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handsome man dressed in the richest clothes she had ever seen. But through the left eye, he was not even
human. The bones of his face were misshapen, some oddly elongated and others oddly shortened. His
green eyes were without either white or pupil, and his mouth was full of small, sharp teeth.
"What are you?" Mina blurted out.
One of the guards struck her hard across the face. His mailed fist split her lip and left scratches and
bruises on her cheek. Reeling, she forced herself to stand upright, determined not to appear weak.
The finely dressed man smiled thinly. "You will not speak unless you are asked a question. Besides, I
would have expected that you would know me. I am very disappointed that you do not. My portrait
appears in the newspapers all the time. Although I suppose it s doubtful that a slut like you can even
read."
His portrait? Blinking back the haze that seemed to originate in her pounding head, Mina concentrated
on the vision from her right eye. The lovely man of the glamour was indeed familiar. But it took her a
moment to put a name to the face.
"You ve disguised yourself as Prince Roderick!" she hissed.
He looked at her in surprise, and then laughed loudly. "Stupid cow. I am your prince."
Cold fear trickled through her blood. This creature, made human only by a thin veil of glamour, could not
be the true Prince. He was lying to her for reasons she couldn t imagine. He had to be. The creature
wearing Roderick s face slunk across the flagstones, until he stood only a few inches from her. For a
moment, he looked at her like a man studying something unpleasant in the gutter. Then he reached out
and grabbed her chin, forcing her face up. His long nails dug into her skin.
"So, you are indeed unseelie. Hard to say how strong with all this iron about." He jerked his hand away,
wiped it fastidiously on a handkerchief. Replacing the handkerchief in his pocket, he drew out a cheap
brass chain. "And disguised as a factory slave. No doubt to throw us off the track with the iron collar."
Mina recognized the chain Duncan had given her, its glamour now gone. "No, I really am inden "
The guard struck her again, a brutal blow that drove her to her knees. Tears streamed out of her eyes,
and she tasted blood in her mouth.
"Well, well, the unseelie bitch does seem eager to talk," Roderick remarked idly. "The queen doesn t
believe that there are more of you in the city. But you re obviously too stupid to have survived this long
on your own. There must be more unseelie faelings. You will tell me everything about them."
She bit her lip, more scared than she could ever remember being. "There isn t anyone else. Just me."
Roderick let out a bored sigh. "Don t insult me, little gutter bitch."
Mina drew in a long, shuddery breath. The fingers of her two guards seemed to drive into the flesh of her
arms like pincers. Iron weighed heavy on her body and combined with the agony in her skull to sap her
strength. "There was one. He taught me how to survive."
"Where is he now?"
"Dead. He was an old man. I swear it."
Roderick s fire-green eyes narrowed. "He must not have taught you very well. Trying to pass faery gold
in the market that was very, very foolish. Almost as foolish as lying to me now."
"I m not lying!"
Roderick smiled, revealing fangs. "Somehow, I just don t believe you, sweetmeat."
He stepped back and made a negligent gesture. Two of the guards vanished back down the hall, only to
return moments later, dragging a small boy with them. His arms and legs were stick-thin with hunger, and
the burden of the iron manacles seemed great enough to break his bones. He stared about frantically, his
eyes huge with confusion and terror.
"The Knights found this one begging outside the city gates today," Roderick said. He tapped his lips
thoughtfully with a finger that had too many joints. "Just another unseelie by-blow. He was small enough
to be of minimal danger but large enough to be entertaining, so I had him brought here."
Roderick snapped his fingers. Another door opened, and a guard led in a pack of snarling Hounds on
silver leashes. When the animals caught sight of the boy, they went mad, baying and slavering. Roderick
nodded, and the handler released them.
They were on the child in a moment. White fangs tore away an ear and a hunk of meat from his skull,
revealing the bone beneath. That was all Mina had time to see before the Hounds bore his screaming
form to the ground. A few moments later, his shrieks stopped, and a tide of blood rolled out around the
Hounds white paws.
Her stomach turned, and she vomited helplessly on the floor.
Roderick laughed. "You have a woman s delicate constitution, I see. Remember what happened here.
Lie to me again, and I will do something far more unpleasant to you. Take her back to her cell, and let
her think over her options."
~*~
"She knows something," Roderick said insistently. "I m certain of it."
Rhiannon sighed and leaned back in her chair. She d still been up when Roderick had returned to the
palace, wild and flushed with his triumph. Unlike him, she d always loved the night. It was in her nature.
She did not love being proved wrong, however, and it irked her that Roderick had been right about the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]