A Red-Rose Chain

I tried, I really did. I swallowed, feeling the precious blood that Marlis had managed to give me run down my throat, and forced my lips to open. No sound came out.

“Your Highness, your binding may be preventing Sir Daye from answering your questions.” Marlis’ comment was calm, even deferential, but it struck me as dangerous all the same. She was disagreeing with something her liege had done. What would happen if he realized that was unusual?

“Let her speak,” hissed the false Queen. She grabbed his arm, digging in her fingernails. “She has to tell us how to fix this!”

“Oh, very well.” Rhys walked back to me, leaned down, and touched the rope of yarrow flowers that stretched across my shoulders. The pain didn’t stop, but it decreased so dramatically that I gasped, feeling as if a huge weight had been removed from my chest. I could breathe again.

Rhys waited a few seconds, watching with an analytical eye as I panted. Finally, he said, “I know this is not going to be a pleasant process for you. Pain is unavoidable. But how much pain is up to me. Do you understand? Answer my questions, and I can keep things pleasant. Like this. We can work together.”

I stared at him. “This isn’t working together,” I said, and was only half surprised to discover that my voice was working again in the absence of the bulk of the pain. “This is you asking me to be good while you cut me up for parts.”

“You make a fine point,” he said. He looked to the false Queen. “She makes a fine point.” Then he looked back to me, and smiled. It was a terrible expression, filled with edges, and with knives. “I suppose I didn’t make myself very clear. Right now, we’re planning to cut you up for parts. That’s true. I won’t try to sugarcoat it. That would insult both of us, and there’s no need for me to do that. But here’s the thing you’re missing. Right now, we’re planning to cut you up for parts. Not your pet death omen, not your squire, not that animal you’ve been bedding. Just you. That could change. Do you understand me? I could easily send my archers after the members of your little team who aren’t yet asleep, and tell them that we’ve proven your treachery, and that your diplomatic immunity has been revoked in the face of crimes against the throne. Once they’re all asleep . . . ah. Oberon was quite clear that we mustn’t kill each other, and I am very, very good at not killing the people who come before me. Some of them may wish I had, when they finally wake. But I never break the Law.”

For a moment, the urge to spit Quentin’s true identity at him was so strong that I had to grit my teeth to keep it in. He’d never be this cavalier about slicing up the Crown Prince.

But he might be willing to use the Crown Prince as leverage to get what he really wanted: the false Queen back on the throne of the Mists, and no one to challenge what he’d been doing with Silences since he made it his own. I couldn’t bring Quentin any deeper into this than I already had. All I could do was hope that Tybalt was smarter than he was loyal: that when he realized I’d been taken, he’d get Quentin the hell out of here, and tell Arden that I was lost.

“Go to hell,” I said.

Rhys sighed. “I hate that you make me do this,” he said. He produced another spike from inside his apron. I had time to tense—barely—and then he was driving it into my stomach, so hard that it seemed like he was pinning me to the table, a moth under glass, at the mercy of the biologist who had netted me out of the air. I screamed. I couldn’t help myself, and I didn’t really try; failure to scream would have meant that I wasn’t playing along, and might have made him even crueler.