An iron nail.
A toxic vapor filled the air and made it difficult to breathe. My head was a tight vise, squeezing into my flesh; the contents of my belly began to churn, even as I heard Lileas beside me, vomiting up her feast.
“Come away, my liege,” she coughed out. “Before it’s too late.”
Jamie stared at me, tears filling his eyes, my poor little bairn! He scooted over into his own seat, where the wisp of white I had seen earlier lay. Only now, I saw it for more than white. It had a luminous purple cast. Jamie picked it up, and it was a glove, but in his hand in transformed into a purple, belled flower.
Foxglove. Fairy glove. Dead man’s bells.
“Elidor,” I hissed. Then I yelled out, “Drop it, lad. By Mab’s grace, drop it!”
Tiny red spots had begun to appear on the boy’s nose and cheeks. Foxglove is poisonous if ingested, but plenty of mortals are sensitive to its very touch.
Jamie dropped the flower and began to cry. He scrambled down from his seat and ran off, in the direction of the palace, I hoped. For the moment that was all I could do.
“Empty the courtyard,” I commanded. “Find a human to dispose of the nail. And arrest Lord Elidor.”
For the killer of my fae mother had struck again.
Forty-Two
The guards escorted everyone fromthe 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.
“Hewasnever 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 longdidI 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.
