That was one of the worst things a pureblood could be called, and I would normally have recoiled from the word, rejecting it as cruel and beneath me. After the day I’d had, and the treatment I’d received, I wasn’t sure there was anything else that suited. I’d followed the instructions of my betters until those instructions left me alone in the human world, easy prey for the first pack of predators to come wandering by, and now I was going to die because I’d dared to fight back against them.
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. But then, as I’d often reminded August when she raised the same complaint about the differences in our station, Faerie had never claimed to be fair. The people on top were there forever, and the people on the bottom were only there until we made a mistake and went away.
Well, it looked like it was my turn to go away. Part of me felt like I should fight, like I should find a streak of resistance buried deep in my bones, but most of me knew there wasn’t any point. I was outclassed and outnumbered, and I was going to die.
Idly, I closed my eyes and bit the inside of my cheek, worrying the flesh between my molars until I tasted blood. It had been easier when I had a knife; cutting yourself without a weapon was even less fun than cutting yourself with one. Still, it was easy enough to make myself bleed.
Swallowing, I raised my hands and looked at them in that impossible way that didn’t use my eyes. As I’d expected, the pink lines were there the same way they’d been for the other people I’d looked at like this. Well. Not quite the same. They were denser, snarled together until they covered every inch of my skin in the opalescent shine of someone else’s magic. How did I, a mere changeling, rate that sort of effort?
And how could I unweave it?
Attempting to get my mental “fingers” under the knots did nothing; they slipped away like mist. The pain in my head got even worse, and I stopped trying. Maybe that was the real limit: I couldn’t undo spells if they’d been cast on me directly. Annoying, but if I knew what the rules were, I could start to work around them.
The thought was contrary enough to my long-cultivated obedience and agreeability that I paused, contemplating it. It was mine, absolutely: it didn’t feel like someone else had somehow planted it there to lead me astray. And how much more astray could I go than locked in the Queen’s dungeons for killing a man? Something which felt like it should have been a lot more upsetting than my imprisonment.
A man was dead because of me, and I was sitting there worrying about my headache and the blood on my clothes and the fact that someone—probably Titania—had cast a spell on me for some reason.
I decided I was in shock. It was better than the alternative, which was that I was the worst person who had ever lived, and my impending execution would be doing Faerie a favor.
The smell of redwood bark and blackberry flower drifted through the room, undercut by a faint whiff of apple cider, completely out of keeping with my surroundings. I turned my face toward the wall. It wasn’t a magical signature I recognized; if the Queen’s men were coming to drag me to judgement, I wasn’t going to fight them, but I wasn’t going to make this any easier on them than it had to be. If they wanted me begging for clemency or running to them looking for saviors, they were going to be direly disappointed.
I might be a changeling, but I was my father’s daughter, whether or not I had the right to his name, and Torquills do not beg.
“Psst.”
The voice was female and not far away. It sounded like the speaker was actually in the room with me, which was impossible. I nestled harder into my corner.
“I think she’s ignoring you, dear sister,” said a second voice. “Quite rude, really, especially for a convicted criminal. Do you think they’ll bother with the pretense of a trial, or go straight to the execution?”
I whimpered and burrowed even harder into the corner.
“There: now you know she hears us.” The speaker sounded remarkably smug for someone whose primary accomplishment had been speaking in a place where they couldn’t reasonably be.
Then again, maybe that was impressive enough to be proud of. With an iron door on the cell, all attempts to teleport or open portals into the room should have been blocked. And these people, whoever they were, had clearly opened a portal.
“Ow!” said the voice. “What’d you go and do that for?”
“You’re being a dick,” said the first person—at least I assumed it was the first person. It’s hard to recognize someone’s voice from a “psst.” The thought of dealing with more than two strangers right now was too much for me to handle. “Dicks get swatted.”
“At last, we see the reason my sister never dates.”
“Ha-ha, you’re hilarious. Come on. We need to get her out of there.”
“I’m not going through.”
“Of course not. You’re a coward.”
There was a soft scuff, as if someone had stepped to the floor near me, and a hand touched my shoulder. “Excuse me, but are you October? October Torquill?”
The stranger was close enough now for me to tell that the redwood-and-blackberry scent was definitely hers, and more, she was a pureblood. I didn’t always get that from a person’s magic, and especially not this strongly, but there it was, marking her like a brand.
I couldn’t ignore a direct question from a pureblood, even if I wanted to. Slowly, fighting the throbbing pain in my skull, I raised my head and twisted very slightly around, opening my eyes.
A woman was crouched behind me, watching me with obvious concern. She wore a patchwork jacket of some sort over a human-design shirt and pants, making her look like a strange hybrid of the two realities. Her hair was so black it was almost purple, and her eyes were mismatched metal, one pyrite, one mercury. Tuatha de Dannan. That explained how she could open a teleportation circle in the first place, although not how she could get one into a warded cell.
She smiled as she saw me looking at her. “Hi,” she said. “You’ve probably looked better, and I’m sorry to be bothering you at a time like this, but if you could answer my question, that would be fabulous.”
“I’m October,” I croaked, dry mouth stealing most of the inflection from the words.
The woman nodded in satisfaction. “Great. Well, my name’s Arden Windermere, and I’m your ride out of here.”
“How?”
“You mean how am I, and my frustrating but devastatingly handsome brother, able to open a gate into a cell laced with so much iron that my teeth are already starting to itch? Make you a deal.” She smiled again, bright as the sun, and offered me her hand. “Come with us, and I’ll tell you.”
“Or?”
“Or, you know. Stay here and die a painful, inevitable, unnecessary death. I guess the choice is yours.” Her smile faded as she looked at me. “I know what I’d go with in your position, but the Queen wouldn’t put me in your position, would she? Oh, I mean, she would, but for very different reasons. Her advisors would try to find a way to let me go, and all because I can trace my lineage back to Armorica with no diversions into the human realms. Like who my ancestors fucked or didn’t fuck makes me special somehow.”
I stared at her.
“Of course, then my parents had to go and die on us, and Nolan and I got to go into hiding, because that’s always fun and healthy for a pair of orphan kids. We were a whole human children’s book all by ourselves, and that’s something else I can tell you about, if you’ll just come with me.”