A Red-Rose Chain

Behind me, Tybalt sighed. I smirked. He was clearly anticipating my next move, and while he didn’t approve, he wasn’t going to stop me.

“Let me,” I said, and reached into the brambles. As I had halfway expected, they writhed, repositioning themselves around my hand, before driving their thorns like needles into my skin.

Healing quickly doesn’t mean I don’t feel pain. If anything, it means the opposite. I don’t get nerve damage and I don’t build up scar tissue: I can recover so fast from an injury that I experience it again for the first time while it’s still ongoing. It seems like a blessing, and it has been, in a great many ways—I would never have been able to live this long if it weren’t for the fact that I can bounce back from things that should by all rights have killed me. But sometimes, when it seems like the pain is never going to end, I wish I’d gotten a different suite of magical talents from my mother. Like the power to avoid situations that end with me willingly jamming my arm into a door made entirely from animate, apparently angry rose briars.

The thorns bit into my flesh until it felt like they were touching the bone. I gritted my teeth, asking, “Does it always do this?” I tried to keep my voice from shaking. If Tybalt or Quentin decided I was in trouble, they might come into range of the door. I didn’t need to deal with multiple people being attacked by the architecture.

Marlis didn’t answer with words. She just raised her arm and rolled down her sleeve, showing me the hundreds of tiny white scars pocking her skin. Some of them were old and almost faded, while others were glossy and as pale as birch bark.

Seeing them both made me feel better about what the door was currently doing to my arm, and made me worry once again about whether we were walking into a trap. Marlis had been under Rhys’ spell for a hundred years, and some of those scars were substantially fresher than that.

She must have seen the doubt in my eyes, because she lowered her arm, rolling her sleeve back down, and said, “He couldn’t hold me all the time. Even when I was dosing myself, it’s dangerous to layer loyalty over loyalty. Sometimes, I came back to my senses. Never for long—never long enough to decide that I could run, that I could leave my family and go. But long enough for me to do certain things that needed to be done.”

“Right,” I said. The thorns dug deeper. Then, as if they had finally found the key they were looking for, the briars began to loosen, finally unspooling and dropping away. I pulled my arm, now effectively shredded, out of the thorns. The smell of my blood washed over the smell of Marlis’ blood, concealing it. That was almost a relief. My blood was at least familiar, and didn’t take as much effort to block out.

Speaking of blood . . . I raised my hand to my mouth and sucked the blood off my wrist, centering and strengthening myself. There was no sense in letting it go to waste when it was right there. I didn’t even need to cut myself.

“You’re bleeding on your dress,” observed Quentin. He sounded unhappy, but not shaken. Me bleeding all over everything was practically normal these days.

“I’ll give it to Tybalt to dispose of on the Shadow Roads,” I said, the blood making my voice sound positively giddy. The thorn door was still opening, unwinding itself one knot at a time. It was a slow process that was probably supposed to look impressive, but really just made me wonder what would happen if someone ever got cornered down here. An escape route that took too long to open was almost as bad as no escape route at all. “I never liked this dress anyway.”