When Sorrows Come Read online

  “I’m an aeromancer,” said Cassie, voice a little unsteady. It wasn’t an admission she made often. “I can see the way the air moves, and it tells me things, whether it means to or not. I don’t know where I got it. Neither of my parents is a seer.”

  “But your sister is,” I said. She turned to look at me. “Karen’s an oneiromancer. We don’t know where that came from either.”

  “That’s different,” she said.

  “How?”

  “Karen doesn’t read dreams so much as she moves through them,” said Cassie.

  “She’s called me before because she had a dream that told her something that was about to happen. She sees the future in dreams.”

  Fiac blinked again, before looking at Cassie like he was seeing her for the first time. “I see,” he said. “Well, that explains almost as much as it asks.”

  “What do you—” I began, then stopped as the door slammed open so hard it bounced off the wall. I’d have to grab a knife from the floor to arm myself, and so I settled for shifting into a defensive stance, fists raised, ready to brawl. I’m not the best brawler, but my ability to take a hit that should knock me down and keep on kicking means that I can definitely be a challenge.

  Cassie moved to put herself behind me, while Artyom moved, sword in hand, to put himself in front of Fiac. Whoever was coming was going to find themselves with at least a little bit of a challenge before they took the High King.

  Then Maida rushed down the short entry hall, two more guards in her wake, and we all relaxed, Artyom already apologizing as he lowered his sword with the speed of a man who expected to be executed for threatening his Queen.

  Maida ignored him, hurrying to drop to the floor next to her unmoving husband and gather his head into her lap. She glanced at the ruined carpet, and I could tell from the way her shoulders tensed that she knew exactly what that volume of blood meant, possibly down to the drop. She knew she should be grieving, not trying to comfort her unwounded husband.

  Tybalt came in behind the rest of them, strolling more calmly, projecting casual unconcern as only a cat can. He didn’t have his hands in his pockets, but everything else about him screamed “whoever’s problem this is, it’s not mine.” None of this blunted the relief in his face when he glanced across the room and saw that I had kept my word and was still standing where he’d left me, not wearing any more blood than I had been before.

  The concerns of our relationship aren’t unique, but they probably ought to be. They’re hard on the nerves.

  “What happened?” demanded Maida, voice just a little shrill, just a little too loud for the space we were in.

  “Well, Highness—” began Artyom.

  “No,” Maida’s voice was flat, leaving no room for argument. “I don’t want to hear it from you. I want to hear it from her.” She turned to look at me, an almost feral expression in her eyes. I was the interloper here, after all, and I’d brought chaos in my wake. I’d come without her son, at least as far as she knew, and my arrival had been marked with infiltration and assault, and now with the injury of the High King. She had good reason to be upset with me. If I’d been in her position, I would have been upset with me. Maybe even more upset than she was. I don’t react well when people hurt Tybalt.

  “The High King came to the room where my party is currently housed,” I said. “I know those rooms were prepared for us by the imposter, not the real Nessa, so we may have to move if there’s something wrong with them, but for right now, that’s where we are. He requested I come with him to interview the Doppelganger who had been masquerading as your seneschal—that’s the Doppelganger all over the kitchenette floor, by the way, I’m sorry we weren’t able to keep it alive for further questioning—”

  “I’m not,” interjected Tybalt, walking daintily around Maida and the guards, and around the bloodstain on the floor, to stand behind me. I resisted the urge to take a step back so our shoulders could touch. I was in the presence of the High Queen. I needed to at least pretend to be following the rules of court behavior.

  “Well, no, it was trying to kill you at the time,” I said. “Anyway, the Doppelganger got everyone to focus on it, and the second Doppelganger, which had replaced a member of the King’s guard—”

  “Enzo,” supplied Artyom. I supposed that would matter if the man was still alive somewhere in the knowe, as Nessa had been. Since the Doppelganger had appeared Tuatha de Dannan while impersonating him, I didn’t have a good feeling about that. Keeping a teleporter confined is difficult at the best of times, and if the Doppelganger had had access to the original Enzo’s blood, it would have been able to teleport away.

