Chapter 21

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Well don't you have just a sparkling personality.

I think I would've been more shocked at her presence had she not been so insufferable. Maybe she deserved to be here. Maybe she and the others were overflow from the Brotherhood's interrogation barn?

"I haven't done anything to anyone," I said crisply. "If you're a prisoner here, that was of your own making. That's what you get for being Wystan's accomplice!" That had to be the only reason they were down here in the bowels of the castle, right? In a dungeon I'd been told didn't exist?

Brandi threw her head back with a laugh. Then she swept a hand behind her at the inmates huddled dejectedly in their cells. While they'd become aware of me, none sought my attention to free them. Except for the fiáin, they all remained as far away from the iron bars as they could get. The feral fairy gave his wings a single flutter as he sniffed loudly in my direction.

"Really? A simple fisher cat is Wystan's accomplice?" Brandi demanded. "That one doesn't even talk!"

Snorting, she turned up the wick under the cauldron, giving it more of that blue flame. "And you're the one to save us, too, if there ever was one." Picking up a golden stirring spoon, she tapped it loudly against the cauldron rim. "That's right, everyone! Our savior has arrived, except she's too stupid to realize it."

Twice this woman had scorned me, and if I wasn't already on a hair trigger after discovering there was a dungeon in the underground silversmithy, her bitterness would've done the trick just fine.

In three quick steps, I was right next to her. As much as my hands wanted to reach out and throttle her, I kept them at my sides, fingernails sawing into my palms. I'd get more out of her with honey than tomcat piss, and I wasn't a bully to use intimidation to get what I wanted. But I also wasn't a push-over.

Brandi flinched, shrinking away from me, but with her ankle shackled, there wasn't anywhere she could go that I couldn't hound her. And I wasn't wobbling on high heels, either.

"We've met before." It wasn't a question. "And in that meeting, you must have learned I am not someone you can poke with your verbal barbs without consequence."

Brandi's tongue darted across her chapped lips before she audibly gulped. When she nodded, her white hair swished violently across her face.

I didn't need a memory to slip through the maelstrom to know who had come out the victor of that previous interaction. I just hoped I'd shown the same mercy as I was choosing to do now.

"If you are as innocent as you claim to be, it would be in your best interest not to antagonize the person who could set you free, isn't that right?"

The hedge witch sighed, deflating, all the vinegar she'd bottled up against me draining away. She shuffled back to her cauldron to give it a stir, gesturing for me to take a look at what she was making. "Despite your best intentions, Meadow Hawthorne, I don't think that's possible, even if these cells and my shackle weren't as warded as a coven's grimoire cupboard."

Cobwebs, damselfly wings, swan feathers… "You're making Caer powder," I whispered. "W-why?"

"Why do you think?" Brandi answered miserably.

Now it was my turn to wet my lips and swallow against a suddenly dry throat. Thistle thorns, it was scratchier than if I'd swallowed a robin's nest. She had to be mistaken. She had to. Maybe Ossian had found out a way to weaponize it against the mallaithe, to disorient the fae hunting trees so they'd be easier to destroy? The same with the sluagh blackbirds, perhaps, befuddling them into breaking from their flock so they could be singled out with an ash arrow?

Why else would there be shelves carved into the wall full of round glass jars filled with white powder?

My mind told me those were all logical reasons, and yet instinct knew they were all false. Oh my Green Mother.

"It's in everything," Brandi whispered, a crazed gleam in her brown eyes. "The food, the drinking water. Well, not his , but everywhere else. Keeps the populace susceptible to his illusions, doesn't it? He keeps it in that big pouch on his belt at all times. He comes down every night to feed and then—"

"Stop," I pleaded, on the verge of hysteria myself. My world was crumbling around me. And not with the gradual erosion seen by time. This was an avalanche. " Stop ."

"He used to make it himself," she rambled on, stirring the cauldron vigorously with her golden spoon. The scrape of it against the inner rim was like the screech of a metal roof being torn off its frame during a storm. "But after he brought that old hag in to feed from"—she tossed her head towards the door at the end of the room, from where I could have sworn I heard the faintest music—"he hasn't had any use for my magic. Except for this."

She started to laugh. "I was never very powerful, but I was always precise. Guess that paid off in the long run, didn't it? Look at me now, Ma!"

My stomach twisted as she became more unglued, cackling away and stirring like a madwoman. I chanced a look at the stairwell, knowing I had left the door ajar and wondering if anyone was hearing her. Us. And what they would do to me if they found me here. I took a backwards step.

Brandi snatched my forearm, her too-thin fingers clamping tight. She wrenched me back to her workbench so I could witness. "But he can't let us go, no, no, no, because what if . What if you need a firmer hand and he needs more magic to handle you? What if he—"

I seized her face in my hands, fingers digging in hard like that's what it took to silence her tongue. " Stop ."

"I c-can't," she blubbered, tears falling freely now even as she continued to stir. "I… I presented myself to him. I was vain and proud and so inflated— Oh Mab, I'm such a fool!"

"Listen to me," I hissed. She lifted miserable brown eyes, sniffling, and I couldn't think of what to say now that I had her attention. My mind was reeling, and it took more than a deep breath and a forceful invocation of the Green Mother's name to form a semblance of a plan. There were just too many variables, too many accusations, too many lies—

"Do you have white papaver seeds here?" I asked, releasing her. Flapping my hands, I shimmied the cuffs of my gown down over my hands to form sleeve-gloves. Then I got to jostling through every jar and bowl and vial strewn about the workstation. She was working on more than just Caer powder, but I was too frazzled to piece the myriad ingredients together to determine exactly what. If only Aunt Peony was here.

