A Stroke Of Midnight   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

“The scullery maid is very frightened,” Doyle said. “I cannot tell if she is afraid in general or about something specific.”

“So you scared her,” I said.

He gave a small shrug. “I did not do it on purpose.”

I looked at him.

“I did not, Meredith, but Peasblossom took it ill that the Queen’s Darkness had come. She seemed to think I’d come to kill her.”

“Why would she think the queen wanted her dead?” Rhys asked.

I had an idea, an awful idea, because Queen Andais would hate it. I didn’t say it out loud, because though the new guards knew as well as we did that a sidhe had done this, they probably wouldn’t be thinking what I was thinking in that moment. Andais had saddled me with several men I did not know and a couple who I outright didn’t trust. The awful thought was, What if it had been Prince Cel’s people? What if the maid, Peasblossom, had seen one of Cel’s people leaving the scene of a double homicide? She’d never believe that the queen would want her to tell anyone.

The trouble was that I couldn’t see what Cel, or anyone serving his interests, would gain from killing Beatrice. The reporter seemed accidental, just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“You’ve thought of something,” Rhys said.

“Later,” I said, and let my eyes flick to the backs of the men just a foot away from us.

“Yes,” Doyle said, “yes, we do need some privacy.”

“We should hide the body,” said one of the men at our backs. Amatheon’s hair, in its tight coppery red French braids, left his face bare, but nothing could leave it unadorned, for his eyes were layered petals of red, blue, yellow, and green, like some multicolored flower. It often made me a little dizzy to meet his gaze, as if my own eyes rebelled at the sight of him gazing out at the world with flower-petal eyes. His face was square-jawed but slender, so that he managed to be both strongly masculine and vaguely delicate at the same time. Almost as if his face, like his eyes, couldn’t quite decide what it wanted to be.

“The reporter will be missed, Amatheon,” I said. “We can’t just hide his body and hope this will all go away.”

“Why can we not? Why can we not simply say we don’t know where he has gone? Or that one of the lesser fey saw him leave the sithen.”

“Those are all lies,” Rhys said.