A Red-Rose Chain

“Careful, Marley,” said Walther. “You’re starting to sound like you agree with him.”


Marlis turned to look at her brother. There was no anger in her eyes: only bone-deep exhaustion, and the quiet resignation that comes with too many defeats. She had the eyes of a woman who’d never won anything in her life, who’d simply stepped through the patterns that were demanded of her, all the while praying she could survive them. “A hundred years,” she said softly. “More than a hundred years. I held our mother down while his people stabbed the arrow into her shoulder, less than a decade past. You got away. You became the man you’d always wanted to be. You grew up. I didn’t. I stayed here, with the man who overthrew our family, and I learned to be a pet. You were my little sister, but if we compare the things we’ve seen, the things we’ve done . . . I’m the little sister now. I can’t say whether I agree with him or not, because I haven’t been allowed to have my own ideas about anything in a hundred years.”

Walther paled. “Marley, I’m sorry. I didn’t . . . I didn’t think . . .”

“Why should you? You’re the one who got out. Did you ever even look for me? Or did you just assume I was in hiding somewhere, because if you really looked, you knew you’d find me here?” Marlis shook her head. “I’m not mad at you for getting away. I could never be mad at you for that. But I’m disappointed that you’re so quick to point fingers at me for echoing the only opinions I’ve been allowed to have for a century.”

“Okay, let’s all take a breath.” I stood, taking a step forward—not quite putting myself between them, but making myself much harder to ignore. “I’m sorry, Marlis. This has been a long night, and it’s not over yet. We didn’t know how bad things were here.”

“Silences keeps to itself,” said Marlis bitterly. “We always have. We were that quiet alchemist’s Kingdom before Rhys took over, and now we’re just quiet because we have nothing to brag about. All our friends and allies left us. The Cu Sidhe. The Huldra. All of them turned and walked away, and left us. All the ties we worked so long to build have been severed. Everything our family built has been broken.”

“Maybe we can put it all back together,” I said. “We have glue. You said they made you help put the members of the royal family back to sleep when the elf-shot wore off?”

Marlis nodded. “Our mother and father; our aunt and uncle, the rightful Queen and King of Silences. And our cousin Torsten, the Crown Prince. If they ever woke . . .”

“If they woke, they’d be within their rights to try to take back their throne, especially now that we know that the woman who gave it to Rhys didn’t have the authority to make that sort of decision,” I said. “They’re all alive? None of them have been injured too badly?”

Marlis looked away again.

I frowned. Walther, on the other hand, seemed to know what her silence meant. “Marley, what did they make you do?” he asked, voice barely rising above a whisper.

I appreciated the fact that he hadn’t asked her what she’d done—what she had done was have a century of her life stolen from her by drugs that she’d been forced to manufacture—but the message was the same. Marlis dropped her head, looking down at her feet. She stayed that way, silent as a statue, while Ceres rose from the table and walked around to stand behind her, putting her hands on the smaller woman’s shoulders.

“Your mother was Amandine of Faerie, was she not?” Ceres asked, attention fixing on me. “She must have taught you the importance of blood.”