“Toby?”
The sound of his voice snapped me out of my thoughts. I looked up. “Yeah?”
“It’s time.” He held out a scalpel. Its edge glittered too softly to be stainless steel; it was silver, as sharp and pure as any fae dueling blade. “I don’t need much.”
“I’ve got plenty.” I took the scalpel from his hand, testing the weight of it before I brought it down across my arm, cutting lengthwise to get as much blood as possible before my body started to heal. He held out a chalice, and I bled into it, turning my face away. I still don’t like the sight of blood, despite how often I bleed. One more thing to thank my own mother for.
“That should be enough,” said Walther.
“Okay. Just tell me if you want more.” I turned back to face him, holding out the scalpel for him to take out of my hand. He did, and I wiped as much of the blood off my arm as I could. Problem: this left me with a blood-coated palm, which I promptly rubbed against my brand new jeans. The amount of time a piece of clothing could expect to be in my possession before being ruined was going down all the time. “What happens next?”
“You let me work, and we both pray that I got the recipe right,” he said. He turned back to his equipment, beginning to add blood—one drop at a time—to his mashed rose petals. He must have added a powder to the chalice that would keep my blood from clotting, because it seemed strangely liquid, even for as fresh as it was, and very, very bright.
The smell was overwhelming, a mixture of blood and roses that was so reminiscent of my mother that it sent shivers down my spine. I moved away, starting to walk a slow patrol around the edges of the dungeon.
Each of the biers was occupied, most by Tylwyth Teg who shared a faint familial resemblance with Walther. There were a few others—a Glastig, a Daoine Sidhe, even a Tuatha de Dannan whose glossy cherrywood hair made her look more like Etienne and Chelsea than Rhys or Arden—but the Tylwyth Teg were by far in the majority. This hadn’t just been a conquest: it had been a rout, and I wasn’t sure, even now, how it had been accomplished. The Mists had possessed the larger army, but Silences had been the aggressors. How could they have underestimated their position so dramatically?
“Walther, you remember the war,” I said, turning. “How did the Mists win?”
“No one knows,” he said, still working. “We were fighting, and it seemed like we had all the advantages. Then we just . . . started to lose. It was like people didn’t have the will to fight back. Entire parties were wiped out without raising a finger to defend themselves. We lost half the Cu Sidhe. The ones who didn’t die just vanished. They’re probably still asleep in a basement somewhere.”
“That’s not good.”
Walther chuckled humorlessly. “Tell me about it. Now hush, and let me work.”
I hushed. But I continued walking around the edges of the dungeon, marking the entrances, and the position of the biers. There wasn’t much here that could be used as cover. I was on my third circuit of the room when I heard a sound. It was faint, like a footstep on a distant, stony floor. It was loud enough to be a concern.
“Walther, hide yourself.”
“What?”
“You’re a good enough illusionist to hide yourself, and you share blood with most of the people in this room; even a Daoine Sidhe won’t be able to sniff you out. Now hide.” I kept my voice low, but my last word verged on a snarl.
Walther didn’t argue. The scent of yarrow flared in the air and then was gone. I looked over my shoulder, and I didn’t see him, or the array of alchemical supplies that he had been using to prepare his counterpotion. Good. There were more powerful people than I was in Faerie, and some of them might have been able to spot him, but only if they were looking. With this many Tylwyth Teg in one room, they hopefully wouldn’t be looking.
That just left me. I grabbed a handful of shadows out of the air, weaving a blur as fast as I could. Anger usually made my illusions easier to cast. I didn’t have anger, but I had the burgeoning seeds of panic. I threw it into the magic, spinning and twisting the spell as fast as I could. I wanted to chant—spoken spells have always helped me to focus my magic and make it obey me more quickly—but I didn’t know how close company was. The last thing I wanted to do was conceal myself magically and give myself away through mundane means.
The spell rose, solidified, and burst around me. I pressed myself to the wall and tried not to move more than I had to. Blur spells don’t make you invisible, but they make you damn hard to see, like those little brown lizards that infest the mortal park outside of Shadowed Hills. As long as I was perfectly still and didn’t make a sound, there was a good chance I’d be overlooked.
Seconds ticked by. I was starting to think that I had been overly-cautious when the footsteps started up again, moving closer. I stopped breathing.
Tia stepped into the dungeon.
Madden’s sister had changed since I’d last seen her, in Arden’s Court, demanding strident justice for her brother. The pigtails and peasant blouse were gone, replaced by unbound waves of red-and-white hair and a long silver-gray gown that hugged her curves and erased any traces of the hippie girl she had seemed to be when she stood before the Queen. Her amber, distinctly canine eyes were narrowed, and she was sniffing the air with every step she took. Two of Rhys’ men were behind her . . . and behind them was Rhys himself, still wearing his Court finery, his hands folded behind his back like he was afraid he would touch something and dirty himself.
Tia’s nose wrinkled as she took in the biers. “You kept them?” she demanded. She turned to Rhys. “You told me they’d been killed, all of them, even down to the suckling babes. You promised me.”
“I told you they had been disposed of,” said Rhys. “What could be worse than an eternity of sleep at the hands of one who bears you no good will? They’ve woken once, and we put them down again. They’ll sleep forever, and each time they wake, they’ll find more of themselves missing, carved away for purposes they will never know. I have made their lives a processional of nightmares and horrors. Would you really rather that they were dead?”
“I suppose not,” sniffed Tia. “Whatever you give them, they deserve. Bastards, all of them.”
“I’ve kept my word to you otherwise,” said Rhys. “I even started with your brother when it came time to declare war on the Mists. Now keep your word to me. Find my enemies.”
“I gave you the opportunity to put an arrow in Madden. I’m not sure you can claim that was a favor to me; you’d have done it for free if I’d promised you there would be no retaliation.”
“And yet I did it because you asked me to, which makes it a favor. All I ask is that you do the same favor for me. Do what I’ve asked.”
I didn’t dare breathe. I had been expecting treachery, treason, all sorts of terrible things, but I hadn’t been expecting Rhys to walk into the room with a Cu Sidhe by his side—not when his Court was so blatantly devoid of fae with animal traits. I’d only been thinking about Daoine Sidhe reading the air for the heritage of those present, or Gwragen looking for the cobweb sheen of illusions. I hadn’t considered the fact that they might just look for the physical.
Tia sniffed the air, her nostrils flaring in a way that was subtly, anatomically inhuman. “Blood, and magic,” she said. “They were here.”
“Where did they go?” Rhys sounded anxious. He didn’t like not knowing where we were.
I didn’t have much sympathy for him. My heart was hammering against my rib cage, beating so hard and fast that I was honestly amazed it hadn’t given me away. If Tia’s ears had been as sensitive as her nose, surely she could have just followed them to me. I stayed as motionless as I could, unsure whether I should be praying for Tybalt to arrive and pull me out or praying that he would stay as far away as possible, avoiding this entire situation. We didn’t both need to get caught. Neither of us needed to get caught.