A Red-Rose Chain

There was a long pause—long enough that I began to worry that I’d misinterpreted the scent of her magic. Maybe she had been here for so many years, casting illusions in an enclosed space, that the smell had worked its way into the walls. Then the air on the other side of the room seemed to crack open, revealing a thin band of extremely low light, like the glow from a nightlight. It was still enough to make me squint and turn partially away after the darkness of the past few minutes.

“Why did you follow me?” Arden’s voice was tense and tight. I didn’t need to see her face to know that she was a flight risk. Maybe she always would be. “Get out of here.”

“We came to bring you back to your court, Your Highness,” I said, stressing her title so hard that it became a weapon. “I understand that this is all sort of overwhelming for you, but it’s overwhelming for everybody. Lowri is trying to hold things down—she’s doing the ‘temporary seneschal’ thing, in the absence of better options—but we need you there. We need you deciding how the Mists will respond.”

“No, you don’t,” she said, an edge of hysterical laughter in her words that set my teeth on edge. If she panicked, if she ran . . . “I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t do this.”

“Begging your pardon, Queen Windermere, but none of us know what we are doing when we begin,” said Tybalt. “It is the role of each monarch to find their way, and the way of their people, even when the world seems set against them. We have no choice.”

“But see, I do have a choice,” said Arden. “I could abdicate. I could step down. This could all be someone else’s problem, and the people I care about would stop being hurt.”

“Once.” The word was cold, heavy with fury, and it took me a moment to realize that I was the one who had spoken it.

“What?” Arden sounded confused. “What do you mean?”

“I said, once.” I took a step toward the narrow sliver of light that hung in the basement air. I could see Arden’s face when I moved. She was framed by darkness, by the two pieces of the illusion that protected her little bolt-hole here in the bookstore basement. It was just magic painted on canvas, but it had kept her hidden for years, before I came and dragged her out of her chosen obscurity.

I had wanted to feel guilty about it when it happened, but I had had no real choice: the Kingdom had needed her. And she had accepted it. She had taken her oaths before the High King of the Westlands, and she had addressed her people. She had promised to do better. She’d promised. Faerie isn’t fair, but we take our promises very seriously.

“You get to make that threat once,” I said, taking another step forward. “You get to play that card once. You get to imply that your throne, your people, your Kingdom are somehow less important than your personal comfort once, and you just got your shot. Boo-hoo, Madden is asleep. That sucks. I’m going to miss him until he wakes up. But he will wake up, because the people that attacked him used elf-shot. They did that for a reason. They did it because they wanted to scare you. You’re really going to let them win?”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Arden spat. The smell of blackberry flowers and redwood bark began to gather in the basement air.

I lunged forward, wrenching the two sides of the illusion apart and revealing the small, shabby apartment where our Queen had spent so many years. Arden, still in her fancy royal gown, gaped at me. I grabbed her hands before she had a chance to move, pinning her in place. She couldn’t open a portal without moving them. She was trapped.

“You’re not going anywhere without me, Your Highness,” I snapped. “If you open a portal, you’re taking me through, or you’re not going. This isn’t a conversation that you get to run away from.”