Queen's Gambit (Dorina Basarab 5)

“People do fall in love, and she did not live with him in the castle. Perhaps—”

“Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps! This is all speculation!”

“Yes, it is. But what else can we do? She is not here to ask.”

“No.” I hugged myself. The water suddenly felt cold. “She isn’t.”

Louis-Cesare pulled me back against him. He didn’t say anything, and for a long time, neither did I, but not because I was processing. I should have been, but all this was too much to take in, and it brought up too many memories.

My mother’s house, snow covered and burnt out, like a reproachful corpse. The wind high in the tree tops, seeming to whisper: “Too late.”

Mircea, giving me a sketchbook that he’d made, with her image caught a thousand different ways, so he’d remember even as the centuries piled up.

Dorina, sitting on the slant of a roofline, outside my window. Showing herself to me for the first time as a transparent, spirit-like being. Not like the specter tonight, but softer, sweeter, speaking of hope and new starts and a better life for both of us.

Where was that life now?

“How do the fey even know about her?” I demanded harshly. “I didn’t even know until recently.”

“You mean Dorina?”

I nodded.

“Efridis,” Louis-Cesare said, his own voice tight. Probably because she was the fey queen who had ordered his possession. “She fought you herself, and had plenty of time to receive reports from others who had done so. She may have even seen the experiments that created your mother. As Aeslinn’s wife, she surely knew about them.”

“But she’s dead—”

“Yet plenty of her people aren’t, and she had time to tell any number of them about her suspicions.”

I didn’t like it, but it fit. Dorina had helped me to defeat a queen of the light fey, but had she outed herself in the process? I shifted uncomfortably.

“There is one thing that does seem certain,” he murmured. “The fey wanted her very badly. They traded a great many warriors’ lives for her, something Aeslinn can ill afford at this juncture.”

That was another point, much as I hated to admit it. I didn’t know how many fey Aeslinn had lost in the assault on his capitol, but it had been a lot. And his people had a really low birthrate, meaning that he couldn’t easily replace them. Yet he’d just risked something like a hundred soldiers to do a snatch and grab on Dorina?

My frown turned into a scowl as I contemplated the obvious reason why.

Louis-Cesare seemed to think the same. “The fey may not be able to recreate the events that led to Dorina’s birth, but they do have thousands of years of godly experimentation to draw on. If they have a living example to hand—”

“They could extract her DNA, study it, and make thousands of Dorinas,” I finished for him. “Or people just like her.”

“Not just like her. Ones loyal to

them, brought up to be their obedient servants—”

“Not if they’re like Dorina!”

“But they won’t be,” he said gently. “However uncomfortable your early years may have been, you complemented each other perfectly. You acted as camouflage for her, while she kept you safe through your travails. Giving both of you time to make up your minds about the people you wished to be. The children brought up by the fey will have no such advantage.”

“And the fey timeline often runs faster than Earth’s,” I realized. “If they hit a patch like that—”

“They will have an army in no time.” He moved around to see my face, and his own was serious. “How old were you before you were deadly?”

I thought back, which wasn’t easy with the blood freezing in my veins. “I don’t remember.”

“Your first kill then.”

“I could walk,” I said slowly. “I remember toddling over to a wolf, which was trying to steal some of our stew. The Romani group I was with had gotten drunk that night and forgotten to put it away. It was winter; the beast was probably just hungry. But so were we . . .”