Page 110 of Confounding Oaths
Even up close, Mr. Caesar could not quite tell if it was his sister. She was still masked, still dressed in the same incongruously flowing glass as everybody else. The only real clue as to her identity was the pattern of fissures that spread across her legs and arms, which seemed familiar but not conclusive.
“Mary?” he tried.
And the girl in the hoop turned to look at him.
“Mary, are you well? Are you yourself?”
Slowly, she slid herself out of the hoop, stood, but said nothing.
“Mary?”
“John?” The answer came soft and uncertain.
“We need to get out of here.”
From the dais, Titania gazed down with emotionless grace. “You do notneedto do anything. The child came here for a reason.”
“You came here,” Mr. Caesar reminded her, “because you did not want this. You’ve gone your whole life ignoring me for—now I look back—very good reasons.Please,Mary, ignore her as well.”
Somewhere in the recesses of her mind—and a mind she still had, that being an immaterial thing not transmutable by our magics—Miss Caesar tried to remember. “I came for redress.”
“And do you still feel you need it?” asked the Queen of All Seasons, innocent as summer.
Only silence answered.
“This might be out of turn,” said Captain James, moving to Mr. Caesar’s side. His hand, I could not help but notice, was resting lightly on the hilt of the cuirassier’s sword. “But it don’t seem to me like the lady’s in much of a place to make decisions.”
“Because the decisions she makes may not please you?” asked Titania. Her voice was a cool spring in a desert, virgin snow in a garden.
“Because she can’t say two fucking words together.”
“Perhaps she chooses not to.” The queen’s eyes were all compassion, or some beast pretending to be compassion. “I assure you I have placed her under no enchantment.”
From just within the ring of dancers, Barryson spoke up. “Say that twice more.”
“A little knowledge,” the queen replied, “is a dangerous thing. But since you insist. I assure you I have placed her under no enchantment. I assure you I have placed her under no enchantment.”
And that, reader, was entirely true. She was indeed giving them such assurances.
Mr. Caesar, taking care not to cut himself on the increasinglyjagged and splintered roses, placed his hand on his sister’s shoulder. “Mary, please.”
As if in a dream, which in many ways she was, Miss Caesar looked at her surroundings. And like a dreamer she found herself hard-pressed to think of anything outside of the unreal present.
“You can stop this,” Mr. Caesar told his sister, with a conviction born from desperation. “Whatever has happened to you, you can overcome.” He took her hand. “I’m here, but I need you to be here too.”
Behind her mask, Miss Caesar shut her eyes and tried.
“I am beginning to feel,” the Queen of Promises said, “that you are wasting my time.”
There was an irony to this, of course. If there was one thing that the Other Court did not have to worry about, it was time.
The music died away and Miss Caesar stood transfixed under the gaze of the Queen of Never and Always. And at last she said, voice near broken, “I have come for redress.”
Titania nodded. “Then speak your case.”
“I bargained for beauty.”
“And you were given it.”
