Once Broken Faith

SEVENTEEN

MY NEXT SEVERAL INTERVIEWS followed similar lines. No one outside of Angels had known King Antonio very well, although the kingdoms that shared borders with Angels generally thought of him as a good neighbor. He’d been so busy minding his own business and not telling people what to do that he’d never even threatened war, much less openly declared it. The kingdoms of Copper and Painted Skies both spoke fondly of him, mostly in the sense of “and nobody ever died because he was bored.” No one volunteered to let me ride their blood, even when I hinted about how much easier that would make things. No one had heard anything about a new kind of teleportation—or quasi-teleportation—magic, or time magic, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pick up any scents that would lead me back to the sound of tearing metal. Locking people in the pantry with me, one by one, meant I was learning magical signatures almost as fast as my mind could file them away, but none of them matched.

That wasn’t quite true. None of them was exactly right, but I’d barely smelled anything at all when the sound had happened. I might be looking my attacker in the eye, and still not be able to recognize them. That was just swell. I have one freak talent, and suddenly even that wasn’t dependable.

By the time I escorted the representatives from Evergreens back to the gallery, I was running out of both patience and ideas. High King Aethlin was on the stage talking about the importance of a unified continent, and why it mattered that we make choices that were good for everyone, and not only for the chosen few. I did my best to tune him out as I made my way down the aisle toward where Theron and Chrysanthe were seated. They turned toward the motion. Theron raised his eyebrows. I nodded, beckoning for them to follow me out.

They didn’t look thrilled. They still stood, and their hooves clacked against the floor as we walked back up the aisle—not as loudly as Bucer’s, but loudly enough that people turned to watch us go. I forced myself to keep walking, not making eye contact. I was going to have to talk with each of these people before the night was out, and I was running out of ideas.

I became a detective not because I’m any good at it, but because I was willing to try. That means a lot in Faerie, where sometimes “turning everyone into a statue to show them the error of their ways” is treated as a valid, even reasonable solution. I’ve gotten better over the years, but still, the majority of my cases involve following cheating spouses and recovering lost items, not questioning an entire knowe full of nobles who thought they were too good to talk to someone like me, hero of the realm or no.

We walked to the pantry in silence. Theron and Chrysanthe held their peace while I opened the door, gestured for them to step inside, and closed it behind myself. Theron sat in one of the chairs I’d scavenged from the kitchen. Chrysanthe lounged against the wall behind him, draping her arms comfortably over baskets of potatoes and onions. It was a nice gambit. Unless you were a courtier or a guard, standing while a king sat was generally considered rude. So was sitting while a queen stood. No matter what I did, I was insulting someone. In fact . . .

“You did that on purpose,” I said, sinking into my own seat and crossing my ankles in front of me. “Am I supposed to be so flustered by trying to decide what I’m supposed to do that I freeze up and let you leave without questioning you? Because I’ve been flustered by the best. You’re going to need to try harder.” Back before Tybalt and I became allies—not even friends, just allies—he practically specialized in throwing me off-balance. After being the primary target of a bored Cait Sidhe for several years, there isn’t much in this world that can genuinely shake me.

Theron and Chrysanthe exchanged a look. Finally, Chrysanthe spoke. “We could play at being offended, demand to know what gave you the right to suspect us, much less question us, but to be honest, we’ve been looking forward to the opportunity to speak with you,” she said. “Why in the world are you working for these people?”

Well. That wasn’t what I’d been expecting. I blinked, trying to conceal my bewilderment, before asking, “What do you mean?”

“You’re a changeling. You may have given up much of your human birthright for power, but you’ve been mortal: you know what it is to be looked down upon for reasons you didn’t choose and can’t control,” she said. “Why would you stay in the Mists, where you’ll never be considered a full citizen of Faerie, when we’re just down the coast? You would be welcome on the Golden Shore.”

I gaped at her. Then, recovering my senses, I shook my head and said, “Because I was born in San Francisco. My liege is here. My friends and family are here. I wasn’t going to give any of that up for politics. I’m still not going to do it. The Mists are my home.”

“That may be so, but your choices might be broader down the coast,” said Theron. “You should consider it.”

I wanted to laugh. Here I was, trying to figure out who’d killed King Antonio and attacked me, and these people were attempting to recruit me? It was ridiculous, and that was what made it so understandable. Faerie had a lot of rules and manners, but it didn’t always understand how to prioritize them for people who actually paid attention to time. When eternity was a given, there was really no good reason to treat anything with urgency.

