A Red-Rose Chain

May had been elf-shot. Walther was being watched for signs of treason. We couldn’t run back to the Mists, or war would follow—and now that I’d seen the way Rhys treated his changeling subjects and responded to any possible threat to his power, I knew the war would be brutal beyond imagining. Even if we rallied every possible ally to our side, called in the Undersea and the Court of Cats and Kingdoms both near and far, people would die. Elf-shot would rain down from the heavens, and there would be no escaping the carnage.

Quentin offered me his arm as we left our temporary quarters, dressed for court, with our vials of countercharm tucked into our clothes. He was shaking a little, his nerves getting the best of him. I slid my right hand into position, using my left to gather my skirt enough to make walking easier. Doing this revealed my tennis shoes. Quentin glanced at them, blinked, and then snorted.

“Really?” he asked. “You can’t even wear heels when your life is on the line?”

“I can barely walk in heels,” I said reasonably. “I certainly can’t run in heels. Given a choice between shoes no one can see, but that don’t leave me at risk of a broken ankle, or tiny torture devices strapped to my feet, I’ll go with sneakers every time.”

“Your mom didn’t do you any favors when she skimped on the early etiquette training,” he said.

“No, no, she did not,” I agreed. “But on the plus side, if I were a more polite person, I wouldn’t be able to associate with most of my friends.”

Quentin snorted, but didn’t say anything. We were well past the safe zone now; we had to assume Rhys was listening to everything we said, and watching everything we did, waiting for one of us to show weakness. It was an uneasy, awkward way to exist, and I had to wonder how his people could bear to live this way. I would have expected a lot more of them to follow the trail blazed by Walther and Lowri. Then again, maybe it had already been too late by the time most of them realized how bad it was getting. There were loyalty potions in the water, and no one was going anywhere without consent of the King.

It was a good way to run a Kingdom without conflict or risk of political upheaval. How could anyone challenge your leadership when they were no longer capable of thinking for themselves?

“Ever notice how the tenser Tybalt is, the more he sounds like he just escaped from a Jane Austen novel?” asked Quentin.

“How many Jane Austen novels have you read?” I asked.

Quentin shrugged. “A few. Enough. All of them.”

“Got it. Yes, I’ve noticed. I think it’s endearing. Although it can get a little difficult to understand him sometimes. If you wind him up far enough, he stops making any sense at all.” I slanted a tight smile toward Quentin. “Wait for the wedding. I plan to get him so freaked out that he sounds like a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Emma.”

Quentin snorted again.

People began appearing in the halls around us as we drew closer to the dining hall. I kept my face turned forward but stole glances at them out of the corners of my eyes, trying to get an idea of what we were walking into. My ball gown would have been too much for a dinner at Shadowed Hills or in Arden’s Court, but here, I fit right in. Some of the women were wearing dresses infinitely more complicated than mine. Their outfits were made of feathers, stitched-together moth’s wings, snakeskins, and other, stranger things. I saw three separate women in gowns made of rose petals held together with tiny loops of silver wire, like floral chain mail. Several of the men were wearing vests of the same manufacture, making me suspect that this was a local fashion brought on by idleness and access to too many rose goblins. It was also, in an odd way, an insult to Ceres: no matter how hard she worked to grow her gardens, they would be decimated over and over again by courtiers looking for a new outfit.

“Wow,” muttered Quentin, as a man walked by wearing a tailcoat that appeared to have been made entirely from evergreen boughs. “How does he get that to lay flat?”