The Queen was many months with child, on the night I found Sebastian in her chambers.
That night, the room had taken on the cast of fire, as if in his honor.
Scarlet flames licked the walls; the floor was glowing coals.
I imagined I could see faces in the fire, howling in a silent scream of damnation.
Though when it came to the Queen, one could never trust this was imagination.
Sebastian was sprawled catlike on the Queen’s bed, his gear the same color as the scarlet silk covers, stretching toward the flickering firelight as if it were the sun.
“Oh, Nene!” the Queen purred. As if she’d forgotten I was coming. As if, in Sebastian’s presence, she’d forgotten all but him. “You need not attend me tonight.” The Queen traced her fingers along Sebastian’s shoulder, his waist, his hip. “I have another to guide me into sleep.”
Sebastian grinned at my Queen like a wolf. “Tonight is not a night for sleeping.”
She let her robe slip from her shoulders, revealing the graceful curve of her rounded belly. Their child.
Did she notice, I wondered, that his smile never reached his eyes?
Sebastian climbed out of bed, and knelt before her, caressing the flesh stretched across her womb.
He leaned in, that wolfish smile lighting his face—and for an insane moment, I thought he meant to devour them, the Queen and her baby both.
Instead, he bestowed a kiss. “My son,” he said.
Then he rose to his feet, and kissed the Queen on the lips. “My lady.”
The Queen’s look was fixed on him. “You may go now, Nene.”
Sebastian turned his devouring gaze on me.
All black hunger, an endless pit of emptiness demanding to be filled.
If I let him, he would use me; he would make me forget everything but the pleasure and pain he would cause me to feel.
He was careful with the Queen, for she had power.
He would not be careful with me. “Unless, of course, you’d rather stay. ”
“Alas,” I said. “My lady has bid me go.”
“Nene,” he said, and I froze. “I know this name.”
I didn’t like that he recognized it. I liked even less the reason why.
“Now I know why you seem so familiar,” he said, as he got closer. “You’re related to the half-breeds, Mark and Helen Blackthorn.”
Miach and Alessa. I felt a chill run through me, that he knew even their mortal names. That he knew their faces, well enough to see them in mine.
He was close enough now that I could feel his breath on my face.
And I could not flee, not until I understood what threat he posed to my blood. I owed that much to Nerissa.
The debt of blood is not love, but it is not nothing.
“How do you know them?”
“Oh, I paid them a visit.”
If I had known then what I learned only later, if I had known what his visit had meant, and that the next time he would visit their home, it would be for blood, that it would be the beginning of his war to end the Shadowhunters, and that my niece and nephew’s family would be the first to fall, if I had known that he would spirit Miach away from his life and into the Wild Hunt, where the death collectors would do what they could to hollow out his humanity and make of him the loveless monster my sister never wanted him to be—what, then, would I have done?
Would I have struck against him, foolishly, uselessly?
Dealt him a blow he would shrug off with a laugh, before gutting me and leaving me in a bloody heap for the other handmaids to wash away?
Would I have warned the Queen against him, beseeched her to sever this brutal alliance before all was lost?
Would I have found a way to stop Sebastian before he started and avert all the bloodshed that was to come?
How could I?
I was only Nene. I was nobody of importance. It was not my story.
“I hear you’re looking after the health of my son,” Sebastian said. “Do you think the child will be like me?”
I hope not. They say Shadowhunter blood breeds true, but Sebastian was no ordinary Shadowhunter.
Whatever darkness had infested his soul, perhaps it would end with him.
Or perhaps—the thought had not occurred to me before, and I vowed never to think it again—the child would be darkness distilled and refined, pure as acid.
“There’s no way to know what a child will be like,” I told Sebastian.
He looked as if he did not agree. “I will raise him as my father raised me.”
“Surely, you and the Queen will decide how to raise him together.”
The Queen could not see how he looked at me then, with a bladed amusement, as if to mock her foolish trust. The arrogance of him, to imagine that he could defy my lady, especially on the matter of her own heir.
Though with Sebastian, as with the Queen, it was never safe to assume imagination was only that.
