Late Eclipses
Page 68

The pain faded, replaced by more dizziness. I lifted my head, squinting as I tried vainly to make out any features of the room. It was dark enough that I couldn’t even tell whether my eyes were open, and with my hands manacled and the iron confusing my senses, it was impossible to be sure. Even purebloods can’t see in total darkness. Sitting required leaning back on the palms of my hands to keep my weight distributed enough that I wouldn’t fall. It took four tries. The manacles made balance almost impossible, but I didn’t dare touch the walls; I could already feel the iron in the stone threatening to overwhelm me.
My catalog of impossible pain was growing daily. Before Amandine changed my blood, I would have called being hit by elf-shot the worst thing in the world. Before the elf-shot, I would have given that honor to forced physical transformation. Now severe iron poisoning was threatening to put all the other kinds of pain out of the running—and believe me when I say that wasn’t a race I’d ever wanted a winner for.
I held my position until I was sure I was stable before trying to stand, tucking one knee under my body as I braced myself against the floor. I had to stop twice and wait for the dizziness to pass before I managed to get to my feet.
Once I was upright, I couldn’t remember why I wanted to get up in the first place. I was still standing there, trying to decide what came next, when I heard footsteps outside the door. Hope surged forward, threatening to overwhelm me. The Queen changed her mind. She realized she was making a mistake, and she changed her mind; she was going to let me go. “Oh, thank Oberon,” I whispered.
Relief died as the Queen’s voice came slithering into the room. Her Siren blood meant she only had to whisper to make herself heard. “Not Oberon,” she corrected. “Flattering as the comparison is. Are you comfortable, October?”
“Your Highness.” I swallowed. “Now that we’re alone, maybe . . . maybe we can talk. I need to explain.”
“No. You really don’t. You see, I don’t care whether you killed the Lady of the Tea Gardens, or attacked the Duchess Torquill. Your failure is in thinking I would.”
“I . . . what?”
“We were peaceful while you were gone. Your mother ceased her meddling, and my Kingdom was untroubled. But you had to come back, didn’t you? And murder and madness and chaos followed in your wake, as it always had to, daughter of Amandine. Well, I’m through with your games. You killed Blind Michael. That’s more than enough to bring you here. You’ll burn, October. And like the Harvest Queen, who burns to bring plenty to the land, your death will bring peace back to my Kingdom.”
“Highness—” I began, and stopped. There was no point to it. The rustling had stopped; the oily presence of her voice had faded. She was already gone.
The Queen’s words echoed in my head as I started pacing. Had things really been that much better while I was gone? I didn’t want to believe it. Considering the world I’d come back to, I wasn’t sure I should. Just how out of touch—just how insane—was she?
The room was about eight by eight feet square. The air near the walls was so saturated with iron that it hurt to breathe there. Only the center of the room was at all clean, leaving less than four square feet where the iron wasn’t pressing in on me.
I was on my third circuit when my foot hit a slippery patch in the straw. I toppled, unable to catch myself. My cheek hit the iron-laced stone wall, and I screamed. Jerking away, I staggered back until I hit the wall on the opposite side of the room. Even my leather jacket couldn’t offer protection from the iron. I screamed again as it hit the wounds in my back. I crumpled forward into the straw, forehead cracking against the stone floor beneath it, and the blackness took me.
I woke up some unknowable time later, dizzier and more disoriented than ever. “Oh, no,” I muttered, trying to sit up. The straw slipped beneath me, making it impossible. “No, no, no.” I’ve had iron poisoning before; I knew the symptoms. I was dizzy, aching, and unable to focus. The room was warm, probably to keep the walls radiating poison, but I felt like I was freezing.
I curled into a ball and buried my face in the straw, using it as a sort of primitive air filter. It smelled like mold, urine, and decay, but it was better than the alternative. I was holding on as tightly as I could, for all the good that it was going to do me. There was no way out, and with the iron manacles burning against my wrists, even breathing through the straw wasn’t going to help for long.
Iron has a physical presence for the fae. Give it enough time and it starts making a sound, like fingernails on a blackboard inside your head. If you leave a fae prisoner in an iron cell for a few days, you won’t have to worry about them anymore; the iron prevents them from using magic to escape and breaks them at the same time. It’s practical cruelty. When you drive your prisoners catatonic, you don’t have worry about them escaping and coming back for revenge.
The length of imprisonment before execution varies depending on the severity of the crime; the worse you were, the longer they keep you locked up before they let you die. I was starting to understand why. After three days of this, I’d welcome death with open arms. Part of me realized dying would mean Oleander and Rayseline won, but the rest of me didn’t give a damn. It just wanted the hurting to stop.
Time slipped away as I drifted in and out of fitful, iron-soaked sleep. I rose and fumblingly relieved myself at the edge of the safe zone at least once, kicking the soiled straw against the wall. No one brought me food or water. That didn’t matter. I wasn’t hungry. During my increasingly rare moments of lucidity, I tried to figure out a way to escape with my hands chained and my strength fading. There wasn’t one.
At first, I thought the knocking on my cell door was just another symptom of iron poisoning. I groaned, burying my face in the straw. The knocking continued, getting louder. Lifting my head, I shouted, “Go away!”
The knocking stopped. I sighed, content in the knowledge that I’d vanquished my hallucinations. I wasn’t completely crazy yet.
And then I heard Quentin whisper, “This one! She’s in here!”
My eyes snapped open. “Quentin?” At least I was hallucinating people I liked. That was a nice change.
“It’s okay,” he said. “We’re getting you out of here.”
A hallucination wouldn’t say that. A hallucination would bring me a blanket and offer to hold my hair while I threw up. “You’re real.”