Page 129 of Bedeviled

I take another sip. It’s pretty damn good wine. Which leaves me a little conflicted, since I don’t really want to credit Eislyn for having good taste in anything.

I feel conflicted, that is, until my stomach spasms. And there it is, my bad decision catching up with me.

Mother of Witches, I do feel strange. Tingly. My magic moves rapidly through my veins, the sensation almost electric.

I move to my bed and sit down, ignoring the way sweat pricks at my hairline.

Eislyn watches me impassively, but I swear she’s clenched her jaw, which probably pairs nicely with her permanently clenched butthole.

Not that I know about the clenching habits of her butthole. But I can guess.

Eislyn lifts her chin. “To think you went from threatening me with weapons and fearing my offerings to drinking my wine. How far you have fallen.”

I take another drink.

I really am a silly little fool.

“Two thousand years it’s been,” Eislyn says, taking a sip of her own wine and watching me carefully. “Few fae live such long lives. And a human?” She shakes her head. “You should have been dead. Long dead. Your bones turned to ash.” She sounds accusing. Even a touch indignant. “Instead, here you are.”

I raise my eyebrows.

“Here I am,” I agree as Nero hops up on the bed next to me, his attention fixed on Eislyn, his muscles tense.

“I saw you got my note,” she adds.

The one in Memnon’s old tomb.

I take another long swallow of my drink. Will drinking of Eislyn’s fae wine help the situation?

No.

Will it blunt the edge of this conversation?

Maybe?

“I didn’t expect to find you in a place like this.” Her eyes move over the walls of my room. “Reinventing yourself, old queen?” she says.

I stare at her for a long moment, perplexed and trying not to show it.

Does she…think I’ve been alive this entire time?

That would be absurd. But then, so would the idea that I just spontaneously reincarnated.

Eislyn’s eyes drop to my ring. “And you’re married.” She raises her brows. “That’s a surprise, given the tomb Memnon woke to.”

She’s making a lot of calculated assumptions. She might’ve been able to verify my marriage license, but she likely does not know with certainty that I was the one to rouse Memnon from his sleep nor my reasons for presumably doing so. She is also unaware of the deal I made with the Hungering Ones that wiped Memnon from memory. She only knows that one day she remembered this fragment of her past.

Eislyn must be burning with curiosity about these things.

That fills me with more than a little glee.

“I imagine he was angry,” she says, fishing for more information.

My mind wheels back to that torchlit chamber, carved with line after line of Sarmatian writing—writing I had developed. Eislyn saw my effort and used it to make that subterranean prison, all so that when Memnon woke, she could spin a tale that I had betrayed him and she could use my writing as proof.

And then she would get what she wanted, which was presumably Memnon.

“Angry enough to marry me,” I agree, giving her nothing she doesn’t already know. I take another drink, my hand trembling just a little.