  “All right,” I said. “A second Doppelganger had replaced Enzo. You need to check all your staff for indication that they’ve been replaced. This is clearly bigger than we thought it was at first. The second Doppelganger stabbed the High King in the lower back, I believe piercing a kidney, from the location of the wound and the volume of blood involved. I don’t believe the blade was poisoned, since I went on to use it to cut myself and have suffered no ill effects. They just wanted to stab him. Like the first Doppelganger, this one said ‘sic semper tyrannis’ after the deed was done, but unlike the first Doppelganger, it slit its own throat so it couldn’t be taken captive. The High King had fallen by that point, and I know he’s Daoine Sidhe, meaning he can borrow magic if he has access to blood. So I bled myself into his mouth before he could die from his injuries, and he was able to heal.”

  Through all this, Fiac stood silent and stoic, waiting until I stopped before he looked at the High Queen and said solemnly, “She speaks the truth.”

  Maida made a sound that was caught somewhere between sob and sigh, stroking her husband’s hair with one hand. “So he’ll live?” she asked. “He’s uninjured?”

  “I didn’t roll him over to check, but he’s still breathing, and he wouldn’t be if he hadn’t been able to use my blood for something, so probably, yeah,” I said. “You can check if you want. He was stabbed . . . here, roughly.” I put my hand on my own back, indicating the place where I’d seen the knife come out.

  Maida nodded and sniffled, pulling on the High King’s shoulder until she had rolled him onto his side. The rent in his tunic was easy to see from this angle. She slid her hand inside, feeling around for several seconds. Finally, her eyes widened. “There’s no injury,” she said, allowing him to roll back into his original position. “You saved my husband’s life. Our kingdom owes you a debt of gratitude.”

  Still Fiac said nothing. I had never considered how intensely disconcerting it would be to have a living lie detector who could fly into a killing rage at the slightest falsehood in the room with me. Then again, it wasn’t a situation that came up all that often.

  I hoped he wasn’t going to be a witness at our wedding.

  “He needed me,” I said. “I couldn’t stand by and let the High King die if there was something I could do to save him.” Quentin would never have been able to forgive me.

  “So why is Artyom saying he was poisoned?”

  “The High King is Daoine Sidhe,” I said carefully. “I’m not, but I know blood memory can be very overwhelming, especially if you swallow too much—and I had to give him a lot of blood to be sure he’d have access to my magic and be able to put himself back together without lingering injury. He’s just a little confused about who he is right now, that’s all.”

  “Treason,” spat Artyom.

  “I think for it to be treason, I would have to have been trying to permanently replace the High King’s mind with a copy of my own, which was not the goal here,” I said. “The world doesn’t need more of me.”

  “One is more than sufficient to most needs,” muttered Tybalt.

  I glanced at him sharply. He put on his best expression of innocence though he didn’t try to deny saying anything.

  Right. I turned back to Maida. “I think
your guard may have mistaken the passive effects of blood magic for an intentional attack,” I said, as delicately as I could manage. “The High King should recover soon. Has he been trained in the use of blood magic?”

  “It’s never been his strongest suit,” said Maida, stroking Aethlin’s forehead with one hand, “but he manages the basics well enough to be considered competent, and I find him quite impressive on occasion.”

  “Then he’ll be fine,” I said. Riding the blood is one of the first and simplest lessons young Daoine Sidhe receive, and I know that to be true in part because I’d believed I was a young Daoine Sidhe when Sylvester Torquill had sat down with me to teach me how to coax a memory out of a drop of blood. He’d started with dilute mixtures, a single drop in an entire glass of water, and for years I’d felt a little hurt by how frustrated he’d looked as he mixed me stronger and stronger samples, adding more blood to less water until I could hear the faint echoes of someone else’s memory.

