A Red-Rose Chain

The woman who was sleeping on the bier, her hands folded over her chest and a faint grimace on her otherwise peaceful face, couldn’t have been anyone but Walther’s mother. The shape of her cheekbones, the subtle composition of her features, even the angled points of her ears, they all mirrored his like some sort of sideways mirror. She looked more like Marlis than she did like him, but together, the three of them formed a family unit so unbelievably clear that there was no point in pretending it wasn’t there.

She was dressed in the pseudo-Medievalist fashion so common among the Courts, and if her gown was a hundred years out of fashion, I certainly couldn’t tell; one of the side effects of choosing all your clothes like you were getting ready to put on an extremely classy production of Camelot was that everything became subtly timeless, impossible to measure. But there were smears of dust at the corners of her eyes, like whoever was responsible for cleaning her hadn’t been as careful as they should have been, and I had no trouble believing that she’d been asleep for a century or more.

Her right leg ended at the knee, leaving that side of her skirt to fall straight down and puddle on the table. Walther followed my gaze to her missing lower limb. Then he looked back up, reaching out to carefully wipe the dust away from her eyes with the side of his thumb.

“We’re starting here, and not with May, because if I’m not exactly right, no one will notice,” he said. “Everyone in this room is already expected to sleep for a century. More than a century—as long as Rhys is in power and willing to keep putting them under. So if I test my tincture on one of them, and they don’t wake up, we haven’t lost anything. If I test it on May and put her to sleep for a thousand years, you’ll probably kill me.”

“Walther, I’m so sorry.” The words seemed awkward and out of place. They were the only things I had to offer. I had known that his family was here, sleeping, but I’d never thought too hard about it, because there hadn’t been anything I could do. Now . . . this was his mother. I didn’t even like my own mother most of the time, and I couldn’t imagine what it would do to me to know that she might never wake up again.

“I can’t start with my aunt or uncle, because we’re going to need them to challenge for the throne before the High King,” he said. “My cousin Torsten is next in line to be King, so I can’t start with him either. Mother was never the best alchemist in our family, but she was always the most adventurous. I remember her turning her hair purple when I was a kid. She laughed and said fashion couldn’t come before science, not if we wanted to understand what we did. She was the first one I told when I really started to understand that I was supposed to be a boy, because I knew she wouldn’t say ‘let’s just cast a transformation spell and make it all better.’ She’d tell me to use my alchemy, to do it myself and make it permanent. Because she believed in me.”

“We don’t have to start with her,” I said softly.

“Yes, we do,” he said. “If I don’t wake her up, I can try again. I can find the right formula, I can wake up my father, and together, we’ll be able to undo whatever it is I’ve done. But if I start with him and I’ve got it wrong, there’s no one I can safely try to wake who will actually be able to help me save him. She has to come first.”

I couldn’t tell how much of his logic was sincere and how much was his need to see his mother again, to feel her arms around him and hear her voice telling him it was going to be okay. In the end, it didn’t matter. He was the alchemist: he was the one who understood the risks, and the possible costs, of what we were about to do. All I could do was follow his lead. “What do you need from me?”

Walther offered me a wan smile. “I’m going to need you to bleed for me.”