“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.