Page 39 of Sleep No More

Of course it did. Blood was liquid, and by bleeding so much today, I’d been dehydrating myself. It was the sort of obvious answer that made me feel foolish for needing to even ask the question. I tried again to sit up.

I failed again.

A new scent—or rather, a new assortment of scents—wafted into the alley right before footsteps came around the corner. Armor rattled, comfortingly familiar and terrifying at the same time, and I heard the people who were wearing it fall into position around me.

“There’s a body over here,” said a voice.

“This is the spot,” said another. “Think that’s the girl?”

“Unless we’ve got another bloody runaway changeling loose on the streets.” Rough hands grabbed me by my upper arms and pulled me to my feet, head lolling as I failed to find the strength to hold it up. “She didn’t weave this illusion herself. And I’m not sure this is the right one. Our tip said the changeling girl’d been stabbed in the gut. No stab wounds on this one.”

Great. So I had managed to heal before I could bleed to death. August was going to be very interested to hear that, assuming I ever made it home to her. Which, at the moment, was starting to feel like a very, very big “if.”

“Not our problem,” said the first voice, brusquely. “Queen said to come here, bring her the changeling. We came here, we found a changeling. If this is the wrong one, Queen can send us out again. We’re not here to think, we’re here to follow orders and please the Queen.”

“For the Queen!” said three more voices.

The smell of magic flared around us, bright and sweet and sour and bitter all at once, and then I was being pulled through yet another transportation circle, and the alley was left behind, along with all the blood I’d lost.

Hey, I thought. I wasn’t done with that yet.

The man who was holding me gave me a sharp shake, almost as if he’d heard my thoughts, and the pain in my head exploded into radiant agony, and for a little while, consciousness left me as a bad investment.

TWELVE

I CAME TO IN A small stone room with heaps of rotting yarrow pushed against the walls as a foul sort of cushion. It did nothing to blunt the chill, which was incredibly strong despite the lack of windows. There was no door; instead, a barred grate blocked the doorway. I wasn’t going to get anywhere near that. Even from my place in the farthest corner, I could feel the iron coming off of it in waves, sickeningly strong. It made my stomach churn and my head spin even worse than it had already been.

Staying away from the door wouldn’t protect me for long. That much iron, this close, would get to me eventually, and I’d start to get sick. I didn’t know the exact symptoms of iron poisoning—Father had always been very firm on the fact that August and I would never need to know—but my chest was already tight, and the air felt like it was too thick, becoming increasingly difficult to breathe.

The Queen. Not Fair Titania, but the Queen of the Mists, my uncle’s liege. Those men had mentioned the Queen, and being told to “fetch the changeling.” They hadn’t known who I was. I raised a hand to my ear and found it as pointed as always. Either they had pulled down my illusions, or the iron had eroded Father’s work while I’d been crumpled in the corner. The first option would mean they knew me, and were probably already negotiating my punishment with my parents and uncle. It would be death, of course; a changeling can’t just kill a pureblood and get away with it. But it could be a painless death, a quick death. They could let Mother come in there and yank the fae blood from my veins, so I wouldn’t be able to heal, then allow one of their executioners to slit my throat.

It could also be a horrible death. They could bind me to the Iron Tree, gouge out my eyes, and burn me alive, as they did to traitors. I was reasonably sure the prismatic pink webs I’d been destroying belonged to Titania herself, and breaking the True Queen’s spells had to count as a form of treason, didn’t it?

I touched the place where I’d been stabbed, feeling no tenderness. My shirt was caked with blood, as my hands were covered in it, but I was uninjured, save for the distant pounding in my head and the persistent dryness in my mouth. I looked around the cell again. There was no water bucket, and I wasn’t sure I would have been able to trust it if there had been; I was a changeling who’d killed a pureblood now, and there were no circumstances that could excuse that fact. I had committed the greatest of all possible crimes, and I deserved whatever punishment they wanted to inflict on me.

Still, water would have been nice.

I huddled deeper into the corner, which was cold and hard but felt like it might actually provide a tiny sliver of distance and protection from the iron. Who would have thought the Queen of the Mists, guardian over one of Fair Titania’s most sacred protectorates, would use iron against her own kind? It was monstrous. It was . . . beastly.

That was one of the worst things a pureblood could be called, and I would normally have recoiled from the word, rejecting it as cruel and beneath me. After the day I’d had, and the treatment I’d received, I wasn’t sure there was anything else that suited. I’d followed the instructions of my betters until those instructions left me alone in the human world, easy prey for the first pack of predators to come wandering by, and now I was going to die because I’d dared to fight back against them.

It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. But then, as I’d often reminded August when she raised the same complaint about the differences in our station, Faerie had never claimed to be fair. The people on top were there forever, and the people on the bottom were only there until we made a mistake and went away.

Well, it looked like it was my turn to go away. Part of me felt like I should fight, like I should find a streak of resistance buried deep in my bones, but most of me knew there wasn’t any point. I was outclassed and outnumbered, and I was going to die.

Idly, I closed my eyes and bit the inside of my cheek, worrying the flesh between my molars until I tasted blood. It had been easier when I had a knife; cutting yourself without a weapon was even less fun than cutting yourself with one. Still, it was easy enough to make myself bleed.

Swallowing, I raised my hands and looked at them in that impossible way that didn’t use my eyes. As I’d expected, the pink lines were there the same way they’d been for the other people I’d looked at like this. Well. Not quite the same. They were denser, snarled together until they covered every inch of my skin in the opalescent shine of someone else’s magic. How did I, a mere changeling, rate that sort of effort?

And how could I unweave it?

Attempting to get my mental “fingers” under the knots did nothing; they slipped away like mist. The pain in my head got even worse, and I stopped trying. Maybe that was the real limit: I couldn’t undo spells if they’d been cast on me directly. Annoying, but if I knew what the rules were, I could start to work around them.

The thought was contrary enough to my long-cultivated obedience and agreeability that I paused, contemplating it. It was mine, absolutely: it didn’t feel like someone else had somehow planted it there to lead me astray. And how much more astray could I go than locked in the Queen’s dungeons for killing a man? Something which felt like it should have been a lot more upsetting than my imprisonment.

A man was dead because of me, and I was sitting there worrying about my headache and the blood on my clothes and the fact that someone—probably Titania—had cast a spell on me for some reason.

I decided I was in shock. It was better than the alternative, which was that I was the worst person who had ever lived, and my impending execution would be doing Faerie a favor.