Once Broken Faith (27 page)

“How hard are they to make? Are they portable?”

She shrugged, looking to Theron. He shook his head. “I don't know. Neither of us has the skill for crafting them. But they were a weapon once, and they could be again, if there was the need for them.”

I opened my mouth to ask if they knew anything more. The tolling of the dinner bell stopped me. It was a light, chiming sound that nonetheless scythed through walls, making sure that everyone within the confines of the knowe was aware that their presence was required.

“With that, I believe this audience is over, Sir Daye,” said Theron. He rose more easily than I would have thought possible for someone with the lower body of a stag, offering his arm to Chrysanthe, who took it with a smile. “We've enjoyed this chance to know you better.”

The two of them walked to the door and let themselves out, leaving me to stare after them in frustration. The bells continued to ring. I slumped backward in my chair, putting a hand over my face. This was getting me nowhere. This was getting me nowhere
fast
. We couldn't let the nobility leave without losing the killer—but if we kept them here, we were keeping ourselves captive with
the killer, and that could only end poorly. My wounds were healed, but there was a phantom ache in my shoulder that was happy to remind me of how badly things could go. I was hard to kill. That didn't make it impossible, and it didn't make the people I cared about any more equipped for survival.

Survival. I lowered my hand, staring up at the strings of garlic and pearl onions that obscured the ceiling. Whoever had attacked me couldn't have been expecting me to survive. Sure, I was sturdy, but
how
sturdy was still under discussion, and many people who knew and loved me had no idea how difficult I really was to kill. I'd been attacked—or Tybalt had—by someone who was expecting to have another body on their hands. So who hadn't been expecting to see me in the gallery? Who had been surprised by my appearance?

Blood contained all memory, and I'd been looking at the audience. I raised my thumb to my lips and started gnawing at my cuticles, trying to bite through the skin fast enough to draw blood. It wasn't working. I healed too fast, and my natural reluctance to hurt myself was a problem. I stood, scanning the shelves. There were no knives in here. There was a trowel in with the potatoes, but it was blunt and filthy, and I had enough common sense that I didn't want to drive it into myself.

The dinner bell was still ringing. There was my answer. Gathering my skirts in one hand, so as not to trip myself, I left the pantry and followed the sound down the hall. Most of the guests were already there, judging by how empty the place was; a few servants passed me, harried and laboring under the weight of their trays. They didn't look upset or ill-used; they were doing their jobs, and they had the focused looks of people who liked what they did and who they did it for. That was nice. I liked to hope Arden was going to be one of the better ones, a treasure instead of a tyrant, since her place on the throne was at least partially my fault.

I'd been friends with the household staff at Shadowed Hills for years, and I knew that for some fae—the Hobs and the Brownies and the Bannicks—service really was their only joy. That didn't mean they didn't deserve to be treated well when they were at work. Or that everyone treated their servants with kindness. The Barrow Wight from Highmountain walked by, despondent as always, a heavy tray in her arms. I did a double-take: a
very
heavy tray. It looked like she was carrying an entire roast suckling pig.

The hall ended at a pair of redwood doors with stained glass inserts, propped open to let the moonlight slant through the colored panes and dance along the hallway walls. Outside was a pavilion of black mesh, letting the starlight shine through while preventing leaves or insects from falling to the deck below. Round tables covered by white cloths studded the area, like something out of a mortal awards banquet. It was a comparison that would have been lost on most of the people here, and laughed at by the rest. The servants I'd seen before swirled through the scene like dancers, pausing to deposit trays and pitchers in front of people as they passed them by. There was even music, courtesy of a string quartet in the far corner. The cello player was a Huldra, and held a second bow in her tail, using it to coax impossible double stops from her instrument.

Arden, Aethlin, Siwan, and Maida were seated at a table on a raised platform at the far end of the deck. Tybalt was at a table nearby, keeping company with the Luidaeg, Karen, Quentin, and Patrick Lorden. I started in toward them, weaving around tables and dodging passing servers. It was like a bizarre obstacle course, and it was a relief when I reached the wide open space in the middle of the dining area, although it took me a moment to realize
why
that space was open.

