A Red Rose Chain

TWENTY

EVERYTHING HURT. IT WAS like someone had taken my nerves and dipped them in fire ants, all of which were now industriously working to chew their way through my flesh. The pain wrenched me out of sleep, pulling me back into a world full of nothing but suffering. At the same time, the pain kept my body from listening to my commands: it was too busy trying not to writhe in involuntary agonies to do anything as simple as letting me open my eyes.

There was a time when I would have thought that no one could endure that level of pain and survive. I had learned a lot since those easy, innocent days, back when I believed a bullet could be merciful enough to let me die.

“This is taking too long,” said a voice. It sounded familiar, although I couldn’t place it, not quite. “You promised me this would go faster.”

“And I told you, cur, that I am a king, and I don’t take orders from my dogs.” Rhys. Bastard. “You’ve already betrayed one master. If you want me to trust you, you will do as you are told.”

“We need this war. You promised.” There was a growl lurking in the unfamiliar voice now, allowing me to place it: Tia. Tia? But she wasn’t supposed to be here . . .

Wait. No. She was the reason they’d been able to find me. Memory coursed back into my body, and I gasped, just a little.

It was enough.

“I think she’s awake,” said a voice—the false Queen. She sounded faintly interested, but not terribly concerned. “Do you think she’s awake?”

“She might be. Faoiltiarna, you are dismissed. I’ll speak with you later.” There was a pause, broken by a huff, and the sound of footsteps. When Rhys spoke again, his voice was closer, only a few feet away from my head. “Sir Daye? Can you hear me? If you can hear me, open your eyes.”

I did not open my eyes. I couldn’t. The pain was too constant, and I still couldn’t get a grip on my own body.

“Hmm. You see, the trouble with this sort of situation, my dear, is the uncertainty. Is she awake and ignoring us, or is she unconscious? It’s so difficult to tell rebellion from oblivion. But I have an idea!” His voice came closer still as he said, very kindly, very cruelly, “Sir Daye, if you do not open your eyes, I am going to put a rosewood spike through the flesh of your left hand. I will not concern myself with the placement of the bones. I’m sure several of them will be broken, and the pain will be unbearable. Now, will you do as I say?”

I tried, I really tried. I’m proud, but I’m not stupid, and I’ve never been a fan of additional pain. My eyes refused to open.

“I see.” He sounded genuinely regretful. I couldn’t tell whether it was sincere or not. It really didn’t matter.

New pain exploded in my left hand, so intense that it made the old pain seem inconsequential. My eyes snapped open, my body straining as it tried to lift up into an involuntary arch, pulling as far away from the pain as it could. I barely got my butt an inch off whatever it was that I was sprawled upon. Something was holding me down, and I was weak as a kitten besides: all the strength had gone out of my muscles, leaving them limp and agonized.

I think I screamed. It was hard to say.

“You see, we still don’t know whether she was awake before, but she’s awake now, and isn’t that what matters?” Rhys didn’t make any effort to conceal how pleased with himself he was. Why should he? He was winning. The winners are allowed to gloat.

I collapsed back into limp motionlessness. I couldn’t really turn my head, but my eyes were willing to respond to commands, and so I glanced from side to side, trying to get an idea of where I was and what was going on.

Rhys and the false Queen were standing off to my left. He was wearing a heavy leather butcher’s apron, which didn’t inspire confidence about what was going to happen to me next. She was wearing white—she was always wearing white—and there were a few spots of blood on her bodice, standing out like brands against the fabric. She was smiling, her moon-mad eyes filled with delight . . .

And Marlis was there, too. She was standing a few feet behind them, holding a wide silver bowl in both her hands, her eyes fixed straight ahead. She was wearing a butcher’s apron, which just made it harder for me to imagine that anything good was going to happen next. I couldn’t tell from looking at her whether she was back under Rhys’ control, or whether she was just playing along until it was safe to do something different. I hoped like hell for the latter.

The room was decorated in Rhys’ usual austere style, and the walls were plain wood, easy to clean. I strained until I could see my shoulder. There were no chains or straps holding me down: just a thin string of yarrow flowers tied together with golden thread. They shouldn’t have been strong enough to keep me from moving. “Should” is a word with very little power in Faerie.

