“What is your name?”
“Icelynne, my lady,” the little fae said, and the queen nodded.
I didn’t say anything, but I wondered exactly how many handmaidens the queen had that she only vaguely recognized and didn’t even know the name of this fae who had served her. Had she noticed she was missing? By the queen’s frown, I guessed she hadn’t, and just maybe, that fact bothered her.
No one spoke for several minutes. The council members huddled together a small distance from the queen and Falin. They stared at the ghost with naked horror. Ryese shook his head, and Lyell and Maeve kept shooting furtive glances back the way we’d come. Blayne’s mouth moved, but nothing audible escaped from behind his lips. Apparently they didn’t like ghosts. Likely this was the first they’d seen. I remembered something Falin had once told me—Fae don’t like reminders of their own mortality. And Icelynne was undeniably fae and dead.
Finally Falin broke the silence. “What happened, Icelynne?”
His voice was surprisingly gentle. His tone that of a cop who had questioned victims before. I sometimes forgot that while it was true he did a lot of the queen’s dirty work, he was also the head of the local FIB office and dealt with the fae equivalent of what any other cop did.
Icelynne rolled from her knees to rock back on her heels. She drew her legs against her chest, hugging them tight to her. If she’d reminded me of a child before, now she did so doubly.
“I felt it. I felt it all. He . . . He ate me.”
“Who did?” the queen asked, taking a step closer to the outside edge of the circle.
The little frost fae shook her head. “I . . . I don’t know. I couldn’t see him. But I knew. I knew he was eating me.”
“Were you blindfolded or was he glamoured?” Falin asked, his voice gentle but demanding. “And could you tell anything else about him? Did he speak? Could you smell anything?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember. He was eating me. That’s all. I couldn’t see or hear him. I—” She broke off in tears.
“How can you not remember something like that?” the queen asked, balling her hands into fists. “Surely you must have been trying to get a sense of him so you could identify him later.”
The little fae just continued to cry, her ghostly body shuddering. I’d moved my hand to her shoulder and I squeezed it lightly, trying to comfort her. If she noticed, she didn’t show it.
“He ate me,” she said between sobs. “And, and he took me apart.” She shot a tear-filled glance back at the knapsack.
Blayne cleared his throat. “The knight disassembled the skeleton. Are you stating the Winter Knight ate you?”
Her eyes went very large as she looked first at the council member and then focused on Falin. Everyone’s attention followed.
I cleared my throat. “No. She’s not. She’s listing traumatic events that she was able to sense but has no coherent details on,” I said, and then hesitated. I didn’t want to explain in front of the ghost, but they needed to understand why she didn’t remember anything about whomever had eaten her and why she’d lumped the person who’d eaten her and Falin when he’d put her bones in the bag under the same moniker. “I think Icelynne was already dead when that happened. Her soul was present, so she experienced what happened to her, but had no functioning systems like hearing or sight to interpret it through. We need to move on.”
They stared at me in disbelief and Icelynne cried louder, gulping down ragged breaths between her sobs. Normally what happened to a body after death was of little consequence to the soul that had resided in it because death occurred the moment the soul left the body. Oh, sometimes full physical death took another minute or two for all bodily functions to shut down, but if I raised a shade, those minutes would be missing because the record button on life had already been clicked off, and of course, the soul wouldn’t remember them because it was no longer connected to the body. But Icelynne’s body had ceased living and her soul had still been trapped inside. Her brain had shut down, her senses dead, but her soul still experienced what happened to her flesh on some level. She hadn’t been eaten alive, exactly, but it was the next worst thing.
“Icelynne,” I said, trying to keep my voice soothing, but I usually questioned shades who had no emotions, not traumatized ghosts. Still, I tried. “Can you tell us what happened before that? What is the last thing you remember seeing?”
She sniffled and wiped her nose on her arm. For a moment I didn’t think she’d answer, but then she said, “I was tied to a chair. And I had these tubes coming out of my arm . . . I was bleeding. I mean, the tubes, my blood was being carried away in those tubes.”