Chapter Ten
Ina’s eyes flickered, though they would not listen to the command to open all the way. Her lids carried the sort of heaviness that made the body feel borrowed.
At first, she knew only that she was warm and that the air smelled faintly of bitter herbs and clean linen. Then the rest came.
The lingering reminder of pain that had just been healed. A high ceiling crossed with carved beams. Pale curtains drawn back from tall windows. The muted hush of a room where sick people were meant to rest and no one trusted them to do it without supervision.
She forced her eyes to open fully.
Derran sat on one side of the bed, Karai on the other.
Of course they did.
Derran had leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, as if he had been sitting that way too long and had forgotten there were more comfortable positions available in the world. Karai sat straighter, though the strain of waiting had settled between his brows and would not quite leave.
He saw Ina’s eyes open and breathed a sigh of relief. Derran looked up and made a similar sound.
On the far side of the room Shayna knelt beside another bed, one hand wrapped around Jasenka’s. The two other ladies were not there, though that memory hardly registered with Ina as she stared at the marsh princess. Jasenka lay still, her face pale against the pillow, eyes closed.
Shayna heard the movement first. She looked up, saw Ina awake, and rose so fast she nearly upset the stool beside her.
“Queen Ina,” she said, and then her voice broke entirely. “The necklace. It’s been stolen.”
“It will be all right,” Ina said, perhaps too lightly, and without any clear reason yet to think so. She pushed herself upright too quickly and had to catch at the blanket while the room steadied itself around her. “We can get more diamonds.”
Shayna stared at her as if contemplating how to tell her queen that her words were foolish.
“You… you don’t understand, your Majesty,” she finally said. “If the diamond with Lugo’s heart in it is destroyed, it will kill him.”
Ina’s mouth opened and she went still. “What?”
She had thought the thing grotesque. Strange. A marsh custom carried further than good sense should have allowed. But she had not understood the whole of it. The weight that came with that tradition.
Karai had. His only reaction had been a sharp intake of breath at the news of the necklace’s theft.
Derran had too, though he at least had the courtesy to react with a curse.
Ina could find no sensible reaction other than staring.
On the other bed Jasenka stirred. At first it was only a tightening in the mouth, a troubled shift of her head on the pillow. Then her eyes opened. They moved once around the room in confusion and fixed on Shayna.
Her free hand went to her throat.
Found nothing.
She made a sound so raw Ina scarcely knew it for a voice. “No!”
Shayna was at her side in an instant. “My lady.”
Jasenka sat up halfway, then cried out and caught herself with one hand against the mattress. “No,” she said again, louder now. “No!”
“Jassie,” Ina said, throwing the blankets off and coming out of her own bed despite Karai’s disapproving look. “Listen to me.”
But Jasenka was not hearing anyone yet. “He trusted me,” she wailed, the despair in her voice so different from its usual measure that Ina stopped in her tracks in surprise.
“He trusted my power and my love, and I’ve lost it. I’ve lost it!”
Her voice broke and rose together. “He’ll never trust me as a princess, even if he survives!”
Then she turned her face into the pillow and wept in a way that was painful to hear because nothing in her looked made for that kind of helplessness.
Shayna bent over her, one hand on her shoulder, the other smoothing hair back from her face. “We’ll find it,” she said. “We’ll get it back before Prince Lugo even knows it’s gone. Do you hear me? We will.”
Jasenka only shook her head against the pillow.
Shayna looked up then, desperation plain in her eyes. “The queen promised to help.”
Jasenka raised her face at that. Her cheeks were wet. She looked at Ina as if the room held only one answer and she had not much strength left to ask for it.
“You did?” she said. “Why?”
Ina had no plan. No direction. No clear sense of where the necklace could have gone or who had taken it or how one hunted stolen hearts across half a kingdom.
Still, she nodded.
“Of course,” she said carefully. “I’m the queen. It’s my duty to protect everyone in the fairy kingdom, and I’m not starting my reign with a prince dying. We’ll get it back. We have to.”