Theron and Chrysanthe ran a kingdom of changelings, but they were still purebloods. No matter how much that statement might have offended them, offense wasn’t enough to make it untrue. “I am sworn in service to Duke Sylvester Torquill of Shadowed Hills, whose Duchy has always been kind to changelings, and through him to Queen Arden Windermere in the Mists,” I said. “I’m pretty cool with both of those things. And I’m getting married soon, and the man I’m marrying isn’t exactly in the position to pack up and move. So while I appreciate the offer, I’m happy where I am. I just want to do my job and find out who murdered one of your peers. Do you think you could help me with that?”

“I don’t see how you can be happy in a place that’s made you give up so much of your heritage,” said Theron solicitously.

I stopped. The urge to yell at him was strong. The urge not to get in trouble for insulting yet another monarch was stronger. Swallowing my rage, I said, “I wasn’t forced to give up my humanity to prove I was as good as the purebloods. I did it to save myself, to save the people who cared about me, and to cure a goblin fruit addiction. Those might not be doors that are open to most changelings, but part of growing up in this world was learning that I can’t refuse to do something just because it might be hard or inconvenient or impossible. Now please. Let me do my job.”

“Are you in favor of this cure?” asked Chrysanthe.

The urge to start screaming was getting stronger. It was like talking to a couple of missionaries, who wanted to bring things back to Jesus no matter how much I wanted directions to the nearest gas station. “Yes,” I said, through gritted teeth. “I was there when it was developed. I would have died or turned myself completely fae without it. So I’m pretty sure this cure is a good thing, and that the purebloods aren’t going to get more careless just because it exists.”

“Would Duchess Lorden agree with you?”

That stopped me. Would Duke Michel have been so willing to shoot her, even knowing that his kingdom was landlocked and hence safe from Undersea reprisals, if he hadn’t known she could be woken up at a moment’s notice? The cure might already be changing how people thought about elf-shot. I just wasn’t sure that was a bad thing.

“Nothing we say here is going to impact the conclave,” I said slowly, feeling my way through the sentence. “I’m not running some secret poll where I find out how everyone really feels about the idea of the cure and then go and tell the High King how he should resolve the situation. You know that, right? I’m trying to solve a murder. Someone is dead. A king is dead. I need to find out who killed him.”

“King Antonio sent us citizens from time to time,” said Chrysanthe. “People who didn’t want to stay in Angels anymore. He’d buy them bus tickets, if you can believe it.”

“I can,” I said. It wasn’t even a surprise. Human cities did that all the time, bussing their homeless to San Francisco, where the milder weather was supposed to make up for the inhumanity of shipping people away from their communities.

“They were never mistreated, per se, or at least not by the Crown,” said Theron. “Most had stories about ill-treatment at the hands of other purebloods, lesser nobles who felt their household staff didn’t need to be protected. He’d send us the addicts, the ones already so far gone on goblin fruit that they could no longer manage whatever menial jobs they’d held before.”

“What did you do?”

“Do?” Chrysanthe’s laugh was small and bitter. “We gave them clean beds and brooms to hold, and fed them toast and jam until they were beyond even that. We buried them in safe places, surrounded by the graves of their own kind. Don’t look so stunned, Sir Daye. We might have found a cure for elf-shot, but a cure for goblin fruit? That’s a thing that will never be, unless we count the cure you’ve made for yourself—give up humanity, give up the addiction. Not a route that’s open to most people.”

The accusation in her voice was hard to miss. I fought the urge to squirm. She was right: my route out of addiction wasn’t open to anyone who didn’t share my bloodline or have access to something that could change theirs. Something like a hope chest, or my mother . . . or me. I had given that choice to the changelings of Silences, after we’d dethroned the puppet king who’d been tormenting them. That didn’t mean I could travel the world, offering it to everyone.

“So Golden Shore was well-inclined toward King Antonio?” I asked, trying to get the conversation back under my control.

“As well-inclined as we are toward any of our neighbors,” said Theron. “Angels buys our produce, sends us their broken, and refuses to change. The same can be said of any of the Kingdoms in this half of the continent. Maybe someday things will improve for the changelings. Maybe someday we can stop being so angry all the time. But that day is a long way from now.”

“Why?” The question burst out before I could stop it. “You’re purebloods. You could have whatever you wanted. Why are you so focused on the treatment of changelings?”

