative.

“I believe we’re getting off the subject,” said King Rhys. “Sir Daye, you claim that Arden Windermere is rightful Queen of the Mists, by virtue of being the eldest child of Gilad Windermere, who died without announcing an heir. Is this so?”

“Yes,” I said. It seemed like a simple question, which meant it was probably anything but. I breathed in through my nose, trying to calm myself, and was hit again with the mingled magical scents of the people around me. Tybalt’s pennyroyal smelled, soothingly, of home, while the false Queen’s rowan and seashore warned me that the danger was very far from over.

“You have also admitted that you don’t know whether you would be able to tell, now, if someone else had manipulated the balance of my lady’s blood, given the violence of your attack.” He leaned forward, expression suddenly predatory. “As you can manipulate blood without a hope chest, and have allies who can walk through shadows and move through walls, who knew where a hope chest was to be found—and you have a mother, do you not? Someone who, presumably, shares your capabilities; Amandine, I believe her name was—why am I to believe that my lady is not also King Gilad’s daughter?”

“My mother was of mixed-blood,” said the false Queen piously. “The Undersea refused her, because her father had been a Banshee, and Banshee are not creatures of the sea.”

“Wait. Wait just one moment.” I put my hands up, palms turned outward. “Are you trying to claim that she’s actually the legitimate heir to the throne?”

“I am the elder among us: none will question that I was born before Arden,” said the false Queen. “Why didn’t you ask if Gilad was my father? Why didn’t you test my blood, look for those markers you claim you can see? You could have told for certain whether part of my heritage had been stolen—and by your own words, once it was taken, it couldn’t be returned. So you stand here and admit, instead, that you destroyed the evidence of such a crime.”

“If that evidence existed,” I snapped. “You never said you’d been part Tuatha and lost it. There’s nothing to support that idea.”

“But there’s nothing to contradict it, either,” said King Rhys. “You’re here because you want to prevent a war between my Kingdom and yours. I can’t blame you for wanting that, any more than I can blame the usurper for sending you. After all, power cleaves to power, and you’re quite enjoying the change in regime, aren’t you? From a powerless changeling to a diplomat. Respected, attended by pureblood servants, allowed to take a squire of your own, even betrothed to a man whose power outstrips your own . . . I’m sure you can see why I find it difficult to believe that you acted solely out of the need to protect your Kingdom.”

“I never said I didn’t have reasons to want Arden on the throne,” I said. “If you don’t think she’s legitimate, take it up with the High King.”

“I don’t have to,” said Rhys. “I am a valid monarch, holding a throne that was given to me by my liege, and I have held that throne well for over a hundred years. No one is going to challenge my right to declare war on my neighbors when they threaten me.”

“How did we threaten you?” I demanded.

“The Mists has threatened me by allowing you to live, Sir Daye,” he said calmly. “You are a threat to my throne, and to my people’s way of life. If Arden’s first step after taking ‘her’ throne had been to order your execution for laying hands in anger upon a pureblood, my lady might have finally accepted my age-old proposal and agreed to sit beside me as my Queen. But Arden didn’t do that. She welcomed you as a part of her Court, of her political structure. And you are, quite simply, too dangerous to be allowed to run about as you do.”

His smile was sudden, and predatory. “You see, Sir Daye, I know you are here to prevent a war, and I would very much like to give you the opportunity to do so. I’d like to offer you a solution.”

“What’s that?” I asked warily.

“Bleed for me.” King Rhys kept smiling. That was possibly the worst thing of all. “Go to my alchemists, and let them bleed you dry. Let us make talismans of your bones, and antidotes from your liver. We’ll let everyone else you brought with you leave—and as you are not a pureblood, we won’t even have to accuse them of standing idly by while Oberon’s Law was broken. Die for us, Sir Daye, and we will let your loved ones live.”

The false Queen had never looked so triumphant. Not even when she was banishing me from the only home I had ever known, not even when she was sentencing me to death for breaking the same Law that would now fail to protect me.

“The choice,” she said, “is yours. But then again, it always was, wasn’t it, October?”