She looked to Derran and Karai.
Both of them nodded.
“The sky court will help,” agreed Derran.
Karai inclined his head. “The burrow court too.”
Jasenka shut her eyes once, as if hiding that she had reached the edge of what she could hold upright and was trying not to fall over it.
Shayna still knelt by Jasenka’s bed, murmuring to her in low marsh court endearments Ina did not know. After a time Jasenka quieted. Her breathing steadied, though not from calm so much as exhaustion.
She turned her head slightly. “Shayna,” she said, voice worn thin now.
“Yes, my lady?”
“Leave us.”
Shayna looked uncertain. “My lady, I ought not.”
“Leave us.” It was not louder the second time. It did not need to be.
Shayna rose reluctantly. She bowed to Ina, Derran, and Karai in turn, then finally to Jasenka, and went out, casting one last look behind her before the door closed.
Silence settled again.
Ina waited.
Jasenka lay still for several breaths, gathering what strength she had left. Then she turned her head toward Ina, and the strain in her face made her seem older than she had the night before.
“My queen,” she said, glancing only once at the princes. “I have to tell you something.”
Ina moved closer. “What is it?”
Jasenka looked at the coverlet rather than at her. “Several days ago I received a note.”
“A note?”
“It said that Prince Lugo and I must not ascend the throne. That if we did, he would be killed.”
Ina felt the room draw tighter around that sentence. Derran and Karai glanced at each other, then back at Jasenka.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
Jasenka shut her eyes. “Because at the time it seemed like a coward’s trick. A threat written in secret. No signature, no seal, no proof of anything but malice. Lugo may not show it, but he is powerful. Everyone knows that. I thought...”
She stopped and swallowed. “I thought no one could truly harm him.”
Ina’s gaze went once, involuntarily, to the bare place at Jasenka’s throat.
“Yes,” Jasenka half-sobbed, hearing the thought without needing it spoken.
“I didn’t know then what the necklace was. He told me only last night, after he gave it to me before the court. If I’d known before, I’d have taken the note differently. I’d have...”
She pressed her lips together. “I don’t know what I’d have done. Something wiser than this.”
Ina did not answer right away. The floorboards under her feet had become very interesting. It gave her a moment to think.
“You believe whoever sent the note has the necklace now.”
“Yes.” Jasenka’s hands tightened in the bedclothes. “Or whoever took it acts for that person. And I think they mean to break the magic if Lugo and I proceed.”
It fit too well. She had to be right.
Ina said, “But you didn’t even tell Lugo about the note?”
Jasenka turned her face away. “No.”
“Why not?”
A bitter little laugh escaped her, empty of humor. “Because I lost the necklace in the span of a single journey. Because I was warned and did not heed it. Because I am meant to stand beside him as princess, and what sort of princess cannot guard the thing most precious in her keeping?”
Ina heard the real question under all of that.
What sort of ruler will he think I am?
“He won’t think you unworthy,” she tried to say, tried to sound encouraging as Jasenka had been to her.
Jasenka looked back at her then, and there was such naked doubt in that look that Ina’s heart pinched. “You don’t know that.”
“No,” Ina said. “I do know this. He loves you. I saw enough of that last night to last me a year. And he trusted you with the necklace because of that love, not because he thought you would live inside a locked box with it hidden under your dress.”
That won the faintest movement at the corner of Jasenka’s mouth.
Ina went on. “Whoever planned this wanted more than the necklace. They wanted fear. They wanted confusion. They wanted you isolated and ashamed and guessing wrong. I won’t help them by doing the same.”
Jasenka lay watching her, too worn out now even for proper despair. “What will you do?”
“I’ll find the necklace,” Ina said with more confidence than she felt. “And we’ll all make sure Lugo is safe. It’s our duty.”
She had promised it already. Saying it a second time made it feel less like comfort and more like work beginning.
Jasenka let out a slow breath. It was plain she had run beyond the end of her strength. Even speaking had cost her. Healing had closed her wounds, but it had not returned what fear and pain had burned through.
