The trouble with feeling invulnerable is that it’s never true. When Marlis moved, she revealed Rhys and the former Queen of the Mists standing a few feet away. The false Queen had a jeweled chalice in her hands, so tacky and crusted with filigree that I had no doubt that it was real. Things like that are either plastic or platinum, with nothing in between. She looked at me, smirked, and raised the chalice to her lips, drinking deeply.
The smell of my magic filled the room, overlaid with a sharp, vinegary note that was acrid enough to bring fresh tears to my eyes. I recognized it objectively as the stamp of Rhys’ magic marking his alchemy, but the rest of me raged against it. How dare he put his magic over mine? How dare he steal something that was so deeply and intrinsically my own, that was supposed to be unique in all of Faerie?
“Look for what’s missing, and call it back,” said Rhys, in the low, encouraging tone of someone who was trying to coach a recalcitrant pupil. “You have her power, you should be able to heal yourself.”
And just like that, I knew what he was doing—what the false Queen had asked him to do. She wanted her Siren blood back. She was stealing my magic because she wanted to restore what I had taken away from her. There was just one problem.
She couldn’t.
Dóchas Sidhe can do things no one else in Faerie can do. That’s true of every race descended from Oberon or his wives. But we can’t create what isn’t there. We can’t make a pureblood mixed, or turn a human into a changeling—and that means that when we remove something from the blood, it’s gone forever. The false Queen wasn’t going to be able to restore her Siren blood, because it was no longer there to be restored. I had taken it away. It was gone.
The smell of my magic began to fade. She lowered the chalice, looking disbelievingly at Rhys. “It didn’t work,” she said. “Why didn’t it work? You told me this would work!”
“We must be missing something,” he said soothingly . . . but when he turned to me, there was nothing soothing in his face. “What are we missing, Sir Daye? How may I restore my lady? Speak, or be sorry that you stayed silent.”
I tried, I really did. I swallowed, feeling the precious blood that Marlis had managed to give me run down my throat, and forced my lips to open. No sound came out.
“Your Highness, your binding may be preventing Sir Daye from answering your questions.” Marlis’ comment was calm, even deferential, but it struck me as dangerous all the same. She was disagreeing with something her liege had done. What would happen if he realized that was unusual?
“Let her speak,” hissed the false Queen. She grabbed his arm, digging in her fingernails. “She has to tell us how to fix this!”
“Oh, very well.” Rhys walked back to me, leaned down, and touched the rope of yarrow flowers that stretched across my shoulders. The pain didn’t stop, but it decreased so dramatically that I gasped, feeling as if a huge weight had been removed from my chest. I could breathe again.
Rhys waited a few seconds, watching with an analytical eye as I panted. Finally, he said, “I know this is not going to be a pleasant process for you. Pain is unavoidable. But how much pain is up to me. Do you understand? Answer my questions, and I can keep things pleasant. Like this. We can work together.”
I stared at him. “This isn’t working together,” I said, and was only half surprised to discover that my voice was working again in the absence of the bulk of the pain. “This is you asking me to be good while you cut me up for parts.”
“You make a fine point,” he said. He looked to the false Queen. “She makes a fine point.” Then he looked back to me, and smiled. It was a terrible expression, filled with edges, and with knives. “I suppose I didn’t make myself very clear. Right now, we’re planning to cut you up for parts. That’s true. I won’t try to sugarcoat it. That would insult both of us, and there’s no need for me to do that. But here’s the thing you’re missing. Right now, we’re planning to cut you up for parts. Not your pet death omen, not your squire, not that animal you’ve been bedding. Just you. That could change. Do you understand me? I could easily send my archers after the members of your little team who aren’t yet asleep, and tell them that we’ve proven your treachery, and that your diplomatic immunity has been revoked in the face of crimes against the throne. Once they’re all asleep . . . ah. Oberon was quite clear that we mustn’t kill each other, and I am very, very good at not killing the people who come before me. Some of them may wish I had, when they finally wake. But I never break the Law.”
For a moment, the urge to spit Quentin’s true identity at him was so strong that I had to grit my teeth to keep it in. He’d never be this cavalier about slicing up the Crown Prince.
But he might be willing to use the Crown Prince as leverage to get what he really wanted: the false Queen back on the throne of the Mists, and no one to challenge what he’d been doing with Silences since he made it his own. I couldn’t bring Quentin any deeper into this than I already had. All I could do was hope that Tybalt was smarter than he was loyaclass="underline" that when he realized I’d been taken, he’d get Quentin the hell out of here, and tell Arden that I was lost.
“Go to hell,” I said.
Rhys sighed. “I hate that you make me do this,” he said. He produced another spike from inside his apron. I had time to tense—barely—and then he was driving it into my stomach, so hard that it seemed like he was pinning me to the table, a moth under glass, at the mercy of the biologist who had netted me out of the air. I screamed. I couldn’t help myself, and I didn’t really try; failure to scream would have meant that I wasn’t playing along, and might have made him even crueler.
It was getting hard to remember why I didn’t tell him about Quentin, or about Walther, or about anything that would make him stop hurting me.
“I hate that you make me be a monster for you,” said Rhys. He didn’t pull the spike from my belly, and his hands, as he pulled them away, were dripping with gore. “You see how hard I’m trying to be reasonable? I’m offering to make the pain as minimal as I can. I’m promising safe passage for your people. And all I need you to do is explain how I may help my lady. Why is that so hard for you? Can’t you just go along?”
“Let me have her,” said the false Queen, stepping up behind him. “I’m still part Banshee. I can make her hurt in ways that never break the skin.”
There was a threat I hadn’t considered, and didn’t really want to think about. I took a breath, feeling the motion tug on the spike now embedded in my stomach, and managed to speak. “What’s your name?”
She blinked at me, looking nonplussed. “What?”
“You must have a name. No one looks at a baby and says ‘fuck her, she’s so ugly that she doesn’t get a name.’ I don’t know what your name is. I’ve never known what it was. You were always a queen, so I couldn’t ask. What’s your name?”
Now her eyes narrowed, expression turning wary. It was more familiar a look for her than confusion. “Why do you want to know?”
“Because you’re going to be dead soon. Maybe I am, too, but I’d like to go to the night-haunts knowing who you were.” I smiled. It was one of the hardest things I’d done in a long time. “Call it a last request?”
“I am not going to be dead soon, you stupid little mongrel bitch,” she said, and sneered at me. “You’ve lost, October. You’ve finally, fully lost. I’m going to enjoy watching Rhys slice you so thin that you could be hung as ribbons from the trees, and I won’t mourn for you. And as for my name, you can’t have it, because I don’t own it anymore. I sold it years ago, in exchange for everything I’d ever wanted, and I have never regretted my decision. Not for a moment.”
“Now tell us what we need to know,” said Rhys. “My patience wears thin.”
“Your patience?” I demanded, lifting my head and shoulders away from the surface beneath me. It was all I could manage—even with the pain reduced, the chain of flowers still bound me tight. “Your patience? You’re not the one with a spike sticking out of your stomach! Oberon’s balls, you have some fucking nerve! Don’t you dare stand there and talk to me about your patience, you arrogant—”