A Red-Rose Chain

“It’s no rumor, my lord,” she said, with open satisfaction in her voice. “It was brought to me by Sir Daye, and placed in my royal treasury. I don’t know where it is now, of course, denied as I am the right to access my own home and goods. But it was a true thing, and one which I saw with my own eyes.” Her gaze slanted back to me, mouth thinning into a hard line. “Until recent events caused me to realize that I had been deceived as to Sir Daye’s heritage, I had assumed that her growing purity of blood was due to her having used the chest herself, before she handed it over to me. I considered raising the question with her, if I am being entirely honest. The hope chest is a powerful artifact, and should not have been left cavalierly in the hands of a changeling.”


“Doesn’t make it yours,” I said, as calmly as I could. “According to the official records, it was given to the care of the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn by Oberon himself. I guess that means it should be held by the Daoine Sidhe, if by no one else. Since you’ve never claimed to be Daoine, and at the time I thought I was, I would have had more right to keep the thing than you did. And I didn’t. I handed it off to the Court of Cats while I finished dealing with the business at hand, and then gave it to the woman who stood as Evening’s liege—you. I never used it.”

At least, I hadn’t used it on purpose. The delicate balance of my blood had been disrupted when I’d touched it: there was no denying that, and it would have been foolish to try. My whole life had been a ride from one end of my heritage to the other, with forces—the hope chest, my mother, the goblin fruit—tugging me first one way and then the opposite. I was finally in a position to do the tugging for myself, and if that meant I was choosing to stay exactly where I was, well, that was my prerogative.

“I believe we’re getting off the subject,” said King Rhys. “Sir Daye, you claim that Arden Windermere is rightful Queen of the Mists, by virtue of being the eldest child of Gilad Windermere, who died without announcing an heir. Is this so?”

“Yes,” I said. It seemed like a simple question, which meant it was probably anything but. I breathed in through my nose, trying to calm myself, and was hit again with the mingled magical scents of the people around me. Tybalt’s pennyroyal smelled, soothingly, of home, while the false Queen’s rowan and seashore warned me that the danger was very far from over.

“You have also admitted that you don’t know whether you would be able to tell, now, if someone else had manipulated the balance of my lady’s blood, given the violence of your attack.” He leaned forward, expression suddenly predatory. “As you can manipulate blood without a hope chest, and have allies who can walk through shadows and move through walls, who knew where a hope chest was to be found—and you have a mother, do you not? Someone who, presumably, shares your capabilities; Amandine, I believe her name was—why am I to believe that my lady is not also King Gilad’s daughter?”

“My mother was of mixed-blood,” said the false Queen piously. “The Undersea refused her, because her father had been a Banshee, and Banshee are not creatures of the sea.”

“Wait. Wait just one moment.” I put my hands up, palms turned outward. “Are you trying to claim that she’s actually the legitimate heir to the throne?”

“I am the elder among us: none will question that I was born before Arden,” said the false Queen. “Why didn’t you ask if Gilad was my father? Why didn’t you test my blood, look for those markers you claim you can see? You could have told for certain whether part of my heritage had been stolen—and by your own words, once it was taken, it couldn’t be returned. So you stand here and admit, instead, that you destroyed the evidence of such a crime.”

“If that evidence existed,” I snapped. “You never said you’d been part Tuatha and lost it. There’s nothing to support that idea.”