It was a dance floor. Of course it was. Because nothing said “let's pause for a quick waltz” like a political
convocation where people were getting elf-shot and murdered.

Conversation at the table stopped when I dropped myself into the chair between Tybalt and Patrick. “I thought you needed to avoid being seen with us too much,” I said. “Shouldn't you be sitting at the high table?”

“I needed to avoid arriving with you, or having my status overtly twined with yours,” said Tybalt mildly. He began buttering a roll. “I will not be the last to hold my position, and did not wish to unduly handicap my successor by implying that the Court of Dreaming Cats owed some debt of fealty to the throne of the Mists. Now that everyone understands that I'm not domestic, I will do as cats have always done, and sit where I like. Besides, the conversation among Kings and Queens is dull as dishwater. Hence all the common men in Will's plays.”

“He's a fucking dumbass, but his heart's in the right place,” said the Luidaeg. “So, Toby, how goes the systematic alienation of every noble on the West Coast? Get yourself banned from any new kingdoms yet? I understand the Kingdom of Copper is a great place to never go.”

“They won't be sending me invitations to tea anytime soon, but I think I've mostly managed not to get myself banned from entry,” I said. I looked around, frowning. “Where's Walther?”

“Things got a little shouty at the conclave,” said Quentin. “Then they got a lot shouty. Then they got screamy, with a side order of shrieky. Walther and Marlis are having dinner up in the room with the sleepers, supposedly so they can help Jin check on everyone's condition, but really, I think, because Walther was afraid somebody would dump something on him.”

“Oh,” I said. The rolls looked good. My stomach rumbled, reminding me that with one thing after another, I hadn't eaten nearly as much as I'd bled since getting out of bed. I snagged one, taking the butter knife out of Tybalt's hand, and focused on the Luidaeg again. “So when
I get out of here, I'm going to be checking my own blood memories for anything that seemed out of place when we first got to the conclave this evening, but this seems like a good time to ask: what can you tell me about fairy rings?”

The Luidaeg sat up straighter, blinking in surprise. Her eyes changed color with each blink, going from driftglass green to foam white, then to solid black, and finally back to their original shade. “Fairy rings? Why are you asking me about those?”

“The monarchs from Golden Shores brought them up during their questioning. Supposedly, fairy rings can move stuff through time?”

“Sort of,” said the Luidaeg. She was still looking thoughtful. “Subjectively. It's . . . not that simple.”

“So how simple is it?”

“A fairy ring is a stepping stone. A fairy ring takes someone or something and freezes them for however long they need to be kept still. It's not time travel. It's not jumping from one era to another. It's just . . . a pause, before things continue on their normal course. It feels like moving forward in time to the people who've been affected, because they were paused.”

There was a clink. I turned to Tybalt. He had dropped his fork and was staring at the Luidaeg, pupils reduced to slits and cheeks gone pale. I reached over and touched his arm. He jumped, gaze flicking to me for a moment before his attention returned to her.

“Would it look . . . to someone on the outside of the ring, would it look like the person had just stopped for some reason?”

“Yes,” said the Luidaeg. “That's part of why they were never as popular as elf-shot. With elf-shot, you put the person to sleep for a hundred years. You can move them, hide them, do whatever you need to with them. With a fairy ring, they're stuck in the circle. As soon as the magic powering the spell is exhausted, time will start moving for them again. Until then, unless you want to break the
ring, you have to keep an eye on them to make sure nothing disturbs the spell. Any time a human wandered into the woods and wandered out a hundred years later, some poor sap had been punished with watching a mortal spend a century standing perfectly still. You can't even draw mustaches on the people, for fear that you'll knock them out of alignment and start the clock again.”

“The way Antonio described the shadows shifting,” I said. “It wasn't someone teleporting him. Time was passing outside the ring, and when the ring was broken—for whatever reason—the shadows looked like they had moved.”

