A Red-Rose Chain

“But there’s nothing to contradict it, either,” said King Rhys. “You’re here because you want to prevent a war between my Kingdom and yours. I can’t blame you for wanting that, any more than I can blame the usurper for sending you. After all, power cleaves to power, and you’re quite enjoying the change in regime, aren’t you? From a powerless changeling to a diplomat. Respected, attended by pureblood servants, allowed to take a squire of your own, even betrothed to a man whose power outstrips your own . . . I’m sure you can see why I find it difficult to believe that you acted solely out of the need to protect your Kingdom.”


“I never said I didn’t have reasons to want Arden on the throne,” I said. “If you don’t think she’s legitimate, take it up with the High King.”

“I don’t have to,” said Rhys. “I am a valid monarch, holding a throne that was given to me by my liege, and I have held that throne well for over a hundred years. No one is going to challenge my right to declare war on my neighbors when they threaten me.”

“How did we threaten you?” I demanded.

“The Mists has threatened me by allowing you to live, Sir Daye,” he said calmly. “You are a threat to my throne, and to my people’s way of life. If Arden’s first step after taking ‘her’ throne had been to order your execution for laying hands in anger upon a pureblood, my lady might have finally accepted my age-old proposal and agreed to sit beside me as my Queen. But Arden didn’t do that. She welcomed you as a part of her Court, of her political structure. And you are, quite simply, too dangerous to be allowed to run about as you do.”

His smile was sudden, and predatory. “You see, Sir Daye, I know you are here to prevent a war, and I would very much like to give you the opportunity to do so. I’d like to offer you a solution.”

“What’s that?” I asked warily.

“Bleed for me.” King Rhys kept smiling. That was possibly the worst thing of all. “Go to my alchemists, and let them bleed you dry. Let us make talismans of your bones, and antidotes from your liver. We’ll let everyone else you brought with you leave—and as you are not a pureblood, we won’t even have to accuse them of standing idly by while Oberon’s Law was broken. Die for us, Sir Daye, and we will let your loved ones live.”

The false Queen had never looked so triumphant. Not even when she was banishing me from the only home I had ever known, not even when she was sentencing me to death for breaking the same Law that would now fail to protect me.

“The choice,” she said, “is yours. But then again, it always was, wasn’t it, October?”





ELEVEN




I TURNED AND STALKED OUT of the receiving room, leaving King Rhys’ terrible proposal unanswered. Tybalt and Walther were close behind me. We walked in silence until we turned the corner of the hall, passing out of sight of the guards on the door. Tybalt looked at me. I nodded, and he grabbed us both—me by the arm, Walther by the collar—before yanking us onto the Shadow Roads.

We emerged less than a minute later on a narrow pathway lined with pine trees. Walther pulled away and Tybalt let him go, watching with some interest as the alchemist staggered, wheezing, to lean against the nearest evergreen. He didn’t look as frozen as I was, just winded, which leant some credence to my belief that Tylwyth Teg were self-defrosting. It was the only way to explain the stunts they could pull with yarrow branches not ending in frostbite or worse.

Tybalt looked at me gravely, studying my face, before pulling me into an embrace that lasted longer than we’d been on the Shadow Roads.

“That could have gone better,” said Walther, voice still strained from the lack of oxygen. His words seemed to break some temporary spell of peace, bringing us crashing back into a world where time was passing and I had to start thinking about the future.

Damn. Sometimes it was nice to have a few minutes where all I had to do was live in the past. Now I had to go back to living in the present, and since the present seemed to want me dead—again—I would have been just as happy to put that off for a little longer.