Chapter Twenty-Two
Karai insisted on the burrow court.
Not on trial there, not on judgment there, but on holding her there while they decided what to do. He said it before anyone else had fully begun speaking.
“She goes to the burrow dungeons.” His voice held the kind of command that expected obedience without asking for it.
No one argued long.
Perhaps because the burrow court’s prisons were older than most grievances and more thoroughly feared than any others in the kingdom.
Perhaps because none of them trusted the marsh court tonight, not after the easy way Zuri had slipped so close to its rulers.
Perhaps because if Karai, of all of them, wanted her under his own stone and steel, they were not inclined to deny him.
Still, none of them were willing to let her go there without escort.
So they all went.
The journey flying felt longer than usual, and then the journey underground felt even longer.
The exhaustion of going to every court between burrow and sky, and then back again, was getting to them.
The dungeons lay far below even the habitual depths of the burrow court, down through stairs cut into old stone and corridors braced with timber blackened by age. The farther they went, the quieter it became. Even their footsteps seemed to sink into the walls.
The dungeons were not like the prison room Ina had once known in the marsh court.
Those had been cells, even if enchanted ones.
These were fortresses in miniature. Each chamber was built as though to hold a siege unto itself.
Stone thicker than any fairy could blast through quickly.
Doors banded with steel. Locks worked not only with metal but with binding magic laid into every hinge and seam.
The air itself seemed denser there, as if the earth had agreed to help keep its prisoners.
If anything can hold the mirage fairy, Ina thought, it ought to be this.
Yet none of them seemed easy even then.
They put her in the deepest chamber they dared use, with her wrists and ankles still bound, the hood still over her head until the last possible moment. Karai reached out to remove it.
Eogan’s voice came cutting. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.
“We are not cruel,” Karai said quietly.
“Leave the blasted hood on, Karai. Who cares if she can’t breathe perfectly as long as she can’t see?” Eogan’s patience had long since gone, and any pretended softness in his words with it.
Karai only shook his head, removing the hood anyway, much to Eogan’s continued dismay. Even once the door shut and the locks settled into place with a heavy final sound, no one stepped away from the place readily.
Karai called for Velor. He came quickly, as he always did, and took in the scene in one hard, silent glance – the rulers of four courts gathered in a dungeon, the atmosphere set somewhere between victory and dread,
and behind the sealed door the most dangerous fairy in the kingdom breathing furiously.
“I want you watching her,” Karai said.
Velor looked at the door. Then at Karai. “How long?”
“The night,” said Karai. “Until we decide what to do with her.”
Velor’s loyalty was the plainest thing about him. He did not hesitate. Even so, caution sat visibly in him now.
“She is powerful, your Highness,” he said with an even look.
“I know.”
“And if she finds a way to use her magic without sight...”
Karai met his eyes. “Then do not let her find it first.”
Velor gave one quick nod. “Understood.”
He took up his post without further ceremony, one hand resting lightly at his side, the other gripping his belt. Ina had seen many forms of devotion in this kingdom by now. Velor’s was among the starkest. Not loud. Not sentimental. Simply absolute.
The rest of them left him there and climbed back to the library.
Once gathered again around the long table, with lamps burning low and too many hours behind them, they began the grim business of deciding what to do.
It went badly.
Not in noise at first. In stalemate.
No one disputed that Zuri had to be contained. No one disputed that the old stone prison had failed. The question was what might hold her now that she had already escaped one sentence designed by all the courts together.
They spoke of metals. Of blindfolds. Of isolation in root-bound chambers.
Of binding circles laid one over another.
Of enchanted stone coffers, of sleep spells, of rotating guards, of exile to places none of them trusted enough to use.
The suggestions grew more elaborate as the hours wore on and none of them became satisfied.
At least three times Eogan said, in one form or another, “We should just execute her.”
He did not say it with relish. That would have been easier to despise. He said it with the unbending practicality of someone who believed the answer obvious and increasingly resented the need to repeat it.
Karai opposed him every time.
No. Flatly. Entirely. Without ornament and without yielding a finger’s breadth.
