Page 77 of A Divided Duty

“Right,” he said, sounding exasperated. “Give me just a second. Hey, Tom!”

His voice got muffled then, as he put his hand over the receiver and talked to one of the other staffers. Several seconds ticked by. I was just starting to get impatient when I heard his hand being removed from the phone, and he said, “Sorry about that. I needed to get someone to cover the counter. Can you put me on speaker?”

“Sure,” I said, taking the phone away from my ear and hitting the appropriate button.

“Dame Elvia,” he said, half a beat later. His voice boomed from my phone, suddenly much more serious and authoritative than it had been only a moment before. He sounded like the Queen’s Seneschal, not like a man who would happily make a cocoa-powder smiley face on top of your mocha latte.

The guard snapped to immediate attention, the motion jostling her possum, which made a grumpy chittering sound and adjusted its position inside the basket of her hair. “Sir,” she said, voice crisp.

“Is she standing up all straight and formal now?” asked Madden.

“She is,” I confirmed.

“Good. Dame Elvia, this is your Seneschal. Sir Daye informs me that you’re barring her from accessing the knowe. Is this true?”

“Sir, it’s almost noon, she doesn’t have an appointment, and the queen has retired for the day,” she said, talking very quickly, almost frantically. “I didn’t let her in because she shouldn’t be here right now.”

“Sir Daye is both a Hero of the Realm and the one responsible for freeing us from the dream spun by the Lady of the Flowers. She comes and goes as she pleases, and none of us shall bar her from our lady’s door. Do I make myself quite clear?”

“You do, sir, you have my full apologies, and I’ll admit Sir Daye straight away.”

“Wonderful. Toby? That good?”

“That should be fine, Madden,” I said.

“Cool. You can take me off speaker now.”

I raised the phone back to my ear.

In a more-normal tone, he said, “Be nice to her, okay? She’s still getting used to how we do things here. She came down from Silences after the big spell broke, and she doesn’t really know how to be relaxed about things. Not with the way they used to run things up there.”

“Right,” I said, managing, barely, not to wince. Silences had been overthrown in the war, years and years ago, their royal family elf-shot or killed and replaced by a puppet king in the control of our own nameless puppet queen—who had been controlled in turn by Eira Rosynhwyr. It was assholes all the way down, and while Rhys had been running things in Silences, a mistake of etiquette could have been enough to cost someone literally everything.

“Talk to you later?”

“Yeah, Madden,” I said. “I appreciate you.”

“Just doing my job,” he said, and the line went dead. I tucked my phone back into my pocket and walked back toward Elvia, who watched my approach with unblinking wariness.

“Can we go inside now?” I asked.

“You are welcome in the royal knowe of Her gracious Majesty, Queen Windermere in the Mists,” she said, through what sounded like gritted teeth.

“Not the question, but still cool,” I said. “Come on, Chelsea. We have work to do.”

Chelsea followed close behind me as I walked to the door and through it into the receiving hall, where the carvings had all changed again. I stopped where I was, scanning them as quickly as I could. They seemed to know everything that happened in the Mists. Maybe they would have some idea of what had happened to Raysel.

There were four entirely new panels that I could find. One showed me and Tybalt by a fire, speaking to Eutychia, who had been rendered so precisely that her parents might have been able to identify her by the slope of her chin, the angle of her eyes. Another showed us in the Luidaeg’s kitchen, bleeding into her bowl, and a third had us walking through a dark, tangled wood. The eyes peeking out of the underbrush on that one were unnerving, since I had no doubt that they were accurate. We’d been watched, and we’d never even realized it.

The fourth panel was the one that gave me pause. A man stood in front of three of Blind Michael’s Riders, carved so precisely that I could easily make out Arden’s arms at his breast. He looked grimly determined, not afraid, and I knew him. I could pretend I didn’t, but I did, and after confronting Melly, I wasn’t going to let her accomplice go free.

Eion.

Chelsea waited until I turned my face away from the carvings before she started talking again.

“What did you see?”

“A path forward,” I said. “Nothing certain.”