“The queen is heir to the magic of our people. It is a different thing. That magic has never accepted a male of the True Race, although …”
“Although what?”
He gave me a sideways look from beneath his lids. “I tell you too many things.” He sighed. “And enjoy it too much. It has been a long time since I knew another worthy of confidences. There is an ancient myth that, should all the contenders for the matriarchal throne be no more, the magic would likely gravitate toward the most dominant male of our race. Some say our rulers are your Janus head, your yin and yang: The king is the strength of our people; the queen is wisdom. Strength draws from brute force, wisdom draws from true power. In harmony, the king and queen lead a united court. Opposed, we war. We have been opposed since the day the king killed the queen.”
“But other queens came along. Couldn’t the king make peace?”
“He did not try. Again, he abandoned his children. Upon finding his concubine dead, through his act of atonement he did what he had sworn never to do. By pouring all his dark knowledge into the pages of an ensorcelled tome, he inadvertently created his most powerful ‘child’ yet. Then he vanished. It is rumored among Seelie and Unseelie alike that he has been trying to—as you humans would say about a lame horse—put it down ever since. The Hunter that killed Darroc was allegedly the king’s own for hundreds of thousands of years. It carried him from world to world, hunting his nemesis. The king, like any Fae, loves nothing so much as his own existence. As long as the Book is free, he knows no peace. I suspect the Sinsar Dubh was amused to take the king’s steed. I also suspect that if the king is no longer using that Hunter, and that Hunter is here in your city, then the king is, too.”
I gasped. “You mean in Dublin?”
V’lane nodded.
“In human form?”
“Who could say? There is no predicting one such as he.”
He would have to occupy multiple bodies. I thought of Barrons and his eight. I shook my head, rejecting the thought. “Back to Cruce,” I said hastily.
“Why this fascination with Cruce?”
“I’m trying to understand the chronology. So the king trusted Cruce, worked with him, taught him, and Cruce betrayed him. Why?”
V’lane’s eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared with cool disdain. “The king’s devotion to his concubine was unnatural. It is an aberration in our race. Humans prize monogamy because they have a mere blink of an eye to suffer each other. You are born beneath the shadow of death. It makes you crave unnatural bondage. We do not spend more than a century, perhaps two, with a partner. We drink from the cauldron. We change. We go on. The king did not.”
“Speaking of which, how do you know any of this?”
“We have scribes and written histories. As one of the queen’s High Council, it is my duty to recount our past, on those occasions she passes an edict. She insists I be able to recite any part at any time.”
“So the king was faithful, and fairies don’t like that.”
He gave me a look. “Spend a thousand years with another and tell me it is not unnatural. At the very least, tedious.”
“Apparently the king didn’t think so.” I liked the king for that. I liked the idea of true love. Maybe, just maybe, some people were lucky enough to find their other half, the one that completed them, like a Janus head.
“The king had become a danger to his children. His court began to talk. They decided to test him. Cruce would seduce the king, turn his obsession from the concubine, make him abandon his singleminded focus on the mortal.”
“Is the king bisexual?”
V’lane gave me a blank look.
“I thought the Fae were gender-specific.”
“Ah, you refer to who fucks whom and are we—how do you say it—monosexual?”
“Heterosexual,” I said. Hearing V’lane say the word “fuck,” in his musical, sensual voice, was foreplay in and of itself. I took a sip of my drink, hung my leg over my chair, and cooled a toe into the surf.
“When I speak of Fae seduction, it is different from human lust. It is the captivation of another’s …” He seemed to be struggling for words. “Humans do not have an appropriate word. Very psyche? That which is all one is? Cruce was to become the king’s favored, replacing the mortal with whom he’d so long been obsessed, who was not even of our kind. Cruce was to make the king once again enamored of our race. When the king returned his attention to the Court of Shadows, he would raise them to their rightful place in the light with the others of their race. His halflings were weary of hiding. They wanted to meet their brethren. They wanted to taste the life their counterparts enjoyed. They wanted the king to fight for them, make the queen accept them, to unify the courts into one. They felt all was as it should be. The queen was the wise and true leader of the Seelie, the king was the strong and proud leader of the Unseelie. They were a Janus head, complete, if only the king and queen would let them live together as one.”
“Did the Seelie feel the same?” I couldn’t imagine they did.
“The Seelie were completely unaware the Unseelie existed.”
“Until someone betrayed the king to the queen.”
“Betrayal is in the eye of the beholder,” V’lane said sharply. He closed his eyes a moment. When he opened them again, the angry gold glints were gone. “I shall rephrase that properly for you: Someone should have told the queen the truth long before she learned it. The queen is to be obeyed in all things. The king disobeyed her repeatedly. When the king refused Cruce, the Unseelie knew he would never stand up for them. They spoke of mutiny, civil war. To avoid it, Cruce went to the queen to speak on his dark brothers’ behalf. While he was away, the other princes designed a curse to be cast into the Silvers. If the king would not give up his mortal, they would forbid him access to her, by blocking him from entering the Silvers and ever seeing her again.”
“So it wasn’t Cruce who corrupted the network of the Silvers?”
“Of course not. Among my race, the name Cruce has become synonymous with one of your humans … I believe his name was Murphy and a certain edict was passed? If something goes wrong, it is blamed on Murphy. It is the same with Cruce. If Cruce had indeed cast the curse into the Silvers, it would not have corrupted their primary function. It simply would have prevented the king from entering. Cruce studied with the king himself; he was far more adept than his brethren.”
“What did the queen say when he went to her?” I asked. It almost seemed that Cruce was a renegade hero. Really, although the Unseelie were vile, so were most of the Seelie I’d met. As far as I was concerned, they deserved each other. They should have reunited in one court, policed their own, and stayed the hell out of our world.
“We will never know. Upon hearing what he had to say, she confined him to her bower. She then summoned the king and they met in the sky that very day. Although I possess no memory of it, according to our histories it was me she sent for Cruce, and when I brought him to her, she lashed him to a tree, took up the Sword of Light, and killed him before the king’s eyes.”
I gasped. It was so strange to realize V’lane had been alive during that time. That he’d had firsthand experience of it all yet recalled none of it. He’d had to read about it in written histories to recall what he’d willingly forgotten. I wondered: What if whoever wrote Fae histories, like our humans, distorted things a bit? Knowing their penchant for illusion, I couldn’t see any Fae telling the whole truth. Would we ever really know what had happened back then? Still, I imagined V’lane’s version was the closest I might ever get to it. “And war broke out.”
He nodded. “After the king killed the queen and returned to his court, he found his concubine dead. According to the princes, when she learned of the battle and discovered that the king had begun to slaughter his own race in her name, she stepped from the Silvers, lay down in his bed, and killed herself. They say she left him a note. They say he carries it still.”