A Red-Rose Chain

“I’ve got a pretty good idea,” I said. Amandine hadn’t taught me much at all about the importance of blood—or the importance of anything else, really. Amandine’s lessons had always focused more on how much of a disappointment I was to her, too fae to be human, too human to be fae. The fact that she’d chosen my father without any input from as-yet-unborn me didn’t seem to be a factor in her judgments.

“Then you know that some potions work better when they contain it. Some potions wouldn’t work at all without it. And if blood is good, bone could be said to be even better . . .”

I went very still. Her words made sense, taken individually, but as a whole, they painted the beginnings of a picture that I didn’t want to see.

Oberon’s Law forbids killing. Just killing: nothing more, nothing less. Elf-shot is allowed. Loyalty potions and brainwashing are allowed. And anything that doesn’t quite kill, well, that’s all right, too. That’s not a death. All he ever told us not to do to each other was murder. Everything else is still on the table.

“How much, Marley?” asked Walther softly.

“Uncle Holger’s left hand, to the elbow; Mother’s right foot, to the knee. An inch at a time, over the course of a century. He . . . he likes to talk about how much he wants their eyes, their tongues, all the pieces that could make the potions stronger, but he won’t take them. Not yet, not while anyone remembers the war. He leaves them lying on their biers in the crypt. He says anyone who wants to see the faces of their old oppressors is welcome, and he makes me take people down to see them. Sometimes, if they’re trying to curry the King’s favor—and everyone wants to curry the King’s favor, because the only thing worse than having it is knowing that you never will—they spit on them. They spit on our family, Wal—Walther. Even people who should still be loyal spit on our family, because doing anything else risks the King’s wrath, and I just . . . I did it, I didn’t tell him no, and I didn’t even think that what I was doing was wrong, because he t-told me to . . .”

Finally, at the end of her speech, Marlis burst into tears. Walther put his arms around her and held her close, letting her sob out a century of abuse and frustrations against the fabric of his shirt. Marlis clung to him like she was afraid he was an illusion. I couldn’t fault her for that. After as long as she’d been dealing with King Rhys and his loyalty tinctures, anything that smacked of freedom or independent thought had to feel like a dream—a beautiful one, but not one that could ever possibly last.

Ceres stepped away from the pair, moving to stand next to Tybalt and me. “If you have any compassion in your bones, you will fix this,” she said mildly.

I started, glancing up at her. “What?”

“You are, as your cat says, a king-breaker. You defeated my father. You’ve done impossible things, and I choose to view your presence here as the beginning of one more impossibility. You could free Silences.”

“I’m not sure how you’d want me to do that,” I protested. “I’m just one person. I don’t have an army.”

“You have a King of Cats and an alchemist who has spent a hundred years perfecting his craft,” said Ceres implacably. “Even if this were all your resources, here in one room, you would have the makings of a revolution.”

“. . . oh,” I said. She wasn’t even accounting for Quentin and May—the boy with the High King’s ear, and the woman who couldn’t be killed.

Maybe she was right. Maybe I did have the makings of a revolution. The only question now was whether I wanted to start one.

Marlis was still clinging to her brother, still weeping in huge, shuddering gasps that seemed like they would shake her entire body into pieces. Only Walther’s arms were keeping her from breaking. Rhys had done this to her—and he’d done it on purpose. He’d done it because he thought that it was funny. Oberon might not have been willing to forbid the things that we did to each other, but maybe he should have—and maybe that was why so many of his descendants were heroes. Because we had to fix what he couldn’t, or hadn’t, or wouldn’t.

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Let’s do this.”





THIRTEEN