“I suppose this is where we’re intended to say ‘I had a changeling child’ or ‘I had a changeling sister,’ or something of the like,” said Chrysanthe. “That would be easy, wouldn’t it? It’s always easy to admit to someone’s right to live when you have a personal tie to them. We don’t have that. What we have is the memory that, before humans and fae met so often, before changelings were common, it was people like us—people who showed how close our King and Queens once were to the natural world—who bore the brunt of those prejudices. There was a time when ‘animals in the court’ was as bad as ‘changelings.’ So, yes, we’re interested in knowing things are going to get better for the changelings, even if we have to fight for it. Not because we have a personal stake. Because it’s the right thing to do.”

I took a breath. “That’s a good thing, honestly. We need all the help we can get.” Most changelings didn’t have stories like mine, where they got titles and responsibilities and respect. Most changelings had things much, much worse. And yet . . . “Now please, for right now, can we focus on the murder?”

“We didn’t kill him,” said Theron, without hesitation. “If you accuse us, we’ll give the High King our blood, and you’ll be revealed as a fraud.”

“Would you even be suggesting that I would make false accusations if I were a pureblood, or do you have some particular reason to think that I’m too incompetent to know who to accuse? Because if not, this seems a little hypocritical of you, given the whole ‘we speak for the changelings’ position you claim to take. And I’m better at reading blood than High King Aethlin. Just so you know. Look: I don’t think you killed him. For one thing, you’re too obvious as suspects. For another, killing him doesn’t stop the conclave. If you were going to break the Law, you’d have broken it in a way that would bury the cure for a few hundred years, and give you what you both seem to want so badly.” The pair looked uncomfortable, Chrysanthe shifting her weight from hoof to hoof while Theron twisted in his chair. “What I need to know is this: can you think of anything that would mess with time, which could be done easily, by someone who didn’t necessarily have a natural gift for it?”

“A fairy ring,” said Chrysanthe.

I raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“A fairy ring,” she repeated. “You’ve heard the stories about humans who wandered into the woods and spent a night dancing, only to go home the next morning and find a hundred years had passed? That was the work of the fairy rings. They were commonly used in wartime, before the development of elf-shot. Instead of sleeping out your sentence, you’d simply go . . . forward. The spell would keep you frozen until you reached a time when the fight was over, and you could no longer serve your liege on the field.”

“How hard are they to make? Are they portable?”

She shrugged, looking to Theron. He shook his head. “I don’t know. Neither of us has the skill for crafting them. But they were a weapon once, and they could be again, if there was the need for them.”

I opened my mouth to ask if they knew anything more. The tolling of the dinner bell stopped me. It was a light, chiming sound that nonetheless scythed through walls, making sure that everyone within the confines of the knowe was aware that their presence was required.

“With that, I believe this audience is over, Sir Daye,” said Theron. He rose more easily than I would have thought possible for someone with the lower body of a stag, offering his arm to Chrysanthe, who took it with a smile. “We’ve enjoyed this chance to know you better.”

The two of them walked to the door and let themselves out, leaving me to stare after them in frustration. The bells continued to ring. I slumped backward in my chair, putting a hand over my face. This was getting me nowhere. This was getting me nowhere fast. We couldn’t let the nobility leave without losing the killer—but if we kept them here, we were keeping ourselves captive with the killer, and that could only end poorly. My wounds were healed, but there was a phantom ache in my shoulder that was happy to remind me of how badly things could go. I was hard to kill. That didn’t make it impossible, and it didn’t make the people I cared about any more equipped for survival.

Survival. I lowered my hand, staring up at the strings of garlic and pearl onions that obscured the ceiling. Whoever had attacked me couldn’t have been expecting me to survive. Sure, I was sturdy, but how sturdy was still under discussion, and many people who knew and loved me had no idea how difficult I really was to kill. I’d been attacked—or Tybalt had—by someone who was expecting to have another body on their hands. So who hadn’t been expecting to see me in the gallery? Who had been surprised by my appearance?

Blood contained all memory, and I’d been looking at the audience. I raised my thumb to my lips and started gnawing at my cuticles, trying to bite through the skin fast enough to draw blood. It wasn’t working. I healed too fast, and my natural reluctance to hurt myself was a problem. I stood, scanning the shelves. There were no knives in here. There was a trowel in with the potatoes, but it was blunt and filthy, and I had enough common sense that I didn’t want to drive it into myself.

The dinner bell was still ringing. There was my answer. Gathering my skirts in one hand, so as not to trip myself, I left the pantry and followed the sound down the hall. Most of the guests were already there, judging by how empty the place was; a few servants passed me, harried and laboring under the weight of their trays. They didn’t look upset or ill-used; they were doing their jobs, and they had the focused looks of people who liked what they did and who they did it for. That was nice. I liked to hope Arden was going to be one of the better ones, a treasure instead of a tyrant, since her place on the throne was at least partially my fault.

