Page 30 of When Sorrows Come

Raj stopped talking immediately and reached inside his tunic, pulling out a small, leather-wrapped bundle. I held out my hand, and he dropped the bundle into my palm.

“Sorry, Toby,” he said, sounding chagrined.

“I know, kiddo.” Raj can never formally be my squire, but he’s learned when it’s time to stop screwing around and listen to me.

The other guards helped the Daoine Sidhe guard back to his feet and fell back, all three of them moving into position around King Aethlin, like they thought whatever had killed Aron was going to leap away from the door and kill them, too.

It wasn’t a completely unreasonable fear. I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood and squinted at the door, looking for the tangle and weave of a spell lain across it. There was nothing on the door itself, the frame or the knob, although the spells worked into the knowe gleamed from the walls, so bright I could barely keep my eyes open. It wouldn’t matter if I closed them; I’d see the weave anyway, burning bright against the dark absence of magic that was the world between the strands.

Hastily, I swallowed the last of the blood clinging to my tongue and released the spell, blinking away the afterimages. Being ableto see and manipulate other people’s spells is still something I’m getting used to—as much as I ever have time to “get used to” anything, rather than lurching from crisis to crisis like some sort of wind-up disaster mannequin—but the Luidaeg assures me it’s part of the same function that allows practitioners of blood magic to borrow the abilities of other fae. Magic is in the blood, and the blood is in the magic, and because of what I am, both will yield to me when I need them to.

No pressure.

“It wasn’t a spell,” I said, satisfied, and waved away the faint cut grass and copper scent of my own magic as I approached the door, moving slowly, scanning my surroundings the whole way.

Aron had moved too fast. That had been his first, and probably fatal, mistake. He was a pureblood, and the sickening feeling of cold iron that radiated from the doorknob should have hit him much sooner than it did me. Only he hadn’t had the time to realize the feeling was there, because he’d been going too fast, and his hand had been on the doorknob before the nausea could register.

I moved closer, swallowing my discomfort. Iron isn’t fun to be exposed to. It can be deadly if someone with strong fae blood spends too much time around it. Some types of fae are more resistant than others—we’re still figuring out where the Dóchas Sidhe fall on that ladder, but given that I’ve had iron poisoning bad enough to almost kill me twice, and I already felt like I was about to lose the dinner I hadn’t had down the front of my dress, I was willing to bet that “pretty susceptible” was going to be the final answer.

Ironic, for a woman who used to carry an iron knife everywhere I went—who still had that iron knife sealed into a rowan box in the back of my closet, just in case, and who held onto my last ounces of humanity in part because I might need to shift my own blood back toward humanity in order to use that knife again.

Tybalt stopped asking why I was so determined to stay mortal right around the time we figured out that I was virtually indestructible. He didn’t like the “virtually” part, but I didn’t like the fact that hewasn’t, so we both got to be a little bit unhappy, and I got to be a little bit human, just in case it was ever necessary to kill another Firstborn. You know. The usual plans a girl makes for her future.

Even if the doorknob had been made of cold iron, which itdistinctly wasn’t, having the same coppery sheen as all the others we’d passed, just touching it wouldn’t have been enough to kill a man. I knelt, unwrapping the bundle I’d taken from Raj and laying it on the floor in front of me. Avoiding iron for the boys meant their kits had taken one of two forms—antique or ultra-modern—and ironically, both options left them ill-prepared for high security locks. The titanium in Quentin’s kit was too thick, while the bronze and carved wood in Raj’s kit was too soft.

They’d graduate to hardened faerie silver eventually, when I thought they were ready for more difficult locks, and in the meantime, Raj’s tools would be good enough for the level of security I’d seen thus far inside the knowe. Most knowes don’t invest in very good internal locks. Why would they? You need to have made it past the wards and past the initial inspection, whatever form that took, to reach any door worth opening. It would have been a foolish investment of resources. I pulled the tweezers and jeweler’s loupe from Raj’s kit, leaning closer still, trying to find any part of the doorknob that didn’t match up with the rest.

