My bedding was soaked with sweat. Faun had not meant to kill me after all—only to make me hate her for a thousand lifetimes.
I set my hand to my chest. The knot’s tugging had eased, and so had my pull toward Dorian. Not completely, but its tautness wasn’t painful as it had been. Dorian was closer now; the thought gratified me… and made me ache.
The door opened, a panel of light appearing. “Oh, you’re awake.” Eleyrie.
Elbows braced, I pushed upward; my head swam as the crystals above came to soft life. “How much time has passed?” My throat felt raw, stung.
“Ten hours? It’s long past dusk.” She approached with a jug and set it on the bedside table. She poured the water into a cup andhanded it to me. “But I’m here as you asked, to wake you before the funeral.”
The cup touched my palm. Would I ever bring a drink to my mouth without pausing? But it was Eleyrie who’d poured it; she was safe. If she wasn’t, the mycelial knot would know.
I drank the water down without so much as a tug on my gut and extended it to her. “More.”
She gave me as much as I wanted. And that made her the best handmaiden ever to serve in this court.
Eleyrie helped me dress for the funeral. A thick black-fur dress so long, I had to hold it up to walk. It had a hood, and she called it the traditional queen’s mourning drape.
Mourning. I wasn’t sure that was the feeling.
I sat while she arrayed my hair into a high knot and pressed a black feather into the center of it. She held a hand mirror in front of my face.
“What’s the feather for?” I asked her.
“Flight.” Her eyes met mine in the mirror. “It encourages the soul to fly to the Gossamer Drifts.”
“Encourages?”
She smoothed the shoulders of my dress. “Powerful souls linger by the body. No one is more powerful than a queen.”
“That’s what you believe, that Rhiannon’s soul even now lingers by her body?”
She took the mirror from me. “All fae believe?—”
“Not all fae. You.”
She fingered the mirror’s ornate handle. “My opinion isn’t important, my queen.”
I stood. The dress felt like it weighed three tons. “Says who?”
Her smile was small, and in her dark eyes I thought I could see the child she’d once been. “I believe she lingered a time. Not as long as most.”
It was all superstition, anyway. In the Kingdom of Storms, we believed we ended up where we were meant to be. I had been meantfor the outer district; more and more, I had come to believe it was the only reason I’d survived Feyreign.
Eleyrie and I came out of my chamber not long before midnight. Ten handmaidens waited, all in long-sleeved black shifts that brushed their ankles, their faces veiled in black. Faun and Haskel stood among them, both in black. No Dorian. When I appeared, their backs straightened and their hands clasped behind them.
In the days since I’d killed Rhiannon, the two of them had given me instructions for actingroyal.And foremost among them was never to show weakness in front of anyone who wasn’t my inner court.
That included handmaidens.
Any one of the fae standing in front of me could want me dead. Maybe one of them had cherished cleaning the supper dregs from Rhiannon’s plate. Another might have carefully brushed snarls from her thick hair. Still another might have slept in bed with her, held the former queen like a mother holding her child.
It was impossible to know. And I wasn’t going to be the queen who killed off a servant because they had been the designated server of Rhiannon’s favorite pomegranate oatmeal each morning.
I nodded at Faun and Haskel, then I hoisted the heavy folds of my skirts and began walking. After five paces, footsteps followed me. Eleyrie, Faun, Haskel, and all ten handmaidens.
We passed through the citadel this way, and every servant we came across stopped in their paces, clasped their hands, and bowed their head. Their gazes found the floor, as though I were not to be looked upon.
A strange, lonely thing. I felt more outcasted than respected. I wore a mask to be a queen; maybe I always would.