I’d been friends with the household staff at Shadowed Hills for years, and I knew that for some fae—the Hobs and the Brownies and the Bannicks—service really was their only joy. That didn’t mean they didn’t deserve to be treated well when they were at work. Or that everyone treated their servants with kindness. The Barrow Wight from Highmountain walked by, despondent as always, a heavy tray in her arms. I did a double-take: a very heavy tray. It looked like she was carrying an entire roast suckling pig.

The hall ended at a pair of redwood doors with stained glass inserts, propped open to let the moonlight slant through the colored panes and dance along the hallway walls. Outside was a pavilion of black mesh, letting the starlight shine through while preventing leaves or insects from falling to the deck below. Round tables covered by white cloths studded the area, like something out of a mortal awards banquet. It was a comparison that would have been lost on most of the people here, and laughed at by the rest. The servants I’d seen before swirled through the scene like dancers, pausing to deposit trays and pitchers in front of people as they passed them by. There was even music, courtesy of a string quartet in the far corner. The cello player was a Huldra, and held a second bow in her tail, using it to coax impossible double stops from her instrument.

Arden, Aethlin, Siwan, and Maida were seated at a table on a raised platform at the far end of the deck. Tybalt was at a table nearby, keeping company with the Luidaeg, Karen, Quentin, and Patrick Lorden. I started in toward them, weaving around tables and dodging passing servers. It was like a bizarre obstacle course, and it was a relief when I reached the wide open space in the middle of the dining area, although it took me a moment to realize why that space was open.

It was a dance floor. Of course it was. Because nothing said “let’s pause for a quick waltz” like a political convocation where people were getting elf-shot and murdered.

Conversation at the table stopped when I dropped myself into the chair between Tybalt and Patrick. “I thought you needed to avoid being seen with us too much,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be sitting at the high table?”

“I needed to avoid arriving with you, or having my status overtly twined with yours,” said Tybalt mildly. He began buttering a roll. “I will not be the last to hold my position, and did not wish to unduly handicap my successor by implying that the Court of Dreaming Cats owed some debt of fealty to the throne of the Mists. Now that everyone understands that I’m not domestic, I will do as cats have always done, and sit where I like. Besides, the conversation among Kings and Queens is dull as dishwater. Hence all the common men in Will’s plays.”

“He’s a fucking dumbass, but his heart’s in the right place,” said the Luidaeg. “So, Toby, how goes the systematic alienation of every noble on the West Coast? Get yourself banned from any new kingdoms yet? I understand the Kingdom of Copper is a great place to never go.”

“They won’t be sending me invitations to tea anytime soon, but I think I’ve mostly managed not to get myself banned from entry,” I said. I looked around, frowning. “Where’s Walther?”

“Things got a little shouty at the conclave,” said Quentin. “Then they got a lot shouty. Then they got screamy, with a side order of shrieky. Walther and Marlis are having dinner up in the room with the sleepers, supposedly so they can help Jin check on everyone’s condition, but really, I think, because Walther was afraid somebody would dump something on him.”

“Oh,” I said. The rolls looked good. My stomach rumbled, reminding me that with one thing after another, I hadn’t eaten nearly as much as I’d bled since getting out of bed. I snagged one, taking the butter knife out of Tybalt’s hand, and focused on the Luidaeg again. “So when I get out of here, I’m going to be checking my own blood memories for anything that seemed out of place when we first got to the conclave this evening, but this seems like a good time to ask: what can you tell me about fairy rings?”

The Luidaeg sat up straighter, blinking in surprise. Her eyes changed color with each blink, going from driftglass green to foam white, then to solid black, and finally back to their original shade. “Fairy rings? Why are you asking me about those?”

“The monarchs from Golden Shores brought them up during their questioning. Supposedly, fairy rings can move stuff through time?”

“Sort of,” said the Luidaeg. She was still looking thoughtful. “Subjectively. It’s . . . not that simple.”

“So how simple is it?”

“A fairy ring is a stepping stone. A fairy ring takes someone or something and freezes them for however long they need to be kept still. It’s not time travel. It’s not jumping from one era to another. It’s just . . . a pause, before things continue on their normal course. It feels like moving forward in time to the people who’ve been affected, because they were paused.”

