So Rhys had been lying about being surprised by my arrival. Somehow, that wasn’t all that shocking. “All he has to do to get me out is agree not to go to war against the Mists,” I said. “It’s that simple.”
She shook her head. “Even if it were that simple,” and her voice told me it wasn’t, not really, “he wouldn’t do it. He seeks the favor of your deposed Queen. He took this throne for her. And for power, of course—some men will do anything for power—but the power he wanted was the power of sitting at her right hand, in his homeland, not being exiled to kingship in our damp and forested lands.”
“Careful, Marley,” said Walther. “You’re starting to sound like you agree with him.”
Marlis turned to look at her brother. There was no anger in her eyes: only bone-deep exhaustion, and the quiet resignation that comes with too many defeats. She had the eyes of a woman who’d never won anything in her life, who’d simply stepped through the patterns that were demanded of her, all the while praying she could survive them. “A hundred years,” she said softly. “More than a hundred years. I held our mother down while his people stabbed the arrow into her shoulder, less than a decade past. You got away. You became the man you’d always wanted to be. You grew up. I didn’t. I stayed here, with the man who overthrew our family, and I learned to be a pet. You were my little sister, but if we compare the things we’ve seen, the things we’ve done . . . I’m the little sister now. I can’t say whether I agree with him or not, because I haven’t been allowed to have my own ideas about anything in a hundred years.”
Walther paled. “Marley, I’m sorry. I didn’t . . . I didn’t think . . .”
“Why should you? You’re the one who got out. Did you ever even look for me? Or did you just assume I was in hiding somewhere, because if you really looked, you knew you’d find me here?” Marlis shook her head. “I’m not mad at you for getting away. I could never be mad at you for that. But I’m disappointed that you’re so quick to point fingers at me for echoing the only opinions I’ve been allowed to have for a century.”
“Okay, let’s all take a breath.” I stood, taking a step forward—not quite putting myself between them, but making myself much harder to ignore. “I’m sorry, Marlis. This has been a long night, and it’s not over yet. We didn’t know how bad things were here.”
“Silences keeps to itself,” said Marlis bitterly. “We always have. We were that quiet alchemist’s Kingdom before Rhys took over, and now we’re just quiet because we have nothing to brag about. All our friends and allies left us. The Cu Sidhe. The Huldra. All of them turned and walked away, and left us. All the ties we worked so long to build have been severed. Everything our family built has been broken.”
“Maybe we can put it all back together,” I said. “We have glue. You said they made you help put the members of the royal family back to sleep when the elf-shot wore off?”
Marlis nodded. “Our mother and father; our aunt and uncle, the rightful Queen and King of Silences. And our cousin Torsten, the Crown Prince. If they ever woke . . .”
“If they woke, they’d be within their rights to try to take back their throne, especially now that we know that the woman who gave it to Rhys didn’t have the authority to make that sort of decision,” I said. “They’re all alive? None of them have been injured too badly?”
Marlis looked away again.
I frowned. Walther, on the other hand, seemed to know what her silence meant. “Marley, what did they make you do?” he asked, voice barely rising above a whisper.
I appreciated the fact that he hadn’t asked her what she’d done—what she had done was have a century of her life stolen from her by drugs that she’d been forced to manufacture—but the message was the same. Marlis dropped her head, looking down at her feet. She stayed that way, silent as a statue, while Ceres rose from the table and walked around to stand behind her, putting her hands on the smaller woman’s shoulders.
“Your mother was Amandine of Faerie, was she not?” Ceres asked, attention fixing on me. “She must have taught you the importance of blood.”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea,” I said. Amandine hadn’t taught me much at all about the importance of blood—or the importance of anything else, really. Amandine’s lessons had always focused more on how much of a disappointment I was to her, too fae to be human, too human to be fae. The fact that she’d chosen my father without any input from as-yet-unborn me didn’t seem to be a factor in her judgments.
“Then you know that some potions work better when they contain it. Some potions wouldn’t work at all without it. And if blood is good, bone could be said to be even better . . .”
I went very still. Her words made sense, taken individually, but as a whole, they painted the beginnings of a picture that I didn’t want to see.
Oberon’s Law forbids killing. Just killing: nothing more, nothing less. Elf-shot is allowed. Loyalty potions and brainwashing are allowed. And anything that doesn’t quite kill, well, that’s all right, too. That’s not a death. All he ever told us not to do to each other was murder. Everything else is still on the table.
“How much, Marley?” asked Walther softly.
“Uncle Holger’s left hand, to the elbow; Mother’s right foot, to the knee. An inch at a time, over the course of a century. He . . . he likes to talk about how much he wants their eyes, their tongues, all the pieces that could make the potions stronger, but he won’t take them. Not yet, not while anyone remembers the war. He leaves them lying on their biers in the crypt. He says anyone who wants to see the faces of their old oppressors is welcome, and he makes me take people down to see them. Sometimes, if they’re trying to curry the King’s favor—and everyone wants to curry the King’s favor, because the only thing worse than having it is knowing that you never will—they spit on them. They spit on our family, Wal—Walther. Even people who should still be loyal spit on our family, because doing anything else risks the King’s wrath, and I just . . . I did it, I didn’t tell him no, and I didn’t even think that what I was doing was wrong, because he t-told me to . . .”
Finally, at the end of her speech, Marlis burst into tears. Walther put his arms around her and held her close, letting her sob out a century of abuse and frustrations against the fabric of his shirt. Marlis clung to him like she was afraid he was an illusion. I couldn’t fault her for that. After as long as she’d been dealing with King Rhys and his loyalty tinctures, anything that smacked of freedom or independent thought had to feel like a dream—a beautiful one, but not one that could ever possibly last.
Ceres stepped away from the pair, moving to stand next to Tybalt and me. “If you have any compassion in your bones, you will fix this,” she said mildly.
I started, glancing up at her. “What?”
“You are, as your cat says, a king-breaker. You defeated my father. You’ve done impossible things, and I choose to view your presence here as the beginning of one more impossibility. You could free Silences.”
“I’m not sure how you’d want me to do that,” I protested. “I’m just one person. I don’t have an army.”
“You have a King of Cats and an alchemist who has spent a hundred years perfecting his craft,” said Ceres implacably. “Even if this were all your resources, here in one room, you would have the makings of a revolution.”
“. . . oh,” I said. She wasn’t even accounting for Quentin and May—the boy with the High King’s ear, and the woman who couldn’t be killed.