“I might only be the memory of that Raven of old,” he says, “but they refuse to believe it. Sometimes that can be useful.”

“I can see how it would be,” I tell him.

But I’m still not completely buying it myself. The way we all feel in his presence, that natural ruling charisma of his . . . there has to be more of a reason behind it than simply his being a memory of the Raven of old.

Those dark eyes of his are studying me, then he smiles again.

“Show me where the buffalo gather,” he says.

Christiana

“Okay, here’s the thing,” Christiana told the fairy court. “At tops, there are maybe fifty actual buffalo soldiers out there looking for your scalps. The rest are all ghosts. Meet them in the between or the otherworld, and they’ll cream you—that’s a given. But if you make them come to you here, in the human world, you’ll only have that fifty to deal with. The others can cross over, but so what? They’ll be wraiths in this world. Spooky, yeah, but they can’t touch you.”

“Are you sure about this?” Tatiana asked.

“I didn’t spend all that time in the libraries of Hinterdale just partying.”

“I’ve no idea what that means.”

“It means, yes. I’m sure.” She paused to give the council a once-over. “You can muster more bodies than you’ve got gathered here, right?”

“Of course. I’m just not . . .”

The queen’s voice trailed off and Christiana nodded.

“You don’t trust me,” she said.

“It’s not so much a matter of trust,” Tatiana said, “as that we are in the wrong, not the buffalo.”

“Haven’t you already said that you didn’t have anything to do with it?”

“Yes. But this is still my court. I rule. I am responsible for what my subjects do, even when they do it without my knowledge.”

“Okay,” Christiana said, “but you can’t go to them. You need them to come here.”

“You obviously don’t understand.”

“Oh, I do. You want to take responsibility. You feel you need to tell them that even though it wasn’t you, you should still have known and stopped the deaths before they happened.”

“Exactly.”

“But you don’t need to be a martyr to do that,” Christiana told her. “You can tell them the same thing here in this world, where they’ll number fifty or so instead of in the thousands. The whole martyr thing is really overrated, trust me. It doesn’t work for anyone, except maybe Joan of Arc, and she still had to die.” Christiana paused a moment, head cocked as she studied the queen. “You don’t have a death wish, do you?”

“She’s annoying as hell,” Mother Crone said before Tatiana could respond, “but she’s right.”