“Amazing,” said Rhys, leaning forward. “Sir Daye, were you aware that you heal so swiftly that your body rejects foreign objects? Your flesh is trying to push out my spike. It’s quite remarkable. I wonder what part of you contains this property. I wonder whether I can bottle it.”

“That’s not the first thing you’re going to bottle,” said the false Queen. There was a faint whine in her voice that hadn’t been there before. It was the first time I had heard her sound anything other than completely confident in her hold over the King of Silences. Her smile vanished, transmuted by suspicion. “You promised me, Rhys, remember? You promised you would get me what I needed.”

“I will, my dear, I will, but you can’t blame me for showing interest in all the other wonderful things that we have resting at our fingertips, now can you? Healing tinctures, complexion potions . . . we have immortality, but we’ve never had indestructability. Now, with a little work and a little cleverness, we can. We can ascend to the level of Oberon himself: untouchable, eternal, never dying or suffering any of the predations of mortality. All we have to do is find the right combination to coax it all out of her.” Rhys leaned forward, grabbing something outside of my limited frame of view.

The pain in my hand, which had faded to a background note in the overall symphony of pain coming from the rest of me, suddenly flared into bright new agony. Rhys held up a wooden spike. It was dark with blood, and there were shreds of something that looked a lot like skin sticking to the sides. “You see? Your body couldn’t decide whether to expel it or consume it, since it was so large, and tried for both. Your healing powers are incredible, Sir Daye, but they’re not very smart.”

“You don’t have to keep using her title,” said the false Queen. “She never deserved it in the first place, and she’s certainly not going to use it again. Are you, October?”

“Go . . . fuck . . . yourself,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper, my lips resisting even that small command. The pain wasn’t getting any better. Aside from moments like the one where Rhys had pulled the spike out of my flesh, it also wasn’t getting any worse.

Pain and I have an interesting relationship. I’ve spent so much time dealing with it over the past few years that it wasn’t quite as incapacitating as it probably should have been. Every nerve I had was still on fire, and every inch of my skin felt like it was being flayed, but as long as those were constants, I could adapt.

“Human and obscene even to the last,” said the false Queen. “Can you do anything with her tongue? It could be an excellent potion ingredient, and more importantly, it would silence her.”

“It would just grow back,” said Rhys. “I’ll save it until I need it; we know she regenerates blood and skin with the same degree of strength, but I’m worried that the rest of her organs will only be fully effective when they’re the originals. What do you think, Sir Daye? Have you experimented with your own limits? If I start removing fingers, will your body know to make more bone, or will it just patch the holes?”

Swearing at the false Queen had exhausted me. I glared at him mutely, hoping that my face would be enough to broadcast my hatred and anger at the situation.

“Ah. A pity. If you’d been willing to share what you knew, we might not have to test you. Now we’ll have to put you through your paces before we know what we can safely do. If you were anything else, I’d just take what we needed—but then, if you were anything else, you wouldn’t be so appealing. So I suppose there’s a consequence for everything.” He put the spike aside. “Marlis. A knife, if you please.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” she said. Her tone was virtually flat, like she was disengaged from the scene. Hearing it answered one question and opened a whole host of new ones, as well as a whole new slate of worries.

Marlis wasn’t back under her supposed King’s control. She hadn’t sounded like a robot when he had her: she had sounded perfectly normal, just loyal to the man who had overthrown and tortured her family. Now she sounded like she was burying everything just to keep from blowing her own cover. If she wasn’t careful, that was going to be the thing that gave her away. I couldn’t help her if the King turned on her. Not while I was tied down and fighting against my own randomly misfiring nervous system.

She stepped closer, holding a blade out toward Rhys, handle first. For one giddy moment, I allowed myself to hope that she was going to flip it around and bury it in his gut. We were in a Kingdom full of alchemists. Surely someone would be able to save him before he died and put her in violation of Oberon’s Law.

He took the knife from her hand without anyone getting stabbed. I hoped my disappointment didn’t show, and was briefly glad for my ongoing agony, as it was probably doing a lot to prevent my face from showing what I was thinking. Only briefly: the man responsible for my pain was now holding a knife, and as worried as I was for Marlis, I was somewhat more concerned for myself.

