Death's Mistress

by Karen Chance

  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 whensubrand 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 maybesubrand 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 . . .

  His legs were pulled apart and secured to the bottom sections of the rack. The rough wood had not been planed properly, and splinters ate into his flesh. Gnats buzzed around his face, crawled over his skin, and he was powerless to knock them away. And on the boards before the rack, pl
aced so that he could see it, the whip lay coiled like a leather snake, waiting to strike.

  He ignored it and looked outward, slitting his eyes against the glare, searching the crowd. She wasn’t hard to find. The pale skin of his exposed flesh was burning, but at least he wasn’t sweating like the mongrel in the family box, perched next to that half-breed of a husband. The canopy over her head was not enough to keep her from staining her pale green gown. She shifted, looking anywhere but at him, her fingers curled tightly into her lap.

  It was a testament to the High King’s lust for power that he had brought such a thing into his court, polluting his line, sapping its strength. And now a full-blooded Light Fey prince was about to be whipped in front of a half-human, half-Dark Fey abomination. It was obscene.

  Soldiers guarded the platform, barring any possibility of escape, watching. The armor on their shoulders and arms, the swords at their sides, the peaks of their helmets all glittered in the glaring sunlight. Pennants and flags of blue and gold hung limp in the breathless air, waiting like everyone else.

  Drummers began a slow, measured beat that echoed around the silent grounds. From across the small hill separating the course from the castle, a parade appeared. The nobles of the court, lords and ladies clad in their glittering best, walked in lines behind the tall figure with the silver-blond hair and the golden circlet of office.

  The king paused in front of the stands, speaking to the crowd. A pointless exercise. They all knew why they were here. But the voice droned on and on, like the sound of the insects buzzing around his ears. He ignored it in favor of staring up at the rotting pieces of flesh that adorned the corners of the stands, all that remained of the few this court boasted with the strength and will to act.

  Vítus had been captured along with him, but he was not a prince. No war hung on the outcome of his fate, and there was no one to speak for him. His family had gone running like the rats they were, bowing and scraping and pleading with the king to save their own skins, to protect their lands and titles. They had left Vítus to the king’s mercy.

  He had been there to witness that mercy, while his own fate still hung in the balance. Had been forced to watch as the king unsheathed a plain battle sword, its water-marked blade gleaming mirror-sharp. It had caught the light, sending a spike of painful radiance into his eyes. But he’d refused to close them, refused to look away even for an instant, lest it be taken for weakness.

  And so he’d seen the sword descend, the neck sever in two, a pulsing arc of pure fey blood shimmering in midair like a spill of rubies. It had all been limned in a flare of red, a slash across his vision, burning the image into his memory. It reminded him of the gleam thrown off by the setting sun just before it slips below the horizon. The difference between day and night, between what was, and what will be.

  The crowd gasped at the first execution some of them had ever witnessed. But they quieted again as the king stepped past Vítus’s body and stopped before Ölvir. He had been manacled kneeling, as the damage to his legs from the battle was too severe to allow him to stand. His hands were bound before him in cold black iron attached to heavy chains. The metal leeched his strength, and if left in place long enough, it would burn the skin.

  It wouldn’t have time to mar his.

  He’d straightened as the king’s shadow fell over him, first his back, then his neck, looking up proudly, tangled black hair falling over his shoulders and sticking to his cheeks. The damage to his face was ugly, and still only half-healed. Only one eye opened enough to see out of but he had stared up at the king without flinching.

  He had not begged for his life or for mercy.

  He had been offered neither.

  The High King finally finished his platitudes and the nobles took their places, in a ring of special seats set close around the stands. They’d been there when the executions took place, too, ensuring that they went home with their finery splattered with the blood of traitors. It had been a clear message, as if any of the puling cowards had needed it.

  The king stripped off his outer shirt, folded it and set it neatly on the thick gold grass next to the platform. His circlet of office went on top, and he smoothed his hair back over his skull, knotting the tail in a neat, quick movement that kept it off his face. Finally, he walked up the steps to the platform, stopping in front of the rack.

  He bent and picked up the whip by the handle, leaving it to uncoil as he straightened, the braided leather slithering over the wood with a dry, scaly sound. He said nothing further as he paced to the required distance, as he drew back, as the whip snapped through the air with a crack. It would be the first of many.

  Blood was soon dripping down the prisoner’s back and legs, oozing from his tightly bound wrists, adding a new pattern to the reddish brown stains beneath him. The Domi had lobbied hard, or so he’d heard, for the maximum sentence: five hundred lashes, likely deadly even for a fey. But the king had bargained it down to two, still trying to prevent a war.

