Page 28 of Queen's Gambit

I awoke to sunlight streaming through diaphanous white curtains, which were ruffling in a breeze coming across a balcony. The wind smelled like butterscotch, which confused me. Until I realized who was sprawled across me, like a big, sweaty blanket.

Well, in fairness, Louis-Cesare didn’t sweat, but he was warm enough to make me do so. Not to mention that Cairo in November still gets into the upper seventies during the day. During the day, I thought, blinking at the sunlight, and wondering why that phrase—

I sat up. “Damn it!”

“It’s all right,” Louis-Cesare said.

“How the hell is it all right? We’ve lost even more time and—what are you doing?” I demanded, as he scooped me up into his arms.

“Bath time.”

“Bath time my ass! Put me down!”

And he did—in the big sandstone pool that was masquerading as a bathtub.

I got out, of course, for any number of reasons, the first of which was that I was still dressed. Someone—hopefully my husband—had put me into one of the filmy nightgowns I’d brought along because this was supposed to be my honeymoon. But because it was my honeymoon, I hadn’t actually worn any of them for more than five minutes.

And this proved to be no exception.

“Give that back!” I said, and grabbed for the swath of silk that a supercilious bastard had just pulled over my head.

I missed.

“After you’ve bathed,” the bastard said, and started the faucets running.

That wouldn’t have been so bad except that the pool had a rain shower built into the ceiling that wasn’t so much a shower head as a waterfall. It had to be three-foot square and it started bucketing down, resulting in my slipping and falling onto my still bruised ass. It hurt, but when I started to complain about it, all I got was a mouthful of water.

Louis-Cesare got in beside me, not having had to waste time stripping because he never wore anything to bed anyway, and started soaping up my back. He didn’t use the loofa on a stick, which would have been rough on my still healing skin, but rather his hands. Which somehow managed to be both incredibly strong and completely gentle at the same time. I groaned and leaned my cheek on the cool stone side of the tub, just for a minute.

“That’s not fair,” I mumbled. “That’s cheating.”

He didn’t reply. He also didn’t stop. Not until my muscles were putty and my spine was liquid and I was about to slip under the water because I was so relaxed. Which I shouldn’t be; I had things to do, important things, and—

“The jet is fueling up as we speak.”

I looked over my shoulder. “The jet?”

“The senate’s airplane.” An auburn eyebrow went north. “The one we came here in?”

I tried to think, which wasn’t easy with the rhythmic kneading going on. “Where is it going?”

“We.”

“What?”

“Where are we going,” Louis-Cesare corrected, then got up briefly to drip across the floor and grab something out of his clothes. As usual, he’d flung them down beside the bed, because there was supposed to be a servant to pick them up. There weren’t any; the egalitarianism that was a hallmark of Hassani’s court ensured that the rooms were cleaned, but anything we threw down stayed where we’d dropped it.

That had left me acting as a substitute valet all week, if I didn’t want people to think we were complete slobs, but I didn’t mind so much at the moment. Didn’t mind at all, I thought, checking out the shift and play of sleek muscles in what had been called the best butt in history. Of course, it had been called that by me, but still. It had been called that.

The view was impressive, and that was before he turned around to walk back over and hand me something. He got back in the tub while I looked it over. And maybe it was because I had just woken up, but I didn’t get it. “Did I leave this downstairs?”

It was his turn to look puzzled. “Quoi?”

“After the fight. I thought Hassani’s people had returned them all, but . . .” I trailed off, frowning. Come to think of it, this didn’t look like one of mine. It was a small golden charm, of the type that looked like a tat on the body, but I couldn’t remember grabbing one depicting a Chinese character from the senate’s armory.

“Ones like it were found on the body of the thieves,” Louis-Cesare said. “All of them. As far as Hassani’s people can tell, it’s a key—it opens a warded door.”

“A warded door where?”

“We don’t know. But the consul has agreed to allow us to take this one.”

I didn’t ask “take it where.” I already knew. I’d seen a couple of the thieves up close, and with this . . .

Son of a bitch.

I started to get up again, but he pulled me back down. “The plane will wait.”

“For what?”

“For us. We need to talk.”

I turned around, because side eye wasn’t going to work for this. “About?”

