Once Broken Faith (33 page)

“Turns out the circle was pretty half-assed,” I said. “It broke, I followed. You have nowhere left to run. Come quietly and maybe the High King will be gentle with you.” That wasn't going to happen. Whether she realized it or not, Queen Verona had signed her own conviction when she jammed an arrow into Quentin's arm. The Sollys family might have been able to forgive her treason and insurrection, but they weren't going to forgive a direct attack on their only son.

“I told you,” said Minna. “I didn't have time to set the traps in that room, not with you moving around and refusing to let me mark them. The fairy rings I scattered were weak, to prevent you being snared and stuck until someone came to free you.”

“That didn't stop you from killing my husband, you washed-out, death-born bitch,” snarled Verona. Her attention swung back to me. “You can't arrest me. I've done nothing wrong.”

“The Law may be the only crime that can carry a death sentence, but I'm willing to bet that between Arden and the High King and Queen, they'll come up with something to punish you for,” I said. “That's the trouble
with having a justice system built on royal whims. Sometimes they work against you.”

Verona turned to Minna. “Kill her,” she said calmly.

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

“No,” said Minna.

“Kill her or I'll kill your sister,” said Verona.

“I'm right here,” I said. “I have a sword.”

“You can't threaten her anymore,” said Minna. “I know you won't hurt her. Not as long as you want to control me. Leave my sister alone, and maybe I'll be willing to listen to you.”

“Didn't you just, you know, kill her husband? King Kabos of Highmountain? Remember him? He's dead. Maybe you should move away from her, and stop letting her tell you what to do.” I've been attacked and I've been belittled. I'd never been ignored while people argued about what to do with me. Especially not when I was heavily armed and already covered in blood.

Covered in blood . . . “Minna,” I said, causing the Barrow Wight to look at me in surprise. She'd never told me her name. Kabos had done that, bleeding out his secrets under my hand. “Who stabbed Madden?”

“She did,” said Minna, indicating Verona. “He wouldn't stop barking.”

“There's no crime in killing a
dog
,” said Verona dismissively.

“There's certainly a crime in killing the Queen's Seneschal,” I said. Verona turned to stare at me. I smiled. “Madden is Arden's best friend and closest confidant. More importantly, he's Cu Sidhe. You're not innocent anymore.”

Verona took a step backward. “Don't touch me!”

“Now you'd run? Now you'd flee? Because your hands aren't clean?” Minna reached out and grabbed Verona's arm, digging in her fingers until the other woman yelped and squirmed, trying to get away. “My hands were clean! My sister's hands were clean!” Her
face was starting to distort, becoming the monstrous mask she had worn when she killed the king.

Verona wailed.

I lowered my sword. “Let her go,” I said, softly. “She deserves justice. So do you. Let her go, and I'll take you both to Arden to stand trial. If there's any way to go gently on you, she'll find it.” There wasn't. Minna was going to die. But maybe she would be the last.

“My sister's name is Avebury,” said Minna. “She's only fifteen. She doesn't know what the world will do to you. She doesn't know what the world demands. Get her out of Highmountain. Don't let them hurt her.”

“Please, let her go.” I took a step forward. “You know that an easy death is more than she deserves. Let her stand trial.”

“Did the dog live?”

Minna's question was so abrupt that it took me a moment to realize what she was asking. I nodded. “Yes, but—”

“Then so will she. What's a hundred years, to a monster? That's what she made of me. She could only do that because of what she was.” Minna's face softened a bit. “She came to me after my mother died and said ‘do what I say and your sister will have the best of everything; refuse me, and she will have the worst.' My mother died as her assassin. This ends only with an ending, not with a pause.”

“Please, she's mad, please,” moaned Verona.

“This ends,” said Minna, and ran for the nearest window, dragging Verona by the arm.

I realized what was about to happen as soon as she began to move. “Minna,
no
!” I shouted, dropping my sword and lunging for her.

