Chapter 42
Forty-Two
The guards escorted everyone from the courtyard, managing with more efficiency than I would have thought possible, given the general inebriation and inconsistent numbers of nether limbs.
A mortal musician was rounded up to dispose of the offending nail, which was wrapped in the foxglove, then tucked into his belt pouch.
He was then sent across the Veil, with very little explanation.
Whether he would understand why he came home after Beltane with a nail and a foxglove in his pocket and what he would remember of us, I could not say.
Nor had I the leisure to worry overmuch.
I could have drunk the wine in which the nail had steeped.
I could have died. Unlike Una, I had no heir.
Faery would have been without a ruler yet again.
She could starve, become that vision Amadan showed me: the cracked, stony ground, air so dry and filled with dust it made my nose bleed, sky the color of blood, carrion birds crying in the distance.
All because Lord Elidor could not stand the idea of having a half-mortal queen.
I should have killed him while I had the chance. There was no punishment I would not inflict upon him now.
He was arrested immediately, caught leaving the feast with one hand gloved and a woman’s veil across his now-scarred face.
When questioned, Elidor credited his vanity for the guise and for the peculiar gloves he wore.
He had been hideously scarred at the queen’s council meeting, he claimed, and was ashamed to show his face.
“He was never meant to show his face again,” I told Lyel, as he escorted me back to the palace that night. I had expected of Elidor what I got from Lord Mossgrow: retirement from public life and exile. Not this foolhardy vengeance scheme.
“The excuse does not explain his gloves, either,” I continued. “I pulled Elidor out of the magma by his hands. They were never burned.” And the glove was white, glowing with a peculiar purple hue. It matched perfectly with the one left behind on Jamie’s throne.
“Clearly he is guilty, Your Majesty,” Lyel said. “The question remains, whether he had help.”
In time, I would have each of the guards questioned by Lyel, to find out how Elidor made his way into the festivities.
I’d fetch a human to wedge splinters of rountree beneath all their fingernails, or let the redcaps soak their caps in their blood while they still lived.
Anything to find out who might have betrayed me this way.
Had it not been for Jamie, I could have died.
When the glove Jamie found was examined, it had been dusted with chamomile, the herb given to me by Mairi Grieve that I might pass the church grounds with little harm. Could such a glove have protected Elidor’s hand from the touch of iron? This seemed to me the likeliest possibility.
When I returned to the palace, I saw to it Jamie was bathed again in milk with sweet oats. Then I, not Lileas as per usual, rubbed a tincture of calendula and marshmallow into his skin to soothe it.
And I had the would-be murderer buried beneath the earth, locked in the deepest prison of Faery, behind bronze bars in a cell almost too small for him to lie down.
There let him cower, where it roared every day and night, sounds as constant as the pounding of the sea.
That gloom, I’d been told, was permeated every so often with the sounds of wet, unwholesome slithering, as of enormous worms or serpents crawling through the earth.
Their movements shook the tiny prison and sent rubble down upon the prisoner’s head.
The cold there was unrelenting, save for brief flashes of intolerable heat, as the mortals claim for their notion of Hell.
I hoped it was Hell for Elidor. I hoped he agonized while waiting for my visit, could not sleep at night for wondering over his final fate.
I hoped the guilt ate him up inside when he thought of what he had nearly done to Faery, leaving her lifeless, an infertile void upon which no flower or plant would ever grow.
We bought ourselves free from this fate when we paid the Teind.
But that freedom belonged to Elidor no longer.
I did not visit his cell right away. I tarried for months, hoping the suspense would eat away at him, that he might grow mad from anticipating what I had planned.
Then, when I thought he had suffered, not enough—nothing could be enough—but shall we say, a good deal, I went to visit my would-be assassin.
I garbed myself in a stola of the ancients, head veiled, with a sword at my waist and bearing a scale in my hand.
Thunder roared in the distance, and the scale turned, momentarily, into a scourge.
Often Justice and Retribution wear the same face.
We call Faery the Underhill, but never did it truly feel like being underground.
The air of Faery was fresh and clear. The sky above Her lacked celestial bodies but not clouds; it seemed to have no end.
But the journey to Elidor’s prison took us down to the coldest depths, so that I felt I breathed in the heavy, moist earth.
At last, we stood outside the tiny cell where Elidor was kept.
