Page 79 of Be the Serpent

I tucked the bottle back into my pocket and transferred the antler knife to my right hand, arming myself properly. Titania watched this warily, staying where she was, close enough that one good lunge would put me on top of her, far enough away that she might be able to dodge if I tried it.

“Does it matter if I do?” she asked. “Those women never were. They’re dead and gone and lost forever, and I’m still here.”

“But you were them,” I said. “How many children, Titania? How many families? How many times did you put your hands around your own baby’s throat and squeeze until they stopped thrashing beneath you? Ask those women who never were how it felt to fade away knowing that they had killed their children. You really think they’re okay with it?”

Not everyone views a child as a gift. Some people don’t want to be parents at all—and in Faerie, that’s an easy-enough reality to avoid, if that’s what you want. But Stacy, at least, had always wanted to be a mother, more than any of the rest of us. She’d wanted a family that belonged to her, something no one would ever be able to take away from her, and for a long time, she’d seemed like the most successful of us all. No one could possibly have known what she was harboring underneath her skin.

Titania snarled. “Shut up.”

“So more than ten, I’m guessing. More than twenty?” She glared at me. “More than a hundred, then. I’m so impressed.”

“Shut up,” she repeated, more sharply. The sounds of the battle were fading as her attention was pulled more and more onto me. I couldn’t be as upset about that as I wanted to be, especially not since I could see Sylvester picking his way down the hill toward the orangery. Hopefully, Titania’s attention was divided enough at this point that she wouldn’t ensnare him.

“You killed so many children,” I said, trying to keep my tone light. “Did it ever get any easier?”

A shadow moved in the trees behind her. I kept my eyes on her face, not wanting my attention to betray whoever was drawing near. Tybalt hissed at me, lips drawn back in a snarl, and I scoffed.

“You’d be better at that if you had whiskers right now, FYI,” I said. “Maybe let go of the whole concept of bipedalism.”

“You have no sense of your place,” said Titania.

I smiled at her. “Give back my husband and I’ll at least pretend,” I said. “Until then, I don’t think there’s any reason for me to show you any more courtesy than you’ve shown me. And you understand that there’s no winning this for me, right? Best-case scenario, I lose my best friend. Worst-case scenario, I lose my best friend and my husband and four more of my nieces and nephews and I have to watch the woman who set up her own kids to play mass murder games do whatever the hell it is she wants to do with Faerie. Which is . . . what, exactly? Oberon didn’t really go around broadcasting your evil plans after he banished you. He just took himself into exile and let everyone keep thinking of you as the nice one, the sweet Summer Queen. I guess you won, in a way. I grew up thinking the children of Maeve were monsters, and the children of Titania were beautiful gifts to Faerie. So your reputation survived you being an absolute asshole.”

Titania shook her head. “You know, you’ve always been disrespectful, but Stacy assumed you knew how to shut your damn mouth when you were talking to people who mattered. She figured you must have, for them to have let you live this long. Clearly she was wrong.”

“It made her uncomfortable when I talked back to the false Queen, so I tried to do it when she wasn’t around,” I said, almost chipperly.

Titania sighed. “Yes, I can see why that would be your answer. Civility is clearly beyond you.” She turned away, waving languidly. “Kill her,” she said to Tybalt, almost as an afterthought.

He leapt, snarling, hands hooked into claws. I held my ground and watched him come. This was a place I’d been before, sad as that is to say. I guess when you fall in love with a living weapon, people will occasionally decide you should be on the receiving end. But I knew something Titania had apparently forgotten, or maybe Stacy had never quite understood: I knew he couldn’t kill me. He didn’t have the right tools.

Oberon said Faerie made what it needed whenever a new Firstborn came to be. With me, it had apparently needed the Timex watch of pushy assholes, because I can take a licking and keep on ticking. As it were.

Tybalt slammed into me, knocking me backward to the grass, his claws sliding into my shoulders and sinking in until they snagged against my clavicle. I shrieked. I may not be easy to kill, but as I have said on many occasions now, pain still hurts.

Titania screamed at the same time, high and anguished and far louder than me. My own shriek died down to a whimper and hers kept going, rising and rising, loud as a klaxon. Who knew the Queen of Faerie was also the Queen of Excessive Dramatics?

Anyone who had ever had anything to do with Faerie, that was who.

As Titania shrieked, Tybalt froze and blinked, eyes seeming to clear. “October?” he said, in a puzzled tone. Then: “Little fish, what’s going on?”

“Okay, sweetie, I need you to work as hard as you can at not freaking out, and take your claws out of my shoulders, okay?” My voice was remarkably level, considering I was being pinned down by someone much larger and better armed than I was. It helped that I knew he probably couldn’t kill me, no matter how hard Titania forced him to try, while I could easily kill him if I had to.

And the thought of how easy it would be to make myself a widow was nowhere near as reassuring as I wanted it to be.

Cheeks paling and eyes going wide with horror, Tybalt yanked his hands out of my shoulders and pushed himself to his feet, backing away from me. I picked myself up from the grass, retrieving my knives, and looked toward the still-screaming Titania as I slid them into their sheaths.

Blood cascaded down her arms from the ten perfect puncture wounds that had opened in her shoulders, exactly mirroring the placement of Tybalt’s claws. My own injuries were already almost gone, my body putting itself back together with the dedicated speed that I had come to depend on. Titania wasn’t recovering anywhere near as quickly.

That shadow was still moving through the trees toward us. I could see the outline of antlers now. Oberon was coming.

I walked toward Titania, trying not to choke on the cloying miasma of roses that surrounded her, rising from her skin, her magic, and her blood in a horrifying choral blend of overwhelming floral perfume. “You shouldn’t have done that,” I said. “You know you’re not allowed to directly harm my branch of the family tree—and even your kid, when she ordered my own father to get me out of the way, was smart enough not to tell him to kill me.”

She glared at me, tears bright in her eyes. “Oberon will kill you himself for hurting me.”

“I don’t think he will, since I didn’t hurt you, and if he wants to threaten Tybalt, well, that will be educational for the both of us. He’ll learn why that’s a terrible idea, and I’ll learn what it feels like to kill a god.”

I pulled the bottle out of my pocket and removed the cork. The smell of loam promptly obscured Titania’s roses. I was grateful for that, more grateful than I could have guessed I’d be.