Her shoulder hit the glass. It shattered, and she fell through, dragging Verona with her. I grabbed Verona's arm, hoping to pull them back. Minna turned to look at me, briefly arrested in her descent. There was sorrow in her eyes, deep and profound and utterly resigned.

“I'm sorry,” she said, and jerked me forward with all of her Barrow Wight's strength. There was no time to catch myself before we were falling, all three of us, caught in the unyielding grasp of gravity.

That was all we were caught in. Minna let us both go and fell with her eyes closed and a beatific smile on her face. Verona screamed, grabbing first at the Barrow Wight and then at me, like we could somehow stop her fall. I pushed her away. I couldn't save her, not now, not with the skills I possessed; all I could do was hope that she wouldn't suffer overly much.

I tried to go limp as I fell, hoping it would minimize the pain of my impact with the ground, which was rushing up on me faster and faster, becoming a black sheet that blanketed my vision and blocked out everything else.

This is gonna suck,
I thought.

Then I hit the ground, and everything disappeared.

C
ONSCIOUSNESS CAME ON LIKE a flipped switch: one moment I wasn't in the world, and the next moment I was. There was no pain. That was probably a good sign. While I was pretty sure that it was possible for me to experience such profound trauma that I lost the ability to feel pain, one little fall from an impossible height wasn't going to be enough to do it.

I opened my eyes.

The ceiling was redwood, spangled with the cutout shapes of stained-glass stars in blackberry purple and deep sea blue. Matching shades covered the lights, keeping them from becoming too bright. I blinked twice, and decided to skip the whole process of testing my body to see whether it still worked. Either it did, or it didn't. There were no other options.

I sat up. A wave of dizziness swept over me, forcing me to throw my hand to the side to brace myself. It hit a softly padded surface. I looked down. I was sitting on a bed, sheets beneath me and patchwork quilt atop me. I was also clean. There was no blood on my clothing, which had been changed while I was asleep, replaced by a simple white cotton shift with a drawstring neck. Tiny
blackberry flowers had been embroidered around the neck, white on white, virtually invisible save for the tiny pops of yellow at their centers. I was still in Muir Woods, then. Arden seemed to have an almost compulsive need to spatter blackberry symbolism on everything she owned, just to make sure people knew it was hers. I couldn't blame her for that, considering how long she'd been exiled from her family's throne. Sure, I would have done the claiming with a label-maker, but to each their own.

“What the
hell
do you think you're doing?” I turned toward the voice and found a slim, short woman with pale skin and sharp features standing in the doorway, arms crossed and dragonfly wings beating a mad tattoo in the air behind her. A sleek, short-cropped pageboy haircut framed her face in black silk, making her look like the poster girl for medical responsibility. “You need to lie back down, now.”

“Hi, Jin,” I said, pushing the quilt back. My legs were bare, although my shift extended to mid-thigh—long enough for decency. I rotated my left ankle experimentally. It moved smoothly and without that little catch that it had been showing before. “Did I rebreak my ankle? Where were you before?”

“I went out the window when they came in. Unlike some people, I can fly. Toby, I need you to look at me.” There was something wrong with her voice. I had heard her in distress before; had heard her struggling to save a patient who she thought was not going to willingly stay. I had never heard her sound so
serious
. Startled, I looked back at her.

Jin wasn't frowning, exactly. Her expression was one of profound and absolute sorrow. I felt myself go cold. “Toby—”

“When did he die?” The question came out surprisingly even. My voice didn't shake. My voice didn't do anything. The words fell between us like stones in a wall,
and part of me knew that this had always been the way things had to be. I didn't get the happy ending, the man who loved me and the bouquet of roses in my hand. The world has never, never been that kind. Not where I'm concerned.

Jin blinked, sorrow fading into confusion. “When did who die?”

“Tybalt. That's why I was screaming for you before, remember? So you could try to save him?” He'd lost so much blood. It was easy to forget that for other people, blood loss was a dangerous problem, not just an inconvenience to be fixed with Pop Tarts and protein. I'd become so accustomed to being invulnerable that I'd allowed myself to believe everyone I cared about was, too.

