Page 52 of When Sorrows Come

“Oh, no? Why not try asking the Crown Prince, greatest living threat to his father’s rule? I’m sure he would have a few things to say about tyranny.”

Fiac still wasn’t reacting. That’s the trouble with lie detectors, whether magical or mundane: they can’t help you if the person you’re trying to catch genuinely believes what they’re saying is the truth. Still, maybe I was missing something. Carefully, I asked, “Crown Prince Quentin Sollys?”

“What, was there ever another one?” The Doppelganger sipped its water, seemingly unperturbed. “He was sent away on ‘blind fosterage,’ and disappeared, just as he was getting old enough to learn the truth about his parents. If you could find him—if he’s even still alive—he could tell you a great many things.”

Only the presence of the guards, who probably didn’t know where Quentin was being fostered, kept me from busting out laughing. If I’d looked at Cassandra or Tybalt, I would have lost my composure instantly. Instead, I schooled my face to careful neutrality and said, “That’s an interesting way to look at things, since blind fosterage has been a tradition for centuries. Can you tell me about the High King’s tyranny?”

“The usual. Theft of land, theft of crown, theft of the lives of the hundreds of common folk who serve and suffer under him, who should be free to pursue their own passions in life, not serve at the pleasure of an unforgiving king.” The Doppelganger sipped its water again. It seemed to be enjoying this. “All kings are monsters.”

“It sounds like you want to overthrow the entire monarchal system.” That was a lot more ambitious than I had ever been. Sure I’d replaced a couple of monarchs who weren’t treating their people fairly, but I had never aspired to taking down the system, mostly because I didn’t feel like I was in any way qualified to decide what was going to come next. Democracy didn’t seem to work all that much better; it just came with fewer beheadings.

“No,” said the Doppelganger. “The people I’m working for aren’t interested in throwing a perfectly good system away. They just want to make sure it’s replaced by something closer to what it was always intended to be, and that begins with putting the rightful King on the High Throne.”

I raised an eyebrow. This was all sounding very calm and logical, and when added to the speech the Doppelganger had given us upon our arrival, it pointed to one clear conspirator. But surely noone who was going to make a run at the High King would be that stupid?

“So tell me,” I said pleasantly, “how long have you been working for the Shallcross family?”

The Doppelganger sipped its water one last time before putting the tumbler calmly down, transforming again, this time into an exact duplicate of Tybalt. “They were always meant to hold the High Throne, you know,” it said, in an eerie replica of his voice. “No one knew about the iron in the harbor, but the convocation that was called somehow locked king to kingdom, rather than looking at what was best for the continent. It should have been High King Shallcross of Maples, not High King Sollys. The theft was committed in the dead of night, quick and clean and all but unremarked. You serve an imposter.”

“And it was a long time ago, and if your employers were going to try and do something about it, that should have happened almost as long ago,” I said. “You’ve condemned yourself for nothing more than sour grapes. I hope they paid you enough to justify losing everything.”

“We’ll see who loses everything,” said the Doppelganger, and leapt, heading straight for the High King, hands up, fingers hooked, and claws exposed.

The guards had taken the creature’s weapons away and given it no replacements. But Tybalt was a King of Cats. He didn’t have weapons that could be taken away, and no matter how much he shifted his form toward the Daoine Sidhe “ideal,” he would always have his claws. The Doppelganger’s recreation of those claws were easily an inch long and wickedly sharp, primed to strike and cut.

“Look out!” I shouted. I know better than to get in the way of Tybalt’s claws, whether or not they were really his. Tybalt slashed my throat open with them once, when he was under the control of the false Queen of the Mists, who had used the talents inherited from the Siren side of her heritage to seize his will and turn him into her puppet. I’d been more mortal then, but it had still hurt like hell, and poor Tybalt had been shy of touching me for what had felt like weeks afterward, convinced that any moment I was going to come to my senses and blame him for what he’d done.

I couldn’t say for sure whether he’d react the same way to me getting flensed by a Doppelganger wearing his face, but I could say that I didn’t want to find out right before my wedding night. Thereare some sacrifices too great to be made even for the sake of a High King. Still, I wasn’t going to go back to Quentin and tell him I’d stood idly by while his father died. I drew my knife, angling my body in front of the High King, ready to defend him. Cassandra, wisely, had already taken a step back, early enough that I guessed she’d seen this moment coming—although not with enough time to give us a warning. Stupid prophetic gifts.

Two things happened at the same time. One of the guards drew his sword with the distinct shimmering twang of metal scraping against hide, and Tybalt leapt, matching the Doppelganger’s approach with his own. He roared as he moved, and the two of them became, briefly, a rolling, roiling ball of limbs and flailing claws. I backed up, knife at the ready, prepared to defend myself if necessary. It didn’t seem likely to be necessary.

One of the Tybalts caught the other by the hair and slammed his forehead into the wall. There was a cracking sound, and the Tybalt who’d been injured groaned, swiping feebly around behind himself. I wanted to intervene. It wasn’t like I was exactly concerned about my own safety. But when I tried to press forward, Tybalt waved me off, and I had to trust that my centuries-old fiancé could handle himself against a shapeshifter bad enough at infiltration to have made such obvious mistakes.

Tybalt slammed the other Tybalt’s head against the wall again, and the second Tybalt blurred, features melting into a mixture of Tybalt’s and Nessa’s, wavering like it couldn’t decide which face was more likely to see it to safety. A trickle of greenish blood ran down its cheek from a cut just under the eye.

“Ack,” it said.

“Good job, hon,” I said brightly. “Excellent violence. A plus.”

There was a noise from behind me, and I turned just in time to watch the second guard pull a dagger that was shaped remarkably like my own out of the High King’s back. Aethlin fell silently, eyes very wide.

“Sic semper tyrannis,” said the guard, raising the dagger, and slit his own throat.

Fiac, still bound, watched him fall with a dismayed expression on his face. Then he looked at me, suddenly gone pale as whey.

“No lies here,” he said—and fainted.

thirteen

“Sire!” I dropped myknife and rushed to kneel at the High King’s side, falling to my knees and reaching for his head, like that was going to help when he’d just been stabbed in the back. The remaining guard was standing next to Fiac, sword in hand, looking baffled. His position was probably why the second Doppelganger hadn’t killed them both.

“Is he alive?” asked Fiac, who had risen from the floor after a relatively short period of shocked unconsciousness.

“Yes, for now,” I said, already regretting the speed with which I’d dropped my knife. Approaching the fallen High King with a weapon in my hand hadn’t seemed like a good idea, in the half-second I’d been given to decide what was or wasn’t a good idea. And now here I was, with no reasonable means of making myself bleed.

“He doesn’t have long,” said Cassandra. “Aunt Birdie—”

“I know. Iknow.”

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