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I nodded. “Thank you,” I told her, and meant it. I pried the bottle out of the wall.
“What are you doing?”
“Even if you’re right, it can still be useful in emergencies,” I told her, shoving it back in my pack.
“But…where are you going?” she demanded, as I started for the stairs again.
“The same place I was going before. Away.”
“But I’ve just explained—”
“That the wine doesn’t work, not over the long haul.”
“Dory!” She grabbed for my arm again, but this time I was ready, and spun out of her reach. “Damn it, get back here!”
“I can’t.”
She reached for me again, but I grabbed her this time, pushing her into the wall face-first. It wasn’t hard enough to hurt, but she didn’t look too happy. Of course, neither was I.
“It’s getting worse, all right,” I told her harshly. “Let’s face it. You can’t control me anymore. And the wine is a stopgap at best. Meaning I’m not—”
I broke off because my back suddenly hit the wall. On the other side of the corridor. Which was a surprise, since I didn’t recall moving.
“You know what’s not safe?” Claire demanded furiously, stalking toward me. “I am not safe. You’re not the only one dealing with pressure right now. I’m under it all day, every day, with no end in sight! And no matter what I try to tell anyone, they never—”
She cut off abruptly, and looked away. “What is it?” I demanded.
She didn’t say anything.
“Claire—”
“No,” she said, looking back at me, her eyes shuttered. “You have enough problems of your own. I can’t solve them for you, but I can keep from piling any more on.”
“But I can help—”
Red hair tossed. “How? I thought you were leaving.”
I just looked at her, because Claire never stayed mad for long. And this proved to be no exception. She deflated suddenly, looking miserable. “You won’t like it.”
“If it has you looking like that, I already don’t like it.”
“No, I mean—” She stopped, and licked her lips. And then she stiffened her shoulders and met my eyes squarely. And dropped the bombshell.
“Æsubrand hasn’t been seen in almost a week.”
I blinked. Okay, if anything could distract me from my own private hell, that was it. Æsubrand was a little bit of hell all on his own.
And, as irony would have it, he was also soon to be Claire’s cousin by marriage. It seemed that the fey family she was about to marry into was almost as messed up as mine. In fact, it might just take the prize, since none of my relatives were actively trying to kill each other.
Well, not at the moment.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t true for Claire. Her father-in-law was Caedmon, king of the Blarestri, one of the three main divisions of the Light Fey. He had a sister, Efridís, who had been married off to the Svarestri king, the leader of one of the other great houses, to seal a treaty or something. I wasn’t real clear on the details. What I was clear on was that she’d had a son, who had turned out to be a homicidal son of a bitch.
He was also ambitious as hell, to the point that merely inheriting one throne wasn’t good enough for him. Oh, no. Æsubrand wanted two. Specifically, he wanted Caedmon’s, which he’d had a claim to—right up until Heidar, aka Caedmon Jr., met a certain redheaded half dragon. And they had a son.
Heidar hadn’t been a problem for Æsubrand, because Blarestri law required its kings to have a majority of fey blood and his mother had been plain old human. But Claire, who was more than fifty percent fey, had tipped their son straight into the line of succession. And the line of fire.
Aiden’s existence had seriously messed up his cousin’s fey-unifying, dynasty-building, Æsubrand-glorifying plans, and he hadn’t taken it well. As in, he’d tried to kill Claire while she was still pregnant, and when that didn’t work, he’d gone after baby Aiden. But—lucky me—I’d managed to get in his way not once, but twice. Not that I’d been the only reason he failed, or even the main one, but for some reason, he seemed to blame me.
