Page 75 of When Sorrows Come

“Don’t I?” I shrugged. “I know the King’s seneschal was replaced, and I haven’t seen the Queen’s chatelaine at all, even though she should be glued to her side during a crisis like this one. She’s one of the only people who doesn’t look suspicious if she starts following the royal couple around, which means her absence indicates some difficulty in replacing her. Yenay, do you know what the Queen’s chatelaine is?”

“Honey?” she asked, voice blank with confusion. “She’s a Centaur.”

“That’s what the High King said, too. A Doppelganger couldn’t replace her if they wanted to. But they must have tried forsomeoneother than Nessa in a high position. So who do you replace? Not the High Queen herself, she’d be caught in an instant. The Court Seer who everyone knows can’t be in the presence of falsehood without losing his shit, though? That’s a great cover.”

Fiac glared at me. I smiled sweetly.

“And you’re sort of stuck right now, because if youwereFiac, you’d be attacking me if anything I said was untrue, which means either you’re Fiac and I’m right, you’re also King Shallcross of Ash and Oak, or you’re not Fiac and it doesn’t matter if I’m lying, because you don’t have his magic, either in the positive or the negative sense. You’ve been faking it pretty well, but that’s not the same. So which is it?”

Quentin moved closer to me, eyeing Fiac sidelong, uncomfortable. He knew me well enough at this point to know that once I start breaking down the reason someone should be on the wrong side of my suspect list, I’m probably about to get stabbed.

Fiac scowled. “What leads you to this conclusion?” he asked.

“No competent seer would allow the King they served into a room with a known assassin present while searching for an imposter. There’s bad advice and then there’s ridiculously misguidedadvice that could lead to someone getting seriously hurt—as this did. You already knew the Doppelgangers were willing to use both physical weapons and poisons, and you still allowed the High King to leave himself underdefended in the face of the unknown. I’m told you’ve served both loyally and long, so tell me, how did that decision make sense?”

Yenay moved closer to me. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Gloating, a bit,” I said. “Antagonizing him, mostly. If I can get him angry enough, there’s a chance he’ll do something stupid, and then the fun begins.”

“You’re trying to get him to attack you?” Yenay sounded horrified, and more than a little confused.

“I’d like to wrap this up, so yeah, it’d be nice.” I smiled at Fiac. “Centuries of planning, time and resources andbreeding, sweet Oberon, thebreeding, doing exactly what your Firstborn commanded you to do, marrying a good Daoine Sidhe woman and getting yourself a crown, getting yourself within an assassination and a badly-worded founding document of the highest office in the land, and it gets fucked up by a changeling who wouldn’t be able to out-deduct the kids from Scooby-Doo. How does that feel? Bet it feels pretty lousy. Bet it makes you wish you’d chosen a different inciting incident, instead of waiting for the arrival of a convenient king-breaker. With the resources you have, you could have pulled this off, if you hadn’t been searching for someone to blame.”

Fiac’s eyes narrowed. Then he snapped, both verbally and literally.

“I have enough men still in this knowe to take it even with your meddling,” he said, reaching for his belt, which seemed bare, but nonetheless provided him with a knife when he pulled his hand away. It was a nice trick that I didn’t have time to fully appreciate. “The High Kingwilldie, and you’ll go down in the process of attacking the young Librarian who could have given your horrifying deception away.”

“Leave me out of this,” said Yenay, taking another step toward me. Apparently, she thought being closer to me was also worth being closer to Fiac. “I’m not a part of your power struggle.”

“You wouldn’t have been, if she hadn’t insisted on involving you,” snarled Fiac, gesturing for me with his knife. His face twisted, seeming to warp around the edges as he scowled. “This didn’t have to be so difficult, you know. If you’d been properly focused ongetting married, like you should have been, I could have killed you all and spread the blame across the kingdom. No collateral damage. No need for anyone to suffer.”

“Mmmm, no,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I’m suffering if I’m dead. What do you think, sweetheart?”

“I think baiting a treasonous bastard into attacking you is a poor wedding gift,” said Tybalt, voice garbled from the effort of speaking around more teeth than his mouth was currently shaped to contain. He reached out and settled a hand on the air about two feet above Fiac’s visible shoulder, tightening his fingers around an obvious obstacle.

“Pureblooded Cait Sidhe can see through illusions when they focus,” I said cheerfully. “Just in case you forgot that little tidbit.”

“I knew you were masked, but assumed it was cosmetic until I heard my lady’s line of questioning,” said Tybalt, tone reasonable. “I looked more closely once I realized there might be something to see.”

Fiac—who wasn’t Fiac at all—laughed. Actually laughed. “I heard the news about your mother,” he said. “It was carried all the way to the East Coast, faster than news ever travels. A new Firstborn! What a cause for celebration among those who’d never met her, what a cause for mourning among those who had.”

“If you think making fun of my mother is a good way to get under my skin, you’re dead wrong,” I said. “Making fun of my mother is a good way to make friends.” My hand inched toward my knife. I wouldn’t say that I was aching to stab something, but it would certainly have been a nice bonus to the situation.

“How shamed she must have been, to carry a mongrel child,” he continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “How painful for her to know that her bloodline, the flesh of her flesh, was trapped in a mortal vessel, doomed to die.”

“Not dying any time soon,” I said. “You made bad choices when you decided to use us as your scapegoats. I am not your excuse for regicide.”

“Oh, but you are. You just don’t realize it yet.” Fiac’s outline shimmered, growing taller, slimmer, altogether elongated, until his visible shoulder was settled firmly into Tybalt’s grasping palm, until nothing about him so much as resembled the Adhene Seer he had been masquerading as.

He was a beautiful man. Of course he was: all Daoine Sidhe are beautiful. Eira would have tolerated nothing less. His hair was the deep burnt orange shade of the perfect jack-o-lantern in waiting, and his eyes were only a few shades lighter, inhuman and compellingly bright. His clothes transformed with the rest of him, becoming the livery of a kingdom I didn’t recognize but assumed must be the lost, inconsistently lamented Ash and Oak.

He was wearing a crown. It was a nice touch, given everything else that had just happened.

“You have no idea what you’re toying with, little girl,” said the man—King Absalom Shallcross of Ash and Oak, I presumed. Yeah, making guesses doesn’t always pan out, but everything I had so far pointed to the man, and I like betting on the sure thing when I can.

“Neither do you,” snarled Tybalt, and whipped King Shallcross around so that they were facing each other. Tybalt’s illusion of civilization was slipping. His eyes had gone fully feline, pupils narrowed to hairline slits, and his mouth bristled with teeth. The stripes traveling along his cheeks and down the sides of his throat betrayed his tabby nature with perfect clarity. He looked like he was on the verge of losing control.

I wasn’t the only one who saw it. Yenay stepped forward, the precious ledger clutched to her chest like a teddy bear. “Please don’t get blood on the books,” she said, in a gasp. “They don’t deserve that.”

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