Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(98)

Only the plural was wrong now, wasn’t it? Queen Verona of Highmountain was alone, and like any widow, she was going to be grieving. She was going to be looking for someone to blame. The people who had caused her to goad her handmaiden into lashing out were going to seem like excellent targets. I dropped to my knees beside the body of the king, not quite realizing what I was about to do until the sword was pressed against the unbroken skin of his arm, and I was slicing through his flesh, looking for the cooling blood beneath. Not cooling; cooled. It bubbled slowly to the surface, thick and deoxygenated after the amount of time it had spent sitting in the dead man’s veins.

I ran my fingers through the clotted mass, bringing them to my lips and sucking them clean. Images flashed into focus at the back of my eyes: Kabos dancing with Verona on a balcony looking down on the city of Denver; Verona proposing they take advantage of this conclave to make things better for themselves in the Westlands; the handmaiden, whose name was Minna, weeping in the back of the coach that had carried them from Colorado to California. They were more impressions than full memories, perhaps due to the age of the blood, but they were enough for me to be sure of where the guilt in this terrible situation truly lay.

That wasn’t going to save the handmaiden. She had killed at least two people, both of them kings. No matter how good her reasons had been, no matter how much duress she had been under, she was going to be punished. If Tybalt died, or if she had hurt Quentin . . .

I couldn’t be sure that I wasn’t going to kill her myself.

Kabos had been dead before the world froze. I looked back at where I’d been standing, and was unsurprised to see the crushed remains of a red-spotted toadstool ground into the carpet. Another fairy ring, and I’d leaped straight into it. I had no way of detecting them or knowing how long they’d last—or how long that one had lasted before it let me go. Long enough for King Kabos’ body to cool. Not long enough for the night-haunts to come.

Too long.

Neither Barrow Wights nor Daoine Sidhe could teleport, which meant that wherever Verona, her handmaid, and the boys had gone, they had gone there on foot. I looked over my shoulder to the open door before looking back to the room. I paused. The floor was polished hardwood. Like all the floors in the knowe, it was impeccably clean. So where had that length of daffodil-colored thread come from, if not the lining of Quentin’s vest?

“Clever boy,” I murmured. Holding Sylvester’s sword unsheathed and low against my hip, I rose and started deeper into the chambers assigned to this particular pair of visiting monarchs.

I wanted to shout for help: I wanted to bring down the roof, if that was what I had to do in order to get Quentin and Madden back. I knew it wouldn’t do me any good. The knowe couldn’t answer in words, assuming it was even interested in helping me, and the only person I would have trusted to hear her name no matter where it was spoken—April—wasn’t here. I was on my own, at least temporarily.

There was a time when I’d only ever been on my own. It hadn’t been so long ago that I didn’t remember how it worked. I walked from the receiving room into a short hallway, which seemed extravagant even for housing intended for royalty, and paused. There were three doors, all closed. None of them looked any more or less likely than the others; all three looked like they would lead, one way or the other, to the outside wall of the knowe. Arden was fond of giving her guests sweeping views to remind them of the majesty of her kingdom, like a tour guide with some very specific goals in mind. I hesitated, looking from one door to the next, trying to decide which one made the most sense.

As I waited, I breathed. And as I breathed, the scent of blood tickled my nose. It wasn’t mine, or Tybalt’s, or King Kabos’. It was almost buried beneath all those other layers of bloodshed, faint enough that I would have missed it if I hadn’t been forced to take my time and decide which way to go. It was coming from behind the central door. Still, I hesitated, looking toward the door on my right. This might be a trap, or it might be Quentin leaving me a clue.

My dress didn’t have pockets. It did have hems, and I was carrying a sword. I sawed off a chunk of heavy, blood-soaked fabric, wadding it into a ball, and lobbed it in a gentle underhand arc toward the right-hand door. The fabric stopped in midair, hanging suspended for an instant before vanishing. A fairy ring. They had closed the doors they didn’t use with fairy rings. It was a logical, effective choice, and I wished to Oberon that they hadn’t thought to make it, because this was going to make an already difficult process unbearably hard.

But Quentin—and the more I breathed, the more I knew that it was him; the blood was whispering tales, even if it was too far away for me to taste it and be absolutely certain—had been smart enough to anticipate this problem, and had left me a trail to follow. I stepped cautiously forward. Time didn’t stop. I reached for the doorknob, waiting for the world to freeze around me. When it didn’t happen, I turned the knob and pushed the door open, revealing the elegant, mostly empty bedchamber on the other side. As in the Luidaeg’s rooms, one wall had been replaced by glass panes, looking out on the redwoods.

Unlike in the Luidaeg’s room, one of those panes had been smashed. No shards littered the polished redwood floor; the glass had been smashed outward, not inward. The smell of blood was stronger here. Quentin had cut himself on the glass. There: as I got closer, I spotted a small triangle of glass jutting from the frame, the edge of it outlined in red. There wasn’t much blood. Verona probably hadn’t even noticed it happen. As a Daoine Sidhe, she was attuned to blood, but experience had taught me that the normal Daoine Sidhe attunement was nothing compared to the appeal blood held for one of the Dóchas Sidhe.