Page 9 of Be the Serpent

So after Raysel was elf-shot, I had used blood magic to go into her dreams, and I had offered her the Choice only the hope chests and the Dóchas Sidhe can grant. I had offered to make the slow war between the two halves of what she was come to a peaceful end, by removing one of the combatants from the battlefield. She had gone to sleep appearing mostly Daoine Sidhe, save for the slant of her ears, the softness of her features, and a faint pinkness at the roots of her hair. She was waking up the rest of the way there. Her bones were sharper now, her ears more pointed, and her hair redder.

She looked like a female version of her father, and I only hoped she’d take it as well awake as she had asleep. I bent carefully over her, opening the bottle in my hand, and pressed it to her lips, sliding one hand under her head to lift it up and allow gravity to encourage her to drink. The trick to giving anything orally to an elf-shot victim is keeping them from choking in the process.

Something about the magic in the mixture allows them to swallow rather than letting the liquid run back out of their mouths. The room fell quiet as the seconds passed, me pouring the liquid drop by drop into Raysel’s mouth, her sleeping peacefully on.

Finally, loudly, Luna demanded, “Why isn’t it working?”

And Raysel opened her eyes.

They were the clear, pale gold of acacia honey, rimmed in a thin line of darker gold, and slightly unfocused as she blinked and tried to recover her bearings. Finally, she pulled away from me and the liquid I was still dripping into her mouth, swallowing one last time as she sat up in her coffin, looking around the room.

I took a step back, tilting the bottle up so as not to pour the rest of the mixture onto the floor. She didn’t need to drink the whole thing for it to be effective; according to Walther, as soon as a sleeper woke, that was it. The spell was broken, and their body would clear the last of the poison with the tincture’s help. If more mortal medicine worked like that, we’d have fewer issues with their hospital system.

Luna made a choked sound and shoved me out of the way in her rush to get to Raysel’s side. Raysel blinked in confusion as Luna yanked her into a fierce hug. The confusion was probably twofold: the last time they’d both been awake, Luna had still been wearing her stolen Kitsune skin. This pink-haired, white-skinned woman was a stranger.

But the smell of her magic was the same, and Raysel was entirely Daoine Sidhe now. She inhaled and relaxed, allowing Luna’s embrace to continue and even lifting her own arms to join it. As she did so, she looked over her mother’s shoulder at me and mouthed, “You promised.”

Shit. Maybe it was cowardly of me, but I’d honestly been hoping she would have forgotten. Despite that, I had taken steps to prepare in case she hadn’t. I turned to face Arden. She was no longer clinging to Jin. Instead, the two of them were standing a foot or so apart, holding hands and talking quietly.

I squared my shoulders and took a deep breath before asking, “Is this Court still open?”

Arden glanced in my direction, looking briefly like she didn’t understand the question. Then she shook her head to clear it, dropping Jin’s hands, and said, “Of course, Sir Daye. What can the Court of the Mists do for you?”

She was using her customer service voice. Unsurprisingly, she wasn’t happy to be interrupted. Well, I wasn’t happy to be doing the interrupting, and Sylvester and Luna weren’t going to be happy about what I was about to do, so at least the misery was getting spread around.

“As Rayseline Torquill is awake, I wish to officially claim offense against her for the abduction and assault upon my daughter.”

A gasp filled the room, uttered in unison by almost everyone present. But not me, not Tybalt, and most importantly, not Raysel.

Arden blinked, eyebrows climbing as she took in what I’d just said. “Are you sure, Sir Daye?”

“I am.”

Claiming offense is an old fae tradition that seems to have arisen mostly because we don’t have much in the way of actual Laws. We have a lot of traditions and rules of etiquette, but we don’t have a system of formalized and codified justice. Given what a shitshow justice is in the mortal world, maybe this is better. I don’t think so, though. I think it has just as many problems, and even less accountability, since at the end of the day, the buck stops with the local monarch and whatever they decide.

Anyway, claiming offense against someone means expressing what they did to wrong you, what you want the consequences to be, and letting the local authorities decide how it’s going to work out. I don’t fully understand it, and I’ve usually been on the receiving side, not the initiating. Luna made a small sound of barely suppressed rage behind me. Sylvester stepped toward me, one hand up, like he thought he could make me retract the words.

“She doesn’t mean that, Your Highness,” he said, sounding almost desperate. “Sir Daye is obviously just confused. She would have spoken to me, as her liege, if she meant that—”

“When?” I asked, spinning to face him. He stared at me in obvious confusion, golden eyes so much like his daughter’s that it hurt to look at them. “When would I have spoken to you, Sylvester? You’ve banned me from Shadowed Hills, even though I’ve done nothing wrong, and you don’t answer the phone when I call. Did you think I was going to send a letter, maybe? Tie a note to a pixie and make them play go-between? You can’t shut me out and then act surprised when you don’t know what I’ve been doing! I am not confused. I came here today to wake Raysel if the Queen allowed, and to claim offense against her as soon as she was able to speak in her own defense.”

“I can’t,” said Raysel, voice a little creaky from disuse, but still clear and carrying. “I did what she says I did. I caused harm, and it doesn’t matter if I understood that I was doing it, it still happened. Her claim is valid. I have no defense for myself.”

“No,” snarled Luna. She appeared next to Sylvester, moving fast, looking at me with such venomous loathing in her eyes that I took a half-step back. How did we get here? How did we go from her being the closest thing I had to a mother figure to her looking at me like that? I didn’t know, not really, but I knew there was no going back.

“No,” she repeated, stabbing her finger at me like she thought she could do actual damage with the gesture. “You can’t claim offense against my daughter. You’re a changeling. You don’t have the authority.”

“Luna . . . ” Sylvester began.

She turned her glare on him, and he quailed. “Don’t say anything. You may like to pretend she belongs in Faerie, that she deserves her position and her place, but we both know she’s mortal. She’s here on sufferance. She can’t claim offense against a pureblood. It’s not allowed.” There was a malicious triumph in her last word.

“Perhaps not,” said Tybalt, voice low and dark and barely above a growl. “But none can contest my place in Faerie, and the girl Rayseline harmed is my daughter by marriage. If you will not allow my lady to claim offense, then I will claim it on her behalf.”

Luna narrowed her eyes. “You have no claim on the girl, and she has no claim on your titles or bloodline. I refuse to allow the pretense that you’re allowed to claim offense for her.”

“Gillian is pureblooded Roane,” said Tybalt. “Will you really claim Faerie’s justice does not apply to her?”

“She wasn’t when she was injured,” snarled Luna. “She was the changeling daughter of a changeling woman, and she has no right to our justice for transgressions committed when that was so.”