Death's Mistress (6 page)

I focused on the little boy. He was the usual pink-cheeked, chubby-limbed baby as far as I could tell. He was currently poking at a couple of chess pieces, trying to get them to fight each other.

He had taken them out of the game and put them in the circle made by the round wicker bottom of the table. He was watching them avidly through the open side of his makeshift combat ring, waiting for some mayhem, but they weren’t obliging. One had hunched down to clean his sword, and the other was having a smoke. Tiny rings wreathed its head for a moment, before the wind pulled them away.

“They’re friends,” I told him. He’d accidentally picked up two trolls instead of one of each.

Puzzled blue eyes looked up at me.

“They’re allies,” Claire said harshly, and a flash of comprehension crossed his features.

A chubby hand rooted around in the game and plucked out an ogre, its small tusks gleaming behind a metal faceplate. He put it into the ring and immediately both trolls fell on it. He frowned and pulled one of them off, making it an even contest.

“He doesn’t know the word ‘friend’?” I asked, a little appalled.

“In Faerie, you have allies and enemies,” Claire said, getting up to get a refill. “Friends are a lot more rare.”

Stinky had joined the little prince, and they had their heads together, one shining blond, one fuzzy brown with pieces of egg roll in it. I picked them out as Claire came back with what looked like a double. “He looks healthy enough to me,” I commented. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing! And it’s going to stay that way.”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“Because he had the bad luck to be born a boy,” she said bitterly.

“Come again?”

“The fey don’t allow women to rule—at least, our branch doesn’t—so a girl wouldn’t have been a threat.”

“A threat to who?”

“Take your pick! Everyone at court has had hundreds of years to make plans based on the idea of the king being childless. Then, a century ago, he had Heidar, but no one cared because he can’t inherit.”

I nodded. Heidar’s mother had been human, and he’d inherited his heavier bone structure and more substantial musculature from her. It was the same blood that ensured he could never take the throne. The law said that the king had to be more than half fey, and Heidar was a flat fifty percent.

“But then I came along,” Claire said, after taking a healthy swallow of her drink. “And I’m slightly more than half fey. So when Heidar and I announced that I was pregnant, everyone did the math and freaked out. Courtiers who’d hoped their daughters would snag the king realized that Caedmon had no more need to marry now that he had an heir through his son. The daughters in question, the male relatives who’d hoped to inherit if he died with no legitimate heir, the people who had spent a fortune sucking up to said relatives—they were all furious.”

“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.”

“And it’s important why?”

“Because it’s been used for . . . well, pretty much ever, as far as I can tell, to guard the heir to the throne. He’s supposed to get it in a ceremony on his first birthday, or as soon as he’s able to withstand its magic. The legend says that whoever wears it can’t be killed.”

“But it’s gone missing?”

She nodded. “Aiden’s only nine months old, but he’s a big boy. So I petitioned to have the ceremony moved up. There was some muttering about protocol, but considering the number of ‘accidents,’ I managed to get my way. And then, the very next night, the relic vanished, right out of the family vault.”

“Who had access to this vault?”

“It was spelled. No one who wasn’t a close blood relative could get in.”

“And how many would that be?”

“Normally only two: Caedmon and Heidar. I couldn’t even go unless one of them was with me.”

“Normally?”

“Before Efridís came to court,” Claire said savagely. “She’s Caedmon’s own sister, and yet—I should have known. She’s Æsubrand’s mother!”

I repressed a shudder. Æsubrand was a fey prince with a sadistic streak who had almost killed me the last time we met, playing what he’d considered a fun little game. I heal quickly—one of the few perks of my condition—yet I still bore the shape of a hand, faint and scar- slick, burned into the flesh of my stomach. His hand.

Of course, the fey hadn’t given a damn about that, as human life, or what passed for it in their eyes, was hardly a valuable commodity. But they had cared very much when
subrand had tried to kill Caedmon. His father was king of a rival band of Light Fey, and I suppose he’d hoped to unify their two lands under one ruler someday. Or maybe
subrand was just tired of waiting for his old man to kick off and decided to go conquer himself a country. Either way, Caedmon hadn’t been amused.

“Tell me they executed that little shit.”

Claire shook her head. “The Domi—that’s their council of elders—wanted to, but Caedmon vetoed it. Faerie is trembling on the brink of war as it is, and he was afraid that executing the Svarestri heir would tip it over into chaos.”

“So what happened to him?”

“They put him in prison, if you think having about twenty servants and the run of a castle qualifies!”

“What the
hell
—”

“It’s a hunting lodge, actually, but it’s as big as a damn castle.”

“Why isn’t he in a cell somewhere?” I demanded. Preferably one with extra rats.

“Because the fey don’t have prisons as we understand them. An offender is incarcerated for a short time pending trial, and then punished or executed. They really didn’t know what to do with him.”

“So they did nothing? He tried to kill you!”
subrand had hoped to eliminate his rival before he was even born by attacking Claire. He’d failed; we’d succeeded. So naturally he was the one sitting around in luxury, while I tried to come up with the money to get the roof fixed.

“They publicly flogged him, and as the wronged party, I had to watch. He stared at me the whole time, with this faint little smile on his face.” She shivered.

“They flogged him,” I said bitterly. “I’m sure that made a great—”

I cut off because the porch winked out, between one breath and the next, taking Claire, the yard and the softly creaking swing along with it. For a moment there was nothing but a boiling black void, like the color of storm clouds against a black sky. And then the scene was slashed with light, with color, with alien sounds and smells, and I was standing in the middle of an open field.

It was a glaringly bright day, the sun a hot coal directly overhead. Before I could get my bearings, rough hands shoved me up some crude wooden steps to the top of a platform. It was so newly built, I could smell the sawdust on the air, and see bits of it caught in the dry grass below.

In front of me were stands filled with people sitting under bright canopies. The air was still, the sun honey thick as it poured down, drenching us all in sticky heat. Yet no one moved, not even to wave a fan. There was no murmuring, no jostling, no talking, none of the raucous behavior of every other crowd I’d ever seen.

But then, I’d never before seen a crowd composed entirely of fey.

He’d been left in the clothes in which he’d been captured for over two weeks, dirty, bloodstained and rank after all this time. They were finally peeled off him, leaving him naked before the crowd. Like a common criminal about to receive sentence.

His wrists were unclasped from behind him and secured to the top sections of an X-shaped rack. The muscles in his arms tightened and rippled as he jerked against them, uselessly. He felt the anger boiling up again, a fury no amount of shouting had been able to drain. That he should be here like this, while that
thing
sat in the stands . . .