A Red Rose Chain

NINETEEN

“WHEN YOU SAID THINGS were going to get interesting, I thought you meant you were going to do a lot of complicated alchemy, not that we were going to break into Rhys’ private morgue,” I hissed, staying close to the wall. Tybalt had stepped into the Shadow Roads, returning in short order with a tank top and jeans from Old Navy. Literally from Old Navy: both had still had the price tags attached. They were the right sizes, too, which had earned him a speculative look. He had answered with a smirk, and I had gone behind a curtain of hanging roses to change my clothes while he got rid of my bloody dress.

I might have done better to stay behind the roses. When I came out, Walther had been waiting with his full kit and a basket of cut flowers. The basket had been pressed into my hands, and Ceres had done what only a Blodynbryd can do, and opened the Rose Road into Rhys’ knowe. All of which led to us walking through a narrow tunnel made entirely of thorns, trying to navigate our way into the heart of Rhys’ knowe without dropping back into the Summerlands proper. Ceres wasn’t going to be able to open a second Road to get us out—she had remained behind in her garden after opening the tunnel. I couldn’t blame her for that. If she got elf-shot for treason, who would take care of her flowers, or the surviving members of the former royal family? She had responsibilities in this Kingdom that needed her to remain above reproach.

But, Maeve’s eyes, we all had responsibilities. Tybalt had a Court to care for; Quentin was going to be the King someday; Walther had his students, who would never know what had happened to him if he disappeared while on a sabbatical to Portland. As for me, I had the people who were walking through the rose-scented darkness by my side, and at least a dozen more who counted on me to be there to save them. I didn’t sign up to be a hero. It just happened. That didn’t mean I could pretend it didn’t matter.

Marlis had also stayed behind. She needed to bandage her wounds, clean off the blood, and prepare to return to the receiving hall, where she would stand right in front of King Rhys and act as if nothing unusual was happening in the knowe. I didn’t envy her the task. I just hoped she was an incredible actress. If she so much as hinted to the King that something was up, we were all going to get caught—and this time when he charged us with treason, there wasn’t going to be any miracle save. He’d have us dead to rights . . . or maybe just dead.

“We’re almost there,” said Walther. He was walking at the front of our uneven little line, while Tybalt walked at the back, leaving me and Quentin in the middle. I would normally have been offended by the implication that I couldn’t take care of myself, but in that moment, I was just glad that someone who knew the way was taking point. I didn’t need to bring up the rear; there was no one I trusted more than Tybalt to hold that position.

“Why did we agree to this again?” I asked.

“Because I may need your blood to quicken the spell, depending on how complicated the counteragent turns out to be,” said Walther. “And I’m doing the final mixing in the dungeon because I need to be able to use this tincture immediately. Anything that has to be chilled to work isn’t going to sit well.”

“I know nothing about alchemy,” I said.

“I know,” said Walther. “That’s why you have to trust me.”

We walked on in silence after that, until Walther held up a hand, signaling for the rest of us to stop. He was looking at a stretch of thorny wall that looked exactly like the thorny wall all around it. “We’re here,” he said, and reached out to touch a single thorn with the tip of his index finger. The smell of his blood, faint but unmistakable, wafted back to tickle my nostrils as the brambles began to unwind.

“Please tell me that wasn’t all that was required to unlock the other door,” I grumbled.

Walther shot me a quick, tightly amused look. “No, that one takes sacrifice, and intent. This is a one-way door. It doesn’t demand as much.” The brambles were still unknotting themselves, opening a narrow slit in the side of the Rose Road. I couldn’t see anything through the opening; it was like it looked out on absolute blankness.

“That’s encouraging,” said Quentin. It was the first time he had spoken since we’d left the garden.

“Look at it this way, young squire: if we plummet into unending blackness, we will be falling into shadow,” said Tybalt. “Stay close to me, and I will be able to yank the three of us onto a more suitable Road before anyone is hurt.”

“Three?” asked Walther.

Tybalt looked at him flatly. “If you lead us into unending blackness, I feel less than obligated to rescue you.”

“Fair enough,” said Walther. “I guess that means I’m going first.” He slipped through the opening, and was gone, taking the faint but lingering scent of blood with him.