“I believe that when two people love each other, they will raise a child well,” I said, thinking of my sister, my niece and nephew.
Nerissa ensured they would grow to be the best versions of themselves, because they would grow with love.
The Queen surely could do the same for this child, whatever lurked in his blood.
There are those who have assumed that because I refuse love, I believe love has no power. Quite the opposite is true.
Sebastian leaned in, his cold lips brushing my cheek, then whispered in my ear. As if bestowing a secret. “There is no love here.”
—
And did I warn my lady, that this man with a bottomless chasm where his soul should have been was not a safe place for her heart?
I did not.
—
I held my tongue.
How easily quiet can become a habit.
The war came, of course. We were safe, in the land beneath the hill, and safer still at Court.
Because the Queen was loyal to Sebastian and his cause, there were those sent off to fight in Alicante, and many of them did not return.
Those of us who stayed behind hid in our ignorance.
We heard rumors, of course, of slaughter, of war in Idris.
Of weapons forged to defeat our people: rowan and salt and cold iron.
Of the bodies left in Sebastian’s wake, not just Shadowhunters, but our folk too. No life was precious to him.
Life, below, continued as it ever did. I tended my lady, though she was hollow-eyed with lack of sleep, sharp and easily angered.
I could see the fear in her eyes for Sebastian, even as I wished, silently, for his downfall.
For the Shadowhunters, somehow, to best him.
Because I knew—better than most, I knew—that a world ruled by Sebastian would mean a time of great darkness for us all.
I knew, and yet I said nothing.
Why throw away my small life, like throwing a pebble into the sea? Losing myself, gaining nothing.
When I was most afraid, for my Queen, for her child, for us all, I would think of Sebastian’s love for his sister.
A man like that, it was unthinkable he could love. But somehow, he did. His love was broken, was poisonous, and yet—this thought I would tug around me like a warm blanket—his love left some slim hope for the world.
For love destroys.
If Sebastian could love, it meant he could be defeated.
—
And so, he was.
And so, as his allies, were we.
And so, my Queen was brought low by the Shadowhunters and their Cold Peace. Humiliated by our defeat, by the despair and oppression of our people, by the Clave’s sanctions, but most of all, I suspected, by Sebastian.
She grieved him, of course.
But she also bore the shame of it, that Sebastian had chosen to pursue his mad dream of power, to die at his sister’s hand rather than rule the Court beside the Queen.
And I, who had wished for precisely this, bore two shames.
That I had hoped so desperately for the outcome that so crushed my Queen.
That I had done nothing but hope.
Which was the same as doing nothing at all.
—
The Queen would not eat. She would not drink.
“Please, my lady,” I urged her. “For the health of the child, you must nourish yourself!”
But she cared not for her son or herself.
She was starved, blank-eyed, her bones protruding.
I was in terror for the child, who surely starved within her, deprived not just of nutrients but of her caring, her anticipation of his birth.
She never rested her hands on her belly now, never hummed to the child or sang to it or spoke of it if she could avoid the topic.
I remembered Nerissa, who believed she had nothing left to live for, even as her children lived on.
“You will not feel this way forever,” I promised the Queen, as I begged her to drink just a little broth, to eat a single candied petal. And this was true, for either her despair would end or her life would. “Everything will be different once the child is born.”
She looked at me in disgust and turned away.
I could not force her to keep the child alive, or herself alive. I could do nothing but hope.
—
Screams cut the air in my Queen’s chambers like knives. So much blood, and my Queen, writhing and sobbing, pain whipping through her like an electric current, her body bucking, eyes rolling back in her head, as the child fought its way from the womb.
It was too early.
It was too bloody.
It was because she was undernourished, I thought, and because she had slept no more than she’d eaten.
Surely it was not because Sebastian’s spawn could only be born in suffering, and would bring only suffering to the world. I tried to put the thought aside. It was not a healer’s thought.
I ministered to my lady, I rubbed her brow with cooling herbs and soothed her screams, and once I had wrenched the baby from her womb, I suctioned its lungs and staunched her bleeding and did what little I could to prevent their lives from leaking away.
It took one full night and one full day.