There was a clink. I turned to Tybalt. He had dropped his fork and was staring at the Luidaeg, pupils reduced to slits and cheeks gone pale. I reached over and touched his arm. He jumped, gaze flicking to me for a moment before his attention returned to her.

“Would it look . . . to someone on the outside of the ring, would it look like the person had just stopped for some reason?”

“Yes,” said the Luidaeg. “That’s part of why they were never as popular as elf-shot. With elf-shot, you put the person to sleep for a hundred years. You can move them, hide them, do whatever you need to with them. With a fairy ring, they’re stuck in the circle. As soon as the magic powering the spell is exhausted, time will start moving for them again. Until then, unless you want to break the ring, you have to keep an eye on them to make sure nothing disturbs the spell. Any time a human wandered into the woods and wandered out a hundred years later, some poor sap had been punished with watching a mortal spend a century standing perfectly still. You can’t even draw mustaches on the people, for fear that you’ll knock them out of alignment and start the clock again.”

“The way Antonio described the shadows shifting,” I said. “It wasn’t someone teleporting him. Time was passing outside the ring, and when the ring was broken—for whatever reason—the shadows looked like they had moved.”

“It happened to you, too,” said Tybalt. I turned to blink at him. He was still watching the Luidaeg, but he was speaking to me; that much was very clear. “We were in your chambers. You were about to kiss me. Do you remember?”

“I got stabbed right before I could,” I said. “That sort of thing is pretty hard to forget.”

“You stopped.” He finally turned to look at me. “You were leaning in, and then you stopped. Not long—only a few seconds—but long enough for me to notice.”

“Oh.” Oh. I remembered the confused look on his face, the way he’d suddenly been staring at me. It couldn’t have been a long pause without him becoming alarmed, but any pause at all would have been strange, given the situation. “Did you see anything? Smell anything?”

“I saw you go still, and I was focused on that,” said Tybalt. “I think I would have noticed someone standing behind you.”

“Not if they were in a chained fairy ring, under a don’t-look-here,” said the Luidaeg. We both turned to her. She shrugged. “Set up two rings. One for your target, one for yourself. Tie them together. Set the spell so that the first ring will break when the second ring is activated, and cast the don’t-look-here just before you step into the first ring.”

“So as soon as I stepped into the second ring, the first ring broke, and they could start moving again,” I said. “They’d know where I was, because they were the one who set the trap, and they’d still be hidden by the don’t-look-here. They were never aiming for Tybalt at all. They were aiming for me.”

“Or for me,” said Quentin. “I’m your squire. I could have been going to the room to fetch something for you. That’s a lot of what normal squires do for their knights.”

“Good thing we’ve never been normal,” I said, a cold thread of fear winding through my veins. If Quentin had been killed . . . it would have ended my usefulness right then and there, at least for a time. The need for vengeance would have come eventually, but would it have been fast enough for me to find anything? Or would the trail have gone completely cold? I sadly suspected the latter. I had my weak points, and Quentin was well known to be one of them. Take him out, and you took me out just through proximity. “Why would you need a second ring if you had a don’t-look-here?”

“Because fairy rings freeze everything. Otherwise, people would have used them for some nasty forms of biological warfare—find a strain of flu that affects purebloods, shove a carrier into a fairy ring, cast a spell to hide them, and then bring all your enemies to get breathed on. Once inside the ring, the person who was trying to harm you couldn’t be smelled, not even by a Cu Sidhe, or otherwise detected. It would even hide the scent of their magic.” The Luidaeg shook her head. “Nasty things, fairy rings.”

“And the second ring? What broke it?”

“It wasn’t meant to hold you. It was just meant to slow you down, and to break the first ring when it was activated. I’m guessing whoever cast it knew that stabbing you would break the ring, and didn’t want to waste their time crafting something genuinely secure.”

I looked at her. “How hard is it to make a fairy ring?”

“Just this side of impossible, if you don’t know how it’s done, but if you do? It’s so easy a child could do it, or a changeling. Merlins used to use them as snares to catch their pureblood relatives, once upon a time. Everything we can use against humanity, humanity can also use against us. That’s something to keep in mind when you’re making a tool, or a weapon. Everything cuts both ways.”

“Why didn’t you bring this up before?”

She looked flustered. “To be honest—and I can’t be anything but honest—I forgot. It’s been so long since anyone has used them for anything, and they were always such a small magic. They didn’t seem worth remembering.”

That was sadly easy to believe. “What would I need?”

