Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(90)

You’re trying too hard, I thought. This should be easy. I’d done this . . . well, not hundreds of times, because there wasn’t that much call for my specific skill set, but quite a few times. Often enough that it had started becoming easier. Never easy. Easier was a matter of degrees: it was no longer like clawing my way uphill through an avalanche, no longer like drowning, no longer a matter of risking my life every time I tasted blood. It was still difficult.

You’re trying too hard, I thought again, and let go, falling down into the red. The sounds of the tables around us went away, replaced by the sounds of the gallery from earlier. This was my memory, not someone else’s: it was crystal clear, with none of the confusion or disassociation that I was accustomed to encountering when I rode the blood.

High King Aethlin was speaking. I ignored him in favor of looking at the crowd, trying to find some hint of tension or surprise. I couldn’t do anything I hadn’t done the first time—this was a memory, not a dream—but I had looked at the crowd the first time. I just hadn’t known what I was seeing.

Several of the gathered nobles looked confused by what was going on. Confusion seemed to be the order of the day. But the King and Queen of Highmountain looked angry. Actively, furiously mad, like something had disrupted their plans. And their handmaiden, that sad-eyed, downcast Barrow Wight, looked openly terrified. She was staring at me, her eyes wide and her jaw slack. How had I not noticed her the first time?

The answer followed the question without pause. I hadn’t noticed her because she was just a servant, and I’d been focusing on the purebloods as the important ones. I’d done to her exactly what so many of them had done to me. I had ignored her.

I’d known I was losing my humanity, but that was the moment when I realized I was never going to get it back.

I broke out of the blood memories with a gasp, pulling my mouth away from my wrist. The wound there had long since healed, leaving only a smear of drying blood to mark where it had been. I looked wildly around, searching the nearby tables for the King and Queen of Highmountain. Someone pushed a napkin into my hand. I wiped my mouth, and kept looking.

“What did you see?” asked Tybalt.

“Not sure yet,” I said. My table contained a Firstborn and a Duke on a hair-trigger. The last thing I wanted to do was trigger an international incident if I could avoid it. I kept scanning the room. “Is anyone missing? Do you see any holes?”

“Someone’s always missing,” said the Luidaeg. “That’s the nature of the beast.”

“Where’s the King of Highmountain?” asked Quentin.

“Show me where you’re looking,” I said. He pointed. I followed the angle of his finger to a table on the other side of the room, where the Queen of Highmountain sat surrounded by a group of minor nobles. She was laughing, a goblet in her hand and an expression of studious unconcern on her face. She looked like every other carefree monarch in the place. It was amazing how many of them were smiling and clearly content, despite the seriousness of the situation. They wanted to be released from their captivity, but apart from that, this was exactly the sort of world that they expected to be waiting for them. Fancy meals, beautiful rooms, and every need met without their being required to lift a finger.

There was an open seat next to her. The King wasn’t there. Neither was the sad-eyed handmaiden.

“What do you know about them?” I asked, without taking my eyes off of her.

“Verona and Kabos,” said Quentin. He didn’t hesitate. This was the sort of thing he didn’t have to think about. “He founded the Kingdom, she became Queen when she married him. They’re traditionalists. Highmountain predates most of the demesnes around it, because they’d been trying to get away from the ‘decadent’ coastal kingdoms.”

“Fae puritans, got it,” I said. “No surnames?”

“They’ve never needed one. No heirs, either. They’ve been married for three hundred years with no kids. Daoine Sidhe, both of them, and supposedly Kabos was in consideration for the throne of North America before it was given to Viveka Sollys, mother of Aethlin Sollys, third in line for the High Crown of Albany.”

It took me a moment to puzzle through that. Then: “You’re saying they’ve been in charge in Highmountain since before the United States was founded, and they don’t like change.”

“Yes,” said Quentin.

This conclave was the ultimate expression of change. Changelings and the untitled were being allowed to speak as if they were equal to monarchs. The fact that we were speaking about something that would impact us all didn’t matter as much as the fact that we were opening our mouths. King Antonio had been an asshole according to the people who knew him, but he hadn’t enforced the classic lines of status and standing: he’d allowed people to be whoever they wanted to be, providing they were able to fight for and maintain their positions. He’d been a populist, in a lot of ways. If no one knew he had an heir waiting to claim the throne—if the assumption was that when he died, someone else would be able to take Angels and run it as a more traditional monarchy—

I stood so fast that the legs of my chair scraped against the floor. Antonio had been an excellent target because he’d been alone, but the attack had happened at mealtime. If I was right, this was the same setting, and another attack could be imminent. If I was wrong, the King of Highmountain was alone somewhere, and could be in danger. We had a wealth of potential targets, and either way, he was a person of great concern.