Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Eurydice
The invitation sat atop a tray, on tri-folded parchment with a golden wax seal. A hawk’s wings filled the center of the seal—such a pretty ornament, it felt wrong to break.
A minute before, I’d been woken by my handmaiden Eleyrie’s knock. As soon as I opened the door, she’d thrust the tray out to me with both hands. “An invitation from Queen Liora of the summer court.”
“An invitation to what?”
Eleyrie had no answer; she only had the tray and the letter. I sent her away and stood in the center of my chamber in my robes with the thick parchment in hand.
As long as I didn’t open it, I didn’t have another snarl to contend with. Queen Liora of the summer court. Highmark—bright and vain, as Faun had called them.
“Open it, or I will.”
Faun stood in the doorway, already in her leathers. She leaned against the frame with crossed arms. Had she been following Eleyrie? Probably; Faun seemed to have two sets of eyes and always to rise before the sun.
I extended the parchment to her. “You do it. I can’t read Faerish, anyway.”
She swiped the invitation from me and slid her finger under the seal. It opened with ease, the wax breaking in two, and she flicked the paper wide. Her eyes traveled down the length of it. “Oh, that first-rate bitch.”
I came around next to her and studied the looping ink as though scrutiny could make it legible. “Tell me.”
Faun threw the paper toward the bed; it fluttered to the bearskin rug. “She’s holding the Festival of the First Light. In two weeks.”
Festivals in the southern district usually constituted a full night at the pub, some carousing in the streets, drunkenness and song. They lasted a couple days and raised spirits. But here in Feyreign, they preceded a dance of death.
She strode toward the doorway. “Stay right here.” She disappeared into the hall, her rapping steps echoing away.
I crossed to the discarded paper and picked it up. Black looping ink, every letter of it foreign to me. As foreign as Highmark. As foreign as my own court.
Two minutes later, Faun returned with a red-faced Haskel behind her. His hair stood askew like he’d just woken. “Show it to me.” His voice was uncommonly gruff.
When I extended the invitation to him, he yanked it from me and turned it right side up. A second later, he slapped the paper with his hand. “Rhiannon’s not yet buried.”
Faun stood with hands on hips. “Exactly.”
Since the day I’d entered Feyreign, the ground had moved beneath me faster than I could keep pace. I had been right: the invitation was a snarl.
“It’s a break in protocol.” Haskel ran a hand down his beard; his blue eyes snapped to mine. “My queen, would you be so kind as to follow me?”
His queen. I tightened my robes around me. “Follow you where?”
“To the dining room.”
My brow lowered. “Why?”
“Because I haven’t had breakfast, and my mind doesn’t work as well when I’m woken by this one yelling.” He nodded at Faun and folded the invitation back up. “I’ll send Dorian’s squire for him.”
Dorian’s squire—did that make him a knight?
Ten minutes later, Faun, Haskel, and I stepped into the formal dining room. I’d barely gotten dressed, wiped sleep from my eyes, and braided my hair. The sun had only just gilded the room’s balcony, and somehow the table had been laid with a full breakfast spread.
Haskel closed the double doors and surveyed the room. “Check the other door,” he said to Faun.
She went about pulling away the tapestry, opening the side door. “Hallway’s empty. I’ve told them to stay out or lose an eye.” She shut the door, and a lock I didn’t know existed clicked into place before she replaced the tapestry.
Haskel stepped to the table, eyeing the food. “Are we sure it’s all safe?”
My gaze locked on a pot of steaming oatmeal. “Safe?”
“Don’t eat anything until I’ve tasted it,” Faun said to me.
“And if I do?”
She crossed to the edge of the table and swiped a finger through a small dish of jam. “You might be the shortest-lived Sylvanwild queen of all time.” She stuck her finger into her mouth and sucked off the jam. “This one’s fine. Care for some blackberry confiture on bread?”
A harsh knock rattled the double doors. “It’s me,” Dorian’s voice grated on the other side.
Haskel opened the door and gestured him in. “I’m eight hundred and five years old and I look less like shit than you.”
Dorian stalked in, his gaze thunderous. Now that he was here, so close, the aching in my chest eased; the longing to be near him increased. Did he feel it, too? If so, he didn’t show it. Cursed magic.
“Show it to me,” Dorian said.
Haskel slipped the parchment from his breast pocket and extended it. “Might want to sit down first, lest the top of your hot head blow off.”
Dorian swiped the invitation, turned, and read. Meanwhile, Faun popped a date into her mouth and chewed.
“The dates are fine,” she said into the thick silence.
