Page 27 of When Sorrows Come

It snarled at me, head snapping forward in an attempt to bite. I punched it in the face. It reeled but couldn’t break my grip on its arm without doing something more drastic than failing to bite me. It raised its free hand to slash, then stopped as Tybalt grabbed it, grasp tight enough that I could hear bones cracking.

“Wrong answer,” I said.

The king’s guard was moving into position around us, but hesitantly, as if they weren’t sure who they were supposed to be arresting. If this was the best the Westlands had to offer, maybe we were in more trouble than I thought.

“The Doppelganger, you jerks,” I snapped, gesturing toward the monster in question with my chin. It was still struggling against us, frantic to escape, and as we held on, it began to shift in our hands. Its arms grew no thinner, but they did grow rounder, softer with the natural fattiness of a mammal’s body. The creature itself shortened and straightened, long blue hair cascading down its back.

“Please,” pled the Doppelganger, in Nessa’s voice. “Please, they’re hurting me. Please.”

“You can look directly at her from only a few feet away, and your eyeballs aren’t melting,” I said, voice low, to the nearest of the guards. “You know that isn’t right.” She was beautiful in this shape, yes, but it wasn’t the sort of beauty that left a trail of corpses in its wake. It wasn’t the beauty she’d been wearing when she came to greet us. This was beauty within the normal ridiculous standards of Faerie, which could be painful, but not fatal.

“Nessa has served here faithfully for fifty years,” said the guard, wresting his eyes away from her with what looked like palpable effort. “She deserves to be treated gently.”

“And if you’ve known her for fifty years, then you know this isn’t Nessa,” I said. “We’ll find her if she’s still alive. You have my word on that. And if she’s stopped her dancing, we’ll find what the night-haunts left for us, and we’ll make sure her family knows to mourn.”

The Doppelganger-turned-Nessa seemed to realize its ploy wasn’t working, maybe because it’s harder to play the innocent ingénue in front of people who’ve just watched you change shapes and stab a visiting dignitary. She turned and hissed at me, displaying a set of teeth an anglerfish would envy.

“Got it,” I said genially, and shoved her at the guard. Two of them grabbed her arms before she could react to her momentary freedom. I pushed my hair out of my eyes, suddenly aware of the mess I’d made of all Stacy’s hard work. “Oh, Stacy’s gonnakillme,” I groaned.

“Not just Stacy,” said Tybalt. I turned. “I don’t fault you for having suspicions,” he said, “but did you consider, even for aninstant, the possibility of voicing them to someone in a position of authority? Not simply as an aside to me in the hall, but precisely and privately?”

“Given how quick she was to pull that knife, I think I did the right thing,” I said. “She was planning to kill someone.”Sic semper tyrannis—thus always to tyrants—that’s the sort of thing someone who’s come to kill a king is primed with.

“You couldn’t have known that,” said Tybalt.

“True,” I agreed. “If she hadn’t pulled a knife, she would have either blown her cover trying to argue with me, or I would have sniped at her until she did, and she would have been arrested without anyone getting hurt. But we needed her not to be wandering around the knowe as an unmarked danger, and we really needed her not to replace one ofus.”

Tybalt looked uneasy at that. “Not an option I would have preferred,” he admitted.

“So let’s not fight, please.” The guards were still standing there, restraining the Doppelganger, which now looked entirely like a naked Gwragedd Annwn woman—only not quite. She was wearing no illusions, and still her beauty failed to assault the eye. Yes, she was a gorgeous, naked woman, but she didn’t hurt to look at. Doppelgangers can emulate form, face, voice, and even certain mannerisms, picking them up from the people they copy. They don’t need blood to do it, either. Transformation is water magic, and wherever they come from, they’ve always been assumed to have more of Maeve in them than anyone else.

But because they don’thaveto use blood to fuel their transformations, they can’t naturally use other forms of magic. If they have access to their target’s blood in the beginning, they can use it to replicate that person’s magic, but doing that will use up the blood, like taking shots of some illicit energy drink. When the blood runs out, what they’ll have left is what comes naturally to them—shapeshifting, mimicry. This wasn’t Nessa, but it had been near her at some point, long enough to bleed her for its initial transformation. Without more of her blood, it couldn’t achieve that level of accuracy again.

“I suppose I’d be a fool to try to change you now, when I’ve already admitted my affection for the woman you are naturally,” grumbled Tybalt, and moved into position beside me, putting one hand on my waist. On the side where I hadn’t been stabbed. Hehad a tendency to avoid the location of recent wounds, no matter how often I reassured him that once I was externally healed, I was internally healed as well, and he couldn’t do any further damage.

“You would,” I agreed, with a small smile, before focusing on the guards. “Why are you still standing here?” I asked. “You need to get her somewhere secure, with a door that locks and a guard who doesn’t navigate purely by sight.”

“You don’t have the authority to order an arrest in my knowe,” said High King Aethlin, voice uncomfortably close. I looked behind me, and there was the ruler of the Westlands, a sword in his hand and an expression on his face that managed to mingle exasperation, concern, and amusement. He didn’t look angry, and there weren’t any arrows sticking out of him, and that was about as far as the positives went.

He turned his attention to the guards. “Take the Doppelganger to the dungeons,” he said, firmly, managing to make it sound like this was all his idea, and not the inevitable conclusion of the evening’s events. “Do not harm the creature more than it already has been, but do not allow it to escape.”

The Doppelganger hissed and struggled as it was dragged out of the room. It didn’t budge from its Nessa disguise. Apparently, the new plan was to let anyone the guards passed in the knowe see that they were dragging a naked, defenseless, unarmed woman away.

Charming. With the danger of the Doppelganger removed, I was free to focus my attention on the potentially greater, if less immediate, danger of the High King. I turned to face him, dipping into a low curtsy—which coincidentally put my hands on a level with my sheath and allowed me to put my knife away before Aethlin took offense at my waving it at him.

“Your Highness,” I said gravely. “You have my abject apologies for the disruption to your dinner.”

“I think if anyone’s supposed to be apologizing here, it would be me, who allowed a Doppelganger to infiltrate my knowe without detection.” He frowned then, looking pensive. “It seems odd, that such could be successfully done before one of the Firstborn.”

“Is the nature of the sea witch well known here, against the shore of the Atlantic?” If she had been in contact with the Roane of Beacon’s Home as recently as the 1700s, she might still be a familiar danger to these people, but Faerie, for all that it’s full of people who make octogenarians look like infants, doesn’t have asmuch in the way of institutional memory as you might expect. Purebloods forget things, quickly, when they can’t see them anymore. It’s like true object permanence is one of the costs of immortality.

“Well enough.”

“Then you understand that unless you make a bargain with her and meet whatever price she chooses to set for you, she can no more offer you protection while she walks your halls than a mountain can offer protection to the creatures who scurry on its sides.” I saw Oberon’s failure to act as a slightly bigger problem, but since the false Nessa hadn’t even forced him to give a fake name, I had no way of mentioning that without outing him, and I wasn’t willing to do that. Not even to the High King.

“I remember the stories spoke of bargains, but I don’t understand why the absence of one would cause her not to act.”

“The bindings that control her are tight ones, woven by someone even greater than she is.” And, apparently, even Oberon couldn’t remove them since she was still bound. “Unless you bargain with her—something I donotrecommend—she can’t help you.”

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