His inhumation beneath mounds of magma had certainly done Elidor’s appearance no favors.
Half his silvery hair had burnt off, and the rest fell over a face red and mottled with scars.
He looked up at me with rheumy eyes, squinting painfully at the sight of Lyel’s torch.
Then he stumbled to his feet, revealing a body shrunk down to naught but skin and bones, not to mention soiled trousers and a shirt the color of dung.
How long did I make him wait? Seems like years, nearly. I almost pitied Elidor. But his state now was still better than he had nearly condemned Faery to. At least he still lived.
I had yet to determine for how long.
Elidor faced us, crouching forward, clinging to the bars for support. He spat in my direction; it could have easily passed through the bars but instead rebounded back into his face.
“The cell is enchanted,” said Lyel. “Anything he tries to do will either fail or reflect back upon him.”
That was useful to know.
Elidor squinted at me and swore under his breath. “You play at justice, I see.”
I considered the scales in my hand. “I tired of playing at mercy. I played it before and, well, this was the result.”
Lyel stood beside me, green eyes glinting like peridot, harder than I had ever seen. “Lord Elidor. You stand guilty of regicide, attempted regicide, and attempting to poison the queen’s ward.”
“Ward, is it now?” Elidor crossed his arms and paced the cell. “Well, it seems you follow your mother’s precedent, showing favoritism to mortals. He is a worm I should have stepped on to squash—but I did nothing to deliberately harm the whelp.”
My eyes narrowed. He could not have said it were it not true, but there is a difference between intending to cause harm and doing it.
“You have nearly made me forsworn. I said I would protect the lad, keep him safe from harm. Yet he had a rash for three weeks, and he could have eaten the foxglove. I am not certain even I could have saved him then.”
Elidor did not so much as blink.
“Do you deny your part in trying to kill the queen?” Lyel demanded.
Elidor rolled his eyes. “I do not call her queen.” He spat on the ground. This time it fizzled but did not bounce back. “She is a foul abomination of a half-blood slut.”
Lyel leaned forward and drew his sword. “You will not speak of her that way.” He nearly seemed to glow with his righteous outrage, and a warmth settled around my heart.
“Or what?” Defiance still shone in Elidor’s eyes. “Am I not to die soon in any case? Who’s to keep me from saying what I want—ahh!”
For I raised a finger with its long, sculpted nail and pointed at Elidor’s throat. Invisible vines shot out and twined themselves around him. I flexed one finger, and they grew thorns. Made a fist and squeezed until his face went red and his eyes bulged.
“Never assume I have already done my worst,” I told him, as he clawed at his throat and gagged. “You will always be mistaken. I could give your skin over to the nucklavee to wear as a coat. Let the Leannan Sith drain you of your blood and senses.”
I let my vines lift Elidor off his feet, then drop him rather heavily to the ground. He pushed himself up on his hands and knees, peering through sparse, greasy strands of hair, his beautiful eyes now red with dust. I rather liked having him on all fours.
“Do that and you show my family how little you respect their long years of service,” Elidor croaked out.
“Do you know how long we had to content ourselves with being minor nobility, only for your whore of a mother to invite a mortal into her bed? He wasn’t even of royal blood, just some upstart musician. And you spurned us just as badly!”
Spurned them? How dramatic. “I refused you one dance, you petty little hobgoblin.”
Elidor sat, fire blazing in his eyes. “Don’t you ever think I am alone in this. There are others, too, who would prefer an unsullied throne.”
“Unsullied.” It seemed to me Faery must cease its dalliances on the other side of Veil, if that was to be the case.
Elidor snarled, and hatred rose off him like steam from a boiling pot. “Kill me if you must, but there are stronger powers at work, and they are closer to you than you know.”
The menace in his words was palpable, and the chill of that deep, forgotten place wrapped around me like a shroud.
“Reveal them!” Lyel commanded.
“I would sooner bite off my own tongue.”
My seneschal lunged forward, as if he might leap through the very bars into the prison beyond. I held him back with a single hand.
“Whether he bluffs or will come to reveal his fellow traitors in time,” I said calmly, “it is clear I need to make a public example of Lord Elidor. He shall render us one last service.”
I raised my chin, let my power flow through and around me, crashing like waves against the shore, while my seneschal looked upon me in wonderment. For I kept the nature of this service to myself.
With Elidor’s blood I would pay the Teind.