Betraying the queen seemed to agree with him. It certainly pleased me. “Why did you ask for a meeting? Are you in danger?
Every time we met was dangerous for him, and I feared losing my contact. A Nightwalker willing to rebel—or even capable of doing so to any extent, given the enchantment—was a gift. I didn’t hold his life lightly.
Riven had been feeding me information out of the queen’s household for three years, for reasons that were his own. He was lean, almost slight. The Fae always carried more strength than seemed possible in their frames, and he was no exception. The queen’s enchantment was reflected in the glossy, impenetrable sheen of his gaze, though he had slipped her enchantment enough to rebel.
“The queen has tasked Clan Obsidian with an interesting mission.” He reached into his coat and produced a folded sheet. “A knife. Old work, pre-Accord if the art is accurate. Capable of severing magical bindings.”
I took the sheet. It portrayed a knife, rather crudely rendered—the queen had killed quite a lot of her own Fae at this point, and apparently several of the ones with more artistic flair—marked in old runes, which Riven had decoded into plain language in the margins. The knife had a name in old Fae that translated roughly tothe unmaking edge.
I didn’t trust any turn this fortuitous, and I glanced beyond him into the shadows, waiting for the queen’s trap to spring. “This cannot be real.”
“Then the queen is sending Obsidian on a fool’s errand for some reason.” He shrugged, disinterested.
“She wants it for herself,” I said.
“That is the implication of sending a clan to retrieve it.”
“Or she wants it destroyed.”
Riven said nothing, which was his way of indicating I was not even worth disagreement.
He was probably right. The queen collected instruments of power the way some people collected trinkets. The knife could sever enchantments. The runes suggested it would not sever everything—not bindings taken on by ancient magic, like the marriage bond—but enchantments inflicted on others, like those on Tay.
But perhaps there was more to it than that. Perhaps this was so important now because she could envision a way to undo my tie to Cara.Could it be used to cut away a dragon mark?
I held that thought for one moment and then set it aside. Useful, but not the most urgent thing. There was the faintest sound, and my head snapped up.
“Hold,” Riven said, raising a hand to my arm. He didn’t touch me; Nightwalkers touched no one without drawing their blood, or at least, that was the legend. Which they likely spread themselves.
He spoke toward the shadows. “You are ready to be known?”
“You brought a friend to our party?” More Nightwalkers were losing their loyalty to the queen? What a fascinating and useful bit of information.
“I’ve brought my accomplice.” Riven glanced back toward the shadow, which I was almost certain contained nothing, and then it contained a second figure, stepping forward with the unhurried ease of nightmares. “She’s on your side.”
The woman who emerged into the narrow reach of the lamplight was lithe and dark haired. She moved silently, but when she saw my face, she studied my face with the careful attention of someone trying to place a half-familiar thing.
Tesa.
Ander’s Tesa.
Dead for four years. Dead in the conflict that had fractured Ander’s history into the before and after, that had remolded him. I had imagined her face in my own nightmares, bloodied, afraid, eyes staring blankly. So unlike the lively woman I had known. For a moment, I could not make sense of what I was seeing, could not fathom that my nightmares could have been lies.
Tesa’s voice was low and uncertain. “I think I know your face.”
“You may have seen me at court.” And not in the thousand memories that tried to play now.
Tesa raising a glass to me in a teasing toast, with Ander smiling affectionately at us both. Her holding a finger to her lips to warn me to silence as she crept behind Ander to tackle him.
She was always surprising him; he would pin her down and kiss her, with great focus no matter what I threw at them.
“No.” She frowned as if she were looking for something she had lost. “It’s something else.”
“How long have you been working for the queen?” I asked.
“Two years. Perhaps longer.” Something shifted in her expression, just briefly. “Memory is not always reliable.”
She had not asked my name. Riven had not offered mine or hers. Did she still know herself to be Tesa?
