Page 62 of Once Broken Faith

“Yes,” said the Luidaeg. “That’s part of why they were never as popular as elf-shot. With elf-shot, you put the person to sleep for a hundred years. You can move them, hide them, do whatever you need to with them. With a fairy ring, they’re stuck in the circle. As soon as the magic powering the spell is exhausted, time will start moving for them again. Until then, unless you want to break the ring, you have to keep an eye on them to make sure nothing disturbs the spell. Any time a human wandered into the woods and wandered out a hundred years later, some poor sap had been punished with watching a mortal spend a century standing perfectly still. You can’t even draw mustaches on the people, for fear that you’ll knock them out of alignment and start the clock again.”

“The way Antonio described the shadows shifting,” I said. “It wasn’t someone teleporting him. Time was passing outside the ring, and when the ring was broken—for whatever reason—the shadows looked like they had moved.”

“It happened to you, too,” said Tybalt. I turned to blink at him. He was still watching the Luidaeg, but he was speaking to me; that much was very clear. “We were in your chambers. You were about to kiss me. Do you remember?”

“I got stabbed right before I could,” I said. “That sort of thing is pretty hard to forget.”

“You stopped.” He finally turned to look at me. “You were leaning in, and then you stopped. Not long—only a few seconds—but long enough for me to notice.”

“Oh.” Oh. I remembered the confused look on his face, the way he’d suddenly been staring at me. It couldn’t have been a long pause without him becoming alarmed, but any pause at all would have been strange, given the situation. “Did you see anything? Smell anything?”

“I saw you go still, and I was focused on that,” said Tybalt. “I think I would have noticed someone standing behind you.”

“Not if they were in a chained fairy ring, under a don’t-look-here,” said the Luidaeg. We both turned to her. She shrugged. “Set up two rings. One for your target, one for yourself. Tie them together. Set the spell so that the first ring will break when the second ring is activated, and cast the don’t-look-here just before you step into the first ring.”

“So as soon as I stepped into the second ring, the first ring broke, and they could start moving again,” I said. “They’d know where I was, because they were the one who set the trap, and they’d still be hidden by the don’t-look-here. They were never aiming for Tybalt at all. They were aiming for me.”

“Or for me,” said Quentin. “I’m your squire. I could have been going to the room to fetch something for you. That’s a lot of what normal squires do for their knights.”

“Good thing we’ve never been normal,” I said, a cold thread of fear winding through my veins. If Quentin had been killed . . . it would have ended my usefulness right then and there, at least for a time. The need for vengeance would have come eventually, but would it have been fast enough for me to find anything? Or would the trail have gone completely cold? I sadly suspected the latter. I had my weak points, and Quentin was well known to be one of them. Take him out, and you took me out just through proximity. “Why would you need a second ring if you had a don’t-look-here?”

“Because fairy rings freeze everything. Otherwise, people would have used them for some nasty forms of biological warfare—find a strain of flu that affects purebloods, shove a carrier into a fairy ring, cast a spell to hide them, and then bring all your enemies to get breathed on. Once inside the ring, the person who was trying to harm you couldn’t be smelled, not even by a Cu Sidhe, or otherwise detected. It would even hide the scent of their magic.” The Luidaeg shook her head. “Nasty things, fairy rings.”

“And the second ring? What broke it?”

“It wasn’t meant to hold you. It was just meant to slow you down, and to break the first ring when it was activated. I’m guessing whoever cast it knew that stabbing you would break the ring, and didn’t want to waste their time crafting something genuinely secure.”

I looked at her. “How hard is it to make a fairy ring?”

“Just this side of impossible, if you don’t know how it’s done, but if you do? It’s so easy a child could do it, or a changeling. Merlins used to use them as snares to catch their pureblood relatives, once upon a time. Everything we can use against humanity, humanity can also use against us. That’s something to keep in mind when you’re making a tool, or a weapon. Everything cuts both ways.”

“Why didn’t you bring this up before?”

She looked flustered. “To be honest—and I can’t be anything but honest—I forgot. It’s been so long since anyone has used them for anything, and they were always such a small magic. They didn’t seem worth remembering.”

That was sadly easy to believe. “What would I need?”

“To make the ring, intent, the right materials, and a small amount of power—a trickle, really. The ring itself is the key. The ring is what magnifies and intensifies the ritual. That’s how a simple spell could hold someone captive for a hundred years. Look.” The Luidaeg leaned over and plucked four spears of asparagus off the platter, holding them up like they were the most important thing in the world. “Plants work well, although fungus works better. Toadstools were traditional, but daisy chains were almost as common, at least for a while. Take the material you’re planning to use, plait it together . . .” Her fingers were quick and clever as they twisted the asparagus into a rough crown. She dropped it onto the table.

“Once your ring is done, you can activate it whenever you like.” Pressing a forefinger against the ring of asparagus, the Luidaeg murmured a string of hissing, rolling syllables that didn’t sound like anything else I’d ever heard. The air around us chilled, dropping in temperature until it felt like we were standing on the shore just as the tide rolled in.

Karen shivered. The Luidaeg raised her eyes.

“Patrick, if you would?”

Patrick nodded, picking up a piece of potato from his own plate. He weighed it briefly in his hand before lobbing it across the circle. Rather than flying straight into the Luidaeg’s lap, it stopped in midair, frozen above the asparagus. The Luidaeg looked pleased with herself.

“It’ll stay there until the spell wears off—ten, maybe fifteen minutes, since I didn’t put much power into it—or until something disrupts the ring. Like so.” She picked up her fork, leaned forward, and stabbed the asparagus. The piece of potato promptly fell to the table, where it rolled to a stop against her water glass. “As temporary prisons go, you won’t find any finer. As useless things in this modern world go, well, they’re tops at that, too.”

“Except that someone has apparently been able to set at least three, maybe more, and use them to catch people unawares. It’s like marshwater charms.”

Tybalt frowned at me. Patrick asked, “What?”

“I used to use a lot of marshwater charms—mixtures of herbs and intent that would help me see through illusions, or keep an eye on a target even when someone was actively trying to counteract my tracking spells.” I shook my head. “I didn’t understand my own magic that well, and I was a lot weaker. I needed every advantage I could get. I always thought the purebloods were stupid for not using the little tools—I’d keep a spray bottle full of mint and pond scum in my glove compartment and think it made me so much smarter than them, and I still started forgetting about those things as soon as I, personally, didn’t need them anymore. Don’t you see? Something that small won’t hold much magic, so even if the spell was cast by someone powerful, they won’t leave enough of a trace for me to track. It’s perfect if you’re a murderous bastard who needs to be stopped.”

“Your priorities are, as always, genuinely unique to you,” said Tybalt.

I elbowed him lightly; he took the blow with good grace. “I’m serious. Whoever’s doing this has already attacked us—whether I was the target or not, they knew harming anyone who was likely to be in that room would make me stop investigating. And it wasn’t Duke Michel.”