"Yes. Over there!" She pointed to a large jar of dark green glass at the end of the table. "Ground fine, it's one of the seven components of the toirchim tonic."

My hands froze above the cork stopper, my heart pounding a single hard beat before crystallizing into ice. "Did you say tonic ?"

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"Never mind." If I didn't focus on the task at hand, I was going to explode with rage and grief and devastation and a whole host of other emotions I was too overwhelmed to name. I had toirchim glaze in my foraging bag, a compound that made the recipient subdued and compliant, and it didn't take a great leap in logic to deduce that toirchim tonic did the same thing. And I'd been drinking it every morning.

After wrangling the cork stopper free with my sleeve-gloves, I used a measuring spoon to withdraw a portion of the papaver seeds to confirm their identity. Pure white, they resembled tiny poppyseed-sized pearls. Not a gray one among them—the highest quality. I grabbed her hand and poured the spoonful into her cupped palm.

"Throw one tablespoon of these into the mix when you add the swan feathers," I told her. "No need to grind them, the heat will break them down. It will lessen the efficacy of the Caer powder."

Brandi tried to jerk back, flattening her hand to rid the seeds from her palm as if I'd given her a cluster of writhing mealworms instead. My nails dug into her wrist, preventing just that.

"N-no! He'll find out!"

"He'll only find out if you lose your nerve. Be brave , Brandi," I pleaded. "For me. For all of them."

She glanced over her shoulder at all the miserable faces trapped behind the iron bars, then jerked her chin to the shelves with all the Caer powder reserves. "But what of all that?"

I chewed my bottom lip, racing through my potions education at a maddening speed. "You can reach the jars, yes? Then add four tablespoons of the papaver seeds into this batch and use it to cut the stuff in the jars. Use a ratio of one to three, papaver to original. Got it?"

She nodded quickly. "O-okay."

"And when he comes down to refill that masala dabba with the tonic ingredients, you give him… this!" I lifted the amber bottle with Tincture of Yarrow written on the paper label. "Add a few drops of this to the ground papaver seeds."

"A few drops of yarrow tincture to the papaver." She gulped, taking the amber bottle and setting it beside the green jar of seeds.

I turned back to the inmates. While I had more access to my magic than ever before, it wasn't enough to break through the wards that guarded the cells, not all of them. And if not all of them could escape, the rest would be interrogated, and I knew the methods the Brotherhood used. "I'm sorry I can't do more."

"Just get him out of Redbud, Meadow," Brandi said, bitterness returning to her tone. It wasn't directed at me.

With a sharp nod, I turned on my heel and hurried over to the silversmithy, the whole reason I'd come down here in the first place.

Arranged along the shelves nearest the sleeping forge were all manner of tools and utensils, bars of raw silver, molds, jars of solutions, and polishing rags. What looked like a leather harness meant for a small dog was on a shelf all its own, and when I manipulated it with my sleeve-gloves, I realized it was a thigh holster with a knife sheath. Except the knife was missing, and I had a sick feeling that this was where my iron knife had run off to, though I didn't remember surrendering it at any point. And what would a high fae want with my iron knife?

If he's drugging you with toirchim tonic and Caer powder, then he's obviously not above disarming you!

A sideways glance at the forge lent strength to my suspicion: it was probably slag at the bottom of the ashes and forever out of reach from hurting him. He probably would've done the same thing with my iron cuffs except those were impossible to remove—only my death would release them.

I replaced the thigh holster and continued my search. On the highest shelf, accessed only by tiptoe, and arranged in a neat little row like individual trophies, were my crystals. All of them, save one, were embedded in what looked like silver diamond-shaped scales.

There was no way I could tap them now—they were fueling some unseen magic I didn't have the time to examine and tamper with. And was the power of one little crystal even worth the effort? In short, no.

Releasing a frustrated growl, I abandoned the crystals, the forge, and that cursed potions lab/dungeon nightmare and raced up the winding stair back to the castle proper. It had only been a miracle that Ossian or anyone else hadn't needed to come down here.

With the black door firmly shut and locked, I wiggled my hands free of my sleeves and abandoned the hallway at a barely managed sedate walk. The fae king had exceptional hearing and running steps would surely alert him. Running steps right outside a door that was strictly off-limits even more so. I'd get to the atrium, collect myself, and figure out my next move.

If anyone stopped me along the way… well, according to the Misty Fields written above the farmhouse's doorbell, I'd been a pretty good actress in a past life. I'd just have to fake it again.

In the meantime… Oh my Green Mother, oh my Green Mother. Fate couldn't have been so cruel as to bind me forever to a personality-manipulating monster, could it? My heart fluttered, my vision swimming. It was either nerves, the realization that Ossian might just be the worst sort of fae imaginable, or low blood sugar. My growling stomach tried to convince me my weakened state was just from hunger pangs, but I didn't believe it. However, I was beginning to believe everything else.

What was I going to do? Cut off from my family, the hearth ember gone, my core still cursed, my memory hazy and incomplete, and now there was the debate of who I could trust.

Sawyer . Despite our argument, ever fiber in my being told me I could trust that little cat. I have to get back to Sawyer!

What sounded like something scraping over stone alerted me I wasn't alone. Thistle thorns, I'd been so lost in my own whirling thoughts I hadn't thought to check my surroundings. Alright, Misty Fields, suit up! Sucking in a fearful breath, I flattened against the wall of one of the shadowed archways emptying into the atrium in time to witness Ossian confirming my darkest suspicions.

The fae king had his second by the throat with one hand and had him hefted so far into the air that Alec's feet kicked by Ossian's upper thighs. "You could have ruined everything ."