Blue eyes met mine unflinchingly. “I think you know.”

I would have gotten out of the tub again, but he’d just follow me. That look said this was happening, one way or the other, and I wasn’t a coward. I was a resentful little lump with greasy hair, however—until Louis-Cesare started shampooing it.

“Stop.” I caught his wrist.

“Stop what?”

“It’s not—I mean, I can do that.”

That won me another look. “But I am already doing it, you see?” He held up soapy hands.

I went back to resentful lump status, because it was either that or explain that I didn’t want him touching my ugly head. Somebody had removed Maha’s elegant solution, and hopefully put it somewhere safe, so it was just the bumpy skin up there.

Thanks to her, it was no longer red and there was actual epidermis covering the burn, but it wasn’t back to normal. Like everything lately. Like the whole world, which was suddenly uncomfortable and upsetting and strange.

“Hassani made a tape for you,” Louis-Cesare said.

I looked up, and had to blink to keep suds out of my eyes. “What?”

“A videotape. Well, actually, I think it is a computer file—”

“Why would he do that?”

“I believe he thought it was the best way to have a conversation. We can pause it when you become—” He saw my expression. “We can pause it when you like.”

Which, of course, basically ensured that I wouldn’t, which he very well knew. He wanted me to see the damned thing for some reason. I wanted to pull on some jeans, strap on a fuck ton of weapons, and go murder something.

But then he started it, and I was stuck.

A T.V. screen that I hadn’t noticed flickered to life on the opposite wall, showing Hassani wearing his serious face. He had on the same outfit as last night, so I assumed this had been made shortly after I left the party. I sighed.

Louis-Cesare pulled me in front of him and continued shampooing and then massaging my ugly head while I prepared to listen to a load of bull crap. He reached my neck, and the wire tight muscles there, and I leaned into it. But I did it resentfully.

“My dear Dory,” Hassani said, as if starting a letter. He paused. “I hope I may call you that after everything we have been through together this week. It feels as though we have known each other for far longer, does it not?”

“An eternity,” I muttered, and felt Louis-Cesare’s chest vibrate slightly behind me.

“I consider you and Louis-Cesare to be friends of my court, and as such, would feel remiss if I did not finish our discussion, however uncomfortable it might seem at the present.”

“Uncomfortable for who?” I said sourly, but he was already moving on.

“As I said, I do not think that your sister, as you call her, is a monster—or a demigod, either. The gods seem to have begun their experiments by crossbreeding themselves with humans, as well as with demons and fey, and fairly indiscriminately at that. But the results were . . . a mixed bag. Some of the children they sired were mad, if the ancient myths are anything to go on, and the rest were either too weak or too disobedient to be useful. They frequently caused as many problems as they solved.”

“Iphemedia,” Louis-Cesare said. “She was a human woman who gave birth to the Aloadae giants by Poseidon. They were so powerful that they kidnapped Ares and required both Apollo and Artemis to take them down.”

I looked at him over my shoulder. “Hassani told you that,” I accused.

He looked hurt. “I read.”

“You read Barbara Cartland.”

“Shh,” he said, because Hassani was continuing.

“The gods did not want rivals,” the consul said. “But rather loyal and capable armies. Indeed, looked at through the right lens, that is what most of the old legends are about. The story of Lycaon, King of Arcadia, for instance, who was transformed along with fifty of his sons into the first werewolves by Zeus. Or the centaurs, who may have been a failed attempt at another shapeshifting army y Zeus, but which stalled halfway. Or the Spartoi, who were said to be Earth born warriors who sprang from the teeth of a dragon. We now assume “teeth” to mean DNA, which is often found in the roots of teeth, and which Ares crossed with the human genome to make another fey-human hybrid.”

“Can we fast forward?” I asked Louis-Cesare.

“He’s coming to the point,” he assured me, and then dunked me into the waterfall to rinse my hair.

When I emerged, I discovered that that had been a lie, because Hassani was still going strong.

“—Amazons, who were described as the daughters of Ares and a wood nymph, but nymphs in the Greek tradition are almost always fey of one type of another, and most of the Amazons do not appear to have been strong enough to have been demigods. This may indicate a fey-human hybrid which was facilitated by Ares—”

“Oh, God, make it stop!” I said.

