Madenn gave a great hiccupping sob. She had once been a goddess of youth, which had left her permanently looking about fifteen, a young fifteen. The face she turned up at us now looked younger, as if her fear were stripping years from her.
“You have said many times that you would cleanse this court of the half-breeds.” Her voice was breathy, and thick with tears. “We mean only to help you do what you always wished to do before she returned from the Western Lands and turned you from us.”
Andais was leaning forward, and the anger was falling away from her. Kieran’s face was beginning to regain its smugness.
“Crystall, search her for a spell, some trinket aimed at the queen.”
Andais frowned at me. “What are you talking about, Meredith?”
“Please, Your Majesty, please,” Madenn said, “help us.”
I watched Andais’s face soften.
“Hawthorne,” I said, “if she speaks again before I give her leave, slit her throat. She’ll heal.”
He didn’t argue with me, he simply unsheathed a knife, and put it against her throat, even as she tried to protest.
Andais looked away from her, shielding her eyes. “What is it?”
Crystall searched Madenn, and he was thorough enough that Kieran protested. “He is laying hands on my wife.”
“If she is a widow then there will be no marriage vows to break,” Andais said.
Kieran’s mouth hung open for a moment, then he closed it, and I saw the first hint of fear in his eyes.
Madenn made a small sound, and Hawthorne pushed the tip of his blade in enough to draw a pinprick of bright crimson blood. She whimpered, but did not try to speak.
Crystall had to get very up close and personal with Madenn before he drew a little cloth bag from under her breasts. It was two pieces of cloth sewn together, almost a tiny pillow, the size of a fifty-cent piece.
I lowered my shields enough to see the little pillow glow, and there was a thin red line from it to the queen.
Crystall cut the threads that bound it, and spilled out a few dried herbs and seven strands of black hair. He held up the hair between his fingers, and the rest in his opposite hand. “A charm for you, and only you, Your Majesty,” he said. “A charm of eloquence, so that her words be sweet to your ears.”
Andais looked to Barinthus on the far side of the dais. “I may give you what I seldom give anyone, Lord Barinthus.”
He bowed. “And what would that be, Queen Andais?”
“An apology.” She looked at Madenn and Kieran. “Why would you risk death to kill Galen?”
“He doesn’t think he risks death,” I said.
She looked at me. “He has used magic to try and work wiles upon me. That is cause for me to challenge one or both of them personally.”
“He told me that Siobhan tried to kill a royal princess and she lives still, and is not being tortured because Ezekiel fears her too much. He said if you would not punish someone for that, then there would be no punishment for trying to kill a half-pixie guard.”
She looked at him, and there was something in that look that made him take a step back, only to bump into the guards. “Did you say that, Kieran?”
“Not those words, no.”
“Did you say the gist of it?”
He swallowed hard enough to be heard and nodded. “Nerys’s entire house turned traitor, tried to kill you, my queen, and they live. Why is the life of one half-breed guard worth more than the life of the queen herself?”
“See, Meredith, you show mercy and they will use it against you.”
“Nerys gave her life so that her house could survive,” I said. “She paid the price for your mercy.”
“Perhaps.” Andais looked past them all to another house of nobles. “Dormath.”
The man who stood was tall and almost impossibly thin. His skin was the whitest that our court could boast, the bloodless pale of a corpse. The black hood of his cloak was pushed back to reveal hair that was as white as his skin, so that he looked almost like an albino, except his eyes were large and luxurious and black. He looked very close to the modern idea of “death.” I was told that once he was as handsome and muscular as any of the sidhe, but that centuries of people’s beliefs had changed him. There were those who debated whether being the representative of death to that degree made him a weak-magicked fool who couldn’t protect himself from mortal thought, or proved that he was one of the most powerful among us, and still worshipped by humans, in a way. His voice was deeper than expected.
“Yes, my queen,” he said.
“Innis is one of yours, as is Siobhan. Are you traitors as Nerys’s house were traitors?”
“No, my queen, I swear that I did not know of Siobhan’s plan, nor of Innis’s. This I swear.”
“You interceded for Siobhan. You begged my mercy. I gave it because my son also valued her, and asked for her life to be spared. I listened to my son and one whom I thought was my ally.”
“I am your ally, Your Majesty. My house is still your house.”
“Two traitors, Dormath, two in one house. How can I trust that there are not more?” She was making idle circles with one finger on the arm of her throne.
“Is not the same thing true of Blodewedd’s house?” he asked.
“Do not drag me into this, Dormath,” Blodewedd said. “You who bear the name of your own dog, for you have shamed your true name.”
“I have shamed nothing.”
“Children,” Andais said, her voice light, almost playful. The sound made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. “You see what mercy gets you as a ruler, Meredith. Do you understand now? Mercy is for the weak, and the dying.”
“I know how Kieran has interpreted your actions.”
She looked at me, and I really didn’t want that much of her attention in this mood, but I had it. “And how is that?”
“That if you would not kill someone for trying to kill me, then you would do even less to someone who tried to kill Galen.”
“Do you think he had the right of that? Do you think he has no punishment coming?”
“I think Siobhan should be executed and Kieran be made an example of.”
“An example how, if not executed?” she asked.
I licked my suddenly dry lips. “I had not thought that far, Aunt Andais.”
“Ah, but I have, and that is the difference between being queen and being princess.” She opened those red, red lips to say something awful, but the big double doors crashed open, and Doyle appeared.
CHAPTER 25
USNA AND CATHBODUA CAME BEHIND DOYLE, DRAGGING SOMEONE between them. Someone wearing a white fur cloak that was decorated with bright spots of crimson.
“Darkness,” Andais said, “how good of you to join us. Who are you bringing so unceremoniously before us?” Her voice still purred with a satisfied tone, promising pain to someone. Doyle had just given her another choice of victims.
“Gwennin, the white lord, a little worse for wear.”
Gwennin, I knew, was no friend of Cel’s. He was no friend of anyone he considered pure Unseelie. He had been one of the last cast out of the Seelie Court, and he still acted as if he might someday go back there. The Seelie might welcome back an exile from among the humans, but once you became Unseelie, you were unclean and unforgivable.
I watched Doyle stalk toward me. He was the tall, dark hunter, the grim figure who had frightened me as a child, but I had to fight an urge to tell him to come to me. I wanted his arms around me. I wanted to be held, to feel safe. Sitting here in open court I didn’t feel safe. What had driven me from faerie three years ago was happening all over again. There was too much death, too many attempts. Eventually, if enough people want you dead, they will succeed. It’s simple mathematics. We had to survive every assassination attempt. They had to succeed just once.
Gwennin was not an ally to any of the lords we had “arrested.” I couldn’t imagine a plot that could hold all those before me. Was there more than one plot against me? And what did any of it have to do with the murders?