A Red-Rose Chain

The smell of meadowsweet and wine vinegar assaulted my nostrils as I moved my hands, clearing more of the lines away. The pain wasn’t receding, but it wasn’t as all-consuming as it had been: I was starting to hear voices. A male voice, raised in anger; a female voice, raised in a plaintive whine that sounded somehow familiar. I knew these people.

Rhys and the false Queen. If they were arguing, it was probably over the fact that I was supposed to be his undying font of alchemical providence, and she had gone and stabbed me in the chest. I wouldn’t be nearly as useful if I was dead. They might as well have stuck with my laundry.

My eyes wouldn’t open. That . . . wasn’t a good sign. Before, it had been pain keeping my body from responding to my demands; now it was weakness, plain and simple and all-consuming. My mouth wasn’t bleeding anymore. There was nothing to lend me strength but stubbornness, and so it was stubbornness I seized upon, using it to force my now-unbound hands to keep moving. If I had hands, I must have arms; that was the logical extension. If I had arms, they were going to do what I told them to do. They were going to work.

It was a relief when my hands touched my chest. Until I felt the fabric of my cheap tank top, tacky with blood and sticking to my skin, I hadn’t been sure the movement was anything but my own dying imagination. Slowly, with fingers that felt like so much dead weight at the end of hands that weren’t much better, I began feeling around for the knife. When I finally found it, I gripped as best I could, and began trying to pull.

Arthur pulling Excalibur from the stone got him a kingdom and a legend and a whole bunch of crappy knock-off stories. Hell, it got him a Disney movie. Me pulling a knife out of my own heart got me pain, pain, and more pain, until I felt like I was on the verge of blacking out again. I gritted my teeth and kept pulling. If I lost my grip, I wasn’t going to get it back.

The knife moved.

It was a small thing at first, just a shift, but it was a shift that pulled an infinitesimal fraction of the blade out of my heart. I could almost feel my flesh beginning to knit back together, moving faster to save me than my body was moving to die. I pulled again, and the knife shifted more, almost coming free.

The false Queen had never been a fighter. Her attack had been intended to kill—there was no doubt of that—but she’d never really had the strength to drive the knife as deeply as she would have needed to. She only got it between my ribs because I couldn’t move away and luck was on her side. While she’d been able to pierce my heart, she hadn’t been able to fully bisect it, which explained why I was still alive to pull the damn thing out.

“—attack her like that!”

“She deserves it for what she did to me! You don’t know how I’ve suffered since that little whore put her hands on me! You’ll never understand the pain she’s put me through.”

“She purified you!”

The sound of flesh striking flesh covered up the sound of the knife finally coming free of my chest. It couldn’t cover the sound of that same knife dropping from my hand and clattering to the floor. There was a sickening pause before Rhys laughed, sounding utterly delighted.

“Look at that! You didn’t exaggerate when you described how difficult she was to kill. She’s amazing.”

I forced my hands to move again, raising them, shaking, to my mouth. I had a few seconds. That was all. Rhys would get over his delight: he would realize I was moving, which meant that his spell had broken. Once that happened, all hell was going to break loose.