Death's Mistress (Dorina Basarab, #2)(12)

“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?”