A Red-Rose Chain

Maybe I was losing touch with my humanity after all.

“All I denied you was my Kingdom, and I denied it to you because you pushed too hard,” she said, apparently taking my stricken silence for confusion. “You couldn’t be still, couldn’t be quiet, couldn’t remember your place. I gave you enough rope to hang yourself and more; enough rope to weave a bridge that could have carried you beyond the Mists. But you wouldn’t go.”

“Everyone I know is in the Mists,” I said. My lips felt numb.

Her eyes narrowed. “And everyone I know is not? I have allies in Silences—obviously, or you would not be here now—but they are few and far between compared to the comforts of my own knowe, my own home.”

The knowe she had claimed as her own was standing empty, waiting for Arden or someone else among the nobility to decide what to do with it. The amount of iron in the false Queen’s dungeons made it a dangerous place for purebloods, apart from the Gremlins, and no one was sure they wanted to give them access to that much iron.

“I found that knowe, remember?” I wasn’t sure what I was going to say until I was speaking, and then it was too late. “It was the first thing I ever did for you. I went into the city, and I found you a knowe when your old one was sinking back into the shallowing it had been shaped from. And I think I sort of wondered, even then, how a kingdom as big as ours could have such an unstable royal seat. Because no one had ever told me that King Gilad reigned from someplace different, you know? I thought you were his daughter.”

She glared at me, her eyes all but snapping fire. “I am my father’s daughter.”

“No, you’re not.” I shook my head. “I mean, technically I guess you are—whoever your father was, you’re his child, but you’re not King Gilad Windermere’s daughter. He was a pureblooded Tuatha de Dannan, and you have no Tuatha in you.”

“Because you stole it from me!” She sat up straighter, expression going triumphant. “You reached into my blood and you ripped away my heritage, all so you could give my throne to someone else! Betrayer! I made you a Countess, I elevated you above all others of your kind, and this was how you repaid me. With unspeakable treachery.”

“I see how we’re playing this,” I said. “You keep saying things that are true, because they don’t have any context. Yes, you are your father’s daughter, but your father was never King in the Mists. Yes, I changed the balance of your blood, and I’m genuinely sorry to have done it without your permission, but I did it to save my friends, and what I took away from you was Siren, not Tuatha. It’s not against the Law for us to use magic against each other. Sometimes I wish that it was. We might do a little less damage that way. Since it’s not, under the Law, I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Wait.” King Rhys leaned forward on his throne, breaking into the conversation for the first time since the false Queen had started speaking. “Is what she says true? Did you really lay hands upon her, and take her heritage from one thing into another?”