A Red-Rose Chain

“Probably,” said Walther, and gave his goblin’s head another careful stroke. The goblin chirped happily. “There used to be a few Dryads on the groundskeeping staff. Since no one cuts down a Dryad’s tree if they can avoid it, I’m assuming they’re still here. They’d be able to translate what the rose goblins say, and they’re too na?ve for anyone to think that they’re lying.”


“Right,” I said. Most Dryads were more interested in being trees than they were in being people. They weren’t stupid, but they were . . . distracted might be the best word. Constantly distracted by the strange situations that came with the incarnate condition, and always keeping half their minds back in their tree. Our friend April was a Dryad who didn’t have those issues, but she was also half computer, which made her a bad model to go on. “Is there any way we can convince the rose goblins not to tell the Dryads what we talk about out here? We could go back to the room, but . . .”

“But if we’re constantly walling ourselves up in there, Rhys is going to figure out that we’re up to something, and he’s going to come looking,” said Walther. “Give me a second.”

“You speak rose goblin?” I asked. I was starting to feel like I needed a list of who could and couldn’t interrogate my house pets.

His smile was brief, and amused. “Not quite. But the ones here in Silences . . . we have ways around language.” This time, he sat down on the path, still holding the large rose goblin against his chest. Once he was settled, he transferred it to his lap and began digging through his vest.

Tybalt put a hand on my arm. I glanced at him. He nodded toward the other side of the path. I nodded in turn, and followed him away from Walther and the gathering of goblins, stopping just before the trees took over. We were still close enough to be together, but by lowering our voices, we could at least pretend to a modicum of privacy.

“Are you all right?” asked Tybalt.

I laughed, unsteadily. “Let’s see. The woman we thought was done threatening my life and transforming my jeans into elaborate formalwear is not only still in the business of doing both, but she’s managed to produce a King who’ll back her up—and oh, right, they want to take me apart.”

“You cannot allow them to do this thing, of course,” said Tybalt, matter-of-factly.

“Right, I—” I paused, blinking at him. He had sounded so calm, like we were talking about where to go for lunch, and not whether I was going to be brutally murdered over the course of several days in order to prevent a war. “What?”

“All my many personal objections aside—and they are many, beginning with my disinterest in marrying a corpse, and continuing onward from there—you cannot allow the king of a demesne famed for its alchemists to have access to any part of your body. Even if your escape requires leaving one or more of us behind, you can’t.”

Tybalt sounded so serious, and so upset, that I couldn’t say anything to that. I just stared at him.

He sighed, shaking his head. “I’d tell you to run, if I thought we could get away with it. I’d say to gather up our people, and those things which we cannot bear to lose, and flee for the hills. Do you not understand what they could make of you?”

“I’m starting to,” I said, in a very small voice.

Blood-workers—like me, like the Daoine Sidhe—could sometimes “borrow” the magical talents of others through judicious sampling of their blood. Tap a vein and hey, presto, suddenly we could teleport, or transform, or do any number of other things that didn’t come naturally. For us, blood was the ultimate wonder drug, opening all doors and removing all barriers—as long as it was the right blood. But it had its limitations. I had never yet been able to borrow magic from blood that wasn’t coming straight out of a living person. I could awaken memories in dried blood, but that was about it; anything more complicated than a few flashes of the past was beyond me. If you wanted to preserve the magic in a person’s blood, or better yet, if you wanted to make that magic accessible to anyone, not just your local blood-workers, you needed something special.