“I will, my dear, I will, but you can’t blame me for showing interest in all the other wonderful things that we have resting at our fingertips, now can you? Healing tinctures, complexion potions . . . we have immortality, but we’ve never had indestructability. Now, with a little work and a little cleverness, we can. We can ascend to the level of Oberon himself: untouchable, eternal, never dying or suffering any of the predations of mortality. All we have to do is find the right combination to coax it all out of her.” Rhys leaned forward, grabbing something outside of my limited frame of view.
The pain in my hand, which had faded to a background note in the overall symphony of pain coming from the rest of me, suddenly flared into bright new agony. Rhys held up a wooden spike. It was dark with blood, and there were shreds of something that looked a lot like skin sticking to the sides. “You see? Your body couldn’t decide whether to expel it or consume it, since it was so large, and tried for both. Your healing powers are incredible, Sir Daye, but they’re not very smart.”
“You don’t have to keep using her title,” said the false Queen. “She never deserved it in the first place, and she’s certainly not going to use it again. Are you, October?”
“Go . . . fuck . . . yourself,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper, my lips resisting even that small command. The pain wasn’t getting any better. Aside from moments like the one where Rhys had pulled the spike out of my flesh, it also wasn’t getting any worse.
Pain and I have an interesting relationship. I’ve spent so much time dealing with it over the past few years that it wasn’t quite as incapacitating as it probably should have been. Every nerve I had was still on fire, and every inch of my skin felt like it was being flayed, but as long as those were constants, I could adapt.
“Human and obscene even to the last,” said the false Queen. “Can you do anything with her tongue? It could be an excellent potion ingredient, and more importantly, it would silence her.”
“It would just grow back,” said Rhys. “I’ll save it until I need it; we know she regenerates blood and skin with the same degree of strength, but I’m worried that the rest of her organs will only be fully effective when they’re the originals. What do you think, Sir Daye? Have you experimented with your own limits? If I start removing fingers, will your body know to make more bone, or will it just patch the holes?”
Swearing at the false Queen had exhausted me. I glared at him mutely, hoping that my face would be enough to broadcast my hatred and anger at the situation.
“Ah. A pity. If you’d been willing to share what you knew, we might not have to test you. Now we’ll have to put you through your paces before we know what we can safely do. If you were anything else, I’d just take what we needed—but then, if you were anything else, you wouldn’t be so appealing. So I suppose there’s a consequence for everything.” He put the spike aside. “Marlis. A knife, if you please.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” she said. Her tone was virtually flat, like she was disengaged from the scene. Hearing it answered one question and opened a whole host of new ones, as well as a whole new slate of worries.
Marlis wasn’t back under her supposed King’s control. She hadn’t sounded like a robot when he had her: she had sounded perfectly normal, just loyal to the man who had overthrown and tortured her family. Now she sounded like she was burying everything just to keep from blowing her own cover. If she wasn’t careful, that was going to be the thing that gave her away. I couldn’t help her if the King turned on her. Not while I was tied down and fighting against my own randomly misfiring nervous system.
She stepped closer, holding a blade out toward Rhys, handle first. For one giddy moment, I allowed myself to hope that she was going to flip it around and bury it in his gut. We were in a Kingdom full of alchemists. Surely someone would be able to save him before he died and put her in violation of Oberon’s Law.
He took the knife from her hand without anyone getting stabbed. I hoped my disappointment didn’t show, and was briefly glad for my ongoing agony, as it was probably doing a lot to prevent my face from showing what I was thinking. Only briefly: the man responsible for my pain was now holding a knife, and as worried as I was for Marlis, I was somewhat more concerned for myself.
“Do it,” said the false Queen.
“Patience,” he said, and lowered the knife toward me. I tried to pull away, I really did, but my body wouldn’t obey me. It may have gotten easier to think, but it wasn’t getting any easier to move.
The line of pain he drew along my collarbone was almost soothing in comparison to the agony flaring in my nerves. The smell of my blood filled the air, hot and sweet and coppery. I inhaled greedily, trying to focus on the blood, which I could feel running down my shoulder. There was a soft plinking sound as it dripped onto something metal; presumably a bowl, since he wasn’t likely to be bleeding me without a collection method handy.
My strength has always been in the blood. It would have been better if he’d been cutting my face, where there would have been at least a chance of a drop hitting my lips, but I’d take what I could get. I didn’t bother arguing with my eyelids, which were now as stubbornly unwilling to close as they had previously been unwilling to open. I just let my eyes become unfocused, and tried to concentrate on the blood.
The downside of being the first—effectively—of a new breed is that there’s never been anyone to tell me what I could do. I’ve learned most of what I know through trial and error, sometimes with assistance from the Luidaeg. Recently, I’ve been getting almost as much assistance from May. She seemed to understand my magic better than I did sometimes, maybe because she had my memories but not my powers, giving her the luxury of objectivity.
Rhys cut me again, slicing through my hard-won distance and tearing it away. I gritted my teeth involuntarily, trying to find my focus through the pain. The blood wasn’t plinking into the bowl anymore. As it fell, it landed with the thick, muddy sound of liquid dropping into liquid. He almost had enough for whatever he was trying to do. He had to—he couldn’t be intending to bleed me dry one slice at a time. Could he?
“Is it ready?”
“Almost, my dear, almost. Have you never learned patience?”
“I was a Queen for more than a century. Any patience I might have learned, I forgot long ago. Now is it ready?”
“Almost.” There was a soft clatter as he put the knife down, and Rhys began to chant. He spoke in a language I didn’t know, full of rolling vowels and muted consonants. The smell of meadowsweet and wine vinegar began to grow in the air, itching where it touched my skin. I could almost see his magic, if I didn’t focus my eyes, if I kept the smell of the blood in mind. It swirled around me, colorless and cruel.
Then it burst, and the false Queen laughed, high and delighted and utterly pleased with the world. “It’s beautiful! You’ve done it!”
“For you, my sweet,” said Rhys. Then: “Marlis, move her head. She should see the sort of wonders she’ll be enabling me to perform.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” said Marlis. She stepped closer, and stumbled, catching herself on the edge of my temporary bed before putting her hands on the sides of my head and turning me to face the King. Her thumb grazed my lips, and I realized the reason for her stumble.
Where she touched me, she left blood behind.
It wasn’t much—just a smear, presumably wiped from the knife that Rhys had set aside—but it was so much more than I had had only a few seconds before. I forced my tongue to move, licking the blood away before she withdrew her hands. The taste of it exploded in my mouth like everything that was good in the world. In that moment, I felt like I could unmake any spell, overcome any obstacle, and do it all without getting a scratch on me.