Page 67 of Night and Silence

“You don’t like having that sword there, do you?” she asked. “I can fix it. And all I need is for you to do one teeny little favor for me.”

“I don’t do favors for people who hurt my family,” I wheezed.

Her hand caught me, hard, across the face, splitting my lip and setting my nose bleeding again. I swallowed a mouthful of blood, letting it warm and stabilize me. The taste was cloying, filling the entire world, but I didn’t let that stop me from swallowing again, trying to draw every drop of strength I could from it.

Jocelyn’s smile vanished, replaced by a scowl. “I wouldn’t have had to hurt her if she’d just been willing to call you,” she spat. “I asked her over and over again, why won’t you make up with your mom? She sounds nice, you should let her come to visit, you should try to forgive her, you should make things right. I tried. But she didn’t want to listen, and so I had to find another way.”

There was something I was missing, something to connect a thin-blooded changeling with an ax to grind to the former Queen of the Mists, who should have been sleeping her years away in another state, another Kingdom. Their alliance didn’t make sense. The false Queen should never have realized Jocelyn existed. Jocelyn didn’t have the resources to brew or steal Walther’s elf-shot cure—which any good alchemist could replicate now that the formula was out there in the world—and even if she could have, there was no way she’d have been able to get into the palace in Silences. What was I missing?

“Look at me!” Jocelyn’s voice rose into a shrill scream. I wrenched myself out of my thoughts and focused on her face. The fairy ointment around her face was smeared and thinning, slowly being absorbed into her skin.

I smirked. It was the one thing I could think of that was most likely to enrage her, and the longer we could keep this show going, the longer the false Queen would stay focused and gloating over my helplessness. “I’m looking,” I said. “How long before you can’t return the favor? Looks like the world’s going to get real blurry for you, real soon.”

Her hand flew to her face, fingertips stopping just shy of the skin around her eyes, which were suddenly wide with alarm. “That won’t happen if I’m here. I’m safe if I’m here.”

“That’s not how fairy ointment works, kiddo,” I said. “Maybe you’ve never been in a real knowe before. But a place like Home, that’s built in the mortal world and concealed with illusions, that’s not the same as the Summerlands. Where you are now, it’s not real to the human part of you. That ointment wears off, you’re flying in the dark. Hope you brought a flashlight.”

Jocelyn made a wordless sound of frustration and dismay, letting go of my chin and turning to run for the back of the dais. I barely had time to relax before the false Queen’s foot bore down on my back again, her heel grinding into my spine. The motion forced me forward, driving another few inches of steel into my gut. I made no effort to stifle my groan.

“You can’t talk your way out of this one,” she hissed. “You’re going to give back what you stole from me. You may be willing to let your daughter die—but then, you already proved that, didn’t you? When you made her mortal, you condemned her to the grave like every other human. You threw her away, and now you pretend at anger because I picked up what you no longer wanted.”

She leaned closer, her breath hot against my ear. “She’s trash. She was always trash, and all you did was prove it.”

Thoughts of plans, of waiting for help to come and make this easier, of patience . . . they flew out of my mind, replaced by raw and burning rage. I slammed my head back as hard as I could and was rewarded with a shriek and a loud cracking noise as my skull impacted with hers. I shoved myself to my feet, grabbing the hilt of the sword in the same motion, and attempted to draw the blade from my own body.

Pulling a sword from a scabbard can be difficult, depending on the angle and the seal between blade and case. A scabbard is designed to house a weapon. Everything about it is meant to make the process of drawing the sword as easy as possible.

My body is not a very good scabbard.

The false Queen staggered backward, one hand over her bleeding nose to keep the mess from spraying everywhere. Then she saw how much trouble I was having getting a good grip that wouldn’t require me to slice myself open lengthwise, and she laughed. Really laughed, loud and joyous and utterly unforgiving.

“You’re no hero,” she jeered, voice rendered thick and burbling by her bruised lips and broken nose. “You’re a joke. You’ve always been a joke. It’s a miracle you were ever able to cause me any trouble at all.”

I yanked the sword free, ignoring the pain that accompanied the motion, and was rewarded with her shocked expression in the instant before I swung it, hard, toward her throat. She vanished in a cloud of rowan-scented smoke. Rowan . . . and cinnamon, again. Cinnamon mixed with cardamom. Those had never been elements of her magic. Who was helping her?

“Oh, come on!” I shouted, recovering my footing. I turned on the dais, sword held defensively in front of me. “I thought I was a joke. Why are you running, if I’m such a joke? Come back here and face me like a queen!”

“Queens fight to win,” she hissed, from behind me, and shoved what felt like a blade of ice into my kidney.

The pain was immediate and electric, racing through my body, paralyzing me where I stood. I dropped to my knees again, the sword clattering harmlessly from my hands. Jocelyn darted forward to grab it, her eyes once more shrouded in rings of glittering fairy ointment. She was smirking. Of course, she was smirking. Somehow, I had come to represent everything she’d never been able to have, and she was seeing me cut low. This was probably one of the best moments of her life.

I tried to reach behind myself and grab the knife I could feel jammed into me, freezing and burning me. My hand passed right through where the hilt should have been. The false Queen kicked me again, in the back of the head this time, and I went sliding across the dais.

“No human hand will ever touch a Folletti blade,” she said, sounding smug. “You should have been quicker at cleaning out my armories if you didn’t want them to be used against you.”

We had cleaned out the treasury, the main armory, as many of her storerooms as we could find. But the knowe had already been folding inward on itself, shutting down and fading in the absence of an owner to keep its doors open, and none of us had been interested in claiming it. Arden had the knowe in Muir Woods, her father’s knowe, and she had been determined to move the seat of the Mists back where it belonged, away from the pretender’s throne. Looking for hidden secondary armories hadn’t been on anybody’s list of things to do.

Belatedly, I realized the false Queen had a dungeon full of iron to go with whatever other delights she might have hidden around the place—and that Jocelyn’s fae blood was weak enough to let her wield iron without any immediate consequences. If the false Queen remembered that little fact, I was going to be in even more trouble than I already was.

But I was still bleeding. There was still a chance my plan, hurried and incomplete as it was, might work.

Come on, Tybalt, I thought, gasping and shivering as the ice lanced deeper into my flesh. Everything was freezing, and everything hurt. Come back for me. I pressed my forehead against the dais, hair dangling in the blood that surrounded me.

“Do you feel like being a good girl now, October?” asked the false Queen. “I think Jocelyn has been patient for long enough.”

“Fuck you,” I managed.

Someone’s foot—I wasn’t sure whose—caught me solidly in the ribs.