Lugomir and Jasenka, to Ina’s relief and complication alike, opposed it as well.
“We are not beginning our rule with an execution,” Jasenka said once, voice tired but unshaken.
Lugomir added, “Not if another way can be found.”
Eogan looked as though he had grave doubts that another way would be found by this company before old age took them all.
Derran said little.
Not because he did not care, but because he seemed to understand that this was not his old war in the same intimate way it was Karai’s or Eogan’s.
At one point, while the others circled back through arguments they had already had twice, he bent toward Ina and spoke low enough that no one else could hear.
“I was very young when all this happened the first time,” he said.
“Young enough to be out of the room for most of it. I was barely into adulthood. I remember the sky court prince of the time, my uncle, being involved. I remember fear. I remember hearing about what she’d done, though I never knew her name. Or perhaps I forgot it too.”
He shrugged as though it didn’t matter either way.
“But I was not yet prince, and no one was asking my opinion then.”
Ina glanced at him.
“She is evil,” he went on. “That much I can say. But she has not earned a place in my heart so large that I burn to see her dead.”
Ina understood. She herself was quiet for an entirely different reason.
Because Eogan was right, at least in one plain and terrible way.
Every prison they imagined seemed frail beside Zuri’s patience and power. Every mercy they considered looked unsteady once turned around in the mind. And beyond all of that sat the promise Ina had made in the canopy court, to do what Karai might not be able to do if it came to it.
More than once Eogan’s eyes found hers.
He did not speak when he did it. He only looked at her as if expecting her to say something. Anything. To lend her voice to his, to keep the promise without having to name it in front of the others.
Each time, Ina gave the smallest shake of her head.
No.
Not now. Not here. Not against Karai, not in this room.
The last time it happened, Eogan’s face changed very slightly.
Not enough for anyone who did not know to call it wounded.
Enough for her. He stopped pressing after that.
It was not surrender. Only recognition that he had no ally in the matter and would gain nothing by battering at the same wall another hour.
Ina felt the betrayal of it herself even before she saw it in him.
At last, when the lamps had burned low enough that shadows pooled between the stacks and everyone at the table had gone from tense to spent, Ina said, “We need to stop.”
No one answered immediately. She looked around at them all.
Lugomir broad-shouldered and worn down now, one hand still clasping Jasenka’s as if he had forgotten to let it go.
Jasenka pale and upright on determination alone.
Eogan cold with fatigue and displeasure.
Derran quiet, leaning back in his chair with the look of a man who would keep going if asked but would not pretend it was helping.
Karai rigid and sleepless and wound tighter with every passing hour.
“She is in Velor’s hands,” Ina said. “We do not need to fear that he will simply wander away from his post. We have found the necklace. Lugo still lives. We can rest for a few hours and think like sensible people instead of exhausted ones.”
That argument, more than any moral one, finally took hold. One by one they gave in to it.
They parted not warmly, but with the heavy civility of people too tired to quarrel further.
Rooms had already been prepared in the burrow palace for the visiting rulers, and servants appeared with lamps to guide them.
Lugomir and Jasenka went together. Eogan inclined his head to Ina with that same formal reserve he used when he meant to remind her he was still displeased with her judgment and still too well bred to say so bluntly.
Derran lingered half a step longer than the others. Karai did too.
Ina knew both looks.
Longing, yes. Also concern. Also the weary habit of seeking one another after a bad day because the body remembered comfort even when the mind had no strength left for it. Not for passion. Just for the comfort of being together.
She loved them for it.
She also shook her head gently at both of them.
I need to be alone.
They understood. Neither argued.
Ina went to the room that had long since become hers in the burrow court. The familiar quilt lay folded at the foot of the bed. One lamp burned low near the mirror. A maid had already laid out a clean nightgown and left without waiting to be thanked.
Ina shut the door behind her, crossed the room, and undressed with movements that had no more thought in them than necessity required.
She was asleep almost as soon as she lay down.
No dreams came for her.
For a few precious hours, there was only dark and stillness and nothing at all.