My jeans, blouse, and bodice were gone, replaced by a pine-green velvet gown straight out of a pre-Raphaelite painting. It was embroidered with gold heraldic roses around the long, trailing cuffs and square neckline. The underdress was pale gold, a few shades lighter than the embroidery, and had its own line of primroses in heather green stitched across the neckline. I kicked out one foot, sending several skirts rustling out of the way, and revealed a green slipper that matched the gown.
“You always did have an excellent sense of color,” I said, looking up again. “You know it didn’t go down like that. You didn’t leave me any choice.”
“I left you the world, October.” The coy theatricality bled out of her eyes, leaving them icy and filled with the moonstruck madness that had always been her stock in trade. It seemed colder than it used to be, less fragmented and more simply wild. I had done that to her. The weight of it seemed to strike me all at once. So much of who she’d always been was in her blood, in the jagged places where her various heritages rubbed up against each other. And yes, sometimes those edges were sharp enough to cut her, or to cut the people around her, but they’d been hers, and I’d taken them away from her without her consent.
The false Queen wasn’t the first person whose blood I had changed. She wasn’t even the most recent. But she was the only one whose blood I had changed without her consent, against her will, and while I had done it to save both myself and the people I loved, I suddenly found myself wishing there had been another way. There was a time when I would have found another way, because I wouldn’t have had any other choice. Back then, I was too human to have transformed her the way that I had.
Maybe I was losing touch with my humanity after all.
“All I denied you was my Kingdom, and I denied it to you because you pushed too hard,” she said, apparently taking my stricken silence for confusion. “You couldn’t be still, couldn’t be quiet, couldn’t remember your place. I gave you enough rope to hang yourself and more; enough rope to weave a bridge that could have carried you beyond the Mists. But you wouldn’t go.”
“Everyone I know is in the Mists,” I said. My lips felt numb.
Her eyes narrowed. “And everyone I know is not? I have allies in Silences—obviously, or you would not be here now—but they are few and far between compared to the comforts of my own knowe, my own home.”
The knowe she had claimed as her own was standing empty, waiting for Arden or someone else among the nobility to decide what to do with it. The amount of iron in the false Queen’s dungeons made it a dangerous place for purebloods, apart from the Gremlins, and no one was sure they wanted to give them access to that much iron.
“I found that knowe, remember?” I wasn’t sure what I was going to say until I was speaking, and then it was too late. “It was the first thing I ever did for you. I went into the city, and I found you a knowe when your old one was sinking back into the shallowing it had been shaped from. And I think I sort of wondered, even then, how a kingdom as big as ours could have such an unstable royal seat. Because no one had ever told me that King Gilad reigned from someplace different, you know? I thought you were his daughter.”
She glared at me, her eyes all but snapping fire. “I am my father’s daughter.”
“No, you’re not.” I shook my head. “I mean, technically I guess you are—whoever your father was, you’re his child, but you’re not King Gilad Windermere’s daughter. He was a pureblooded Tuatha de Dannan, and you have no Tuatha in you.”
“Because you stole it from me!” She sat up straighter, expression going triumphant. “You reached into my blood and you ripped away my heritage, all so you could give my throne to someone else! Betrayer! I made you a Countess, I elevated you above all others of your kind, and this was how you repaid me. With unspeakable treachery.”
“I see how we’re playing this,” I said. “You keep saying things that are true, because they don’t have any context. Yes, you are your father’s daughter, but your father was never King in the Mists. Yes, I changed the balance of your blood, and I’m genuinely sorry to have done it without your permission, but I did it to save my friends, and what I took away from you was Siren, not Tuatha. It’s not against the Law for us to use magic against each other. Sometimes I wish that it was. We might do a little less damage that way. Since it’s not, under the Law, I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Wait.” King Rhys leaned forward on his throne, breaking into the conversation for the first time since the false Queen had started speaking. “Is what she says true? Did you really lay hands upon her, and take her heritage from one thing into another?”
“Yes.” There was no point in lying. We didn’t go around advertising the fact that I wasn’t Daoine Sidhe, as I had always assumed, but the more fae I became, the more obvious it was that my heritage had nothing to do with Titania. Everything about me was wrong for one of her children, and perfect for one of the children of Oberon. “When I placed my hands on her, she had three bloodlines in her. Siren, Sea Wight, and Banshee. She was using the abilities she inherited from her Siren bloodline to harm the people I love. I had no other solution that wouldn’t violate the Law, and so I took those abilities away from her.” Oberon’s Law said that we weren’t allowed to kill each other. It never said anything about getting creative with our magic, which was how elf-shot was invented, and why so many of us had passed a few centuries as trees, or boulders, or white stags that only appeared at sunrise.
“And this is something you could do again?” He leaned forward a little more, looking at me with more interest than I was really comfortable with. “You could just . . . change someone?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “But I can only work with what’s already there. I couldn’t make myself part Cu Sidhe, or turn a Tylwyth Teg into a Tuatha. I’m . . . sort of an alchemist, I guess, in a weird way. I can’t actually transform anything into something that it’s not.”
“I haven’t heard this power attributed to the Daoine Sidhe before,” he said, raising one eyebrow inquisitively. “Are you a prodigy of some sort? Or are you a danger? Is this a thing any Daoine Sidhe could do, were they not limited by their own safeguards?”
There was a time when I could pass for something other than what I was, and thus protect my mother’s first big secret: that she was Firstborn, a daughter of Oberon himself, and hence the parent of a whole new race. That time was long past, and if Mom wanted me to keep my mouth shut, she should have given me a reason. “I didn’t say I was Daoine Sidhe,” I said. “I’m Dóchas Sidhe. We’re blood-workers, but our powers run along different lines.”
“I see. Fascinating.” King Rhys settled back in his throne again. “Forgive me if I’m a little slow to fully grasp the implications of these . . . powers . . . of yours. Are you saying you can’t return my lady’s true heritage to her?”
“That’s correct,” I said. “There’s no Siren left in her blood. I can’t create something that isn’t there.”
“If you looked for it, would you even be able to find traces of it? Would there be any sign that it had ever existed?”
“I don’t know,” I said, slowly. “I’ve never had reason to look for a bloodline that had been removed from someone. I think there would probably be signs. She’d have to consent to my looking, though; they’d be delicate and hard to find, and would require her cooperation.” There were watermarks in my blood, showing the places where my fae and human heritages had slid back and forth, fighting for dominance. There was no reason to believe that the false Queen would be any different.
“I see. What about the process of the removal itself? Could it have, ah, ‘washed away’ any of those marks that were made before you laid hands on her?”
Too late, I recognized the trap that I was walking into. “Yes,” I said.
“Then you don’t know that my lady is not King Windermere’s daughter and rightful heir. What makes you so sure that what you did to her had not been done before? Hope chests have always existed. In fact . . .” He turned to the false Queen. “Wasn’t there a rumor that a hope chest had been found in the Mists? In the care of the Countess Winterrose?”