“And your father did not? I don’t see you carrying his soul around in a sword.” The Duchess leaned closer. “My darklings did nothing but awaken the fairy magic already within your son’s blood. Judging by your mother’s trick with the hazel tree, I’d guess dryad magic, perhaps three or four generations removed. Your son is a rare creature indeed. One with the ability to manipulate both human and fairy magic. The only question was who would be first to sense that potential and try to steal it.”
“Impossible.” The anger in her voice startled her, but she didn’t try to suppress it. The idea that her mother, that she herself carried fairy blood… “Jakob is human. Snow examined him many times after we escaped your cave, and she never found anything unnatural.”
“What could be more natural than fairy magic?”
Danielle shook her head. “I would have known.”
“Is our kind so horrible? Rest your mind, Princess. You and your son are human in every way that matters. But, like your friend Talia, you’re also something more.”
“You knew.”
The Duchess spread her hands. “I suspected. Human blood dilutes our own. Even a fairy of the pure caste might not recognize one of our descendants after a few generations.”
“Why did you never-?” Danielle backed away. There were many reasons to keep such secrets. A better question was why the Duchess was telling her now. Was it simply a way to keep Danielle off-balance? “What do you want?”
“I can help you find Jakob. In exchange for that help, you will send him to me in Fairytown for six months of each year. I give you my word to raise him like my own son. He will be protected from all harm. Given everything you’ve said, he’ll be safer here than in your own palace.”
“You can’t be serious,” Danielle breathed.
“Isn’t this better than losing him altogether?” The Duchess softened her words, never losing her smile. “I can teach him to understand his fairy blood, to use his magic to protect himself.”
For Jakob’s sake, Danielle refrained from telling the Duchess what she could do with her bargain. “Choose another price.”
“Why ask me, Princess? Why not your friend Snow White?” Amusement danced in her eyes. “Could it be she has finally overreached herself, that she’s fallen prey to her own power?”
The Duchess knew Snow was behind Jakob’s kidnapping. It shouldn’t have surprised her. Febblekeck was the obvious candidate for the spy, but by now word had likely spread.
“As I understand the story,” the Duchess said, “Snow’s mother ordered her killed. She intended to dine upon her own daughter’s heart. Gruesome, but not unknown.”
Danielle kept silent, unsure where the Duchess was leading.
“Ancient wizards believed you could consume another’s magic in such ways. I hope whoever stole Jakob away doesn’t believe as Snow’s mother did. I hate to imagine him suffering such a fate because his own mother was too weak to protect him.”
“I won’t save him from one evil only to give him to another.”
“Very well.” The Duchess’ image began to fade. “When you change your mind, you know how to reach me.”
Danielle’s blade rang against the floor where the Duchess’ face had mocked her only a moment before. Her strike cut the carpet and gouged the tile below. She relaxed her grip, allowing the sword to fall to the floor.
The Duchess was fey; she would keep her word, protecting Jakob and raising him as her own son. Raising him to be fairy. Shaping him into God only knew what. Given the Duchess’ own magic, how difficult would it be to turn Jakob against his own kind?
She stepped to the window. Tiny flecks of silver and iron were worked into each pane of glass. Fairy glass, said to protect against magic, though only the weakest of charms would be repelled by such. The Duchess had answered Danielle’s summons easily enough.
A quiet squeak made her jump. A lone mouse stood in front of her wardrobe, balanced on his hind legs. The animals had always known her mood, coming to comfort her in the darkest times of her childhood. Danielle thought them friends sent by her mother’s spirit.
She dropped to one knee as the mouse darted closer. Drawn by friendship, or by some instinctive fairy allure? “The Duchess is right about one thing,” she whispered. “Every moment I waste, Snow takes my son farther from here.”
The mouse jumped back and waited, whiskers quivering. Its pose reminded her of a soldier awaiting orders.
“Thank you, but I’m afraid you can’t help me in this.” She grabbed her sword and headed for the chapel. Nobody stopped her as she crossed the courtyard. Perhaps something of her mood showed upon her face, because while several people started toward her, each one swiftly turned away.
She yanked open the chapel doors, taking in the scene in a single glance. Armand lay asleep on the altar. Gerta and Father Isaac had stopped talking in mid-sentence with Danielle’s arrival. “How is he?”
“Unchanged,” said Talia. She appeared disheveled, her hair a mess, her clothes rumpled and sweaty. A glance at the bench beside her explained why. A red cape, lined with wolfskin, sat in a pile on the bench. The cape had once belonged to the assassin known as the Lady of the Red Hood. Talia must have tried using the cape’s magic to track Snow and Jakob.
“Did you find anything?” Danielle asked.
Talia glanced at the cape. “Snow’s scent vanished from the workshop. I picked her up again near the main gate, but lost her outside the palace. I think she took a carriage, but I couldn’t say where she went.”
“Damn.”
Talia was studying Danielle’s face. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing.” This wasn’t the time to talk about the Duchess’ revelations. Danielle marched past, toward the altar. Gerta took a step back. Was Danielle’s frustration so apparent? “What have you found?”
“Very little.” Gerta was clearly exhausted, her eyes red and shadowed. She had nearly frozen to death below the palace, and hadn’t gotten a decent night’s sleep since… ever, really. “Neither exorcism nor summoning rituals have helped. Everything is coming from within the prince. As far as we can tell, the demon isn’t controlling him. It’s simply changing the way he sees the world. It’s fascinating, really.”
Father Isaac cleared his throat, and Gerta blushed. Her enthusiasm reminded Danielle of Snow. Her eyes shone with the same excitement when she talked about magic. “We have to remove the splinter from his body.”
“It moves each time we try to examine it,” said Father Isaac. He had unbuttoned the prince’s shirt, and pulled it open to show new bruises along the right side of Armand’s chest. “I’ve kept him asleep, but the splinter acts like a living thing. I’m afraid if we try to cut it from him, we’d only send it deeper into his body.”
“Where is it now?”
Gerta pointed to Armand’s lowest rib on the right side. In a soft voice, she said, “Had it remained in his arm, we might have been able to amputate.”
Danielle forced those images away. “Snow could destroy her mirrors at will, reducing them to powder. Can you crush this splinter?”
“Even if we did, the pieces might still carry the curse,” said Father Isaac.
Gerta chewed her lower lip as she studied the bruises on Armand’s side. “If we bled him as soon as the glass was crushed, we might be able to remove most of it. Like sucking poison from a wound.”
“Or we could spread the poison throughout his body,” Isaac countered.
Danielle turned away. “A single sliver took my husband from me. My father was a glassmaker, but never have I seen a mirror as large as Snow’s. What we’ve seen in the palace is only the start. We have to know if this infection can be cured.”
“There are others we could attempt to free,” Isaac said. “I could have one of the prisoners brought from the dungeon-”
“They’re not prisoners, they’re people. Friends. You mean to tell me their lives are less important than Armand’s? That their families will grieve less over their loss?”
“He means you don’t risk the Prince of Lorindar to unproven magic,” said Talia.
“I could trap it,” Gerta said suddenly. She brushed her fingers over Armand’s chest. “Crushing the splinter