“To make the ring, intent, the right materials, and a small amount of power—a trickle, really. The ring itself is the key. The ring is what magnifies and intensifies the ritual. That’s how a simple spell could hold someone captive for a hundred years. Look.” The Luidaeg leaned over and plucked four spears of asparagus off the platter, holding them up like they were the most important thing in the world. “Plants work well, although fungus works better. Toadstools were traditional, but daisy chains were almost as common, at least for a while. Take the material you’re planning to use, plait it together . . .” Her fingers were quick and clever as they twisted the asparagus into a rough crown. She dropped it onto the table.

“Once your ring is done, you can activate it whenever you like.” Pressing a forefinger against the ring of asparagus, the Luidaeg murmured a string of hissing, rolling syllables that didn’t sound like anything else I’d ever heard. The air around us chilled, dropping in temperature until it felt like we were standing on the shore just as the tide rolled in.

Karen shivered. The Luidaeg raised her eyes.

“Patrick, if you would?”

Patrick nodded, picking up a piece of potato from his own plate. He weighed it briefly in his hand before lobbing it across the circle. Rather than flying straight into the Luidaeg’s lap, it stopped in midair, frozen above the asparagus. The Luidaeg looked pleased with herself.

“It’ll stay there until the spell wears off—ten, maybe fifteen minutes, since I didn’t put much power into it—or until something disrupts the ring. Like so.” She picked up her fork, leaned forward, and stabbed the asparagus. The piece of potato promptly fell to the table, where it rolled to a stop against her water glass. “As temporary prisons go, you won’t find any finer. As useless things in this modern world go, well, they’re tops at that, too.”

“Except that someone has apparently been able to set at least three, maybe more, and use them to catch people unawares. It’s like marshwater charms.”

Tybalt frowned at me. Patrick asked, “What?”

“I used to use a lot of marshwater charms—mixtures of herbs and intent that would help me see through illusions, or keep an eye on a target even when someone was actively trying to counteract my tracking spells.” I shook my head. “I didn’t understand my own magic that well, and I was a lot weaker. I needed every advantage I could get. I always thought the purebloods were stupid for not using the little tools—I’d keep a spray bottle full of mint and pond scum in my glove compartment and think it made me so much smarter than them, and I still started forgetting about those things as soon as I, personally, didn’t need them anymore. Don’t you see? Something that small won’t hold much magic, so even if the spell was cast by someone powerful, they won’t leave enough of a trace for me to track. It’s perfect if you’re a murderous bastard who needs to be stopped.”

“Your priorities are, as always, genuinely unique to you,” said Tybalt.

I elbowed him lightly; he took the blow with good grace. “I’m serious. Whoever’s doing this has already attacked us—whether I was the target or not, they knew harming anyone who was likely to be in that room would make me stop investigating. And it wasn’t Duke Michel.”

That got Patrick’s attention. “How are you so sure?” he asked.

“For one thing, Dianda’s not dead,” I said. “People like him don’t start with murder and back off to misdemeanor. It’s either one or the other, or misdemeanor turning into manslaughter by mistake. For another thing, he was way too willing to let the High King ride his blood. Sure, he wasn’t thrilled about it, but if he’d broken the Law, he would have fought more, because there’s no way he wouldn’t have been thinking about the murder when his blood was drawn. It’s the old ‘don’t think about pink elephants’ problem. If you have something you desperately don’t want people to know, that’s all you’re going to be able to think about when the time comes.”

“So we have two separate miscreants,” said Tybalt. “We know the Duke was trying to suppress the elf-shot cure. What does this second assailant want? October and King Antonio have little to nothing in common with one another.”

“Could be the same thing,” said the Luidaeg. “This changes the status quo a lot.”

I frowned. “The status quo . . .”

Quentin’s frown mirrored mine. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that sometimes we make things too complicated,” I said. “King Antonio was all about power, right? Not necessarily using it for anything; just having it.” But he had been using it for something. He’d been using it to protect his family, for all the good that had done him. “This wouldn’t be the first time someone assumed I do the things I do because I want to support the monarchy blindly as a concept, rather than because I think they’re actually what’s right. Me, Quentin, Tybalt—any of the three targets you could reasonably hit by setting a trap in my room would undermine the local status quo.” That was before taking into account Quentin’s position as Crown Prince. If someone knew about that . . .

“Dianda doesn’t affect the status quo on the land,” said Patrick. “She’s well-inclined, because she married me, but she has few standing alliances, apart from Goldengreen.”

