“Once your ring is done, you can activate it whenever you like.” Pressing a forefinger against the ring of asparagus, the Luidaeg murmured a string of hissing, rolling syllables that didn’t sound like anything else I’d ever heard. The air around us chilled, dropping in temperature until it felt like we were standing on the shore just as the tide rolled in.
Karen shivered. The Luidaeg raised her eyes.
“Patrick, if you would?”
Patrick nodded, picking up a piece of potato from his own plate. He weighed it briefly in his hand before lobbing it across the circle. Rather than flying straight into the Luidaeg’s lap, it stopped in midair, frozen above the asparagus. The Luidaeg looked pleased with herself.
“It’ll stay there until the spell wears off—ten, maybe fifteen minutes, since I didn’t put much power into it—or until something disrupts the ring. Like so.” She picked up her fork, leaned forward, and stabbed the asparagus. The piece of potato promptly fell to the table, where it rolled to a stop against her water glass. “As temporary prisons go, you won’t find any finer. As useless things in this modern world go, well, they’re tops at that, too.”
“Except that someone has apparently been able to set at least three, maybe more, and use them to catch people unawares. It’s like marshwater charms.”
Tybalt frowned at me. Patrick asked, “What?”
“I used to use a lot of marshwater charms—mixtures of herbs and intent that would help me see through illusions, or keep an eye on a target even when someone was actively trying to counteract my tracking spells.” I shook my head. “I didn’t understand my own magic that well, and I was a lot weaker. I needed every advantage I could get. I always thought the purebloods were stupid for not using the little tools—I’d keep a spray bottle full of mint and pond scum in my glove compartment and think it made me so much smarter than them, and I still started forgetting about those things as soon as I, personally, didn’t need them anymore. Don’t you see? Something that small won’t hold much magic, so even if the spell was cast by someone powerful, they won’t leave enough of a trace for me to track. It’s perfect if you’re a murderous bastard who needs to be stopped.”
“Your priorities are, as always, genuinely unique to you,” said Tybalt.
I elbowed him lightly; he took the blow with good grace. “I’m serious. Whoever’s doing this has already attacked us—whether I was the target or not, they knew harming anyone who was likely to be in that room would make me stop investigating. And it wasn’t Duke Michel.”
That got Patrick’s attention. “How are you so sure?” he asked.
“For one thing, Dianda’s not dead,” I said. “People like him don’t start with murder and back off to misdemeanor. It’s either one or the other, or misdemeanor turning into manslaughter by mistake. For another thing, he was way too willing to let the High King ride his blood. Sure, he wasn’t thrilled about it, but if he’d broken the Law, he would have fought more, because there’s no way he wouldn’t have been thinking about the murder when his blood was drawn. It’s the old ‘don’t think about pink elephants’ problem. If you have something you desperately don’t want people to know, that’s all you’re going to be able to think about when the time comes.”
“So we have two separate miscreants,” said Tybalt. “We know the Duke was trying to suppress the elf-shot cure. What does this second assailant want? October and King Antonio have little to nothing in common with one another.”
“Could be the same thing,” said the Luidaeg. “This changes the status quo a lot.”
I frowned. “The status quo . . .”
Quentin’s frown mirrored mine. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that sometimes we make things too complicated,” I said. “King Antonio was all about power, right? Not necessarily using it for anything; just having it.” But he had been using it for something. He’d been using it to protect his family, for all the good that had done him. “This wouldn’t be the first time someone assumed I do the things I do because I want to support the monarchy blindly as a concept, rather than because I think they’re actually what’s right. Me, Quentin, Tybalt—any of the three targets you could reasonably hit by setting a trap in my room would undermine the local status quo.” That was before taking into account Quentin’s position as Crown Prince. If someone knew about that . . .
“Dianda doesn’t affect the status quo on the land,” said Patrick. “She’s well-inclined, because she married me, but she has few standing alliances, apart from Goldengreen.”
“And being allied with a County doesn’t do much if you’re not also allied with the Kingdom it’s in,” I said. It was tempting to view the attack on Dianda as related, especially given that Quentin and Dean were dating—but I didn’t think that was common knowledge yet, and again, for Quentin to be the common factor would require people to know about his heritage. We weren’t seeing any sign of that. Quentin was vulnerable while he was with me; none of the attacks had directly targeted him. “So, yeah, we’re definitely looking at two different people here. But have all the attacks been about opportunity, or was the attack on King Antonio planned?”
“I don’t know,” said Quentin.
“Neither do I,” I said. “On the plus side, I might have a way of finding out who does. Dinner can wait. Can you pass your steak knife?”
Quentin handed me his knife. Tybalt narrowed his eyes.
“If you’re about to do what I’m certain you’re about to do, can you please do me the immense favor of not slicing your palm through the center?” he asked plaintively. “I know you heal with ridiculous speed—although you did not, I should remind you, the first time you decided slicing your hand open was an expedient way of getting what you wanted—but it still makes my teeth hurt to see you treat yourself so.”
“I’ll skip the palm this time, I promise,” I said, and pressed the knife against the top of my wrist, pushing down until the edge bit into the soft skin. I gritted my teeth. “You’d think healing fast would come with reduced pain sensitivity.”
“Nope,” said the Luidaeg. Her voice was soft. I glanced up. She looked at me with sad, driftglass-colored eyes, and said, “Those who heal the fastest have always had to hurt the worst. It’s the cost of being able to handle so much trauma. The pain will always be eager to remind you that it has a claim.”
“Swell,” I muttered, and yanked the knife toward myself, angling my wrist so I wouldn’t bleed on my dress. The skin parted and blood welled to the surface, bright and coppery and smelling of secrets. I wanted it. The sight of it revolted me, but I wanted it all the same—a paradox that had been becoming increasingly common since my heritage had been shifted more toward the fae. Quentin stiffened. So did Patrick. Daoine Sidhe were blood-workers too, even if their talents didn’t quite match my own. I offered the two of them an encouraging smile, lowered my mouth to my wrist, and drank.
The taste of blood filled my mouth and chased away everything else. As always, it made me feel stronger, more prepared to face the world around me. It was my blood: it should have had no strength to offer me that I didn’t already possess, and yet somehow, it did. Magic is weird. Magic has always been weird.
The smell of cut-grass and copper began to rise in the air around me, the copper trending, as always, more and more toward the bloody. One day I was going to lose the metallic aspect entirely, and just smell like a pastoral crime scene. I knew people were stopping to stare. I closed my eyes to shut them out, drinking deeper, looking for the place where the present would drop away and I would fall into the red haze of my own blood memories.