I sighed. “There’s only one way out. Come on.” I stepped through the opening after Walther. There was a moment of disorientation, like I was riding an extremely fast, totally dark elevator—

—and I was standing on a rough cobblestone floor, surrounded by gray granite walls. Stone biers studded the room, spaced out like display cases in a strange museum. There were at least a dozen of them, each with their own motionless figure lying atop them—the jewels in these inhumane displays. Walther was standing next to the nearest bier, his head bowed and his hands clenched into fists. I spared a glance behind me and, seeing that there was no opening, stepped out of the way. My instincts were correct: Tybalt and Quentin appeared out of thin air a second later.

Tybalt stopped as soon as he had his bearings, looking warily around the room. “This is dangerous,” he said, eyes narrowing. “Do what needs to be done, and let us be away from here.”

“I still don’t understand why we couldn’t start with May,” I said, walking over to Walther. I stopped when a few feet away, feeling my stomach drop toward my feet. I put a hand over my mouth, unsure of what I could possibly say in response to the scene in front of me.

The woman who was sleeping on the bier, her hands folded over her chest and a faint grimace on her otherwise peaceful face, couldn’t have been anyone but Walther’s mother. The shape of her cheekbones, the subtle composition of her features, even the angled points of her ears, they all mirrored his like some sort of sideways mirror. She looked more like Marlis than she did like him, but together, the three of them formed a family unit so unbelievably clear that there was no point in pretending it wasn’t there.

She was dressed in the pseudo-Medievalist fashion so common among the Courts, and if her gown was a hundred years out of fashion, I certainly couldn’t tell; one of the side effects of choosing all your clothes like you were getting ready to put on an extremely classy production of Camelot was that everything became subtly timeless, impossible to measure. But there were smears of dust at the corners of her eyes, like whoever was responsible for cleaning her hadn’t been as careful as they should have been, and I had no trouble believing that she’d been asleep for a century or more.

Her right leg ended at the knee, leaving that side of her skirt to fall straight down and puddle on the table. Walther followed my gaze to her missing lower limb. Then he looked back up, reaching out to carefully wipe the dust away from her eyes with the side of his thumb.

“We’re starting here, and not with May, because if I’m not exactly right, no one will notice,” he said. “Everyone in this room is already expected to sleep for a century. More than a century—as long as Rhys is in power and willing to keep putting them under. So if I test my tincture on one of them, and they don’t wake up, we haven’t lost anything. If I test it on May and put her to sleep for a thousand years, you’ll probably kill me.”

“Walther, I’m so sorry.” The words seemed awkward and out of place. They were the only things I had to offer. I had known that his family was here, sleeping, but I’d never thought too hard about it, because there hadn’t been anything I could do. Now . . . this was his mother. I didn’t even like my own mother most of the time, and I couldn’t imagine what it would do to me to know that she might never wake up again.

“I can’t start with my aunt or uncle, because we’re going to need them to challenge for the throne before the High King,” he said. “My cousin Torsten is next in line to be King, so I can’t start with him either. Mother was never the best alchemist in our family, but she was always the most adventurous. I remember her turning her hair purple when I was a kid. She laughed and said fashion couldn’t come before science, not if we wanted to understand what we did. She was the first one I told when I really started to understand that I was supposed to be a boy, because I knew she wouldn’t say ‘let’s just cast a transformation spell and make it all better.’ She’d tell me to use my alchemy, to do it myself and make it permanent. Because she believed in me.”

“We don’t have to start with her,” I said softly.

“Yes, we do,” he said. “If I don’t wake her up, I can try again. I can find the right formula, I can wake up my father, and together, we’ll be able to undo whatever it is I’ve done. But if I start with him and I’ve got it wrong, there’s no one I can safely try to wake who will actually be able to help me save him. She has to come first.”

I couldn’t tell how much of his logic was sincere and how much was his need to see his mother again, to feel her arms around him and hear her voice telling him it was going to be okay. In the end, it didn’t matter. He was the alchemist: he was the one who understood the risks, and the possible costs, of what we were about to do. All I could do was follow his lead. “What do you need from me?”

