A Red-Rose Chain

And Marlis was there, too. She was standing a few feet behind them, holding a wide silver bowl in both her hands, her eyes fixed straight ahead. She was wearing a butcher’s apron, which just made it harder for me to imagine that anything good was going to happen next. I couldn’t tell from looking at her whether she was back under Rhys’ control, or whether she was just playing along until it was safe to do something different. I hoped like hell for the latter.

The room was decorated in Rhys’ usual austere style, and the walls were plain wood, easy to clean. I strained until I could see my shoulder. There were no chains or straps holding me down: just a thin string of yarrow flowers tied together with golden thread. They shouldn’t have been strong enough to keep me from moving. “Should” is a word with very little power in Faerie.

“Amazing,” said Rhys, leaning forward. “Sir Daye, were you aware that you heal so swiftly that your body rejects foreign objects? Your flesh is trying to push out my spike. It’s quite remarkable. I wonder what part of you contains this property. I wonder whether I can bottle it.”

“That’s not the first thing you’re going to bottle,” said the false Queen. There was a faint whine in her voice that hadn’t been there before. It was the first time I had heard her sound anything other than completely confident in her hold over the King of Silences. Her smile vanished, transmuted by suspicion. “You promised me, Rhys, remember? You promised you would get me what I needed.”

“I will, my dear, I will, but you can’t blame me for showing interest in all the other wonderful things that we have resting at our fingertips, now can you? Healing tinctures, complexion potions . . . we have immortality, but we’ve never had indestructability. Now, with a little work and a little cleverness, we can. We can ascend to the level of Oberon himself: untouchable, eternal, never dying or suffering any of the predations of mortality. All we have to do is find the right combination to coax it all out of her.” Rhys leaned forward, grabbing something outside of my limited frame of view.

The pain in my hand, which had faded to a background note in the overall symphony of pain coming from the rest of me, suddenly flared into bright new agony. Rhys held up a wooden spike. It was dark with blood, and there were shreds of something that looked a lot like skin sticking to the sides. “You see? Your body couldn’t decide whether to expel it or consume it, since it was so large, and tried for both. Your healing powers are incredible, Sir Daye, but they’re not very smart.”

“You don’t have to keep using her title,” said the false Queen. “She never deserved it in the first place, and she’s certainly not going to use it again. Are you, October?”

“Go . . . fuck . . . yourself,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper, my lips resisting even that small command. The pain wasn’t getting any better. Aside from moments like the one where Rhys had pulled the spike out of my flesh, it also wasn’t getting any worse.

Pain and I have an interesting relationship. I’ve spent so much time dealing with it over the past few years that it wasn’t quite as incapacitating as it probably should have been. Every nerve I had was still on fire, and every inch of my skin felt like it was being flayed, but as long as those were constants, I could adapt.

“Human and obscene even to the last,” said the false Queen. “Can you do anything with her tongue? It could be an excellent potion ingredient, and more importantly, it would silence her.”

“It would just grow back,” said Rhys. “I’ll save it until I need it; we know she regenerates blood and skin with the same degree of strength, but I’m worried that the rest of her organs will only be fully effective when they’re the originals. What do you think, Sir Daye? Have you experimented with your own limits? If I start removing fingers, will your body know to make more bone, or will it just patch the holes?”