“This is your office.” I don’t mean it as an accusation but it sounds like one anyway. “Where do you sleep?”
He gestures vaguely to the bench I’m sitting on. “There, mostly.”
I don’t believe him. I want to prod at the subject, but the door swings open, and our eye contact breaks.
Lydia strides in wearing an apron over a white cotton dress. “Awfully early to pull me from bed. Quite rude, you two. No respect for your elders.”
Emmett glances at her paint-smeared hands. “You weren’t asleep.”
Lydia glances at me, sisterly concern on her face. “Not the point. What did I miss?” she asks as she sits down beside me.
Rhion lingers in the doorway.
“Not you,” Emmett calls.
Rhion’s shoulders drop as the door shuts in his face.
Once settled back in the room, Emmett turns to Lydia. “I’m getting Ivy up to date on our little project.”
“The updated dinner menus or the faerie-killing knife project?” she asks.
I blink. In my experience, faeries are invincible. Every injury is stitched back together as quickly as it was obtained. They never age.Never grow weaker. If I didn’t know Bram had killed his father, I wouldn’t think they could be killed at all.
“Faerie-killing knife?” Maybe it’s stupid, but while I want Bram gone, viciously, completely, the thought of actually killing him leaves me reeling. Could I do it if it came to it? Could Lydia?
In my worst moments, I’ve thought perhaps Lydia was on Bram’s side. That she’d stay loyal to him, win the competition to keep whatever power she has here.
Emmett can read the horror on my face. “We hope to just use it as a threat—something to convince him to abdicate his thrones for the good of both kingdoms.”
“And if he doesn’t?” I say uncomfortably.
Lydia pales. “He’ll abdicate. I know he will.”
“That’s where Ferrinus comes in,” Emmett offers.
“Ferrinus?” I’m lost.
“Ferrinus is the name of a legendary knife, one used to kill a faerie king. Bram used it to kill his own father after he banished his mother to England.”
I’d always known in some way that Bram was responsible for his father’s death, but it chills me to hear it said so plainly. “What kind of knife would be capable of killing a faerie? Is it magic?” I ask.
“Faeries can use magic to kill each other, but it doesn’t touch Bram,” Emmett explains.
Lydia nods. “It makes sense. The only way to have a new ruler is through regicide, so why wouldn’t there be protections put in place for the king? Otherwise, it would be chaos.”
“So a faerie can kill another faerie, but Bram can’t be harmed.”
“Exactly.” Lydia nods gravely. “We believe only this knife can kill a royal.”
“What kind of knife would be capable of that?” I shudder. But through the mist of memory, a page fromFaeries of the British Islescomes back to me.
“Cold iron,” I say. “That’s what can kill a faerie.”
Emmett snaps his fingers. “Precisely. Remember how those chains took down Queen Mor at your wedding?”
I prefer not to think of that day at all.
“Then we have to find it,” I say. I feel horrible the moment the words leave my mouth. For all that Bram has done, not all of me wants him dead. But if we could use the knife somehow, to threaten him into giving up power or permanently closing the door between our worlds, then perhaps there is a way out of all of this. England would be free of him, and I would have my sister and Emmett back. For the first time since I came here, I feel like I’m finally achieving what I set out to do.
