Page 69 of Once Broken Faith

I didn’t want him to be merciful. I wanted her to burn. I wanted them all to burn. But that was why it was so important that someone else be involved in this. She’d hurt Tybalt. Whether she’d done it because someone else had forced her to or not, she had hurt him. That didn’t mean the people who’d turned her into a weapon and aimed her at their targets deserved to get off without punishment. If anything, it meant exactly the opposite. They needed to be punished. They needed to understand that what they had done was wrong. And under the Law, they just might get away with it.

“You said that if I did as you ordered, you would leave my family alone,” said the Barrow Wight doggedly. “You promised.”

“Promises don’t count when they’re made to the lower classes,” said Kabos.

Madden crouched suddenly, snarling in the back of his throat. I glanced down at him, taking my eyes off the scene for a moment.

It was long enough.

There was a cracking sound, followed by Verona, screaming. I whipped around. The King of Highmountain was sprawled on the floor, eyes open, neck bent at an unnatural angle. The Barrow Wight handmaid was next to him, breathing heavily, her features distorted into something more gargoyle than human, her mouth bristling with teeth. I stared. I’d heard stories of the Barrow Wights and their true faces, but Stacy’s Barrow heritage was distant enough that she had no second face to hide—only the one she wore on the outside. This was what they were, down in the dark, where passing for human had never been a concern.

“Never touch her!” she snarled, and leaped for the screaming Verona.

I lunged forward, intending to put myself between them. There was a sound like ripping metal, and the world stopped—

—only for me to stumble into an empty room. The body of the king was still there, sprawled on the floor. The night-haunts hadn’t come yet. Verona and the handmaid were gone. So were Quentin and Madden. I was alone.

Panic surged through my veins, followed by a cold, implacable fury. These people had turned a subject into a sword. From the things she’d said—and more, the way she’d said them—they had done it by holding her sister’s safety hostage. It was a good technique, if you wanted to keep your hands technically clean while accomplishing the unthinkable. It was a technique that didn’t leave much question about how far you would go to accomplish your goals. These people would go all the way, if that was what they considered necessary.

Only the plural was wrong now, wasn’t it? Queen Verona of Highmountain was alone, and like any widow, she was going to be grieving. She was going to be looking for someone to blame. The people who had caused her to goad her handmaiden into lashing out were going to seem like excellent targets. I dropped to my knees beside the body of the king, not quite realizing what I was about to do until the sword was pressed against the unbroken skin of his arm, and I was slicing through his flesh, looking for the cooling blood beneath. Not cooling; cooled. It bubbled slowly to the surface, thick and deoxygenated after the amount of time it had spent sitting in the dead man’s veins.

I ran my fingers through the clotted mass, bringing them to my lips and sucking them clean. Images flashed into focus at the back of my eyes: Kabos dancing with Verona on a balcony looking down on the city of Denver; Verona proposing they take advantage of this conclave to make things better for themselves in the Westlands; the handmaiden, whose name was Minna, weeping in the back of the coach that had carried them from Colorado to California. They were more impressions than full memories, perhaps due to the age of the blood, but they were enough for me to be sure of where the guilt in this terrible situation truly lay.

That wasn’t going to save the handmaiden. She had killed at least two people, both of them kings. No matter how good her reasons had been, no matter how much duress she had been under, she was going to be punished. If Tybalt died, or if she had hurt Quentin . . .

I couldn’t be sure that I wasn’t going to kill her myself.

Kabos had been dead before the world froze. I looked back at where I’d been standing, and was unsurprised to see the crushed remains of a red-spotted toadstool ground into the carpet. Another fairy ring, and I’d leaped straight into it. I had no way of detecting them or knowing how long they’d last—or how long that one had lasted before it let me go. Long enough for King Kabos’ body to cool. Not long enough for the night-haunts to come.

Too long.

Neither Barrow Wights nor Daoine Sidhe could teleport, which meant that wherever Verona, her handmaid, and the boys had gone, they had gone there on foot. I looked over my shoulder to the open door before looking back to the room. I paused. The floor was polished hardwood. Like all the floors in the knowe, it was impeccably clean. So where had that length of daffodil-colored thread come from, if not the lining of Quentin’s vest?

“Clever boy,” I murmured. Holding Sylvester’s sword unsheathed and low against my hip, I rose and started deeper into the chambers assigned to this particular pair of visiting monarchs.

