Tybalt stopped as soon as he had his bearings, looking warily around the room. “This is dangerous,” he said, eyes narrowing. “Do what needs to be done, and let us be away from here.”
“I still don’t understand why we couldn’t start with May,” I said, walking over to Walther. I stopped when a few feet away, feeling my stomach drop toward my feet. I put a hand over my mouth, unsure of what I could possibly say in response to the scene in front of me.
The woman who was sleeping on the bier, her hands folded over her chest and a faint grimace on her otherwise peaceful face, couldn’t have been anyone but Walther’s mother. The shape of her cheekbones, the subtle composition of her features, even the angled points of her ears, they all mirrored his like some sort of sideways mirror. She looked more like Marlis than she did like him, but together, the three of them formed a family unit so unbelievably clear that there was no point in pretending it wasn’t there.
She was dressed in the pseudo-Medievalist fashion so common among the Courts, and if her gown was a hundred years out of fashion, I certainly couldn’t tell; one of the side effects of choosing all your clothes like you were getting ready to put on an extremely classy production of Camelot was that everything became subtly timeless, impossible to measure. But there were smears of dust at the corners of her eyes, like whoever was responsible for cleaning her hadn’t been as careful as they should have been, and I had no trouble believing that she’d been asleep for a century or more.
Her right leg ended at the knee, leaving that side of her skirt to fall straight down and puddle on the table. Walther followed my gaze to her missing lower limb. Then he looked back up, reaching out to carefully wipe the dust away from her eyes with the side of his thumb.
“We’re starting here, and not with May, because if I’m not exactly right, no one will notice,” he said. “Everyone in this room is already expected to sleep for a century. More than a century—as long as Rhys is in power and willing to keep putting them under. So if I test my tincture on one of them, and they don’t wake up, we haven’t lost anything. If I test it on May and put her to sleep for a thousand years, you’ll probably kill me.”
“Walther, I’m so sorry.” The words seemed awkward and out of place. They were the only things I had to offer. I had known that his family was here, sleeping, but I’d never thought too hard about it, because there hadn’t been anything I could do. Now . . . this was his mother. I didn’t even like my own mother most of the time, and I couldn’t imagine what it would do to me to know that she might never wake up again.
“I can’t start with my aunt or uncle, because we’re going to need them to challenge for the throne before the High King,” he said. “My cousin Torsten is next in line to be King, so I can’t start with him either. Mother was never the best alchemist in our family, but she was always the most adventurous. I remember her turning her hair purple when I was a kid. She laughed and said fashion couldn’t come before science, not if we wanted to understand what we did. She was the first one I told when I really started to understand that I was supposed to be a boy, because I knew she wouldn’t say ‘let’s just cast a transformation spell and make it all better.’ She’d tell me to use my alchemy, to do it myself and make it permanent. Because she believed in me.”
“We don’t have to start with her,” I said softly.
“Yes, we do,” he said. “If I don’t wake her up, I can try again. I can find the right formula, I can wake up my father, and together, we’ll be able to undo whatever it is I’ve done. But if I start with him and I’ve got it wrong, there’s no one I can safely try to wake who will actually be able to help me save him. She has to come first.”
I couldn’t tell how much of his logic was sincere and how much was his need to see his mother again, to feel her arms around him and hear her voice telling him it was going to be okay. In the end, it didn’t matter. He was the alchemist: he was the one who understood the risks, and the possible costs, of what we were about to do. All I could do was follow his lead. “What do you need from me?”
Walther offered me a wan smile. “I’m going to need you to bleed for me.”
“That’s something I can do.” I looked toward Tybalt and Quentin, who were standing quietly a few feet away. Neither of them looked happy with our situation. Neither of them was telling me not to help. I think we all knew that ship had sailed long ago, and not one of us had been on board.
“Good. It’ll be a few minutes.” Walther opened his kit, beginning to unpack it one piece at a time on the edge of his mother’s bier. Some of the things were familiar—mortar and pestle, little jars of assorted herbs, syringe. Other pieces were strange to me, weights and presses and oddly-shaped vessels that didn’t hold anything but potential. The rest of the world seemed to drop away from him as he bent over his work.
I turned and walked back to Tybalt and Quentin. “I don’t know how long this is going to take, and I’m not comfortable being unarmed, or leaving May by herself,” I said. “Tybalt, do you think you can get Quentin back to our room, and come back here with my knife?”
Tybalt scowled. “No good ever comes from sending me away.”
Quentin looked resigned, and a little relieved, like this was the answer he’d been hoping for but hadn’t quite dared to suggest. “She’s right. Someone should be with May, and if things go wrong here, I probably shouldn’t be caught where the alchemy is happening. My parents would be pissed if I wound up getting elf-shot.”
“You’ve left me on my own several times since we got here, and I’ve been fine,” I said, leaning up to kiss Tybalt on the cheek. “Just trust me, okay? I need my knife, and May needs someone to protect her. I can take care of myself in the nice, empty dungeon until you make it back.”
“You tell me you no longer yearn for death, but sometimes, you do things that make it difficult to believe you,” said Tybalt. He had the resigned tone that meant he was going to do what I was asking, thank Maeve. Quentin was looking more uncomfortable by the minute, and the threat of discovery was making me twitchy. I didn’t want to get the Crown Prince of the Westlands busted for treason if I could help it.
When I first found out Quentin was going to be High King someday, I had promised him I wouldn’t let the knowledge make me treat him differently. For the most part, I’d kept my word. But there were certain things that had made me unhappy when he was just my untitled squire, and now that I knew who he really was, they were unbearable. Situations like this made the list.
“I love you, too,” I said. “Quentin, stay with May; don’t let anyone in.”
“Got it,” he said. “Don’t do anything completely stupid, okay?”
“I’ll do my best,” I said. Quentin smiled tightly as Tybalt took him by the arm. Then my boyfriend and my squire stepped backward into the shadows, and they were gone, leaving only the faint scent of musk and pennyroyal hanging in the air.
I walked back to the bier where Walther was working, standing silently off to one side and watching as he mixed powders and liquids, ground rose petals in a mortar, and generally worked his own quiet brand of magic. There are races in Faerie that are uniquely well suited to the art of alchemy—Tylwyth Teg, Kitsune, Huldra—but anyone can learn it, if they’re willing to put in the time, and even the races with a natural talent require years of training and practice before they can really claim to be skilled alchemists. Walther had been practicing for more than a century. He had reshaped his body with his art, and he was a living testament to what kind of alchemist he had become.
At the same time, he was trying to unmake a spell first woven by one of the Firstborn, a spell that had been used throughout Faerie for millennia without being broken or undone. He was going to need every bit of skill he possessed, and then some, if he wanted to make this work.