  Fool. It was obvious to everyone but him. They were already in one.

  Chapter Five

  Someone slapped me. I flinched, and the brightly lit scene shattered and fell away, leaving me staring blankly at a cobweb on the underside of the porch’s ceiling. I was sprawled on the couch with Claire standing over me, a hand gripped around my wrist, her face pale and frightened. Her other hand was raised, but I caught it in time. My cheek already stung enough.

  “I’m all right.”

  “All right?” she demanded shrilly. “Your face went slack. You wouldn’t talk. You were barely breathing! For over a minute, Dory!”

  “I saw something—”

  “I’m sure you did! You’re lucky it wasn’t the last thing!” She held up her uncle’s little bottle. “How much of this did you have?”

  “Not that much.” I sat up, feeling too warm and vaguely nauseous. I could still smell the blood, hot on the air, hear the eerie silence of the crowd, feel the sharp bite of stripes I’d never taken. But that wasn’t what had me struggling to my feet.

  “Sit down!” she snapped, trying to press me back. “I’m going to get you some water, and you’re going to drink all of it!”

  “I sawsubrand being punished,” I told her, pushing past to the railing.

  “That stuff will make you see anything, if you drink enough of—”

  “You were wearing green. An apple green dress. It was hot and you were sweating. You looked like you wanted to be anywhere else.”

  She stared at me, her flame red hair glowing in the light from the hall. “How did you—”

  “I see memories, Claire.”

  “But you weren’t there! Dory, are you telling me you can see other people’s memories? That you can see mine?”

  “It wasn’t yours I saw,” I told her, scanning the yard. I concentrated on the distant rain, the metallic smell of it, its elusive, seductive whisper—and at the presence hovering just behind it.

  Claire frowned. “Whose, then? Because Aiden wasn’t—”

  “subrand?” It leapt out of me on a breath, curled at the end into a question.

  Claire clutched my arm. “Dory! He’s in prison in Faerie! He isn’t here!”

  “I didn’t see the beating from your perspective,” I told her harshly. “I saw it from his. And I only do that when someone is close.”

  “How close?”

  “Very.”

  It was hard to tell what might be out in the garden, or in the darkness just beyond. The storm was almost here, and the breeze was increasing. I watched it run a circuit of the yard, high in the trees, slipping under the green leaves and turning them over so that their lighter undersides caught the moonlight. More leaves turned as the wind raced along the fence, until the yard became a silver flag unfurling with a rustle against the dark green storm clouds.

  But if there was a person in all that, I couldn’t see him.

  Claire was shaking her head. “Nobody will be here for a couple of days at the earliest, I promise you. Eve
n if he’d somehow escaped, he couldn’t be here.”

  “The fey timeline differs so much from ours that there’s no way to know how much time has passed there since you left. They could have had weeks to look for you.”

  “No, they couldn’t.”

  “Claire! I saw you a month ago and you weren’t even showing! And now you have a one-year-old—”

  “Nine months.”

  “Whatever. The point is—”

  “That time is running faster here right now, giving me a head start.”

  I turned from staring at the garden to look at her. “Come again?”

  “The fey have the timeline variations charted out. It’s one of their major advantages over us. They always know exactly when they’re going to arrive in our world, and we never do in theirs.”

  “How the hell can you chart something like time?”

  She pushed up her glasses, the old signal for nervousness. Or maybe it was just the heat. The air was thick with rain, muggy and hot like an encompassing blanket. Smothering. Like the daysubrand took two hundred lashes, and learned nothing but how to hate.

  Like he’d needed the lesson.

  “Caedmon has this room in the palace where they keep up with it,” she told me, sitting back down. “There’s this big thing on the wall. It looks sort of like a map with two rivers. One is our world’s timeline; the other is theirs. And they each have their own riverbed, you know? Sometimes they go pretty parallel, while in others, one will bow out in a big loop, taking a lot more time to get back anywhere near the other.”

  “So sometimes time runs faster here, and sometimes it runs faster there?”

  “Yes. I checked yesterday, and it will be a while before anyone can come after me.”

  “How long?”

  “It depends on how long they look for me in Faerie before thinking that maybe I slipped through. The current bend in the river—if you want to call it that—isn’t huge. So yes, a few more days. Maybe a week if I’m lucky.”

  I stared at the yard, unconvinced. “Then why do I feel like I’m being watched?”