Page 81 of Night and Silence

“Even before he tried to stab his mistress in the heart, yes.” Her expression turned wistful. “Far be it from me to wish harm on another, but we might be in a better place, as a kingdom, if certain events had occurred more quickly.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “If she’d died without an heir, High King Sollys would have been forced to name someone else to take the throne, and we would never have gone looking for Arden. Awful as it was getting here, I sort of feel like this may be the best-case scenario.”

Lowri’s cheeks flushed. “I hadn’t considered that.”

“It’s okay. What happened to Dugan? After he was arrested, where did he go?”

“The false Queen had him taken to the dungeons. You remember the dungeons.”

Did I ever. They’d been so soaked with iron that both Tybalt and I had come close to dying. He’d actually reached the point of begging me to shift my own blood away from fae, so I would be human enough to survive. He’d expected me to do it, too, to take an escape hatch that was only available to me and leave him to die. We’d gotten out. We’d been lucky, and we’d had access to magic that Dugan, as a pureblooded Daoine Sidhe, could never have accessed.

“Yes,” I said tightly.

“She left him there for a fortnight. Long enough for him to soften, for him to start listening to what she had to say.” Lowri shook her head, expression clearly disapproving. “It’s torture. You know, the humans forbid it? They have more laws than we do, and half of them are about not hurting each other. Sometimes, I think they have the right of it.”

“You’re not alone in that,” I said. “What happened after a fortnight?”

“She let him go.” Her expression twisted, going from simple disapproval to outright disgust. “He tries to kill her in full view of the Court, and she lets him go. Like it was nothing to be concerned over; like it was ordinary. He’s a Baron, yes, but he’s not from a powerful family, he doesn’t stand at the center of some great web of obligations. She let him go because she wanted to, and not because she had to.”

“That’s about what I thought,” I said.

Iron is poison, in every sense of the word. It kills magic. It burns fae flesh. It distorts the world, making time slow down and then dissolve like sugar into water, so that everything that happens has been happening forever, and anything that came before the iron seems inconsequential. I don’t have many regrets about the increasingly fae balance of my blood, but my increased sensitivity to iron is one of them. The mortal world can be dangerous for someone who can’t stand the touch of a major metal.

After almost two weeks in the false Queen’s dungeon, Dugan would have been willing to agree to anything if it meant he got to walk away. Anything. Like eternal loyalty, the kind that can be compelled with an oath or geas. The fact that he was helping her now made sense when I saw it in that light. And if she’d somehow convinced him she had a shot at retaking her throne . . .

Too many people had seen him attack her. The only way he was ever going to rise to true power was if she was the one to lift him up. As a Daoine Sidhe, encouraged by his Firstborn to ambition, the temptation to try must have been too great to resist.

“Where’s Arden?” I asked.

To her credit, Lowri barely flinched at my use of the queen’s proper name. “In the salon with your people. I believe they’re waiting for you.”

“Got it. It was good to see you.”

“Open roads,” she replied.

“Kind fires,” I said, and walked through the doors with Tybalt by my side. This was almost over. I just had to hang onto that. This was almost over, and soon, we would be going home.

We walked along the length of the receiving hall. The guards flanking the door motioned to the left when they saw us coming, and we reoriented ourselves, walking on. It seemed to work like that every time we came to a juncture: we would approach and a servant or guard or courtier would appear, quietly indicating the way we were supposed to go. It was all running smoothly, and I thought I could see Cassandra’s hand in the elegance of it all.

As Arden’s seneschal, Madden was in charge of serving as her good right hand when she couldn’t be present to make a decision pertaining to her kingdom. As chatelaine, Cassandra filled the same role on a smaller level, making decisions for the household. Cassandra had grown up in a house full of younger siblings, all attending human schools during the day while their parents were asleep. She was very good at organizing things as unobtrusively as possible.

One silent turn at a time, we came to a part of the knowe I had never seen before, a wide, sunny parlor with panes of colored glass in place of a ceiling and bright carnival sheeting on the walls. Couches and loveseats dotted the floor, and household servants moved between them, offering sandwiches and cups of lemonade.

Arden and Nolan were seated together on one loveseat, while Madden sat in an oversized armchair, his feet tucked up under his body. May sprawled across an entire loveseat by herself. Quentin, who had been stalking a serving girl with a tray of sandwiches around the edges of the room, broke into a broad smile when he saw us.

“Toby!” He trotted in my direction as the others were still turning to look our way. His smile faded as he got closer. “Gillian. Is she . . . ?” He stopped.

The room seemed to be holding its breath. May, especially, looked like she was on the verge of breaking down in tears. I shook my head in quick negation.

“No,” I said. “No, she isn’t dead, no, she isn’t dying, no, she isn’t going to spend the next hundred years asleep. She’s . . . she’s going to have some adjusting to do, but she’s going to live.”

Even the servants had stopped moving as they listened to me. I kept my focus on Quentin and May, my family, the ones who needed to know this.

“She’s going to be a part of Faerie now,” I said.

There was a crash. We all turned. One of the serving men had dropped his silver tray, scattering drinks and appetizers across the floor at his own feet. He was staring at us, eyes wide and angry. His hair was brown, his eyes were green, and there was a glimmer in the air around him, like he was hiding something, like he was hiding himself.

I smelled cinnamon.