“It happened to you, too,” said Tybalt. I turned to blink at him. He was still watching the Luidaeg, but he was speaking to me; that much was very clear. “We were in your chambers. You were about to kiss me. Do you remember?”

“I got stabbed right before I could,” I said. “That sort of thing is pretty hard to forget.”

“You stopped.” He finally turned to look at me. “You were leaning in, and then you
stopped
. Not long—only a few seconds—but long enough for me to notice.”

“Oh.”
Oh
. I remembered the confused look on his face, the way he'd suddenly been staring at me. It couldn't have been a long pause without him becoming alarmed, but any pause at all would have been strange, given the situation. “Did you see anything? Smell anything?”

“I saw you go still, and I was focused on that,” said Tybalt. “I think I would have noticed someone standing behind you.”

“Not if they were in a chained fairy ring, under a don't-look-here,” said the Luidaeg. We both turned to her. She shrugged. “Set up two rings. One for your target, one for yourself. Tie them together. Set the spell so that the first ring will break when the second ring is activated, and cast the don't-look-here just before you step into the first ring.”

“So as soon as
I
stepped into the second ring, the first ring broke, and they could start moving again,” I said. “They'd know where I was, because they were the one who set the trap, and they'd still be hidden by the don't-look-here. They were never aiming for Tybalt at all. They were aiming for me.”

“Or for me,” said Quentin. “I'm your squire. I could have been going to the room to fetch something for you. That's a lot of what normal squires do for their knights.”

“Good thing we've never been normal,” I said, a cold thread of fear winding through my veins. If Quentin had been killed . . . it would have ended my usefulness right then and there, at least for a time. The need for vengeance would have come eventually, but would it have been fast enough for me to find anything? Or would the trail have gone completely cold? I sadly suspected the latter. I had my weak points, and Quentin was well known to be one of them. Take him out, and you took me out just through proximity. “Why would you need a second ring if you had a don't-look-here?”

“Because fairy rings freeze
everything
. Otherwise, people would have used them for some nasty forms of biological warfare—find a strain of flu that affects purebloods, shove a carrier into a fairy ring, cast a spell to hide them, and then bring all your enemies to get breathed on. Once inside the ring, the person who was trying to harm you couldn't be smelled, not even by a Cu Sidhe, or otherwise detected. It would even hide the scent of their magic.” The Luidaeg shook her head. “Nasty things, fairy rings.”

“And the second ring? What broke it?”

“It wasn't meant to hold you. It was just meant to slow you down, and to break the first ring when it was activated. I'm guessing whoever cast it knew that stabbing you would break the ring, and didn't want to waste their time crafting something genuinely secure.”

I looked at her. “How hard is it to make a fairy ring?”

“Just this side of impossible, if you don't know how it's done, but if you do? It's so easy a child could do it, or a changeling. Merlins used to use them as snares to catch their pureblood relatives, once upon a time. Everything we can use against humanity, humanity can also use against us. That's something to keep in mind when you're making a tool, or a weapon. Everything cuts both ways.”

“Why didn't you bring this up before?”

She looked flustered. “To be honest—and I can't be anything but honest—I forgot. It's been so long since anyone has used them for anything, and they were always such a
small
magic. They didn't seem worth remembering.”

That was sadly easy to believe. “What would I need?”

“To make the ring, intent, the right materials, and a small amount of power—a trickle, really. The ring itself is the key. The ring is what magnifies and intensifies the ritual. That's how a simple spell could hold someone captive for a hundred years. Look.” The Luidaeg leaned over and plucked four spears of asparagus off the platter, holding them up like they were the most important thing in the world. “Plants work well, although fungus works better. Toadstools were traditional, but daisy chains were almost as common, at least for a while. Take the material you're planning to use, plait it together . . .” Her fingers were quick and clever as they twisted the asparagus into a rough crown. She dropped it onto the table.