Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(38)
Lowri’s cheeks colored. “No,” she admitted. “There’s to be an hour of drinks and small confections after this phase of the conclave, and all the servers were needed in the kitchen. We let him go.”
“So I’ll be going to the kitchen next, to see if I can find our only possible witness. Got it.” Sometimes I wonder how I got my job, given how bad I am at some of the basic tasks that it entails. And then I spend five minutes in the company of purebloods, and I’m reminded that no matter how inept I sometimes feel, I am worlds and miles ahead of most of the people around me. “Quentin, Karen, can you two start collecting the bits of King Antonio’s Merry Dancers? They’re sort of everywhere.”
“And what am I to do?” asked Tybalt.
I turned to look at him. He was still wearing a mask of cool unconcern, but that was exactly what it was—a mask. I could see the worry in his eyes. He was shaken by all of this, the dead body, the thinly veiled accusations from people we normally regarded as our allies. No matter how much time we spent together, parts of my world would always be as alien to him as parts of his were to me. That was oddly comforting, and gave me the strength I needed to do what had to be done.
“You?” I rose from my crouch, glancing down to be sure that I wasn’t about to crush any more fragments of Merry Dancer as I moved to put my hands on his shoulders. “You’re going to go back to the conclave. You’re going to do what you came here for, and remind those petty, squabbling jerks that you’re a King. Oberon himself said you were their equal. When they try to ignore that, they’re going against the father of us all. So you don’t let them ignore it.”
His mask slipped, revealing relief and confusion behind it. “Don’t you need me here?”
“Need? No. I have Quentin. I have Karen, at least until the Luidaeg comes. I can handle anything this dead body can throw at me. Want? Always. But as you’ve reminded me already, we can’t always put desires above duty.”
Tybalt’s mouth twisted. “I can’t help feeling as though this is a punishment for neglecting you over these last few days. I wasn’t there when you needed me to be, and so now I am to be sent away, like a second son who can never inherit the estate.”
“I’m not an estate. Even if I were, you would already have inherited me and oh, oak and ash, I’m sure that sort of thing sounds super-romantic in your weird pureblood brain but right now, you need to go. You need to go be a King.” I leaned up and kissed him, just a quick peck. “I’m in the Queen’s knowe. I have my squire, and I’m about to have the supervision and wisdom of the most terrifying woman I’ve ever met. I promise you, I’ll be fine without you for a short period of time. Besides, it’ll give you time to miss me more, so that you’ll remember never to pull this crap again.”
“Beware of women, children,” said Tybalt, turning on Quentin and Karen with the poise and exaggerated dignity of a professor offering wisdom to the young. “This is how they will treat with your tender hearts.”
“I’m too young to date,” said Karen.
“I’m sort of seeing someone, and I’m pretty sure Toby’s about to punch you,” said Quentin.
I punched Tybalt in the arm. He was laughing as he slipped into the shadows and was gone.
Lowri and the other guards were surprisingly silent through all of this. I turned to look at them. They were all staring at the door, wary as mice watching the approach of a cat. Ah. I turned further, to the object of their attentions, and offered a taut smile.
“Luidaeg,” I said. “Good. Now we can get started.”
“I suppose that’s true,” she agreed. She was still wearing her gown of crashing seawater and the tide, but the blackness had bled out of her eyes, leaving them green as driftglass, devoid of shadows. She turned those green, green eyes on Lowri and the others, quirked an eyebrow upward, and asked, “Well? Are you going to stand there staring at me like a bunch of old owls, or are you going to go do your jobs? I should warn you that if you elect for the ‘owls’ option, I can have you in feathers like that.” She snapped her fingers. Lowri flinched.
“Call if you need us,” she said, and all but ran for the door, with her people following close behind her.
The Luidaeg waited until they were gone before she turned to me. “What happened?” she asked.
“The same thing that always happens,” I said. “We were having a perfectly nice evening until it got ruined by a corpse.”
Her smile was full of teeth. “Oh, good,” she said. “I was worried that it was something serious.”
NINE
KING ROBINSON’S MAGIC SMELLED of walnut shells and Spanish moss. Its ghost lingered in his blood, like spices dusted over the coppery brightness of the blood itself. I sat on the floor next to his body, knowing the Luidaeg was there to pull me back into myself if I sank too far into the blood memory. More importantly, I knew that Quentin and Karen were watching, and would see it if I lost control. Karen will never be a blood-worker. Her heritage, tangled and strange as it is, doesn’t include any of Oberon’s lines. But Quentin would need to do these things when he became High King, and I refused to be the reason he was afraid of his own magic.
I raised my fingers to my mouth. I tasted the blood. The memory closed around me like a glove, and the world went away.