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She closed her eyes. ‘Won’t work, Em.’

‘Are you sure? Because I’m just thinking …’ I gestured at Creon. ‘They’re afraid to join because they’re scared I’m nothing but Creon’s puppet and they don’t want to risk ending up in a fae empire even worse than the one in which they’re currently living. Correct?’

‘Yes,’ Lyn said wearily, ‘but—’

‘So if we want them to join, we have two options. Either we have to convince them that Creon is actually a cuddly little sweetheart, which may be accurate but is hard to prove, given his unfortunate tendencies to murder people all over the place …’

He chuckled next to me. ‘Go to hell.’

‘…or,’ I stubbornly continued, ignoring Tared’s blink of bemused surprise, ‘we have to convince them that evenifCreon were evil incarnate, I’m not under his thumb at all, and ittherefore wouldn’t be a problem if I talked to him every now and then. Which sounds a little more doable to me, right?’

‘It doesn’t work like that, Em,’ Lyn said, eyes gleaming with bleak despair. ‘Theydon’t work like that. You can stomp in with Creon on a leash for all they care—’

Creon burst out laughing. Tared dramatically rubbed a hand over his pained face, muttering something about things we could do in our spare time and mental images he had absolutely no use for.

‘Oh, comeon,’ Lyn snapped, flinging up her little hands and silencing them both. ‘Listen, none of you have the faintest idea of how these people truly operate, alright? They very much aren’t alves or fae. You can’t impress them by being shockingly brave or vicious, because they don’tcareabout courage or viciousness or whatever other quality they consider synonymous with stupidity. All they want is … is …’

‘Order and obedience,’ Nenya muttered.

Lyn slumped in her chair with a grateful look to her side. ‘Yes. I think you might get it.’

I didn’t want to think about that – how much the place Lyn had called her home resembled the lair of a king who locked the vampires he created in his cellars like cattle to dine on. ‘So what do you suggest, then?’

‘I don’tknow.’ She sounded on the brink of tears. ‘If we try to go along with their policies and procedures, we’ll have lost the war before we receive their next official response. But bursting in and forcing them to see reason will tell them we’re not the sort of people they trust to deliver them victory, and they might just decide that joining the Mother and hoping for her sympathy will be a safer way to get themselves through these months unscathed. Which is obviously not what we’re hoping for, either.’

Silence fell. Nenya seemed ready to set her fangs into someone. Naxi was biting her nails with her small, sharp teeth.Tared gave the impression he was itching to fade to Phurys and kick a few locked doors off their hinges.

‘And you’re sure killing them won’t help?’ Edored said, looking puzzled.

Nenya let out a groan. ‘Edored.’

‘What?’ he said indignantly. ‘I’m just helping you think. Maybe we could scare them a bit? If they think we’ll mess up their libraries if they join the Mother, they might—’

Creon abruptly sat up next to me.

‘We’renottouching anyone’s libraries,’ Lyn snapped, rolling her eyes so hard I thought she might strain them. ‘I have my limits, you heathens, and either way—’

‘I wasn’t thinking about libraries,’ Creon said, throwing her a wry grin.

‘Oh, thank the gods.’ She sagged a little. ‘Any other plans, then?’

‘Noplans, necessarily,’ he admitted, sitting straighter, flattening his wings against his shoulders. It was that single movement that abruptly did away with the languid, uncaring manner of the all-powerful fae prince, a gesture that could not have looked more dangerous if he’d slipped his knives from their sheaths in the same breath – sharpening the very air around him in the blink of an eye. ‘But I just realised … Look, we’re all focusing on ways to makenotjoining us unpleasant for them, rather than on ways to convince them they’ll get what they want if theydojoin us. We might want to try luring them in rather than forcing them.’

‘That’s lovely in theory,’ Nenya said curtly, ‘but we don’t have anything they want. All we can offer them is risk and likely death.’

Creon shrugged. ‘We have Em.’

Oh.

Oh.

‘The bindings,’ I said breathlessly.

His grin at me was alarmingly alluring – that grin of whirling thoughts, of the Silent Death spinning his spider’s web around his unsuspecting victims.

‘Yes, obviously they want the bindings,’ Lyn burst out, throwing up her arms again, ‘but we can’tusethe bloody things yet! We have absolutely no idea which binding belongs to whom! And as long as we don’t even know where to start looking—’

‘We could promise them they’ll be first in line once we know, though,’ Tared said slowly. ‘Not that I like it much, but from a strategic perspective, that would probably be the first choice anyway. We need those wings.’