“And being allied with a County doesn’t do much if you’re not also allied with the Kingdom it’s in,” I said. It was tempting to view the attack on Dianda as related, especially given that Quentin and Dean were dating—but I didn’t think that was common knowledge yet, and again, for Quentin to be the common factor would require people to know about his heritage. We weren’t seeing any sign of that. Quentin was vulnerable while he was with me; none of the attacks had directly targeted him. “So, yeah, we’re definitely looking at two different people here. But have all the attacks been about opportunity, or was the attack on King Antonio planned?”

“I don’t know,” said Quentin.

“Neither do I,” I said. “On the plus side, I might have a way of finding out who does. Dinner can wait. Can you pass your steak knife?”

Quentin handed me his knife. Tybalt narrowed his eyes.

“If you’re about to do what I’m certain you’re about to do, can you please do me the immense favor of not slicing your palm through the center?” he asked plaintively. “I know you heal with ridiculous speed—although you did not, I should remind you, the first time you decided slicing your hand open was an expedient way of getting what you wanted—but it still makes my teeth hurt to see you treat yourself so.”

“I’ll skip the palm this time, I promise,” I said, and pressed the knife against the top of my wrist, pushing down until the edge bit into the soft skin. I gritted my teeth. “You’d think healing fast would come with reduced pain sensitivity.”

“Nope,” said the Luidaeg. Her voice was soft. I glanced up. She looked at me with sad, driftglass-colored eyes, and said, “Those who heal the fastest have always had to hurt the worst. It’s the cost of being able to handle so much trauma. The pain will always be eager to remind you that it has a claim.”

“Swell,” I muttered, and yanked the knife toward myself, angling my wrist so I wouldn’t bleed on my dress. The skin parted and blood welled to the surface, bright and coppery and smelling of secrets. I wanted it. The sight of it revolted me, but I wanted it all the same—a paradox that had been becoming increasingly common since my heritage had been shifted more toward the fae. Quentin stiffened. So did Patrick. Daoine Sidhe were blood-workers too, even if their talents didn’t quite match my own. I offered the two of them an encouraging smile, lowered my mouth to my wrist, and drank.

The taste of blood filled my mouth and chased away everything else. As always, it made me feel stronger, more prepared to face the world around me. It was my blood: it should have had no strength to offer me that I didn’t already possess, and yet somehow, it did. Magic is weird. Magic has always been weird.

The smell of cut-grass and copper began to rise in the air around me, the copper trending, as always, more and more toward the bloody. One day I was going to lose the metallic aspect entirely, and just smell like a pastoral crime scene. I knew people were stopping to stare. I closed my eyes to shut them out, drinking deeper, looking for the place where the present would drop away and I would fall into the red haze of my own blood memories.

You’re trying too hard, I thought. This should be easy. I’d done this . . . well, not hundreds of times, because there wasn’t that much call for my specific skill set, but quite a few times. Often enough that it had started becoming easier. Never easy. Easier was a matter of degrees: it was no longer like clawing my way uphill through an avalanche, no longer like drowning, no longer a matter of risking my life every time I tasted blood. It was still difficult.

You’re trying too hard, I thought again, and let go, falling down into the red. The sounds of the tables around us went away, replaced by the sounds of the gallery from earlier. This was my memory, not someone else’s: it was crystal clear, with none of the confusion or disassociation that I was accustomed to encountering when I rode the blood.

High King Aethlin was speaking. I ignored him in favor of looking at the crowd, trying to find some hint of tension or surprise. I couldn’t do anything I hadn’t done the first time—this was a memory, not a dream—but I had looked at the crowd the first time. I just hadn’t known what I was seeing.

Several of the gathered nobles looked confused by what was going on. Confusion seemed to be the order of the day. But the King and Queen of Highmountain looked angry. Actively, furiously mad, like something had disrupted their plans. And their handmaiden, that sad-eyed, downcast Barrow Wight, looked openly terrified. She was staring at me, her eyes wide and her jaw slack. How had I not noticed her the first time?

The answer followed the question without pause. I hadn’t noticed her because she was just a servant, and I’d been focusing on the purebloods as the important ones. I’d done to her exactly what so many of them had done to me. I had ignored her.

I’d known I was losing my humanity, but that was the moment when I realized I was never going to get it back.

I broke out of the blood memories with a gasp, pulling my mouth away from my wrist. The wound there had long since healed, leaving only a smear of drying blood to mark where it had been. I looked wildly around, searching the nearby tables for the King and Queen of Highmountain. Someone pushed a napkin into my hand. I wiped my mouth, and kept looking.

“What did you see?” asked Tybalt.

