“It’s no rumor, my lord,” she said, with open satisfaction in her voice. “It was brought to me by Sir Daye, and placed in my royal treasury. I don’t know where it is now, of course, denied as I am the right to access my own home and goods. But it was a true thing, and one which I saw with my own eyes.” Her gaze slanted back to me, mouth thinning into a hard line. “Until recent events caused me to realize that I had been deceived as to Sir Daye’s heritage, I had assumed that her growing purity of blood was due to her having used the chest herself, before she handed it over to me. I considered raising the question with her, if I am being entirely honest. The hope chest is a powerful artifact, and should not have been left cavalierly in the hands of a changeling.”
“Doesn’t make it yours,” I said, as calmly as I could. “According to the official records, it was given to the care of the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn by Oberon himself. I guess that means it should be held by the Daoine Sidhe, if by no one else. Since you’ve never claimed to be Daoine, and at the time I thought I was, I would have had more right to keep the thing than you did. And I didn’t. I handed it off to the Court of Cats while I finished dealing with the business at hand, and then gave it to the woman who stood as Evening’s liege—you. I never used it.”
At least, I hadn’t used it on purpose. The delicate balance of my blood had been disrupted when I’d touched it: there was no denying that, and it would have been foolish to try. My whole life had been a ride from one end of my heritage to the other, with forces—the hope chest, my mother, the goblin fruit—tugging me first one way and then the opposite. I was finally in a position to do the tugging for myself, and if that meant I was choosing to stay exactly where I was, well, that was my prerogative.
“I believe we’re getting off the subject,” said King Rhys. “Sir Daye, you claim that Arden Windermere is rightful Queen of the Mists, by virtue of being the eldest child of Gilad Windermere, who died without announcing an heir. Is this so?”
“Yes,” I said. It seemed like a simple question, which meant it was probably anything but. I breathed in through my nose, trying to calm myself, and was hit again with the mingled magical scents of the people around me. Tybalt’s pennyroyal smelled, soothingly, of home, while the false Queen’s rowan and seashore warned me that the danger was very far from over.
“You have also admitted that you don’t know whether you would be able to tell, now, if someone else had manipulated the balance of my lady’s blood, given the violence of your attack.” He leaned forward, expression suddenly predatory. “As you can manipulate blood without a hope chest, and have allies who can walk through shadows and move through walls, who knew where a hope chest was to be found—and you have a mother, do you not? Someone who, presumably, shares your capabilities; Amandine, I believe her name was—why am I to believe that my lady is not also King Gilad’s daughter?”
“My mother was of mixed-blood,” said the false Queen piously. “The Undersea refused her, because her father had been a Banshee, and Banshee are not creatures of the sea.”
“Wait. Wait just one moment.” I put my hands up, palms turned outward. “Are you trying to claim that she’s actually the legitimate heir to the throne?”
“I am the elder among us: none will question that I was born before Arden,” said the false Queen. “Why didn’t you ask if Gilad was my father? Why didn’t you test my blood, look for those markers you claim you can see? You could have told for certain whether part of my heritage had been stolen—and by your own words, once it was taken, it couldn’t be returned. So you stand here and admit, instead, that you destroyed the evidence of such a crime.”
“If that evidence existed,” I snapped. “You never said you’d been part Tuatha and lost it. There’s nothing to support that idea.”
“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.