Not Quite Human

Chapter 14

Neil couldn't stop staring at the myna.
It wasn't beautiful — far from it, actually. It was objectively an odd-looking bird, with startling grey eyes and a beak of almost aggressive yellow. And yet there was something undeniably majestic about it. Something, Neil thought, disturbingly human. It sat on the queen's arm with the expression of someone who had opinions about him specifically — grey eyes trained on him with a haughtiness that seemed excessive for a bird.
He felt strange accusing a bird of attitude. He did it anyway. Perhaps, like the dragon, it was educated.
The queen chuckled and rose from her throne, moving toward him with the unhurried grace of something predatory. As she drew closer, Neil became aware — gradually and then all at once — of something that didn't quite align with his expectations. He stared for a moment longer than he should have.
"You're a man," he said.
Damien drew a sharp breath beside him. The kind of breath that communicated, very efficiently, that Neil had made a significant error.
The queen's smile faltered for just a fraction of a second before reasserting itself. She closed the remaining distance between them until she was very much inside his personal space, her minty breath warm on his face, one long pointed nail lifting his chin.
"I am a lady because I prefer to be one," she said, her voice like a bell — sweet and clear and carrying an unmistakable edge. "Lady Legasus. Queen Legasus. Whatever you like. I have been a lady for so long that no one knows me as anything else — not in their thoughts, not in their words." The nail at his chin applied the faintest pressure. "And so it will be in yours."
Neil gulped.
He stood very still after she stepped back, the message having been — as she'd clearly intended — effectively branded. There were stranger things in the world than a queen who chose her own identity. What had possessed him to say it out loud, in her throne room, to her face, he genuinely could not explain. He was lucky she hadn't added him to the wall next to Santa Claus then and there.
"Now then," the queen said, clapping her hands together with the enthusiasm of someone who had entirely moved on. "Enough small talk. Let's get to business."
A table materialised from nowhere, along with three chairs — two on one side, one on the other. The queen took the single chair and gestured for them to sit. Neil did so with the careful movements of someone who had learned, very recently, to be cautious.
He hadn't expected the topic that followed. The queen began talking about the murders in Sailee — the string of killings that had been troubling the city for months. As far as she was concerned, the evidence pointed clearly to fey involvement. Most of the victims had been fey themselves, some of them powerful. Several of the spells used were ancient — a few so obscure they belonged to a body of dark knowledge that had supposedly been destroyed long ago. The pattern suggested something larger and considerably more sinister than isolated incidents.
Neil found himself wondering why she was telling them this. The king had investigators — he'd have to, given how public some of the killings had been. So why bring it to this table?
The queen looked at him with the particular expression of someone waiting for a thought to catch up.
"I do hope you have no plans to cross me in the future, little one," she said pleasantly. "You're far too pretty to stand next to Clause — though I do like the idea of keeping one of your eyes for my collection. I keep most of them in a jar in the closet, but yours I think I'd keep on the bedside table."
Neil stared at her. His face went slightly green.
She huffed with amusement. "I'm pulling your leg, fledgling. Not about the warning — but about the eyes. The only things in my closet are clothes."
Neil did not find this entirely reassuring, given the wall full of mounted heads he'd walked past to get here. Santa Claus was up there. The bar for what this queen considered acceptable décor was not where he'd have placed it.
The queen and Damien moved on to politics — Fiory's recent instability, various tax policies Neil had no context for, something about trade agreements with a kingdom whose name he'd already forgotten. It went on for approximately an hour. Neil sat quietly and counted the number of times the queen used the word the.
Seventy-three. He thought that was rather impressive.
On the way back, once they were safely out of earshot of anything that might report back, Neil asked Damien what the visit had actually been about.
"Character assessment, most likely," Damien said. "It's difficult to know what goes on in her head." He paused. "She isn't a man, by the way. She's a Finoba — a particularly powerful fey, essentially sexless by nature. She's quite sensitive about it. There was a time when she very much wanted a child and couldn't have one. I wouldn't raise the subject in her presence if I were you."
Neil winced. He had been so thoroughly, spectacularly rude. He hoped she wasn't harbouring anything about it — she had warned him not to cross her, after all. He turned the warning over in his mind. Did she suspect him of involvement in the murders? The idea was absurd. Him, taking a life. He couldn't even finish the thought.
Damien laughed when he said this out loud. The spells used in those killings were extraordinarily complex — far beyond anything a newly changed fey could manage even with considerable effort. The idea of Neil being responsible was genuinely funny.
He did understand where the warning came from, though. Blood fey tended toward power, and history offered no shortage of examples of what happened when that power was left unchecked — when blood fey had tried to force their will on fey society and caused devastation in the process. It was a reasonable thing for Lady Legasus to want to establish early.
He looked at Neil, who was staring out the window with the expression of someone still processing a very full day.
It was, Damien thought, extremely unlikely that this particular boy would ever be a problem in that regard. He didn't have a power-hungry bone in his body.