  That hadn’t been a fun summer. For either of us. At the time, I hadn’t been able to understand why he’d even bother, since it was blazingly obvious I would never have strong enough magic for it to matter. Now, I wondered how he’d been able to convince Mom to let him give me even that much training—although it could also have been her idea. I’d been a stubborn child. I know, big shock. But she’d been dedicated to the idea that if I thought I was powerless, I would be, and she’d never wanted me to understand my own potential, or the ways in which it deviated from the Daoine Sidhe norm.

  If the High King had received even the most basic training, he’d be able to fight his way through my memories and back into himself in due time. And until he did, he probably shouldn’t be trusted with knives since the regenerative capabilities of my magic wouldn’t last as long as the memories did. He could easily stab himself, thinking it was something he’d be able to shrug off, only to find that most people don’t do well with knives jutting out of their bodies.

  Sure, the fact that he currently thought he was me could be taken as raising some uncomfortable questions about identity in Faerie, but no more uncomfortable than the questions raised by the existence of Fetches and night-haunts. We had better things to worry about.

  “We need to interview your entire staff,” I said. “And by ‘we’ I mean ‘you,’ and by ‘you’ I mean ‘someone you trust implicitly, probably with Fiac present to verify people’s responses, because if you were to find another Doppelganger, you’d probably get stabbed, too, and that’s not a fun family activity.’ ”

  “Can I . . .” The High Queen faltered, swallowed, and then began again, asking, “Can I beg a vial of your blood to carry with me, until such time as this is resolved? I would rather not be stabbed, but if it becomes inescapable, I would like a way to not succumb to my wounds.”

  It was an interesting question, and one that gave me momentary pause. I glanced to the side, where Tybalt and Cassandra were observing the scene. Tybalt gave a very small nod, indicating that he wouldn’t disapprove. Cassie was watching the air between me and the High Queen, giving no indication that she had heard a single thing we were saying.

  Seers. What can you do? I looked back to Maida. “If you promise me you’re not going to give it to anyone else or save it to use against me later. Blood is a dangerous thing. We can’t just leave it lying around for anyone to find.”

  “I promise,” she said swiftly. “If we get through this without issue, and I still have the blood, I will return it to you if there is any possible way to do so. By the root and the branch, the rose and the thorn, the ash, the rowan, the oak, and the yew, I swear.”

  Fiac nodded when she stopped, approving her words as true. But let’s be honest. I was always going to agree to her request. She was the mother of my squire, and the same laws of sympathetic magic that would allow someone to use my blood against me would have allowed me to use her son against her. Yes, she’d only sent him away because Eira made it sound like a great idea and it’s almost impossible for Daoine Sidhe to go against her wishes, but if Maida could trust me with her entire son, I could trust her with a little bit of my blood if it would help her feel safe in her own knowe.

  “The first Doppelganger, before it attacked us, was explaining how it believed King Shallcross should have been granted the title of High King even if Ash and Oak wasn’t chosen for the Kingdom seat,” I said. “It said High King Sollys was an imposter who sits upon a stolen throne.”

  “The convocation was to decide both where the High Kingdom would be seated and who would wear the crown,” said Maida. “Everyone involved agreed the high crown would travel with the seat, to make matters as simple as possible. It wasn’t until his kingdom was passed over that Shallcross began making claims of illegitimacy and theft. He’d been so sure no one could choose Muddy York over New York that he never bothered to raise a complaint until the matter was settled and done.”

  I nodded slowly. “I know you weren’t there,” I said. Maida had been born toward the end of the last High King’s rule, so she couldn’t possibly have been in attendance. “I also know the Luidaeg was because she told us as much, and she can’t lie. Is there anyone else in this knowe who attended the convocation in the flesh? I’d like to speak to them, if so. I need to understand what’s going on here.”