Walther offered me a wan smile. “I’m going to need you to bleed for me.”

“That’s something I can do.” I looked toward Tybalt and Quentin, who were standing quietly a few feet away. Neither of them looked happy with our situation. Neither of them was telling me not to help. I think we all knew that ship had sailed long ago, and not one of us had been on board.

“Good. It’ll be a few minutes.” Walther opened his kit, beginning to unpack it one piece at a time on the edge of his mother’s bier. Some of the things were familiar—mortar and pestle, little jars of assorted herbs, syringe. Other pieces were strange to me, weights and presses and oddly-shaped vessels that didn’t hold anything but potential. The rest of the world seemed to drop away from him as he bent over his work.

I turned and walked back to Tybalt and Quentin. “I don’t know how long this is going to take, and I’m not comfortable being unarmed, or leaving May by herself,” I said. “Tybalt, do you think you can get Quentin back to our room, and come back here with my knife?”

Tybalt scowled. “No good ever comes from sending me away.”

Quentin looked resigned, and a little relieved, like this was the answer he’d been hoping for but hadn’t quite dared to suggest. “She’s right. Someone should be with May, and if things go wrong here, I probably shouldn’t be caught where the alchemy is happening. My parents would be pissed if I wound up getting elf-shot.”

“You’ve left me on my own several times since we got here, and I’ve been fine,” I said, leaning up to kiss Tybalt on the cheek. “Just trust me, okay? I need my knife, and May needs someone to protect her. I can take care of myself in the nice, empty dungeon until you make it back.”

“You tell me you no longer yearn for death, but sometimes, you do things that make it difficult to believe you,” said Tybalt. He had the resigned tone that meant he was going to do what I was asking, thank Maeve. Quentin was looking more uncomfortable by the minute, and the threat of discovery was making me twitchy. I didn’t want to get the Crown Prince of the Westlands busted for treason if I could help it.

When I first found out Quentin was going to be High King someday, I had promised him I wouldn’t let the knowledge make me treat him differently. For the most part, I’d kept my word. But there were certain things that had made me unhappy when he was just my untitled squire, and now that I knew who he really was, they were unbearable. Situations like this made the list.

“I love you, too,” I said. “Quentin, stay with May; don’t let anyone in.”

“Got it,” he said. “Don’t do anything completely stupid, okay?”

“I’ll do my best,” I said. Quentin smiled tightly as Tybalt took him by the arm. Then my boyfriend and my squire stepped backward into the shadows, and they were gone, leaving only the faint scent of musk and pennyroyal hanging in the air.

I walked back to the bier where Walther was working, standing silently off to one side and watching as he mixed powders and liquids, ground rose petals in a mortar, and generally worked his own quiet brand of magic. There are races in Faerie that are uniquely well suited to the art of alchemy—Tylwyth Teg, Kitsune, Huldra—but anyone can learn it, if they’re willing to put in the time, and even the races with a natural talent require years of training and practice before they can really claim to be skilled alchemists. Walther had been practicing for more than a century. He had reshaped his body with his art, and he was a living testament to what kind of alchemist he had become.

At the same time, he was trying to unmake a spell first woven by one of the Firstborn, a spell that had been used throughout Faerie for millennia without being broken or undone. He was going to need every bit of skill he possessed, and then some, if he wanted to make this work.

“Toby?”

The sound of his voice snapped me out of my thoughts. I looked up. “Yeah?”

“It’s time.” He held out a scalpel. Its edge glittered too softly to be stainless steel; it was silver, as sharp and pure as any fae dueling blade. “I don’t need much.”

“I’ve got plenty.” I took the scalpel from his hand, testing the weight of it before I brought it down across my arm, cutting lengthwise to get as much blood as possible before my body started to heal. He held out a chalice, and I bled into it, turning my face away. I still don’t like the sight of blood, despite how often I bleed. One more thing to thank my own mother for.

“That should be enough,” said Walther.

“Okay. Just tell me if you want more.” I turned back to face him, holding out the scalpel for him to take out of my hand. He did, and I wiped as much of the blood off my arm as I could. Problem: this left me with a blood-coated palm, which I promptly rubbed against my brand new jeans. The amount of time a piece of clothing could expect to be in my possession before being ruined was going down all the time. “What happens next?”