It was so subtle I could easily have missed it, even taking my time and looking closely. On the left side of the knob, concealed against the shaft, someone had affixed a small mechanism that didn’t quite match the metal around it. It wasn’t a total mismatch, just a rectangle of slightly duller metal, like someone had failed to fully polish it. Carefully, I leaned forward and pressed against it with the tip of the tweezers.

It was a simple spring mechanism, but it was still deeply unnerving when the edge of the plate snapped forward and a needle stabbed out, hitting nothing but empty air. I held up my free hand, signaling the others to stay back.

“I’m going to need a minute to disassemble this safely,” I said. “If someone could get me a rowan jar, that would be fantastic.”

Yes, wooden jars exist. They’re not common, glass being so much cheaper and having the advantage of transparency, but they exist, and they’re not difficult for even a semi-competent woodturner to make. Rowan wood has a dampening effect on iron; it would make it safer to keep the little mechanism, even if there wasn’t much we’d be able to learn from it.

“Go,” snapped Aethlin, looking to the Redcap guard, who nodded curtly, spun on his heel, and ran away down the hall. He was probably relieved to have an excuse to get away from the corpseand the taint of iron hanging in the air. “Sir Daye, what did you find?”

“Someone set a trap on this doorknob,” I said. “Poisoned needle under a pressure plate. I mean, I’m guessing on the poison, since we haven’t given this thing to Walther to analyze yet—”

“Walther?” asked Aethlin, sounding faintly baffled.

“Oh, he’s one of our wedding guests. He’s also Arden’s court alchemist, and the one who developed the cure for elf-shot. You met him at the convocation.” I continued prodding the mechanism, trying to verify that it was as straightforward as it seemed. It didn’t seem to have any backup attacks concealed behind its thin metallic frame, but did I want to risk my life on that? No.

We were pretty sure I was unkillable, and to be fair, Ihadrecovered from half a dozen different ways to die. But I could still be elf-shot, and the poison still stayed in my system long enough to require administration of the cure before I woke up. Magic could still hurt me. If this was a magical poison—and who uses a purely mundane poison inside a knowe? That would be silly—there was a chance it could do the impossible and kill me.

As if sensing the direction of my thoughts, Tybalt cleared his throat and said mildly, “I would prefer not to be a widower before I’ve enjoyed my wedding night. Please be careful.”

“I am,” I said. “Anyway, whatever’s on this, Walther will be able to work it out in no time.”

“I have my own alchemists,” said Aethlin. “I know them, and I trust them.”

I did twist and look around at that, taking in the small formation behind me; Raj and Tybalt, the two guards, and the High King. Not a predictable combination from where the night had started—but an understandable one. “I am willing to wager a good deal on the fact that you have not spent as much time, even cumulatively, with your court alchemists as I have with Walther,” I said. “He has saved my life on multiple occasions, and I trust him completely. If your own seneschal could be replaced for some unknown period of time without anyone noticing, how can I trust that your alchemists, with whom you do not have remotely as much contact, would not have suffered the same fate? Hmm? Give me a good reason, and I’ll stand down. Or don’t, and we’ll use my alchemist.”

“You can’t speak to him like that,” snarled the Daoine Sidhe guard, whose shock and grief was apparently beginning thetransition into anger. Well, that was probably easier to carry, at least for a little while.

Grief is a weight that you can’t put down, only transmute into other things, and once it lands on your shoulders, you have to wait for time’s erosion to lift it off. We’re all Atlas, in a way. We carry all the sins of our past, and all the things we think we’ve lost, and we might as well do it forever for as long as it can seem to last.

“I can, I did, and I will, and I wouldn’t talk if I were you, since I haven’t seen the royal guard exactly covering themselves in glory so far,” I said, with what must have seemed like almost obscene cheerfulness. “I’m not sure how big ‘the realm’ is, whether it’s kingdom by kingdom or what, but Queen Arden Windermere in the Mists declared me a hero of the realm, and we’ve got a dead man and a poisoned doorknob and a missing seneschal and a Doppelganger on our hands here, so I’d say this is pretty solidly hero territory, and that means it’s absolutelymyterritory, and telling people what they need to do if they want this to work out for the best is a big part of my job.”

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