“Do it,” said the false Queen.

“Patience,” he said, and lowered the knife toward me. I tried to pull away, I really did, but my body wouldn’t obey me. It may have gotten easier to think, but it wasn’t getting any easier to move.

The line of pain he drew along my collarbone was almost soothing in comparison to the agony flaring in my nerves. The smell of my blood filled the air, hot and sweet and coppery. I inhaled greedily, trying to focus on the blood, which I could feel running down my shoulder. There was a soft plinking sound as it dripped onto something metal; presumably a bowl, since he wasn’t likely to be bleeding me without a collection method handy.

My strength has always been in the blood. It would have been better if he’d been cutting my face, where there would have been at least a chance of a drop hitting my lips, but I’d take what I could get. I didn’t bother arguing with my eyelids, which were now as stubbornly unwilling to close as they had previously been unwilling to open. I just let my eyes become unfocused, and tried to concentrate on the blood.

The downside of being the first—effectively—of a new breed is that there’s never been anyone to tell me what I could do. I’ve learned most of what I know through trial and error, sometimes with assistance from the Luidaeg. Recently, I’ve been getting almost as much assistance from May. She seemed to understand my magic better than I did sometimes, maybe because she had my memories but not my powers, giving her the luxury of objectivity.

Rhys cut me again, slicing through my hard-won distance and tearing it away. I gritted my teeth involuntarily, trying to find my focus through the pain. The blood wasn’t plinking into the bowl anymore. As it fell, it landed with the thick, muddy sound of liquid dropping into liquid. He almost had enough for whatever he was trying to do. He had to—he couldn’t be intending to bleed me dry one slice at a time. Could he?

“Is it ready?”

“Almost, my dear, almost. Have you never learned patience?”

“I was a Queen for more than a century. Any patience I might have learned, I forgot long ago. Now is it ready?”

“Almost.” There was a soft clatter as he put the knife down, and Rhys began to chant. He spoke in a language I didn’t know, full of rolling vowels and muted consonants. The smell of meadowsweet and wine vinegar began to grow in the air, itching where it touched my skin. I could almost see his magic, if I didn’t focus my eyes, if I kept the smell of the blood in mind. It swirled around me, colorless and cruel.

Then it burst, and the false Queen laughed, high and delighted and utterly pleased with the world. “It’s beautiful! You’ve done it!”

“For you, my sweet,” said Rhys. Then: “Marlis, move her head. She should see the sort of wonders she’ll be enabling me to perform.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” said Marlis. She stepped closer, and stumbled, catching herself on the edge of my temporary bed before putting her hands on the sides of my head and turning me to face the King. Her thumb grazed my lips, and I realized the reason for her stumble.

Where she touched me, she left blood behind.

It wasn’t much—just a smear, presumably wiped from the knife that Rhys had set aside—but it was so much more than I had had only a few seconds before. I forced my tongue to move, licking the blood away before she withdrew her hands. The taste of it exploded in my mouth like everything that was good in the world. In that moment, I felt like I could unmake any spell, overcome any obstacle, and do it all without getting a scratch on me.

The trouble with feeling invulnerable is that it’s never true. When Marlis moved, she revealed Rhys and the former Queen of the Mists standing a few feet away. The false Queen had a jeweled chalice in her hands, so tacky and crusted with filigree that I had no doubt that it was real. Things like that are either plastic or platinum, with nothing in between. She looked at me, smirked, and raised the chalice to her lips, drinking deeply.

The smell of my magic filled the room, overlaid with a sharp, vinegary note that was acrid enough to bring fresh tears to my eyes. I recognized it objectively as the stamp of Rhys’ magic marking his alchemy, but the rest of me raged against it. How dare he put his magic over mine? How dare he steal something that was so deeply and intrinsically my own, that was supposed to be unique in all of Faerie?

“Look for what’s missing, and call it back,” said Rhys, in the low, encouraging tone of someone who was trying to coach a recalcitrant pupil. “You have her power, you should be able to heal yourself.”

And just like that, I knew what he was doing—what the false Queen had asked him to do. She wanted her Siren blood back. She was stealing my magic because she wanted to restore what I had taken away from her. There was just one problem.

