“Wait?” She paused politely.
“?subrand said he’d challenge for the throne when Aiden grew up! Your son is far more experienced, far more skilled—he ought to have a clear advantage. Or are you so sure that you birthed a weakling?”
And, suddenly, there it was, the flash of anger I’d seen on the stairs back at Claire’s, when I’d spit in the eye of the manlikan that I guessed Efridis had been controlling.
“My son is quite capable of defeating the half-breed,” she snapped, “were he on his own. But he won’t be on his own, will he?” Her eyes slid to her brother. “If you want someone to blame for your death, for the child’s, for all of this, look to—what do they call you here? Caedmon?” Her lip curled. “Great King. Even in your human name, you reveal your ambition!”
“Ambition?” I looked from her to Caedmon. “What is she talking about?”
Caedmon didn’t answer; he was too busy glaring at his sister.
“Poor, deluded fool,” she told me. “You don’t even know why you’re dying, do you?”
“Why . . . don’t you . . . enlighten me?”
It was becoming harder to think, harder to breathe, not that it mattered.
“She’s stalling,” Louis-Cesare snarled, and started forward.
But Efridis caught his arm. “A moment. I’m going to enjoy this.” She looked back at me. “My brother and I both grew up with the same ambition: to see Faerie united under a single crown. One king, or . . . one queen . . .” She smiled.
I suddenly wondered how much power her son was actually supposed to have in this new order.
“Our plan was to end the constant bloodshed!” Caedmon erupted. “We were supposed to end the perpetual warfare that has torn our world apart!”
“Oh, I will, brother,” Efridis assured him. “As soon as you are dead.”
“I . . . don’t understand,” I said. Because I really didn’t.
“My brother and I chose different paths to power,” Efridis informed me. “I joined ancient bloodlines through my marriage, ones that had long been kept apart by old quarrels, and produced a son who controls all four elements. I brought together the complete spectrum of our greatest powers in one prince, who every member of the Light Fey has reason to support.”
Her eyes slid to Caedmon. “Every member except one.
“My brother tried something similar, but his marriage to the queen of what you call the Green Fey was a signal disaster.” She laughed. “It produced no sons, or children of any kind, nor did any of the concubines he took thereafter. How it must have galled you, brother, to see me succeed where you had failed—”
“I have a son!” Caedmon snarled.
“Yes, a half-breed! A mongrel half-human disgrace that you would set before—” She caught herself. “My brother,” she continued, more calmly, “knew the Light Fey forces were almost certain to rally to my son—enough of them, at least, to make his rule inevitable. So he tried a new tactic. My child combined all strains of royal Light Fey blood in one person, but my brother would go a step farther. He would go where no one had ever dared, would do the unthinkable, would create an abomination—”
“The only prince who can rule all Faerie is one who embodies all of it!” Caedmon exploded. “Not just the parts you feel are worthy!”
“There, you see?” Efridis asked me. “I did not start this conflict, dhampir. The birth of the polluted prince did that. The one who combines both Light and Dark Fey blood in a single person, and not just any Dark Fey blood. My brother somehow found a scion of one of their ruling families living here on Earth, away from their oversight. For they, too, would never have allowed such a union. But they didn’t even know she existed, the product of some tryst by one of their princes, and by the time they did—”
“Aiden.” I felt my heart sink.
She inclined her head.
“A prince who combines the blood of all faerie could one day raise a Dark Fey army, combine it with my brother’s forces, and defeat my son. But that will never be. This ends tonight.”
“And with it, any real chance for peace,” Caedmon said, his voice ringing out across the cave. Because he was talking to the trolls, I realized. Our only hope for allies.
“She will betray you,” he told them. “No matter what she has promised. Has she told you that you will rule over your own lands? That she only cares about the Light Fey? Her ambition will never allow her to stop short of taking all Faerie! As the humans say, she’ll create a wasteland and call it peace! Whereas I—”
Efridis cut him off with a gesture and a line of liquid syllables I didn’t understand.
I guess the trolls didn’t, either, because they just stood there.
“Oh, allow me to translate for your friends,” Caedmon told her viciously, but looking at them. “She said: ‘And you would give Faerie over into the hands of savages, under a king as unclean as they are!’”
“You lie!” Efridis said. “You always—”
“I’m not the one planning to consolidate power and use it to destroy them! You will never obtain peace this way—none of us will!” he told the trolls. “Don’t be foolish!”
But it was too late. The troll leaders had made their decision. They were gambling on the power and wealth Efridis and her ally had promised. And without them, we had no friends in the room.
“I thought you said you’d never follow another fey king?” I reminded them desperately.
“She no king,” Gravel Face rumbled, and I contemplated banging my head into the ground.
Efridis glanced at Louis-Cesare. “Finish this.”
I looked at Caedmon, who looked back at me. And for the first time, I saw something other than perfect self-assurance in those green eyes. For the first time, I saw something that looked a lot like panic.
And then shock, as another voice rang out across the room.
It was as loud as someone using a megaphone, and so startling that I jumped, and sliced open my back on the sword. While Louis-Cesare stopped his run, halfway across the huge space, staring around in confusion. But not for long.
“Alfhild!”
Louis-Cesare’s face abruptly turned gleeful. “Mircea! Come to watch your daughter die?”
And then, out of the side of my eye, I saw a hazy version of Mircea shimmer into existence. I could see right through him, out to the snowy mountains beyond. He looked like a ghost, so much so that I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.
Until I realized: he was in our heads.
“Your head,” he told me. “I am transmitting this through my link with you.”
So I was Wi-Fi now? I took a look at the twelve-inch-long dagger in Louis-Cesare’s hand, and decided I didn’t mind so much.
“I came to bargain,” Mircea said, and Alfhild laughed.
“There is nothing you have that I want!”
“Isn’t there?” He held something up.
Something familiar.
“Keep it,” she snapped, looking at the little ivory casket that had once held a potent magical shield. “Consider it a souvenir of your failure!”
“Oh, it’s already a souvenir,” Mircea said mildly. “One the consul took the night she visited your palazzo, all those years ago. I thought it in poor taste at the time, but I’ve since learned that she has excellent . . . instincts. As soon as I heard who we were dealing with, I took a ley line to Paris, in order to retrieve it.”
Louis-Cesare’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about? If you think—”
“What I think is that you’ve never asked yourself an obvious question: what happened to your bones, Alfhild?”
There was a sudden silence. For a moment, all I could hear was my heartbeat and the wind whistling through the cave mouth. And then—
“You’re bluffing!”
Mircea’s ghostly form opened the little casket and snapped something. And Louis-Cesare jerked, as if he’d been stabbed. A dark eyebrow rose.
“Believe me now?”