Maybe if Verona hadn't interrupted her. Maybe if she'd been allowed to work. Maybe if we'd gotten the elf-shot into his arm a little sooner.

You can hang the stars on maybe, but they won't light up the sky.

“Oh, sweet Titania, Toby, no.” Jin's face relaxed as she understood. “Tybalt is
fine
. I was able to patch up his remaining injuries and give him a potion to help regenerate the blood he lost. He may be sore when he wakes up, but he's alive. He's going to be perfectly healthy. There won't even be a scar.”

I stared at her. “What?”

“Tybalt is recovering. He's still asleep because the conclave isn't over, and we don't have permission from the High King to wake anyone, but he isn't going to die.”

None of this made sense. “Then why—”

“
You
died.”

I froze.

Jin kept talking. “I saw you fall. I was hiding on the roof of the tower, trying to decide whether it was safe to go for help, and when you came out of the window, I went after you. You landed at the base of the tower, and
you were . . . you were
broken
, October. I don't have the words for what I saw when I looked at you, except to say that I never want to see anything like that again. I didn't rebreak your ankle.
You
did, when you fell. You broke . . . I think you broke every bone in your body, and even a few that shouldn't have been breakable. You
shattered
yourself.”

“Oh.”

“Yours wasn't the only body there, but you were the only one still breathing. I don't know
how
you were still breathing. You should have been dead before I could reach you. I was trying to figure out how to move you when Queen Windermere appeared. The pixies had gone to find her.” Jin shook her head. “I gave you an anesthetic, and we carried you back into the knowe. It took me three hours to set your bones, Toby. Three
hours
. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle.”

“I guess it was a longer fall than I thought.” The words sounded weak even to my own ears.

Jin glared at me. “You think? As soon as your bones were set, the Luidaeg brought me a decanter filled with blood. She said she owed it to you. I've been feeding you the blood of a Firstborn for the last two days, watching your body put itself back together after a fall you should never have been able to walk away from. You died, I'm sure of it. I don't know how you can be talking to me now.”

“I don't think it was the first time.”

Jin's eyes narrowed. “Explain?”

Haltingly, I did. How the false Queen of the Mists had stabbed me through the heart; how Evening Winterrose's wards had swatted me out of the sky and into the unforgiving sea. All the other near misses and narrow escapes that maybe hadn't been misses after all. Finally, I said, “I still think I can die. Everything that lives can die. But I think . . . unless my body is so broken it can't heal, I think there's a really good chance I'll come back.”

“That explains why the Luidaeg assumed you would live,” said Jin. “I'm sure that also explains why I need you to lie still and recover. You've been unconscious. You need to rest.”

“If I've been unconscious, all I've been
doing
is resting,” I said. “I need to find out what's going on. I need to tell High King Aethlin what happened.” They must have found Quentin by now, sleeping peacefully in the high tower. I needed them to understand.

Jin shook her head. “He already knows. He took a sample of your blood as soon as we were sure you would live. It told him the whole story.”

I stared at her. It was hard not to feel like my privacy had been invaded, even though what she was talking about Aethlin doing was exactly what I did every time I rode someone's blood without their consent. I would have said he could go ahead if I'd been awake, not because I wanted to, but because I knew that refusing would have been seen as suspicious. I would also have been able to focus my thoughts on Verona and her crimes, rather than allowing him to roam at will through my memories.

At least it had been him. He already knew most of the secrets I was tasked with keeping, although he might not have been quite so aware of Arden's insecurities. I pushed the sleeves of my shift up to my elbows, trying to cover my discomfort with a question: “How's Madden?”

“The knife missed all the major organs, and you did a pretty decent job with the field dressing for someone who has no medical background.”

Jin probably hadn't gone to a human medical school. Ellyllon were natural healers, and their knowledge of the body and its ailments was mostly instinctual. I decided not to point that out. I was already pissing her off enough by refusing to get back under the covers, and I had once seen her knock Sylvester out with a touch of her fingers and a gentle command to go to sleep. “Good. Arden
needs him, and he didn't deserve to die that way. Where are we in the knowe?”