She couldn’t.

Dóchas Sidhe can do things no one else in Faerie can do. That’s true of every race descended from Oberon or his wives. But we can’t create what isn’t there. We can’t make a pureblood mixed, or turn a human into a changeling—and that means that when we remove something from the blood, it’s gone forever. The false Queen wasn’t going to be able to restore her Siren blood, because it was no longer there to be restored. I had taken it away. It was gone.

The smell of my magic began to fade. She lowered the chalice, looking disbelievingly at Rhys. “It didn’t work,” she said. “Why didn’t it work? You told me this would work!”

“We must be missing something,” he said soothingly . . . but when he turned to me, there was nothing soothing in his face. “What are we missing, Sir Daye? How may I restore my lady? Speak, or be sorry that you stayed silent.”

I tried, I really did. I swallowed, feeling the precious blood that Marlis had managed to give me run down my throat, and forced my lips to open. No sound came out.

“Your Highness, your binding may be preventing Sir Daye from answering your questions.” Marlis’ comment was calm, even deferential, but it struck me as dangerous all the same. She was disagreeing with something her liege had done. What would happen if he realized that was unusual?

“Let her speak,” hissed the false Queen. She grabbed his arm, digging in her fingernails. “She has to tell us how to fix this!”

“Oh, very well.” Rhys walked back to me, leaned down, and touched the rope of yarrow flowers that stretched across my shoulders. The pain didn’t stop, but it decreased so dramatically that I gasped, feeling as if a huge weight had been removed from my chest. I could breathe again.

Rhys waited a few seconds, watching with an analytical eye as I panted. Finally, he said, “I know this is not going to be a pleasant process for you. Pain is unavoidable. But how much pain is up to me. Do you understand? Answer my questions, and I can keep things pleasant. Like this. We can work together.”

I stared at him. “This isn’t working together,” I said, and was only half surprised to discover that my voice was working again in the absence of the bulk of the pain. “This is you asking me to be good while you cut me up for parts.”

“You make a fine point,” he said. He looked to the false Queen. “She makes a fine point.” Then he looked back to me, and smiled. It was a terrible expression, filled with edges, and with knives. “I suppose I didn’t make myself very clear. Right now, we’re planning to cut you up for parts. That’s true. I won’t try to sugarcoat it. That would insult both of us, and there’s no need for me to do that. But here’s the thing you’re missing. Right now, we’re planning to cut you up for parts. Not your pet death omen, not your squire, not that animal you’ve been bedding. Just you. That could change. Do you understand me? I could easily send my archers after the members of your little team who aren’t yet asleep, and tell them that we’ve proven your treachery, and that your diplomatic immunity has been revoked in the face of crimes against the throne. Once they’re all asleep . . . ah. Oberon was quite clear that we mustn’t kill each other, and I am very, very good at not killing the people who come before me. Some of them may wish I had, when they finally wake. But I never break the Law.”

For a moment, the urge to spit Quentin’s true identity at him was so strong that I had to grit my teeth to keep it in. He’d never be this cavalier about slicing up the Crown Prince.

But he might be willing to use the Crown Prince as leverage to get what he really wanted: the false Queen back on the throne of the Mists, and no one to challenge what he’d been doing with Silences since he made it his own. I couldn’t bring Quentin any deeper into this than I already had. All I could do was hope that Tybalt was smarter than he was loyal: that when he realized I’d been taken, he’d get Quentin the hell out of here, and tell Arden that I was lost.

“Go to hell,” I said.

Rhys sighed. “I hate that you make me do this,” he said. He produced another spike from inside his apron. I had time to tense—barely—and then he was driving it into my stomach, so hard that it seemed like he was pinning me to the table, a moth under glass, at the mercy of the biologist who had netted me out of the air. I screamed. I couldn’t help myself, and I didn’t really try; failure to scream would have meant that I wasn’t playing along, and might have made him even crueler.

It was getting hard to remember why I didn’t tell him about Quentin, or about Walther, or about anything that would make him stop hurting me.