  Doppelgangers in their natural forms don’t have blood as such; they’re an undifferentiated flesh, more fungal than anything else, and while the slime they leave behind when they die might contain traces of their magic, you’re not going to catch me putting that stuff in my mouth. I looked at the slime eating its way into the carpet and nearly gagged at the thought alone. No: blood magic wasn’t going to be the answer here, save in the sense that it was going to let me give High Queen Maida the peace of mind she needed to go back to her life.

  In the meantime . . . “How long has King Shallcross been calling the legitimacy of the throne into question?” We hadn’t heard anything about it in the Mists, but without reliable phones or Internet, news travels more slowly in Faerie than it does in the mortal world.

  Not that that had been enough to stop the rumors of my king-breaking from spreading with enormous speed. I guess “October Daye will stab you until you die if you’re naughty” was a much more interesting rumor than “maybe the High King, who hasn’t really been an asshole or demanded anything unreasonable from his vassal kingdoms in over a century, was not supposed to inherit the throne after all.” People are people no matter what.

  “Since the convocation,” said Fiac. “He didn’t like the answer when he asked, ‘May I have the crown?’, and so he began objecting. He insisted Ash and Oak should have been chosen despite the testimony of the Roane—called them liars and slaves to a Firstborn’s fickle fancies—even after the first signs of iron poisoning began to make themselves clear in the subjects of his own demesne. The man could have seen his courtiers melt and still claimed it was safe to remain in the kingdom.”

  I looked to Fiac. “Were you there?”

  “My predecessor was. My mother served the first High King as I serve his son, and she told me what had happened in precise and unyielding terms. I would have known had she lied to me.”

  “Yes.” Intentionally, anyway. Recollection is imprecise. If he’d been there, I could have asked for a sample of his blood and lived the memory for myself, studying it from every angle. Blood magic allows me to be an eyewitness to events I couldn’t possibly have seen for myself, and that’s valuable.

  The Luidaeg had been there, of course, but asking for her blood wasn’t an option. I’ve tasted it before, and it’s overwhelmed me every time, knocking me down and damaging my ability to manage my own life. The blood of the Firstborn is too powerful to be consumed so casually, as Simon Torquill learned to his dismay.

  “I’m so sorry, Sir Daye,” said Maida. “I’m afraid this will interfere with your marriage.”

  “No.” Tybalt’s voice was a wall, slamming
down over the High Queen’s words and forbidding any further passage. “We will be wed before the end of this visit. I refuse to consider any other outcome.”

  “Is it really responsible for us to divert resources to a celebration when there’s a possible coup in progress?” asked Maida.

  “Had we not agreed to come to your domain for our wedding, had we remained in the Mists and allowed Queen Windermere to perform the ceremony, as she volunteered to do, your coup would be proceeding without my lady’s intervention or assistance,” said Tybalt flatly. “We came here for diplomacy’s sake, not because we needed you. If you declare yourselves unable to host, we will of course be disappointed, and we will remove ourselves from your halls immediately. I have delayed my marriage to this woman frequently enough to allow her a great many injuries, at least one act of impossible, inadvisable magic, and more poor decisions than we have time to list right now. No. I will not delay any further.”

  “He speaks truth, Lady,” said Fiac.

  I said nothing. I didn’t feel the need to be married now, right now, this second as strongly as Tybalt did, but I probably would have, if he had shared my talent for getting himself stabbed every time I let him out of my sight. Much as it rankled when Tybalt got overprotective, I had to admit he’d earned the reaction, every scrap of it, and all he was doing was asking me to lie down in the bed I’d made for myself.

  “I’ll go with him if he says we have to move the wedding,” I said abruptly, earning myself a wounded look from Maida and a thankful one from Tybalt. I couldn’t comment on either of them. “It’s important for us to finally get married, and we wouldn’t have been here to get involved if not for that. So while you can absolutely say you’re not comfortable hosting right now, if you do that, we’ll have to leave, and you’ll have to handle your coup on your own.”

  “We could order you to stay,” said Maida. “Hero of the realm or not, you are a knight of the Divided Courts, and you answer to our authority.”