“You let me work, and we both pray that I got the recipe right,” he said. He turned back to his equipment, beginning to add blood—one drop at a time—to his mashed rose petals. He must have added a powder to the chalice that would keep my blood from clotting, because it seemed strangely liquid, even for as fresh as it was, and very, very bright.

The smell was overwhelming, a mixture of blood and roses that was so reminiscent of my mother that it sent shivers down my spine. I moved away, starting to walk a slow patrol around the edges of the dungeon.

Each of the biers was occupied, most by Tylwyth Teg who shared a faint familial resemblance with Walther. There were a few others—a Glastig, a Daoine Sidhe, even a Tuatha de Dannan whose glossy cherrywood hair made her look more like Etienne and Chelsea than Rhys or Arden—but the Tylwyth Teg were by far in the majority. This hadn’t just been a conquest: it had been a rout, and I wasn’t sure, even now, how it had been accomplished. The Mists had possessed the larger army, but Silences had been the aggressors. How could they have underestimated their position so dramatically?

“Walther, you remember the war,” I said, turning. “How did the Mists win?”

“No one knows,” he said, still working. “We were fighting, and it seemed like we had all the advantages. Then we just . . . started to lose. It was like people didn’t have the will to fight back. Entire parties were wiped out without raising a finger to defend themselves. We lost half the Cu Sidhe. The ones who didn’t die just vanished. They’re probably still asleep in a basement somewhere.”

“That’s not good.”

Walther chuckled humorlessly. “Tell me about it. Now hush, and let me work.”

I hushed. But I continued walking around the edges of the dungeon, marking the entrances, and the position of the biers. There wasn’t much here that could be used as cover. I was on my third circuit of the room when I heard a sound. It was faint, like a footstep on a distant, stony floor. It was loud enough to be a concern.

“Walther, hide yourself.”

“What?”

“You’re a good enough illusionist to hide yourself, and you share blood with most of the people in this room; even a Daoine Sidhe won’t be able to sniff you out. Now hide.” I kept my voice low, but my last word verged on a snarl.

Walther didn’t argue. The scent of yarrow flared in the air and then was gone. I looked over my shoulder, and I didn’t see him, or the array of alchemical supplies that he had been using to prepare his counterpotion. Good. There were more powerful people than I was in Faerie, and some of them might have been able to spot him, but only if they were looking. With this many Tylwyth Teg in one room, they hopefully wouldn’t be looking.

That just left me. I grabbed a handful of shadows out of the air, weaving a blur as fast as I could. Anger usually made my illusions easier to cast. I didn’t have anger, but I had the burgeoning seeds of panic. I threw it into the magic, spinning and twisting the spell as fast as I could. I wanted to chant—spoken spells have always helped me to focus my magic and make it obey me more quickly—but I didn’t know how close company was. The last thing I wanted to do was conceal myself magically and give myself away through mundane means.

The spell rose, solidified, and burst around me. I pressed myself to the wall and tried not to move more than I had to. Blur spells don’t make you invisible, but they make you damn hard to see, like those little brown lizards that infest the mortal park outside of Shadowed Hills. As long as I was perfectly still and didn’t make a sound, there was a good chance I’d be overlooked.

Seconds ticked by. I was starting to think that I had been overly-cautious when the footsteps started up again, moving closer. I stopped breathing.

Tia stepped into the dungeon.

Madden’s sister had changed since I’d last seen her, in Arden’s Court, demanding strident justice for her brother. The pigtails and peasant blouse were gone, replaced by unbound waves of red-and-white hair and a long silver-gray gown that hugged her curves and erased any traces of the hippie girl she had seemed to be when she stood before the Queen. Her amber, distinctly canine eyes were narrowed, and she was sniffing the air with every step she took. Two of Rhys’ men were behind her . . . and behind them was Rhys himself, still wearing his Court finery, his hands folded behind his back like he was afraid he would touch something and dirty himself.

Tia’s nose wrinkled as she took in the biers. “You kept them?” she demanded. She turned to Rhys. “You told me they’d been killed, all of them, even down to the suckling babes. You promised me.”