Dorian paced toward the balcony, still reading. “Two weeks. Our queen not yet buried…”
Faun poured tea from a steaming pot into a mug.
She swirled and sniffed. “Better to be certain.” She upturned the contents of the mug over a pot of canna lilies; all of us watched the steam rise from the orange blossoms. “The first taste always goes to the earth which bore us. A useful Sylvanwild tradition when you’re toasting—or testing a brew. ”
She crossed to the table, picked up the teapot. “Not poisoned. Eury?”
I didn’t want dates. I didn’t want tea, either. “Tell me what I’m missing.” My gaze passed over the three of them. “Why are we gathered here?”
Haskel and Faun both turned toward Dorian.
Dorian lowered the invitation. “It’s a ploy to take you out of Sylvanwild. Queen Liora knows you’re vulnerable, weak.”
That stung. Yet it didn’t feel like a dart, just truth.
“It’s an invitation,” I said. “If an invitation in Feyreign is anything like it is in my kingdom, then I’ll just decline.”
Faun snorted. Haskel breathed out through his nose. Dorian tossed the invitation atop the table.
“You can’t decline, my girl.” Haskel’s voice was a gentle rumble. “The Festival of the First Light is the prelude to the Killing Fields.”
Goosebumps rose on my arms—a sense of uncertainty, of edged pressure like a knife. The Killing Fields. The Killing Fields.
I sat down in the high-backed chair at the end of the table, set both hands on the surface like they could keep the world steady. “I’ll take a coffee.”
I had to accept the invitation. Had to accept it like prey must accept their captor’s teeth around their head.
In a week, I would travel to Highmark. It couldn’t be avoided; I had declared myself my own champion in the Killing Fields, and champions must obey the rules of the trials.
Before the four of us left the dining room, Faun, Haskel, and Dorian insisted I be prepared.
I would spend every day building immunities, discerning small forks from big ones, being trained to use my magic, to dance…
and to avoid death. All in preparation for the gleaming fangs of the summer court.
Decorum, courtliness, life and death. A strange braid of silks and knives.
Haskel and Dorian excused themselves from the dining room soon after we came to our decision. I resisted asking where Dorian had to be. He wore his cloak and his riding boots; that was enough to know he was leaving the citadel.
What is he up to?
I doubted he’d tell me if I asked.
Faun and I broke our fast, but this time I sat in the high-backed chair at the table’s end. Rhiannon’s chair. Faun insisted I sit there; if a queen did not wear her crown and robes as though she deserved them, then who would believe she did?
It was fine logic. I still felt like a child in an adult’s seat.
Coffee was brought out—it had grown on me after all—but Faun stopped me with a hand over the rim before I brought the mug to my lips. She snapped her fingers at the male servant who’d delivered the carafe.
“Pour”—she pointed at the carafe and an empty mug—“and drink.”
When he made to drink the coffee black, she said, “With the milk.”
He added milk into the coffee and drank both together, upturning the mug until it was empty. Faun watched, spine straight, eyes predatory, and said, “You’ll taste every dish placed in front of the queen before she touches it. You’ll do this every morning.”
The servant nodded, departed through the tapestry door.
Faun slid my mug back toward me. When I didn’t touch it, she said, “Don’t worry—he’d have dropped before he got through the side door if it were poisoned.”
I stared at the fae. “How would you know that?”
“My mother was the queen’s apothecary. I could recite all the poisons in Feyreign by the time I was eight.”
Was. Was the queen’s apothecary.
Perhaps Faun sensed my next words, because she diverted herself to pouring tea. “Rhiannon was poisoned several times. But she had enough immunity to survive.”
Finally, I drank. Coffee had become a soothing ritual. “How did she gain immunity?”
“The mycelial knot.” Faun dropped two squares of sugar into her cup and stirred. “She hated the indignity of vomiting at the dining table.”
I raised my brows. “The mycelial knot?”
She tapped her spoon on the rim of the cup. “It’s a fungal network that coats your esophagus and stomach. Rejects most poisons, herbal or magical. A Sylvanwild specialty.”
Suddenly I felt like I sat with Elisabet during a biology lesson. Half the words didn’t penetrate—only the practical part: “If you have the mycelial knot, then why make that servant taste everything?”
“I don’t much care for yakking at breakfast.” She raised the cup to her mouth and took a savoring sip with eyes half shut. “And that servant was one of Rhiannon’s favorites in the kitchen and in the bedroom. He’s immune to everything.”
Gods, I really didn’t know these people at all.