Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices, #2)

The phouka leaned in. He smelled of salt and seaweed baking in the sun. “Listen,” he said. “If you enter Faerie, you will again see the face of someone you loved, who is dead.”

“What?” Shock stabbed through Emma. “You’re lying.”

“You know I cannot lie.”

Emma’s mouth had gone dry.

“You must not tell the others what I told you, or it will not happen,” said the phouka. “Nor can I tell you what it means. I am only a messenger—but the message is true. If you wish to look again upon one you have loved and lost, if you wish to hear their voice, you must pass through the Gate of Lir.”

Emma drew the stele from her belt. A pang went through her as she handed it over. She turned away blindly from the phouka, his words ringing in her ears. She was barely aware of Mark brushing past her, the last to speak to the water faerie. Her heart was pounding too hard.

One you have loved and lost. But there were many, so many, lost in the Dark War. Her parents—but she dared not even think of them; she would lose her ability to think, to go on. The Blackthorns’ father, Andrew. Her old tutor, Katerina. Maybe—

The sound of wind and waves died down. Mark stood before the phouka in silence, his face pale: All three of the others looked stricken, and Emma burned to know what the faerie had told them. What could compel Jules, or Mark, or Cristina, to cooperate?

The phouka thrust out his hand. “Lir’s Gate opens,” he said. “Take it now, or flee back toward the shore; the moon’s road begins to dissolve already.”

There was a sound like shattering ice, melting under spring sunlight. Emma looked down: The shining path below was riven with black where the water was springing up through cracks.

Julian grabbed her hand. “We have to go,” he said. Behind Mark, who stood ahead of them on the path, an archway of water had formed. It gleamed bright silver, the inside of it churning with water and motion.

With a laugh, the phouka leaped from the path with an elegant dive and slipped between the waves. Emma realized she had no idea what Mark had given him. Not that it seemed to matter now. The path between them was shattering rapidly: Now it was in pieces, like ice floes in the Arctic.

Cristina was on Emma’s other side. The three of them pushed forward, leaping from one solid piece of path to another. Mark was gesturing toward them, shouting, the archway behind him solidifying. Emma could see green grass through it, moonlight and trees. She pushed Cristina forward; Mark caught her, and the two of them vanished through the gate.

She moved to take a step forward, but the path gave way under her feet. For what seemed like much more than seconds she tumbled toward the black water. Then Julian had caught her. His arms around her, they fell together through the arch.

*

The shadows had lengthened in the attic. Arthur sat motionless, gazing out the window with its torn paper at the moonlight over the sea. He could guess where Julian and the others were now: He knew the moon’s road, as he knew the other roads of Faerie. He had been driven down them by hooting packs of pixies and goblins, riding ahead of their masters, the unearthly beautiful princes and princesses of the gentry. Once in a winter forest he had fallen, and his body had shattered the ice of a pond. He recalled watching his blood spray across the pond’s silvered surface.

“How pretty,” a faerie lady had mused, as Arthur’s blood melted into the ice.

He thought of his mind that way sometimes: a shattered surface reflecting back a broken and imperfect picture. He knew his madness was not like human madness. It came and went, sometimes leaving him barely touched so he hoped it was gone forever. Then it would return, crushing him beneath a parade of people no one else could see, a chorus of voices no one else could hear.

The medicine helped, but the medicine was gone. Julian had always brought the medicine, from the time he was a small boy. Arthur wasn’t sure how old he was now. Old enough. Sometimes Arthur wondered if he loved the boy. If he loved any of his brother’s children. There had been times he had awoken from dreams in which terrible things had happened to them with his face wet with tears.

But that might have been guilt. He had lacked either the ability to raise them, or the bravery to let the Clave replace him with a better guardian. Though who would have kept them together? No one, perhaps, and family should be together.

The door at the foot of the stairs creaked. Arthur turned eagerly. Perhaps Julian had thought better of his mad plan and returned. The moon’s road was dangerous. The sea itself was full of treachery. He had grown up near the sea, in Cornwall, and he recalled its monsters. And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests are as fangs that devour.

Or perhaps there had never been monsters.

She appeared at the top of the steps and looked at him coolly. Her hair was pulled back so tightly her skin seemed stretched. She tilted her head, taking in the cramped, dirty room, the papered-over windows. There was something in her face, something that stirred a flicker of memory.

Something that made cold terror wash through him. He gripped the arms of his chair, his mind chattering with bits of old poetry. Her skin was white as leprosy, the nightmare Life-in-Death was she—

“Arthur Blackthorn, I presume?” she said with a demure smile. “I’m Zara Dearborn. I believe you knew my father.”

*

Emma landed hard on thick grass, tangled up in Julian. For a moment he was propped over her, elbows on the ground, his pale face luminous in the moonlight. The air around them was cold, but his body was warm against hers. She felt the expansion of his chest as he inhaled a sharp breath, the current of air against her cheek as he turned his face quickly away from hers.

A moment later he was on his feet, reaching down to pull her up after him. But she scrambled upright on her own, spinning around to see that they were standing in a clearing surrounded by trees.

The moonlight was bright enough for Emma to see that the grass was intensely green, the trees hung with fruit that was vividly colored: purple plums, red apples, star-and rose-shaped fruits that Emma didn’t recognize. Mark and Cristina were there too, under the trees.

Mark had pushed the sleeves of his shirt up and was holding his hands out as if he were touching the air of Faerie, feeling it on his skin. He tipped his head back, his mouth slightly open; Emma, looking at him, blushed. It felt like a private moment, as if she were watching someone reconnect with a lover.

“Emma,” Cristina breathed. “Look.” She pointed upward, at the sky.

The stars were different. They arched and whirled in patterns that Emma didn’t recognize, and they had colors—icy blue, frost green, shimmering gold, brilliant silver.

“It’s so beautiful,” she whispered. She saw Julian look over at her, but it was Mark who spoke. He no longer looked quite so abandoned to the night, but he still seemed a little dazed, as if the air of Faerie were wine and he had drunk too much.

“The Hunt rode through the sky of Faerie sometimes,” he said. “In the sky the stars look like the crushed dust of jewels—powdered ruby and sapphire and diamond.”

“I knew about the stars in Faerie,” Cristina said in an awed, quiet voice. “But I never thought I would see them myself.”

“Should we rest?” Julian asked. He was prowling the outline of the clearing, peering between the trees. Trust Jules to ask the practical questions. “Gather our energy for traveling tomorrow?”

Mark shook his head. “We can’t. We must travel through the night. I know only how to navigate the Lands by the stars.”