Page 9 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)
“What did she want to speak with you about?”
“I’ll tell you later,” I said. There was no way I was going to start filling him in now, because I meant what I had said to Arden about not wanting to cause a diplomatic incident.
Luckily I was saved from having to say anything further as Madden, Arden’s Seneschal, stepped to the edge of the dais. Court was going to begin.
Tybalt moved to stand behind me and put his arms around me, positioning them so that they grazed the very top of my stomach.
It was the closest and most comfortable way he could come to holding us both.
I leaned my head back so that it rested briefly against his chest, then turned my attention to Madden.
Madden shifted his weight from one foot to the other, looking out across the throng that had collected in the hall.
Knowing that this was going to be a formal court put the sheer number of people in attendance into a new light.
Eira Rosynhwyr, masquerading as Countess Evening Winterrose, had put the false Queen on the throne after the death of Arden’s father.
Emboldened by the circumstances behind her coronation, the false Queen had never been very careful about who she pissed off.
I guess when you’re planning to be Queen forever, you stop really paying attention to that sort of thing.
During her time on the throne, she had played favorites, enforced rules arbitrarily and with no eye to the future, and honestly, that had been her downfall.
I hate to admit that I’m not constantly motivated by the need to make things better for everyone, but I’m not, and if she hadn’t targeted me for her cruelties, I would never have gone looking for the true heir to the throne in the Mists.
In a way, Arden owed her position to me, and if she’d wanted it more, she would probably be in my debt.
Instead, I get to be the woman who sort of saved and sort of ruined her life, and that was only one of the many reasons we were probably never going to be friends.
I leaned back on my heels, resting against Tybalt, and waited for Madden to call the court to order.
The room quieted further. Madden kept standing there in silence, just watching us.
He was a striking man in a room full of striking figures, with platinum hair streaked with veins of bloody red.
He should have looked like a candy cane with that hair.
Instead, he looked like someone who’d just been in a vicious fight, and deserved to be viewed with respect.
He was tall and broad-chested, with a fighter’s build, dressed in the livery of the Mists.
Every scrap of his clothing had been impeccably tailored, lending him an air of luxury and wealth that was only partially true.
When not serving in Arden’s court, Madden worked at a coffee shop down on Valencia Street, happily making only slightly above minimum wage.
He shared an apartment in the Castro with his human boyfriend, Charles, who thought the “queen” Madden served was the drag variety.
The places where Faerie and the human world collide are not always without humor.
Finally, Madden cleared his throat. The sound rolled through the hall, clearly enhanced by some sort of magical effect.
I paused, realizing I didn’t know all that much about the magic of the Cu Sidhe.
They were shapeshifters, switching at will between canine and humanoid forms, and they had sharp senses of smell, but did they have other gifts?
Maybe some sort of amplification to help their howls guide the hunts they used to accompany when we had access to the deeper realms of Faerie?
And it didn’t matter now, because Madden was speaking.
“Hi,” he said, sounding only slightly uncomfortable.
Behind him, Arden took her throne, and Nolan appeared, doing the same with his own.
They were a matched pair, both with purple-black hair and mismatched eyes, one mercury, one pyrite.
Looking at them side by side, and having seen the carvings depicting their parents in the main hall, it seemed incredible that the false Queen had ever been able to pursue her claim to the throne.
They looked so much like each other, and like their father, that it should have been impossible.
“Welcome to the Court of Arden Windermere, rightful Queen in the Mists, protector of Muir Woods and guardian of the Pacific Coast,” said Madden, gesturing vaguely to the thrones behind him.
“I am Madden, Seneschal of the Court, and you have been summoned here tonight for the sentencing of the pretender to my liege’s throne, the nameless woman known only as the false Queen of the Mists. ”
There was a commotion on the other side of the ballroom.
I straightened, straining to see what was going on.
A group of Arden’s guards—and she hadn’t been exaggerating about expanding her guard; I’d never seen half of these people before—were leading a tall, white-haired woman into the room, her wrists and ankles bound with carved rowan-wood shackles.