“Not sure yet,” I said. My table contained a Firstborn and a Duke on a hair-trigger. The last thing I wanted to do was trigger an international incident if I could avoid it. I kept scanning the room. “Is anyone missing? Do you see any holes?”

“Someone’s always missing,” said the Luidaeg. “That’s the nature of the beast.”

“Where’s the King of Highmountain?” asked Quentin.

“Show me where you’re looking,” I said. He pointed. I followed the angle of his finger to a table on the other side of the room, where the Queen of Highmountain sat surrounded by a group of minor nobles. She was laughing, a goblet in her hand and an expression of studious unconcern on her face. She looked like every other carefree monarch in the place. It was amazing how many of them were smiling and clearly content, despite the seriousness of the situation. They wanted to be released from their captivity, but apart from that, this was exactly the sort of world that they expected to be waiting for them. Fancy meals, beautiful rooms, and every need met without their being required to lift a finger.

There was an open seat next to her. The King wasn’t there. Neither was the sad-eyed handmaiden.

“What do you know about them?” I asked, without taking my eyes off of her.

“Verona and Kabos,” said Quentin. He didn’t hesitate. This was the sort of thing he didn’t have to think about. “He founded the Kingdom, she became Queen when she married him. They’re traditionalists. Highmountain predates most of the demesnes around it, because they’d been trying to get away from the ‘decadent’ coastal kingdoms.”

“Fae puritans, got it,” I said. “No surnames?”

“They’ve never needed one. No heirs, either. They’ve been married for three hundred years with no kids. Daoine Sidhe, both of them, and supposedly Kabos was in consideration for the throne of North America before it was given to Viveka Sollys, mother of Aethlin Sollys, third in line for the High Crown of Albany.”

It took me a moment to puzzle through that. Then: “You’re saying they’ve been in charge in Highmountain since before the United States was founded, and they don’t like change.”

“Yes,” said Quentin.

This conclave was the ultimate expression of change. Changelings and the untitled were being allowed to speak as if they were equal to monarchs. The fact that we were speaking about something that would impact us all didn’t matter as much as the fact that we were opening our mouths. King Antonio had been an asshole according to the people who knew him, but he hadn’t enforced the classic lines of status and standing: he’d allowed people to be whoever they wanted to be, providing they were able to fight for and maintain their positions. He’d been a populist, in a lot of ways. If no one knew he had an heir waiting to claim the throne—if the assumption was that when he died, someone else would be able to take Angels and run it as a more traditional monarchy—

I stood so fast that the legs of my chair scraped against the floor. Antonio had been an excellent target because he’d been alone, but the attack had happened at mealtime. If I was right, this was the same setting, and another attack could be imminent. If I was wrong, the King of Highmountain was alone somewhere, and could be in danger. We had a wealth of potential targets, and either way, he was a person of great concern.

“Quentin, Patrick, find King Kabos,” I said, scanning the ballroom again, this time trying to think like a bigoted pureblood who hated change. Who were the best targets? Chrysanthe and Theron seemed obvious, but in a weird way, that was what would keep them safe. They isolated changelings by removing them to Golden Shore and keeping them out of the way of the purebloods of the world. What they were doing was good and valuable and necessary, and yet it was almost the expression of a pureblood dream—sending all the changelings away to live on a farm and not bother anyone.

Arden was sitting on the dais with the High King, High Queen, and Queen Siwan. She’d been able to ascend to her throne because of a changeling and a King of Cats, and her upbringing hadn’t prepared her to enforce the sort of rules most nobles found to be second nature. She thought more like a changeling than like a queen. But attacking her would mean risking the High King and High Queen. Maybe this would go that far. Maybe it wouldn’t. I just didn’t think she’d be the third target. Not when they still thought they could get away without being caught. Siwan was protected by the same logic.

I heard a sound like tearing metal, close enough that it seemed to fill the world. Once again there was a faint, distant scent I couldn’t quite identify: attenuated magic, so bleached and thin it was like a ghost of itself. I whipped around. Karen was behind me, wide-eyed and pale, with little red dots on the white fabric of her dress. Little red spots, as if from arterial spray. She wasn’t hurt; the blood wasn’t hers. It wasn’t mine, either. I would have noticed.

The world seemed to slow down. I knew I wasn’t malingering, no matter how much I didn’t want to see, but it felt like it took forever for me to turn and look at Tybalt, who was staring down at the stake protruding from his chest with wide-eyed shock. His gaze moved to me, pupils thinning to slits, before he collapsed.

Someone screamed as he hit the floor.

It may even have been me.