Page 111 of The Blood Queen
She has to be.
Callum takes my horse’s reins and starts to lead it away when I find my voice, my throat dust dry, my heart bruised it’s beating so hard.
“Alyth?” I ask him. “Do you—is Alyth Graham here?”
Callum looks over his shoulder at me.
The confusion on his face breaks me. He doesn’t recognize the name.
He doesn’t know her.
I stagger like I took a blow, biting down hard on my tongue to keep from gasping. No, no—
Then Callum speaks. “How do you know Lady Alyth?”
30 Alyth
“Beside me,” Queen Mary says.
I dip into a small curtsy and take the prized seat beside the queen of Scotland, feeling all the eyes of the ladies of court watching. It’s not unusual for me to be in Mary’s confidence; I am not her closest friend, but I am at least her most trusted adviser.
Even when she doesn’t listen to me.
Not that I expected her to heed my advice to avoid that tall young man, Lord Darnley, when he proposed marriage. Nor to expand reinforcements after the attempted coup that killed our friend David Rizzio.
Recently, though, I’ve started to feel as if I have a second sense about things. This meeting Mary’s called to bring her lairds together and discuss the problem of her husband. After that, I started to…know things. Guess things.
As if I have an echo of a memory I’ve never lived before.
These visions grew sharper not too long ago, as if I had a whole second set of memories. And then, all of a sudden, it all snapped into place, a fully formed awareness of an alternate fate.
Samson Calthorpe. Flaming-red hair and an English accent. A smile he gave only to me.
But…
I rewrote fate.
And fae magic always comes at a cost.
If I saved Scotland in some alternative timeline, saved the Seelie Court, saved even my own life, would there not be a price to pay? And what dearer price could there be to pay than him?
I tap my hand on my knee. One. Two. Three. Again. Three times.
There’s magic afoot, but I have not yet quite been able to grasp at it. It flickers from my mind’s eye every time I try. Just like a will-o’-the-wisp…
Dodgy girl! A male voice—English, Samson—echoes in my mind. In these not-memories of a future I haven’t lived, Samson and I were in a bog, meeting Moyra, and he was charmed by the will-o’-the-wisps.
And I know this all must be real somehow, because if I can hear a man speak in English with that accent and feel nothing but hope, then it must mean something special.
The queen leans over, stilling my nervous fidgeting. “What do you think?” Mary asks, holding up a bit of cloth with embroidered flowers etched in thread over the material.
“Very good,” I say, leaning closer to her, my mind still on him. Now that I remember Samson, now that I know everything about him from his name to the taste of him on my lips, I cannot stop wishing for him. For the first time in my life, I long to go to England, to try to find him. But I stay. Not for Mary. Not for Scotland.
I stay here and I wait, because I only have one delicate thread of hope that our fates still line up enough that he will come to me.
Mary taps the thistle she embroidered on the black velvet and shoots me a look. “Tell me what you really think,” she says in a lower voice, and I know she’s asking me not about her sewing but about Scotland and its defenses. I force myself to center myself on this reality.
“You’ve built a good boundary here,” I say, touching the Celtic knotwork framing the thread flowers, and I know she takes that to mean that the fae—under my leadership—are positioned to watch the southern border of Scotland and alert her to any outside threat. Queen Elizabeth has shown zero interest in Scotland, but everyone in the world seems keenly aware of how the queen’s declaration to remain a virgin puts Mary and her child in direct line for the throne. Fortunately, the relationship between the two nations is at least on the friendly side of tense. As long as Mary has the heir and Elizabeth maintains her relatively neutral stance, it seems inevitable that the thrones will be united into one empire peacefully rather than through war.