“I told you they had been disposed of,” said Rhys. “What could be worse than an eternity of sleep at the hands of one who bears you no good will? They’ve woken once, and we put them down again. They’ll sleep forever, and each time they wake, they’ll find more of themselves missing, carved away for purposes they will never know. I have made their lives a processional of nightmares and horrors. Would you really rather that they were dead?”

“I suppose not,” sniffed Tia. “Whatever you give them, they deserve. Bastards, all of them.”

“I’ve kept my word to you otherwise,” said Rhys. “I even started with your brother when it came time to declare war on the Mists. Now keep your word to me. Find my enemies.”

“I gave you the opportunity to put an arrow in Madden. I’m not sure you can claim that was a favor to me; you’d have done it for free if I’d promised you there would be no retaliation.”

“And yet I did it because you asked me to, which makes it a favor. All I ask is that you do the same favor for me. Do what I’ve asked.”

I didn’t dare breathe. I had been expecting treachery, treason, all sorts of terrible things, but I hadn’t been expecting Rhys to walk into the room with a Cu Sidhe by his side—not when his Court was so blatantly devoid of fae with animal traits. I’d only been thinking about Daoine Sidhe reading the air for the heritage of those present, or Gwragen looking for the cobweb sheen of illusions. I hadn’t considered the fact that they might just look for the physical.

Tia sniffed the air, her nostrils flaring in a way that was subtly, anatomically inhuman. “Blood, and magic,” she said. “They were here.”

“Where did they go?” Rhys sounded anxious. He didn’t like not knowing where we were.

I didn’t have much sympathy for him. My heart was hammering against my rib cage, beating so hard and fast that I was honestly amazed it hadn’t given me away. If Tia’s ears had been as sensitive as her nose, surely she could have just followed them to me. I stayed as motionless as I could, unsure whether I should be praying for Tybalt to arrive and pull me out or praying that he would stay as far away as possible, avoiding this entire situation. We didn’t both need to get caught. Neither of us needed to get caught.

Sweet Oberon, please get me out of this, I thought.

Then Tia turned toward Walther, still sniffing the air, and took a step in his direction. “It’s freshest this way. Is there a secret passage? Those Yates bastards riddled their home with holes, and their Davies cronies weren’t any better. They could have dug straight down through the stone, just to give themselves another place to beat their dogs . . .”

Two more steps and she would be on top of Walther. Walther, who was the only chance we had of unmaking the potion that powered the elf-shot. Without him, we’d never be able to wake any of the sleepers—not Madden, not May, and not the true heirs to Silences. He was so close. He could fix it all, as long as he could have just a little bit more time. That was all he really needed: just a little bit more time. He wasn’t going to get that if Rhys caught him. He was going to get an elf-shot arrow to the shoulder and a long sleep in this same dungeon, and the victims of elf-shot were going to sleep out their sentences, no matter where they were.

I couldn’t let that happen. No matter how much I wanted to stay safe and hidden, I was a hero of the realm, and that meant I had to choose the greater good. Tybalt, I’m sorry, I thought, and raked the palm of my left hand against the rough stone of the dungeon wall, leaving a layer of skin behind.

The pain was immediate and intense, followed almost as fast by the dull ache of healing. The smell of blood filled the air around me, hot and unmistakable. Tia’s head whipped around, her nostrils flaring and her pupils dilating as she scented blood in the air. “There,” she said, and pointed, so much like a hunting hound that a bubble of desperate, angry laughter tried to raise in my throat. “She’s against that wall.”

“Excellent,” said Rhys. “Men?”

His men reached into their jerkins and withdrew cheesecloth bags, like party favors at a wedding. They flung them at the spot Tia had indicated. I ducked away, but couldn’t avoid the cloud of pale blue dust that exploded around me as the bags burst, filling the air with the taste of evergreens and smoke. I coughed. I choked. And finally, I collapsed, hitting the floor so hard that I felt the impact all the way down into my bones.

The last thing I saw before everything went black was Tia’s face, looming in my field of vision like a mountain. “And they call me a bitch,” she said, and spat on my cheek. I felt the dampness. I felt the stone floor beneath me.

And then I didn’t feel anything at all.