Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(85)
“Would Duchess Lorden agree with you?”
That stopped me. Would Duke Michel have been so willing to shoot her, even knowing that his kingdom was landlocked and hence safe from Undersea reprisals, if he hadn’t known she could be woken up at a moment’s notice? The cure might already be changing how people thought about elf-shot. I just wasn’t sure that was a bad thing.
“Nothing we say here is going to impact the conclave,” I said slowly, feeling my way through the sentence. “I’m not running some secret poll where I find out how everyone really feels about the idea of the cure and then go and tell the High King how he should resolve the situation. You know that, right? I’m trying to solve a murder. Someone is dead. A king is dead. I need to find out who killed him.”
“King Antonio sent us citizens from time to time,” said Chrysanthe. “People who didn’t want to stay in Angels anymore. He’d buy them bus tickets, if you can believe it.”
“I can,” I said. It wasn’t even a surprise. Human cities did that all the time, bussing their homeless to San Francisco, where the milder weather was supposed to make up for the inhumanity of shipping people away from their communities.
“They were never mistreated, per se, or at least not by the Crown,” said Theron. “Most had stories about ill-treatment at the hands of other purebloods, lesser nobles who felt their household staff didn’t need to be protected. He’d send us the addicts, the ones already so far gone on goblin fruit that they could no longer manage whatever menial jobs they’d held before.”
“What did you do?”
“Do?” Chrysanthe’s laugh was small and bitter. “We gave them clean beds and brooms to hold, and fed them toast and jam until they were beyond even that. We buried them in safe places, surrounded by the graves of their own kind. Don’t look so stunned, Sir Daye. We might have found a cure for elf-shot, but a cure for goblin fruit? That’s a thing that will never be, unless we count the cure you’ve made for yourself—give up humanity, give up the addiction. Not a route that’s open to most people.”
The accusation in her voice was hard to miss. I fought the urge to squirm. She was right: my route out of addiction wasn’t open to anyone who didn’t share my bloodline or have access to something that could change theirs. Something like a hope chest, or my mother . . . or me. I had given that choice to the changelings of Silences, after we’d dethroned the puppet king who’d been tormenting them. That didn’t mean I could travel the world, offering it to everyone.
“So Golden Shore was well-inclined toward King Antonio?” I asked, trying to get the conversation back under my control.
“As well-inclined as we are toward any of our neighbors,” said Theron. “Angels buys our produce, sends us their broken, and refuses to change. The same can be said of any of the Kingdoms in this half of the continent. Maybe someday things will improve for the changelings. Maybe someday we can stop being so angry all the time. But that day is a long way from now.”
“Why?” The question burst out before I could stop it. “You’re purebloods. You could have whatever you wanted. Why are you so focused on the treatment of changelings?”
“I suppose this is where we’re intended to say ‘I had a changeling child’ or ‘I had a changeling sister,’ or something of the like,” said Chrysanthe. “That would be easy, wouldn’t it? It’s always easy to admit to someone’s right to live when you have a personal tie to them. We don’t have that. What we have is the memory that, before humans and fae met so often, before changelings were common, it was people like us—people who showed how close our King and Queens once were to the natural world—who bore the brunt of those prejudices. There was a time when ‘animals in the court’ was as bad as ‘changelings.’ So, yes, we’re interested in knowing things are going to get better for the changelings, even if we have to fight for it. Not because we have a personal stake. Because it’s the right thing to do.”
I took a breath. “That’s a good thing, honestly. We need all the help we can get.” Most changelings didn’t have stories like mine, where they got titles and responsibilities and respect. Most changelings had things much, much worse. And yet . . . “Now please, for right now, can we focus on the murder?”
“We didn’t kill him,” said Theron, without hesitation. “If you accuse us, we’ll give the High King our blood, and you’ll be revealed as a fraud.”
“Would you even be suggesting that I would make false accusations if I were a pureblood, or do you have some particular reason to think that I’m too incompetent to know who to accuse? Because if not, this seems a little hypocritical of you, given the whole ‘we speak for the changelings’ position you claim to take. And I’m better at reading blood than High King Aethlin. Just so you know. Look: I don’t think you killed him. For one thing, you’re too obvious as suspects. For another, killing him doesn’t stop the conclave. If you were going to break the Law, you’d have broken it in a way that would bury the cure for a few hundred years, and give you what you both seem to want so badly.” The pair looked uncomfortable, Chrysanthe shifting her weight from hoof to hoof while Theron twisted in his chair. “What I need to know is this: can you think of anything that would mess with time, which could be done easily, by someone who didn’t necessarily have a natural gift for it?”