“—but I digress,” Hassani went on, as if he’d heard. “The point is that the gods seemed to have replaced their early efforts at having children to assist them in their wars with attempts to make armies by hybridizing “lesser creatures”, possibly infused with a small amount of godly DNA to bump up their effectiveness. Which brings me to your sister.”

I sat up.

“The gods must have learned a great deal from their experiments, information they left with their fey allies, who continued their work. We both saw the results of some of the fey’s experiments, which were loosed on us at your consul’s court. They were supposedly the failures, and yet they were formidable.”

“Damn,” I said, and Louis-Cesare reached over and stopped Hassani mid-word, giving me a moment.

I needed it, because the consul was right about that much—the fey had been experimenting. I’d been running across some of their rejects for a while, including my adopted son and the misbegotten monsters the fey had thrown at us as cannon fodder. I just hadn’t thought that I might be one of them.

I scowled. Only I wasn’t, and neither was Dorina. This was—I didn’t know what this was, but it didn’t prove anything.

“You don’t believe him,” Louis-Cesare said, watching me.

“Do you?”

“I don’t know. But it would explain a great deal—”

“It explains nothing! My mother died.” I didn’t know why nobody seemed to get that simple point. “If she was some super soldier, she might still be here. She certainly wouldn’t have met her end screaming on the end of a pike!”

Louis-Cesare didn’t say anything, but I could tell that he wanted to.

“What?”

“Merely that, when your parents met, two lines of godly experimentation came together for the first time. Vampire from your father, and . . . whatever your mother may have been. Neither of the two strains may have been completely satisfactory on their own, but together . . . they created something new.”

I frowned at him, because that had actually made a weird sort of sense. Except for the obvious. “Then why the hell was she in Romania, living like a peasant?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “But she blended in well enough to fool even your father. Perhaps that was one of her gifts: camouflage. Perhaps she escaped from the fey, made her way to Earth, and went to ground, in the most out of the way place she could think of. Perhaps she thought she’d be safer in a peasant’s cottage than somewhere more prominent—”

“So she dates a prince?”

“People do fall in love, and she did not live with him in the castle. Perhaps—”

“Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps! This is all speculation!”

“Yes, it is. But what else can we do? She is not here to ask.”

“No.” I hugged myself. The water suddenly felt cold. “She isn’t.”

Louis-Cesare pulled me back against him. He didn’t say anything, and for a long time, neither did I, but not because I was processing. I should have been, but all this was too much to take in, and it brought up too many memories.

My mother’s house, snow covered and burnt out, like a reproachful corpse. The wind high in the tree tops, seeming to whisper: “Too late.”

Mircea, giving me a sketchbook that he’d made, with her image caught a thousand different ways, so he’d remember even as the centuries piled up.

Dorina, sitting on the slant of a roofline, outside my window. Showing herself to me for the first time as a transparent, spirit-like being. Not like the specter tonight, but softer, sweeter, speaking of hope and new starts and a better life for both of us.

Where was that life now?

“How do the fey even know about her?” I demanded harshly. “I didn’t even know until recently.”

“You mean Dorina?”

I nodded.

“Efridis,” Louis-Cesare said, his own voice tight. Probably because she was the fey queen who had ordered his possession. “She fought you herself, and had plenty of time to receive reports from others who had done so. She may have even seen the experiments that created your mother. As Aeslinn’s wife, she surely knew about them.”

“But she’s dead—”

“Yet plenty of her people aren’t, and she had time to tell any number of them about her suspicions.”

I didn’t like it, but it fit. Dorina had helped me to defeat a queen of the light fey, but had she outed herself in the process? I shifted uncomfortably.

“There is one thing that does seem certain,” he murmured. “The fey wanted her very badly. They traded a great many warriors’ lives for her, something Aeslinn can ill afford at this juncture.”

That was another point, much as I hated to admit it. I didn’t know how many fey Aeslinn had lost in the assault on his capitol, but it had been a lot. And his people had a really low birthrate, meaning that he couldn’t easily replace them. Yet he’d just risked something like a hundred soldiers to do a snatch and grab on Dorina?

My frown turned into a scowl as I contemplated the obvious reason why.