More ropes of braided yarrow were wrapped around her body and even crowning her head.
She looked furious, moon-mad eyes snapping fire as she looked around herself.
Her mouth was a thin, hard line behind a muzzle of woven rowan wood, and her hands were clenched into claws that dangled uselessly against her thighs.
Her gown was simple, gray linen, tattered and stained, but I could tell, even from a distance, that she hadn’t been exposed to iron. Arden was doing her duty as a queen. She was not embracing the false Queen’s cruelty as a torturer.
Tybalt’s arms tightened around me. “What is she doing here?” he hissed, voice low.
“As far as I know she’s been here in the dungeons the whole time. It seems like a waste not to have had her play herself, but apparently Titania doesn’t like to reward failure.”
“So when I saw her, that was…?”
“Karen Brown, under an illusion. Titania didn’t let anything go to waste.
” The statement might seem strange, but there was an explanation: several other people I really hadn’t wanted to deal with had been a part of the enchantment, despite the fact that they were dead or imprisoned or otherwise unavailable.
Blind Michael, Devin, they were monsters from my past, and I should never have had cause to fear them again.
Titania had accounted for that little hiccup by simply transforming people she didn’t need for other purposes into them.
Worse, she’d cast her own children, my honorary nieces and nephews, in those roles.
Tybalt snorted, breath warm against my ear. “Naturally. Why use the monster in your pocket when you could abuse a helpless child?”
“That’s Titania for you.” The guards were continuing to lead the false Queen across the room.
She glanced back and forth as she walked, clearly searching for someone who would speak for her.
She was met with cold looks and open hostility.
Rather than wilting in on herself, she stood up straighter, squaring her shoulders and adopting an expression of frozen unconcern as she kept walking.
When the guards reached the center of the room they pushed her into place, centering her before the dais, and stepped away.
This left her still-bound wrists dangling, pulled down by the weight of the rowan chains.
I inhaled, and realized part of why they were making such a public spectacle of her condition:
There wasn’t a speck of iron on her. Unhappy as she looked with her bonds, they were all good, honest wood and wards.
She wasn’t being poisoned by her own captivity.
By forcing us to acknowledge that, Arden was reminding us all that the false Queen’s cruelty had been a choice all along.
There had never been any reason to do things the way she had.
“We have asked you your name, repeatedly, that we might seek your next of kin to see if anyone would speak for you,” said Arden.
She sounded almost bored, and her voice carried the same way Madden’s had.
“We have asked, and you have refused to answer. So we call you now before us under the only name we have for you: false Queen of the Mists, you stand before us accused of high treason, kidnapping, unlawful imprisonment, willful distribution of goblin fruit to our changeling subjects, and the assault of the Crown Prince in the Mists. How do you plead?”
The false Queen drew herself up to her full height, which wasn’t as great as it had been before I’d been forced to pull the Siren blood from her veins in order to protect my people.
She was shorter and frailer now, a blend of Banshee and Sea Wight, and while she was still beautiful, she was less preternaturally compelling.
I still felt a little bad for stealing her Siren heritage.
I’d done it because I hadn’t seen any other way out of the situation she’d had us trapped in: she’d been using her Siren powers to control and harm my allies, and had even forced May to slit her own throat.
Leaving her with that power could have resulted in a whole bunch of death, and would definitely have resulted in even more injury.
And all that felt like making excuses for having done something truly terrible to her.
She may have been a throne-stealing, iron-waving bitch, but she’d still deserved to have her bloodlines left alone.
The silence stretched out. Arden frowned, leaning forward in her throne. “How do you plead?” she repeated.
The false Queen tilted her head gently to the side and smiled, a small, self-satisfied expression.
“Allow the record to show that the accused has pled guilty on all counts,” said Arden, leaning back again. The false Queen’s expression of satisfaction melted into shock, and then quickly onward to anger.