Li Qin sighed, heavily. “I hate to do this,” she said. “Honestly, I hate the whole system. Changelings happen. Changelings have always happened. But ordering people to have children just so the rest of Faerie will have people they feel like they can safely boss around isn’t right. It’s immoral, if nothing else. And yet. You grew up with these rules. You grew up ‘knowing your place.’” The way she said it turned a phrase that had always been a source of pride and comfort into something bordering on an insult.
Silently, still searching for speech, I nodded.
“Fine, then. I, Li Qin Zhou, Duchess of Dreamer’s Glass, pureblooded daughter of the Shyi Shuai, order you, October Torquill, daughter of Simon and Amandine Torquill, to make me bleed, ride my blood, and tell me what you see contained therein.” Her face was a mask of cold authority. “You cannot countermand me.”
“You’re right,” I admitted, voice gone soft, “I can’t.”
Drawing my knife, I stepped close to her once more. “But I can hate you for it,” I added. “Give me your hand.”
Li Qin nodded to her outstretched arm, her wrist already turned toward the ceiling. “Don’t cut too deep,” she cautioned. “I need my hands.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said, and pressed the edge of the knife to the outside of her hand, pushing down until it barely—just barely—broke the skin.
The smell of blood washed over me, heavy with the twinned scents of her magic. They smelled truer this way, purer, almost, like they had only ever been meant to be experienced straight out of the vein. It made my mouth water and my head spin, and I hated the contradiction, even as I wiped the knife against the leg of my trousers, tucked it back into its sheath, and grasped her arm with my free hand, pulling her toward me.
“It works better if it comes from you,” I said, reciting a half-remembered fragment of a lesson I had once heard Father giving to August. “Try to think about what you want me to see.”
Then I clamped my mouth over the wound I’d created, and the room went away.
As with the first time I had tasted my own blood, there was a shell, almost, above the true memory, something hard and sweet and brittle. It shattered when I pressed against it, unable to keep me out or withstand the slightest pressure, and I plunged down, down, down into the red well of Li Qin.
Unlike my own memories, I am not myself here in the red. I know that without being able to look at the body I currently occupy, which is seated in some sort of soft, leathery chair, hands folded in its lap. In front of me/them, a person I know stalks back and forth.
January. When April referred to January O’Leary, I didn’t realize she meant my cousin January ap Learainth. How they would even have met was a mystery, but in this vision, January is on the verge of panic. She moves with the energy of a trapped animal, yanking at her own hair. She wears human clothing—trousers like mine, a sweatshirt with an illustration of a grinning rabbit on it—and for all her anxiety, she wears it naturally, like this is normal for her.
“Calm down,” I say, and when I hear my voice, I understand: in this memory, I am Li Qin. “You don’t know that she’s going to do anything.”
“You weren’t in Silences when the false Queen invaded us,” January snaps. “You weren’t there. Titania’s a Queen, too. She’s going to do something. She has to. Her authority has been threatened, and it’s Toby’s fault, so she’s going to be at the epicenter. The rest of us . . . we’re just going to be collateral damage. Like my mother was.”
“Jan, please.” I/Li stand and move to wrap my/her arm around the unhappy January, trying to calm her. She shrugs me/her off. “It might not be that bad.”
“No.” January looks at me/us, and her mouth is set in a hard line of conviction. “It’s going to be worse.”
So January was real, but that didn’t tell me anything else about what April had been saying. Li Qin was still bleeding. I tried to focus on that, on the shape of my own skin, and took another swallow. I needed to see something deeper.
She’s sleeping, my January, hair spread across the pillow in red and brown streaks, eyes closed for once. For once. Having her here is still a miracle. I/Li thinks it will always be a miracle. Even Faerie isn’t supposed to return the dead. Gone is gone. But she never went to the night-haunts, and somehow they’ve returned her to me/Li. She’s here. She’s staying. We get to be a family again. Whatever Toby wants, forever, she can have it.
Maybe too deep. It felt like the lines between us were blurring. I broke contact with a gasp, stepping backward, trying to shake off the red-tinted veil of her memories. Li Qin stared at me, eyes wide, expression hopeful.
With a sharp wash of ozone, April appeared by my side, flickering out of the nothingness. “What did you see?” she asked, tone almost academic. “Boring courtly duties and Titania’s perfect Faerie, or a complicated, messy, real version of our world?”
“I—I don’t know what I saw,” I said. “I saw my cousin, January. But her last name isn’t O’Leary.”
“She changed it to match mortal tradition when she moved to the Mists after the fall of Briarholme,” said April. “That is a strange thing, to fixate on a name when you saw her reflection in the blood. Strange and small, almost as if you don’t want to have seen what you saw.”
“She . . . blamed me,” I said. “For somehow upsetting Titania, she blamed me. She said there had been a war in Silences? And this was my fault? That you would be collateral damage? Why would she blame me?”
“Because it was your fault.” April somehow managed to make what should have been a brutal accusation into a simple statement of fact. Titania was angry enough to have rewritten Faerie to suit herself, splitting up families, doing Oberon-only-knew what other terrible things in the process, and it was somehow supposed to be my fault?
April clearly saw the confusion in my expression. She put a hand on my arm, fingers light and barely solid enough to feel. “It was your squire who told me what happened, October. It was you who saved my mother, who saved my family. You are the most powerful blood-worker I have ever known, and if you have angered Titania, I am relieved, because it means I can believe this will be undone. I can believe that you will save us, as you always have before.”
SEVEN
SILENCE FELL AFTER APRIL’S proclamation, hanging in the air until I burst out laughing and shattered it past all repair. She recoiled, taking her hand away from my arm. I switched my focus to Li Qin.
“August put you up to this, didn’t she?” I asked. “My sister always says I need to have better self-esteem, and this feels like the sort of joke she’d try to put together. I never thought she’d involve a duchess.”
Li Qin gave me a look full of hurt. “If this were a conspiracy against you, don’t you think you would have seen it in my blood?”
“My sister is a very skilled blood-worker. She might have been able to cover real memory with false—”
“That centered you?” asked April. “That featured people you didn’t know in completely unbelievable and hence unrealistic situations? I cannot force you to believe the unbelievable, October. But pause, for just a moment. Think of the things you have seen in your own blood. Think of the things your magic knows to be true. Titania can lie to you. You can lie to yourself. Your magic cannot.”