I looked at Doyle. "You must be joking."

"It has been long since it fed, Meredith."

"You've endured more pain than a few thorns," Rhys said.

"You even enjoyed it," Galen said.

"The context was different," I said.

"The context is everything," he said, softly. There was something in his voice, but I didn't have time to decipher it.

"I would give my wrist in your place, but I am not heir," Doyle said.

"Neither yet am I."

The vine moved lower, tickling against my hair like a lover trying to caress his way to the promised land. I offered my other arm, fist closed. The vine wrapped around my wrist with an eager speed. The thorns sank into my flesh. The vine pulled tight. It brought a gasp from my throat. Rhys was right. I'd endured greater pain, but every pain is singular, a unique torture. The vines pulled themselves taut, raising my hands tight above my head. There were so many thorns that it felt like some small animal was trying to bite through my wrists.

Blood ran down my arms in a fine, continuous rain. I'd been able to feel each individual line of blood at first, but my skin grew dead to so much sensation. The pain in my wrists drew all my attention. The vines raised me up on tiptoe, until their grip was all that kept me from falling. The sharp biting pain began to fade into a burning. It wasn't poison. It was just my body reacting to the damage.

I heard Galen's voice as if from a distance. "That's enough, Doyle." It wasn't until he spoke that I realized I'd closed my eyes. Closed my eyes and given myself to the pain, because only by embracing it could I rise above it, travel through it, to the place where there was no pain and I floated on a sea of blackness. His voice brought me back, wrenched into the kiss of thorns and the spill of my own blood. My body jerked with the suddenness of it, and the thorns answered that movement by jerking me into the air, free of ground.

I cried out.

Someone grabbed my legs, supporting my weight. I blinked down to find Galen holding me. "It's enough, Doyle," he said.

"They never drank so long from the queen," Frost said. He'd moved up to us, my knife in his hand.

"If we cut the vines, they will attack us," Doyle said.

"We have to do something," Rhys said.

Doyle nodded.

The sleeves of my jacket were blood-soaked. I thought vaguely that I wished I'd worn black. It didn't show blood as badly. The thought made me giggle. The grey light seemed to be swimming around us. I was dizzy, light-headed. I wanted the blood loss stopped before I got nauseated. There was nothing like nausea induced by blood loss. You felt too weak to move and still wanted to spill your stomach onto the floor. My fear was fading into a light, almost shining, sensation, as if the world were edged with fog.

I was perilously close to passing out. I'd had enough of the thorns. I tried to say "enough," but no sound came out. I concentrated on my lips and they moved, forming the word, but there was no sound.

Then there was a sound, but it wasn't my voice. The vines hissed and shivered above me. I looked upward, my head falling back bonelessly. The vines rolled above me like a black sea made of rope. The thorns around my wrist pulled upward with a sharp hiss. Only Galen's arms on my legs kept me from being lifted into the nest of thorns. The vines at my wrists pulled, and Galen held, and my wrists bled.

I screamed. I screamed one word: "Enough!"

The vines shuddered, trembling against my skin. The room was suddenly thick with falling leaves. A dry brown snow filled the air. There was a crisp sharp smell like autumn leaves, and under that, like a second wave of scent, was the rich smell of fresh earth.

The thorns lowered me toward the ground. Galen cradled me, picking me up in his arms as the vines let me down, slowly. Both Galen's arms and the vines themselves seemed strangely gentle, if teeth could be gentle while they tried to bite your arm off.

The sound of the door banging back against the wall was the first hint I had that the vines had pulled back from the door.

Galen was holding me in his arms with the vines still pulling my wrists above my head when we all turned to the spill of light from the open doors.

The light seemed brilliant, dazzling, with an edge of soft mist. I knew the light only appeared bright after the dimness, and I thought the edge of mist was just my ruined vision—until a woman stepped out of that light with smoke rising from her fingertips as if each pale yellow finger were a snuffed-out candle.

Fflur moved into the room dressed in a gown of unrelieved black that made her yellow skin the bright color of daffodils. Her yellow hair fanned around her dress like a shining cloak twisting in a wind of her own power.

The guards spilled out to either side of her. A handful had weapons; the rest came into the room bare-handed. There were twenty-seven men in the Queen's Guard and the same number of women in the King's Guard, which now answered to Cel because there was no king. Fifty-four warriors, and less than thirty came through the doors.

Even through the faintness I tried to memorize each face, tried to remember who came to our aid and who stayed behind in safety. Any guard that hadn't come through those doors had lost any chance they had at my body. But I couldn't focus on all the faces. A flood of new forms swept in behind the Guard, most of them shorter and much less human.

The goblins had come.

The goblins were not Cel's creatures. That was my last thought before darkness spilled over my vision and ate the mist across my eyes. I sank into that blissful darkness like a stone thrown in deep water that could only fall and fall because there was no bottom.