her gaze around the hall, slashing at the phae with a glare as edged as a shattered jewel. “Any of you could be next.”
Adelyn had time for nothing else as she was pushed into the dark corridor that led to her death.
Her tears—mere water now, her knack drained—blinded her. Unbalanced by her bound hands, she stumbled. The rip in her veils dipped forward over her breasts. Stupid gilded slippers had no traction.
A sudden burst of illumination flared beyond her tears.
“Musetta.” The voice of her looming death—low and rough, as she might have guessed six feet deep would sound—froze her in her tracks.
The Queen might be capricious and terrifying, and her goblin chamberlain was petty and horrendous, but the Queen’s vizier existed in a dark realm all his own.
Adelyn closed her eyes, hoping death took her quickly. The vizier’s grim countenance was known to send courtiers into fits of madness. And those were phae who weren’t convicted of treason.
“Musetta, look at me.” A note of compulsion forced her eyes open.
She clamped her tongue between her teeth to stop herself from begging for mercy. The Queen had no mercy. And no mercy’s name—at least as it was screamed by hopeless phae in their last moments—was Raze.
Swathed in a gray samite robe, his hulking figure was a drear wall, his glare equally gray above cheekbones as whetted as the exposed steel of the athame hanging from his belt. Amongst beings who could conjure any masquerade, his stark—and, frankly, uninspired—presentation seemed a mockery, as if he had never left the Iron Age behind. It vexed Adelyn’s musetta power to no ends; a muse did not do gray.
Not that she would say so aloud, not to Raze the Ruiner.
A glint in his half-closed eyes made her think he read her thoughts, despite her determined silence.
“Musetta.” His voice sliced, slowly and dagger-cruel, through the word as if he might trick—or torture—her into sharing her real name. With such precious insight he could twist her into whatever he wished. “You find yourself in desperate straits.”
She lifted her chin to an angle between elegance and disdain. “Straight as an executioner’s blade.”
He laughed. “The Queen’s death sentences are—like most words from phae lips—open to interpretation.”
Adelyn bit her tongue again. She would not beg. As inspiration personified, she could not be moved by necessity or entreaty.
Though she longed to let her wrecked golden slippers move her far, far away.
The Ruiner crossed his arms over his chest, his gray-gloved hands gripping his biceps with knuckles aimed her way. “Don’t you wish to hear your options?”
She scowled at his malicious teasing. “Musetta I am, but I will not incite you to more enthusiastic methods of murder. Specifically, my murder.”
Raze drummed his fingers. “The Queen wants you out of her sight. Death would do. But exile accomplishes much the same results.”
Exile? Her heart twisted in her chest. “Exactly the same results for me. I cannot leave the phaedrealii.”
Raze snorted. “Many musetta have journeyed out of court. Where do you think humans find their inspiration?”
His offhand reassurance gave her no comfort. “I never wanted to inspire humans.”
“And yet you’ve done it so well,” Raze purred. He fingered the torn neckline of her veils. “You are everything a man could want to inspire him.”
She leaned away, holding her breath against the stink of lightning that clung to him. Out from the gap of his sleeve, a hairy gray spider as big as the vizier’s hand scuttled over her breast. She gasped as it pattered across her skin, but Raze’s grip trapped her.
The spider gathered the edges of the tear. With a few pumps of its spinneret, it laced the rip, then it vanished up Raze’s sleeve. Adelyn sagged back, and this time the vizier let her go.
He glanced over his massive shoulder. “William, come. And bring the key.”
A hysterical sob congealed in Adelyn’s throat. “Why is he here?”
“He wanted to see you off. And to tell you—”
William elbowed Raze aside as only one of the Queen’s lovers would dare. “Sweet muse, I had no idea it would end like this.”
“You are fucking our Queen,” she snapped. “Yet you wrote a poem to my eyes. How else would it end?”
William’s cherubic blonde curls bobbed as he ducked his head, though his ravenous gaze on her was anything but saintly.
Raze tsked at her. “Poor boy, he just couldn’t help himself. You are musetta. You inspired him.”
She never bothered with humans. Why waste the breath of inspiration on creatures that breathed only a hundred years or so? Making her place in the phaedrealii was hard enough since musetta had no real value themselves except what they inspired in others. Now she fastened her gaze on the iron key dangling from William’s fingers. She pitched her voice as musetta did, echoing the smooth slide of rich fabric or fine wine. “Free me, William.”
William hesitated. As a mere human, he shouldn’t have resisted her voice. Shouldn’t have wanted to. But her influence had waned under the shackles and the fear that pulsed like her iron-poisoned blood.
Raze chuckled. “William wants to keep you here. He forgets a musetta can’t be imprisoned.”
William scowled at the vizier, bold in his passionate idiocy the way the Queen preferred her human lovers. Somehow they kept that callow foolishness, no matter how long she ensnared them. “I know she can’t stay. The Queen is so angry.” Awareness flickered behind his eyes, then vanished in a phae haze. “But I’ll make her forget.”
Raze waved one hand. “Everyone forgets. Makes it damn hard to get anything done around here. But before you tra-la-la along, unlock the musetta.”
Adelyn couldn’t hold back a moan of relief when William fumbled at her bindings and the manacles fell away. The phae who had survived the Iron Age were resistant to more refined versions of the ore, but even the steel-born phae avoided raw iron. Tucking her burned wrists against her belly, she glared at William. “Thank you. If only these ode-worthy eyes of mine had never glimpsed you.”
His mouth twisted. “Sweet muse—”
“You doomed me. Also, your cadence was off and your rhyming sucked.” She put all the musetta force into her voice. “Go.”
He went with a wrenching sigh, as if she had torn the exhalation from him.
Raze laughed again. “You are unkind, musetta.”
She held out one wrist in mute evidence.
The Ruiner shrugged. “I have nothing against cruelty. It might help in the task I’m giving you.”
Adelyn
