A Red-Rose Chain

  “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?”

  ELEVEN

  I TURNED AND STALKED OUT of the receiving room, leaving King Rhys’ terrible proposal unanswered. Tybalt and Walther were close behind me. We walked in silence until we turned the corner of the hall, passing out of sight of the guards on the door. Tybalt looked at me. I nodded, and he grabbed us both—me by the arm, Walther by the collar—before yanking us onto the Shadow Roads.

  We emerged less than a minute later on a narrow pathway lined with pine trees. Walther pulled away and Tybalt let him go, watching with some interest as the alchemist staggered, wheezing, to lean against the nearest evergreen. He didn’t look as frozen as I was, just winded, which leant some credence to my beli
ef that Tylwyth Teg were self-defrosting. It was the only way to explain the stunts they could pull with yarrow branches not ending in frostbite or worse.

  Tybalt looked at me gravely, studying my face, before pulling me into an embrace that lasted longer than we’d been on the Shadow Roads.

  “That could have gone better,” said Walther, voice still strained from the lack of oxygen. His words seemed to break some temporary spell of peace, bringing us crashing back into a world where time was passing and I had to start thinking about the future.

  Damn. Sometimes it was nice to have a few minutes where all I had to do was live in the past. Now I had to go back to living in the present, and since the present seemed to want me dead—again—I would have been just as happy to put that off for a little longer.

  I pulled away from Tybalt, turning to face Walther. “I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised,” I said. “We all knew she was here. We knew she’d kill me if she could. I just didn’t expect her to be quite so blatant about it.”

  “The ways of the Divided Courts grow more distasteful by the hour,” said Tybalt. “It is a pity you cannot, as you say, introduce a thing that is not present into the blood. I would beg you to come and be a cat with me, and leave this terrible way of doing things behind.”

  “I never thought that would sound so tempting.” I tried to run my hand through my hair, only to run into the braids May had put in it earlier. I groaned instead. “I don’t think we should be talking out here. It’s too open.”

  “Yes, exactly,” said Walther. “Being out in the open is a form of protection. It’s hard as hell to cast listening charms on living trees, and I haven’t seen any pixies. That means they’d need stationary stones, which I can check for, or something else.”

  “I can think of what that something else might be,” I said slowly. “Tybalt, why are we here, specifically? Instead of back in the room?”