“Oh, no.” Jin narrowed her eyes. “Get back in the bed. I am not going to be responsible for you running off and hurting yourself again.”

“No, you won't,” I agreed, and stood. “But I'm awake now, and I need to tell High King Aethlin that I'm his to command. I can't just lie around here waiting until you feel like I'm well enough to deal with my daily existence.” Especially with the conclave still going; especially with Tybalt still sleeping. I needed the High King to remember that I was here.

Quentin was probably going to be a sufficient reminder of the urgency of the matter at hand. I couldn't imagine any parent would want to leave their eldest child to sleep for a hundred years if there was any way around it.

Jin took a breath, looking like she was going to object again. Then she stopped, and sighed, and said, “I never win this fight. Just once, I'd like to win. You know that, right?”

“I do,” I said solemnly. “Next time I'm at Shadowed Hills, I'll stub my toe and let you put me to bed for a week, okay?” The idea was appealing. Peace, quiet, access to the kitchen . . . I could deal with that sort of break.

“It's a promise,” said Jin.

“Great,” I said. “Now where are my clothes?”

Her smile was slow, and more than a little sadistic. “Oh, I'm sorry, did you want me to do you a favor beyond saving your worthless life? That's not on the books for today.”

“Don't think I'm going to stay in here just because you refuse to give back my shoes,” I said.

“I don't think even you will go streaking around a royal knowe.”

“You call this streaking?” I held out my arms. “I'm
more covered than a tent. Don't think I won't walk out that door.”

“You won't.”

“Watch me.” I walked past her, choking a little on the cloud of pixie dust thrown up by her frantically buzzing wings, and out the door into the hallway on the other side, where my dignified escape was promptly thwarted by Sylvester Torquill.

“October!” he cried, rising from the lion-footed chair where he'd been sitting, nervous as a father waiting for news from the delivery room. He swept me into a tight hug before I could react, lifting my feet off the ground. I made a small sound of protest. He didn't appear to notice, occupied as he was with swinging me around and exclaiming, “Jin said you were recovering, but I never expected to see you up and about so soon! And looking so well! My darling girl, can you ever forgive me?”

“Not dead,” I managed to wheeze. “That means I need to breathe.”

“Sorry! Sorry.” He set me gingerly to my feet and took an exaggerated step backward, giving me my space. “Are you all right?”

“I'm still in one piece, despite the best efforts of gravity and the ground,” I said. I felt light-headed with relief. This was the closest thing to an intimate moment Sylvester and I had shared since the night I'd learned that he had lied to me for my entire life. He'd done it out of loyalty to my mother and love for me, but he had still hurt me, and that had damaged my trust in him. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed feeling like I could turn to him in times of crisis.

“Please don't do that again. My heart can't handle it.”

“I'm pretty sure you're not the only person who's going to say that to me,” I said. “Did you get your sword back?”

“I did,” he said. Then he smirked. “Even dropping yourself from a great height is not enough to defeat the art of a good blacksmith.”

“I'll try harder next time.” I took a deep breath. Let it out. And said, “I'm still mad at you. If you ever keep secrets from me for my own good again, we're done. I will ask you to release me from my oaths, I will find a new liege, and I will be
gone
. But I miss you. I miss my friend. I miss my liege. Please, can we make up now?”

Sylvester nodded. He looked tired. Daoine Sidhe don't age after they reach maturity, staying young and vital forever, but there were still shadows around his eyes, and he looked older than he had before Evening Winterrose came back, before I learned that he could lie to me. “I'm so sorry,” he said. “I will do my best never to break your trust again.”

This time, I was the one who hugged him, wrapping my arms around his waist and breathing in the reassuring dogwood and daffodil scent of him, letting it fill my lungs. Sylvester put his arms around my shoulders, and I allowed myself to take a moment and just exist.