“I hate that you make me be a monster for you,” said Rhys. He didn’t pull the spike from my belly, and his hands, as he pulled them away, were dripping with gore. “You see how hard I’m trying to be reasonable? I’m offering to make the pain as minimal as I can. I’m promising safe passage for your people. And all I need you to do is explain how I may help my lady. Why is that so hard for you? Can’t you just go along?”

“Let me have her,” said the false Queen, stepping up behind him. “I’m still part Banshee. I can make her hurt in ways that never break the skin.”

There was a threat I hadn’t considered, and didn’t really want to think about. I took a breath, feeling the motion tug on the spike now embedded in my stomach, and managed to speak. “What’s your name?”

She blinked at me, looking nonplussed. “What?”

“You must have a name. No one looks at a baby and says ‘fuck her, she’s so ugly that she doesn’t get a name.’ I don’t know what your name is. I’ve never known what it was. You were always a queen, so I couldn’t ask. What’s your name?”

Now her eyes narrowed, expression turning wary. It was more familiar a look for her than confusion. “Why do you want to know?”

“Because you’re going to be dead soon. Maybe I am, too, but I’d like to go to the night-haunts knowing who you were.” I smiled. It was one of the hardest things I’d done in a long time. “Call it a last request?”

“I am not going to be dead soon, you stupid little mongrel bitch,” she said, and sneered at me. “You’ve lost, October. You’ve finally, fully lost. I’m going to enjoy watching Rhys slice you so thin that you could be hung as ribbons from the trees, and I won’t mourn for you. And as for my name, you can’t have it, because I don’t own it anymore. I sold it years ago, in exchange for everything I’d ever wanted, and I have never regretted my decision. Not for a moment.”

“Now tell us what we need to know,” said Rhys. “My patience wears thin.”

“Your patience?” I demanded, lifting my head and shoulders away from the surface beneath me. It was all I could manage—even with the pain reduced, the chain of flowers still bound me tight. “Your patience? You’re not the one with a spike sticking out of your stomach! Oberon’s balls, you have some fucking nerve! Don’t you dare stand there and talk to me about your patience, you arrogant—”

Rhys’ hand caught me across the face, slamming my head back down against whatever was beneath me. I choked on a mouth that was suddenly full of blood, hot and sweet and exactly what I’d been hoping for. A man who likes to tell you about his plans is a man who can be goaded into lashing out. Years of dealing with villains and misguided despots has taught me that.

“See what you made me do?” He sighed. There was nothing soft or sorry in that sound. “Now answer my question, Sir Daye. Why didn’t it work?”

I swallowed. My mouth was still bleeding, and I swallowed again, unwilling to let any of the precious blood escape. Finally, as my mouth healed enough to make speech possible, I said, “It didn’t work because it can’t work. She has no Siren blood to restore. I took it all away from her. It’s like I told you before. My magic can’t create—it can only manipulate what’s already there.”

“You’re lying!” The false Queen lunged for me, and only Rhys’ arms around her chest kept her from clawing my throat open. She struggled against him, face set in a mask of hatred that had nothing in common with her mild amusement of only a few minutes before. “You give back what you took from me! You give it back right now!”

“I can’t.” I didn’t take any pleasure in the words, strange as that might sound. She was clearly desperate, and I was starting to wonder whether I had made things that much worse for her. Sirens and Sea Wights were both descended from Maeve, while Banshee were descended from Titania. When she had been the daughter of three bloodlines, she might have been in a strange sort of internal truce, tilted so much farther toward Maeve than toward Titania that she had been able to remain relatively at peace. Now her bloodlines were equally weighted, and there was a good chance that they were tearing her apart.

I took a breath. “I can’t,” I repeated. “But I can take more away. I can make you purely Banshee, or purely Sea Wight. I know you’re hurting. Maeve and Titania . . . their bloodlines don’t blend. If you let me take one of them out of you—”

“You’ll touch me again over my dead body,” she snarled. She broke free of Rhys, and there was a knife in her hand, the silver clean and glinting in the light from overhead. She slammed it into my chest in a hard overhand arc, and I gasped, shock racing through my body only a few beats behind the pain, which was immense and unrelenting.

She must have hit a lung, I thought desperately. I couldn’t lift my arms to claw at the blade. I couldn’t do anything but close my eyes, and let the world drop away.

So I did.