I wanted to shout for help: I wanted to bring down the roof, if that was what I had to do in order to get Quentin and Madden back. I knew it wouldn’t do me any good. The knowe couldn’t answer in words, assuming it was even interested in helping me, and the only person I would have trusted to hear her name no matter where it was spoken—April—wasn’t here. I was on my own, at least temporarily.

There was a time when I’d only ever been on my own. It hadn’t been so long ago that I didn’t remember how it worked. I walked from the receiving room into a short hallway, which seemed extravagant even for housing intended for royalty, and paused. There were three doors, all closed. None of them looked any more or less likely than the others; all three looked like they would lead, one way or the other, to the outside wall of the knowe. Arden was fond of giving her guests sweeping views to remind them of the majesty of her kingdom, like a tour guide with some very specific goals in mind. I hesitated, looking from one door to the next, trying to decide which one made the most sense.

As I waited, I breathed. And as I breathed, the scent of blood tickled my nose. It wasn’t mine, or Tybalt’s, or King Kabos’. It was almost buried beneath all those other layers of bloodshed, faint enough that I would have missed it if I hadn’t been forced to take my time and decide which way to go. It was coming from behind the central door. Still, I hesitated, looking toward the door on my right. This might be a trap, or it might be Quentin leaving me a clue.

My dress didn’t have pockets. It did have hems, and I was carrying a sword. I sawed off a chunk of heavy, blood-soaked fabric, wadding it into a ball, and lobbed it in a gentle underhand arc toward the right-hand door. The fabric stopped in midair, hanging suspended for an instant before vanishing. A fairy ring. They had closed the doors they didn’t use with fairy rings. It was a logical, effective choice, and I wished to Oberon that they hadn’t thought to make it, because this was going to make an already difficult process unbearably hard.

But Quentin—and the more I breathed, the more I knew that it was him; the blood was whispering tales, even if it was too far away for me to taste it and be absolutely certain—had been smart enough to anticipate this problem, and had left me a trail to follow. I stepped cautiously forward. Time didn’t stop. I reached for the doorknob, waiting for the world to freeze around me. When it didn’t happen, I turned the knob and pushed the door open, revealing the elegant, mostly empty bedchamber on the other side. As in the Luidaeg’s rooms, one wall had been replaced by glass panes, looking out on the redwoods.

Unlike in the Luidaeg’s room, one of those panes had been smashed. No shards littered the polished redwood floor; the glass had been smashed outward, not inward. The smell of blood was stronger here. Quentin had cut himself on the glass. There: as I got closer, I spotted a small triangle of glass jutting from the frame, the edge of it outlined in red. There wasn’t much blood. Verona probably hadn’t even noticed it happen. As a Daoine Sidhe, she was attuned to blood, but experience had taught me that the normal Daoine Sidhe attunement was nothing compared to the appeal blood held for one of the Dóchas Sidhe.

I plucked the piece of glass from the frame, tucking it into the bodice of my gown. It didn’t matter if it cut me; I’d heal. There was no way I was leaving Quentin’s blood lying around for anyone to find. Not given who he was, and the secrets he was trying to keep. I took one more step forward, to the very edge of the broken glass, and blanched, feeling my stomach do a slow tuck-and-roll.

This room might not have been one of the highest points in the knowe, but it was more than high enough. The window wall looked out on an endless sea of redwoods, and the drop between me and the ground was easily fifty feet, maybe more. We were in the Summerlands, after all, where the laws of nature were superseded by the laws of Faerie, which were much more forgiving in certain ways.

None of the people I was looking for could fly. I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath, and looked again.

Far below me in the gloom—at least fifteen feet straight down—one of the wooden paths that Arden’s people used to move through the trees wound its way into the darkness. Verona was a pureblooded Daoine Sidhe, and could possibly have some sort of spell in her arsenal to allow them to make the drop in safety. Fifty feet was too much, but fifteen? That wasn’t out of the question. They could be down there.

If they were, and I was hesitating here, then I was allowing them to get even more of a head start on me—not good, since I had no idea how long I’d been trapped in that fairy ring. If they weren’t, and I jumped down to follow them, I’d have to find a way back up in order to resume my pursuit. That could be the last straw. Quentin needed me following him, not running off on some wild goose chase.

Carefully, I leaned far enough out the open window to look to either side, searching for another way out of here. There wasn’t one: the room ended in a sheer drop, an artificial redwood cliff face descending down into the misty dark. They hadn’t gone back, I was sure of that; Quentin didn’t heal the way I did, and would have still been bleeding if he’d been dragged out to the hall. There would have been some sort of sign, a trace for me to follow. They must have gone down. There was no other option.