Ashes of Honor

Bastard. He gets everything he wants—he always has, Prince of Londinium, King of San Francisco, and how much of it has he worked for? How much of it has he earned? Not a bit, and yet there he sits, and here I stand, hoping he’ll exploit my son enough to grant me the power to pull us away from this cursed place, these cursed people who walk and talk and call themselves our equals.

I’d always known that Samson was a cruel, resentful man, but I’d never understood how angry he was until that moment. Angry about his place in Cait Sidhe society, angry at the accident of birth that made Tybalt a King and him a subject, angry at the fact that his only living child would eventually have that same level of power and privilege. He resented Raj, even as he viewed his son as the one opportunity he’d ever have to achieve the status he thought he deserved.

I was dimly aware that I was on my knees on the cold stone floor of the hall; I could feel a hand gripping my shoulder, fingers clutching hard enough that I could feel them despite the leather of my jacket and the distance imposed by the heavy veil of blood between us. I clung to that sensation—to the knowledge of self, and the even better knowledge that there was someone ready and waiting to call me back—as I forced myself deeper into the spell.

“So you can get me the girl?”

“I can.” I do not brag—cats do not brag—but I still speak the truth. Riordan came to me with rumors, and I proved them to be reality. An untrained, unwatched Tuatha changeling. She could have amounted to nothing. Instead, she came to be so much more.

“How?”

“She walks the same route every day. I can take her into the shadows and bring her to you before she musters her senses enough to run.”

“If you fail me…” She does not complete the sentence. She doesn’t need to. I know the price of failure better than she does, because I understand what this is. She thinks it’s an escape from the eyes on her borders. I know it for something more.

This is a coup.

“I will not fail.”

Riordan says nothing. She simply nods, and I think again that power is the one thing the Divided Courts got right. They understand that power should belong to the strongest—if you can take a thing and hold it, it should be yours. She would have made a fine cat. A pity, then, that she must belong to the lesser Courts. Unlike some, I will never dirty myself.

But still, she’s lovely in the moonlight.

Seen through Samson’s assessing eyes, Duchess Riordan was a beautiful tool, as clueless and malleable as the rest of the Divided Courts but with a strength of character that he found himself compelled to admire. The taste of his admiration was alien in my mind, so cold and calculating that I would have mistaken it for another flavor of hatred if I hadn’t been wound so deeply in his memories.

Too deeply; I was seeing Riordan in her own territory, and not in the moonlight of Annwn. I forced myself to move forward through Samson’s memory, clawing my way through the blood-soaked veils of recollection until the red shattered and re-formed into something more familiar. The cliff at the edge of the moor, overlooking the sea.