Page 69 of Night and Silence

I turned, intending to show him the knife protruding from my back. The motion left me dizzy, and my legs buckled, sending me crashing toward the dais. I was almost getting used to hitting it face-first. I braced for impact.

Tybalt’s arms wrapped around my waist and pulled me back, scooping me against him. He searched my face with wide, worried eyes. “What have you done to yourself now?” he asked, voice low.

I blinked. He was blurry. “Jocelyn . . . ?”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“Good. She’s . . . patsy. Queen not working alone.” I closed my eyes. “There’s a knife. My left kidney. Can’t touch it. Still too human. Can you . . . ?”

“As the sword from the stone,” he said, and rolled me over in his arms. I went limp, allowing him to move me. I trusted him. Out of everyone in the world, I trusted him.

The blade sliding out of my kidney was an indescribable pain, followed by an absence that ached for a moment before the agony of thaw set in. I think I screamed. I know I convulsed, and only Tybalt grabbing me and refusing to let go kept me from taking yet another tumble.

When I was done screaming, when the cold had died to a manageable level and my legs were willing to hold me, I shuddered and leaned against Tybalt, trying to open my eyes. That was when I heard the silence, or rather, didn’t hear it.

The false Queen wasn’t screaming anymore. Neither was the Baobhan Sith. The only sound was Jocelyn sobbing somewhere nearby, the thin, reedy wails of a child who had been denied her favorite toy.

Unsteadily, I pushed myself away from Tybalt and looked around. The cut in my back still ached, healing slowly—assuming it was healing at all. The existence of one thing that could hurt me for more than a few seconds implied the existence of other things, things that might be a little more permanent than the bite of the Baobhan Sith.

“That’s why I have two kidneys,” I muttered, mostly to myself.

The mist covering the floor had grown higher, turning everything not on the dais into a sea of eddying white. I turned slowly. Jocelyn was standing in the shadow of the false Queen’s throne, cradling her hand against her chest and weeping. I dismissed her. She didn’t have a weapon, and judging by the glassy expression on her face, this was the first time she’d been seriously hurt in her entire life. She would be processing her way through the pain for a while. Once she did, she might become a threat again. Until then . . .

I stooped to retrieve my sword, taking a careful step in the direction where I’d last seen the Baobhan Sith. “Hello?” I called. “Is there anyone out there who can talk right now?”

“I call for truce,” said an unfamiliar voice. A woman stepped out of the mist.

Her hair was still the color of gorse, but blooming, yellow and green tangled together until she looked like a meadow going out for a stroll. Her eyes were an odd blend of the two, almost chartreuse. Her skin was clear, and her flesh had filled out until she could have been any woman on the street, assuming the women on the street had pointed ears and teeth like daggers, ready to slice through flesh to find the blood beneath. She was wearing plenty of that blood—maybe even more than I was, which was no small trick—in dried tracks down the front of her winding white gown.

“Why do the blood-workers always wear white?” I asked, almost dazedly. “It makes us look like the sloppiest eaters ever.”

“I was bound and buried, and a shroud is appropriate for that sort of thing,” said the Baobhan Sith, watching me warily. Most of her attention was on my sword. “Is truce granted?”

“For the moment, yes,” I said, lowering the weapon slightly. “You’ll forgive me: I don’t have a scabbard on me. Did you kill her?”

“No,” said the Baobhan Sith. Her lip curled in disgust. “She tried to push me into a violation of the Law, but as it seems I have avoided it, I refuse to waste the crime on her.”

I nodded. “You got a name?”

“Kennis. Yourself?”

“Sir October Daye, Knight of Lost Words. This is—”

“I remember the King of Dreaming Cats, even if we never had direct acquaintance with one another.” Kennis offered Tybalt a polite nod. It was strange, having her converse so calmly when only a little while ago, she’d been trying to kill us both. “The year must not be so very late, if you’re still the one leading the Cait Sidhe of this place.”

She had been emaciated when I’d first found her, as if she hadn’t eaten in years. I gave her a measuring look. “What year do you think it is?”

“I was taken by surprise in my bed, pinned and prisoned while the house burned around me, in nineteen seventy-four,” said Kennis. “I knew my captor by the smell of her, ice and rowan, but I couldn’t fight—not with as much magic as she’d poured into the room before the match was lit. I’ve woken twice since then, once when a man came to me with a cup of blood from a human girl, and again when you entered the room where I was tethered. You have my sincere apologies for what happened next. I was not entirely myself.”

“Meaning the false Queen starved you to use you as a weapon,” I concluded grimly. Not against me, necessarily; in the seventies, I’d still been in the Summerlands, following my mother like a good little shadow, trying to do everything within my power to make her proud of me. But the false Queen had always been fond of her weapons.

How many more traps were scattered throughout the Mists? How many more citizens of Faerie, people like Kennis, were bound and waiting to be triggered, reduced to their basest impulses by hunger, or isolation, or a dozen other factors? We had been careless. We had put Arden on the throne, and not followed the regime change by immediately beginning to ferret out every scrap of danger the false Queen had left behind.

“False Queen?” Kennis asked, eyebrows raised in surprise. “She’s not the rightful holder of her throne? Oh, naughty girl. Have I brought a fugitive to justice, then?”

“You’ve helped,” said Tybalt mildly. “I am sure Queen Windermere will be glad to reward you by not punishing you for attempting to devour a hero of the realm.”

Kennis had the good grace to blush. “I was starving. I would apologize, but I had no control over my actions.”