A Red-Rose Chain

Swearing at the false Queen had exhausted me. I glared at him mutely, hoping that my face would be enough to broadcast my hatred and anger at the situation.

“Ah. A pity. If you’d been willing to share what you knew, we might not have to test you. Now we’ll have to put you through your paces before we know what we can safely do. If you were anything else, I’d just take what we needed—but then, if you were anything else, you wouldn’t be so appealing. So I suppose there’s a consequence for everything.” He put the spike aside. “Marlis. A knife, if you please.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” she said. Her tone was virtually flat, like she was disengaged from the scene. Hearing it answered one question and opened a whole host of new ones, as well as a whole new slate of worries.

Marlis wasn’t back under her supposed King’s control. She hadn’t sounded like a robot when he had her: she had sounded perfectly normal, just loyal to the man who had overthrown and tortured her family. Now she sounded like she was burying everything just to keep from blowing her own cover. If she wasn’t careful, that was going to be the thing that gave her away. I couldn’t help her if the King turned on her. Not while I was tied down and fighting against my own randomly misfiring nervous system.

She stepped closer, holding a blade out toward Rhys, handle first. For one giddy moment, I allowed myself to hope that she was going to flip it around and bury it in his gut. We were in a Kingdom full of alchemists. Surely someone would be able to save him before he died and put her in violation of Oberon’s Law.

He took the knife from her hand without anyone getting stabbed. I hoped my disappointment didn’t show, and was briefly glad for my ongoing agony, as it was probably doing a lot to prevent my face from showing what I was thinking. Only briefly: the man responsible for my pain was now holding a knife, and as worried as I was for Marlis, I was somewhat more concerned for myself.

“Do it,” said the false Queen.

“Patience,” he said, and lowered the knife toward me. I tried to pull away, I really did, but my body wouldn’t obey me. It may have gotten easier to think, but it wasn’t getting any easier to move.

The line of pain he drew along my collarbone was almost soothing in comparison to the agony flaring in my nerves. The smell of my blood filled the air, hot and sweet and coppery. I inhaled greedily, trying to focus on the blood, which I could feel running down my shoulder. There was a soft plinking sound as it dripped onto something metal; presumably a bowl, since he wasn’t likely to be bleeding me without a collection method handy.

My strength has always been in the blood. It would have been better if he’d been cutting my face, where there would have been at least a chance of a drop hitting my lips, but I’d take what I could get. I didn’t bother arguing with my eyelids, which were now as stubbornly unwilling to close as they had previously been unwilling to open. I just let my eyes become unfocused, and tried to concentrate on the blood.

The downside of being the first—effectively—of a new breed is that there’s never been anyone to tell me what I could do. I’ve learned most of what I know through trial and error, sometimes with assistance from the Luidaeg. Recently, I’ve been getting almost as much assistance from May. She seemed to understand my magic better than I did sometimes, maybe because she had my memories but not my powers, giving her the luxury of objectivity.

Rhys cut me again, slicing through my hard-won distance and tearing it away. I gritted my teeth involuntarily, trying to find my focus through the pain. The blood wasn’t plinking into the bowl anymore. As it fell, it landed with the thick, muddy sound of liquid dropping into liquid. He almost had enough for whatever he was trying to do. He had to—he couldn’t be intending to bleed me dry one slice at a time. Could he?

“Is it ready?”

“Almost, my dear, almost. Have you never learned patience?”