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“But murder—”
“The ‘accidents’ started almost as soon as he was born,” she said, quietly livid.
“What kind of accidents?”
“In the first month alone, he almost drowned in the bathwater, was set upon by a pack of hunting dogs and had the ceiling of his nursery collapse. And things only got worse from there.”
“And Heidar didn’t do anything?”
“The maid was fired, the dogs were put down and the ceiling was reinforced—none of which helped the fact that my son was surrounded by a bunch of killers.”
I sipped my own drink for a minute, trying to think up a tactful way of putting this. It wasn’t easy. Tact was Mircea’s forte, not mine. “Is it at all possible that at least some of these things really were accidents?” I finally asked.
“I’m not crazy, and I’m not hallucinating!” she snapped, her spine stiffening with a jerk.
So much for my attempt at diplomacy. “I never said you were. You want to protect your child, and a mother’s instincts are usually pretty good. But you were born here. Heidar was brought up there. If he doesn’t think there’s a problem—”
“Oh, he knows damned well there’s a problem! Everybody does, after tonight.”
“What happened tonight?”
“They tried again. And this time, they almost succeeded.”
I sat up. “What happened?”
She took a breath, visibly steadying herself. “I was on my way to dinner, but at the last minute, I decided to check in on Aiden. He was fussy—he’s teething, and he gets like that sometimes—and walking calms him down. So I took him for a quick stroll, and when I got back… God, Dory. The blood. It was in his room.”
“Whose blood?”
“Lukka’s,” she whispered. “I found her lying across the threshold of the nursery. They’d cut her throat and the puddle… It had run down the tiles, into all the crevices. Almost the whole floor was wet with it.”
“Lukka was his nurse?”
Claire nodded, her lips pale. “She was so young. I wasn’t sure, when they first brought her to me, but she was really good with him. The fey love babies and she couldn’t—” She swallowed. “She loved him,” she said simply. “And he wasn’t even there, and they killed her anyway.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know!” She gestured tiredly. “It could have been anyone. There’s no shortage of people who think they’d be better off if Aiden had never been born.”
“But it must have been someone Lukka could have identified, or there would have been no need to kill her.”
“That’s what I realized, after. But then I just turned around and ran. I didn’t stop until I got to Uncle’s portal—”
“That’s why you showed up with no shoes.” That was one mystery solved, at least.
She nodded. “It’s over a mile from the palace, in the middle of some pretty thick woods. I lost them on the way.”
“Doesn’t the palace have its own portal?”
“Yes, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’d planned to come here anyway, and I guess it was stuck in my head, because I was halfway there before I even thought about it.”
“You planned to come here?”
“Yesterday, when we found out about Naudiz.” She said that like I should know what it meant.
“I hate to sound like twenty questions, but—”
Claire got up and started pacing back and forth along the porch. “It’s this rune. It isn’t even well carved, just a piece of stone with some crude scratches on it. Caedmon showed it to me once, told me it was part of a set that’s mostly lost now. Nobody seems to know where it came from; everyone I asked just said ‘the gods.’” She made a face. “But the fey always say that when they don’t know.”
