A Little Night Muse(3)

                “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.