Louis-Cesare seemed to think the same. “The fey may not be able to recreate the events that led to Dorina’s birth, but they do have thousands of years of godly experimentation to draw on. If they have a living example to hand—”

“They could extract her DNA, study it, and make thousands of Dorinas,” I finished for him. “Or people just like her.”

“Not just like her. Ones loyal to them, brought up to be their obedient servants—”

“Not if they’re like Dorina!”

“But they won’t be,” he said gently. “However uncomfortable your early years may have been, you complemented each other perfectly. You acted as camouflage for her, while she kept you safe through your travails. Giving both of you time to make up your minds about the people you wished to be. The children brought up by the fey will have no such advantage.”

“And the fey timeline often runs faster than Earth’s,” I realized. “If they hit a patch like that—”

“They will have an army in no time.” He moved around to see my face, and his own was serious. “How old were you before you were deadly?”

I thought back, which wasn’t easy with the blood freezing in my veins. “I don’t remember.”

“Your first kill then.”

“I could walk,” I said slowly. “I remember toddling over to a wolf, which was trying to steal some of our stew. The Romani group I was with had gotten drunk that night and forgotten to put it away. It was winter; the beast was probably just hungry. But so were we . . .”

“You killed it.”

I nodded, remembering the warmth of its blood on my hands, the softness of its fur, the sadness I had felt at its death. “One of the women made me a coat out of its pelt,” I said quietly. “They called me Little Wolf for the longest time . . .”

Louis-Cesare sighed. “I do not think there is time to waste, then.”

No, but I’d been wasting plenty of it! “I need to talk to Hassani,” I said angrily. “I need to talk to him now!”

That was easier than I expected, as it was a smart T.V. that could connect to the computer in his office. I’d gotten out, dried off, and put on a robe by the time Louis-Cesare managed to get him online. But Hassani still looked a bit shocked.

Like I gave a damn.

“Yesterday morning, you were trying to ship me off to Whatshername’s temple without a word.”

“Hatshepsut’s Temple,” he agreed.

“With all this happening? With time running out?”

“As I believe I said, it would have reassured my people to see us carrying on as normal whilst the investigation was made.”

“But that’s not what you did. You took me downstairs—”

“Yes. After you made it clear that you intended to follow your lover—excuse me, your husband—and find your sister. It occurred to me that you might be the only one who can.”

“But your people must have seen something. They were all over that bazaar—”

“And I have shown you what they saw. I have held nothing back.”

“I need to talk to them, everyone who was there—”

“Lady Basarab—”

“—and I need to see the bodies. I know they’ve been gone over, but I want to see them again—”

“Lady Basarab—”

“—along with anything they were wearing, and that includes—”

“Dory!”

I paused, because the volume had just missed a shout. But he was looking a lot less prim and proper, suddenly. For the first time since I arrived, he looked like the man I’d seen at our senate. For the first time, he looked like the assassin instead of the teacher.

I immediately liked him better.

“Do you know why I help you?” he demanded.

“Because we’re friends of the court?” I deadpanned.

His eyes flashed dangerously, and Louis-Cesare tightened the hand he’d placed on my arm. I didn’t need the warning. I could almost feel the consul’s power, his anger, from here, and he was in his office almost a block away.

But I didn’t think the anger was for me, something he confirmed a second later.

“I lost ten Children in the assault on this court, killed not in combat, which would at least have been an honorable end, but by a coward’s weapon, a missile that tore through my shields and incinerated them where they stood. I lost six more in the fight that followed, chasing thieves and murderers through the streets, and another seven in the temple below us, battling the ancient curse they unleashed upon me. Twenty-three, young one. Twenty-three who drank of my blood, who shared my trials, who lived in my heart. Twenty-three whom I shall never see again.

“Someone will pay for that.

“Someone will bleed for that.”

“Fuck, yeah,” I whispered.

“But these are enemies I do not understand, who come from a land I do not know. I have only one card against them, and I am playing it. Find them for me. You know all that we do, and you know her better than any of us. And she knows you. You are two halves of one soul, yearning to be reunited. You will find her.

“And you will call me when you do.”

“I’ll call you,” I said. “If she’s left any of them alive.”

And for the first time, Hassani and I shared a look of perfect understanding.