“Rest now,” Ina told her, almost a command. “Sleep.”
Jasenka did not argue. Her eyelids had already begun to lower. Just before sleep took her again, she murmured, “Do not tell him. Not yet.”
Ina hesitated. She did not like the request. She did not like secrets added to danger. But neither did she intend to shake a recently-healed woman back awake to argue judgment when the room itself was turning soft around her.
“I won’t,” she promised.
Jasenka did not hear it.
Ina sat there a while longer beside the bed, listening to the slow, even breathing of the princess who might by evening become a widow, depending on what enemies did with a stolen jewel.
Then she rose, crossed slowly back to her own bed, and sat down, finally looking at Derran and Karai again. “But where do we even begin?”
Derran was already moving toward the door. Action suited him best when fear threatened to root itself in a room. “I’ll send word to every raven fairy in the sky court. If that necklace is out in the open anywhere, they’ll find it. Ravens notice what glitters before they notice what’s wise.”
Karai stood as well. “And I’ll have our fox fairies search the place where the attack occurred. If the beasts or their handlers left any trace, foxes will catch the scent.”
Ina nodded. “Go.”
Neither man hesitated after that. Derran touched her shoulder once in passing, quick and steady. Karai’s gaze held hers for a beat longer, a silent promise in it, then followed Derran out.
The room grew quieter as soon as they were gone, too still now.
Ina put a hand to her forehead and closed her eyes.
A luncheon with Eogan had been irritating when she woke. By now it felt as though she had stepped into the middle of something far older and worse.
Ina did not stay long in the healing room after that.
She left Jasenka asleep, the lines of strain still faintly visible even in rest, and found her way out through the winding canopy court corridors with a mind too crowded for ease.
The palace was all carved wood and filtered sunlight, airy bridges and leaf-shaped windows, built to soothe.
At the moment, it only made her feel she was moving through something too calm for the day she was having.
She found Eogan sooner than expected.
He was in a narrow hall that opened onto one of the outer terraces, speaking urgently with two attendants over a spread of papers pinned under smooth stones. He looked up when she approached, dismissed the attendants with a turn of the hand, and waited.
“I must go,” Ina said without preamble.
He studied her face a moment. Whatever he saw there made him ask no foolish questions.
“Of course,” he replied. She had expected resistance.
Or annoyance dressed as courtesy. Or at least one remark sharp enough to remind her she had disrupted his plans.
Instead he only folded the papers once and set them aside.
“The matter of an attack on either a queen or a princess is not one that can wait.”
“It’s not,” Ina agreed.
He inclined his head. “Don’t worry. The luncheon can survive the injury.”
Ina blinked and made no move to turn away.
He raised an eyebrow. “Are you surprised?”
“I’m…” She stopped. She wasn’t sure what she was. Confused at his calm where normally he was constantly irritated, perhaps.
He interrupted her thoughts. “That’s tiresome for both of us.”
She almost smiled. “I didn’t mean offense, Eogan.”
“Of course not, your Majesty.” He glanced toward the terrace, then back at her. “If you require any help from the canopy court, ask for it.”
That took her more off guard than anything else. Her mind drifted backward to a time he had said he would raze every court to find her. Now he offered himself as a servant at her command.
For a moment she looked at him and wondered whether some part of his constant edge was indeed habit more than nature, a posture so long practiced it had become his ordinary face.
He carried disapproval the way some men wore cloaks, as if it lent weight to the shoulders.
But perhaps it was not all one thing. Perhaps there was more room in him than he liked to show.
“I may,” she said.
He nodded once. “Then I will answer.”
She did not tell him about the necklace.
Not yet. Of course he had to know something terrible had happened, when a queen and a princess had been dragged unconscious into his court.
But too many people knew too much already, and she had no wish to widen the circle before she understood the danger better herself.
“Thank you,” she said instead.
That seemed to irritate him slightly, which reassured her that the world had not entirely overturned.
She left and flew for the sky court.