4
The night the walls came crashing down, I cowered in a belfry, my only goal to survive until dawn.
I had no idea if the world would survive with me.
I thought it was the longest night of my life. I was wrong.
This is the longest night of my life, walking side by side with my enemy, mourning Jericho Barrons, drowning in my own complicity.
It stretches on and on. I live a thousand hours in a handful. I count from one to sixty beneath my breath, over and over, ticking away the minutes I make it through, thinking if I put enough of them between me and his death, the immediacy of the pain might dull and I will be able to catch a breath without a knife stabbing through my heart.
We do not pause to eat or sleep. He keeps Unseelie flesh in a pouch and periodically chews it while we travel, which means he can keep going far longer than I. At some point, I’ll be forced to rest. The thought of relinquishing consciousness in his presence is not a pleasant one.
I have weapons in my arsenal that I’ve not yet tried on him. I have no doubt he is concealing armaments, too. Our truce is a floor of eggshells and we’re both wearing combat boots.
“Where is the Unseelie King?” I ask, hoping distraction might make the minutes move faster. “It’s his book on the loose out there. I heard he wants it destroyed. Why isn’t he doing something about it?” I may as well embark on an Unseelie fishing expedition, casting my nets for anything I can use. Until I know how powerful Darroc is and better understand what I have in my dark glassy lake, subtlety is the name of my game. I will make no rash moves that jeopardize my mission. Barrons’ resurrection depends on it.
He shrugs. “He vanished long ago. Some say he’s too insane to care. Others believe he cannot leave the Unseelie prison and lies encased in a tomb of black ice, slumbering eternally. Still others claim the prison never contained him to begin with and that remorse for the death of his concubine was the only bond he ever permitted.”
“That implies love. Fae don’t.”
“Debatable. I recognize myself in you and find it … compelling. It makes me less alone.”
Translation: I serve as a mirror and the Fae enjoy their own reflection. “Is that desirable to a Fae—to be less alone?”
“Few Fae can endure solitude. Some posit that energy cast into an ethos that fails to reflect or rebound it permits that energy to dissipate until nothing remains. Perhaps it is a flaw.”
“Like clapping for Tinker Bell,” I mock. “A mirror, validation.”
He gives me a look.
“Is that what the Fae are made of? Energy?”
He gives me another look that reminds me of V’lane, and I know that he will never discuss what the Fae are comprised of with me or any human. His superiority complex has in no way been diminished by time as a mortal. Rather, I suspect it has grown. He knows both sides now. This gives him a tactical advantage over other Fae. He understands what makes us tick and is more dangerous because of it. I file the energy idea away for further contemplation. Iron affects the Fae. Why? Are they some kind of energy that could be “shorted out”?
“You admit to flaws?” I press.
“We are not perfect. What god is? Examine yours. According to your mythos, he was so disappointed with his initial efforts creating your race that he tried again. At least we imprisoned our mistakes. Your god permits his to roam free. At a mere few thousand years old, your creation myths are far more absurd than ours. Yet you wonder why we can’t recall our origins, from a million or more years in the past.”
We have drawn closer to each other while speaking and both realize it at the same time. We glide back in instant retreat, regaining enough distance between us that we would see an attack from the other coming. Part of me finds this amusing.
The princes have not yet reappeared. I am grateful. Although they no longer impact me sexually, they have a profoundly terrible presence. They leave me feeling oddly two-dimensional, minus something essential, guilty, betrayed in a way I can’t understand and don’t want to. I don’t know if I feel this because I was once beneath them, with my entire sense of self being stripped from my skin and bones, or if they are fundamentally anathema to all humans. I wonder if the “stuff” of which they were made by the Unseelie King is so alien and horrific to us that they are the equivalent of a psychic black hole. That they are unspeakably beautiful only makes it worse. Their exquisiteness is the event horizon from which there is no escape. I shiver.
I remember.
I will never forget. Three of them and an invisible fourth, moving over me, in me.
Because Darroc commanded it. That, too, I will never forget.
I thought being raped by them was terrible, that it had carved me in deep places, changed my innate makeup. I’d known nothing of pain, of transforming change. I do now.
We clear the forest, and the terrain begins to slope downward. With the moon lighting our way, we hike through dark meadows.
I give up my fishing expedition for now. My throat is raw from screaming, and putting one foot in front of the other while keeping an impassive expression on my face takes all my concentration. I slog through a lifetime of hell in the interminable darkness before dawn.
I replay the scene on the cliff through my head a thousand times, pretending it ended some other way.
Thick grass and slender flat rushes rustle at my waist and brush the undersides of my breasts. If there are animals in the dense thicket, they keep their distance. If I were an animal, I would keep my distance from us, too. The climate grows more temperate; the air warms with the perfume of exotic night-blooming jasmine and honeysuckle.
As abruptly as night falls here, dawn breaks. The sky is black one moment, pink, then blue. Three seconds, night to day.
I made it through the night. I draw a shallow, careful breath.
When my sister was killed, I discovered that the light of day has an irrational leavening effect on grief. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s just to shore us up so we can survive the lonely, bleak night again.
I didn’t know we were on a high plain until we were suddenly at the edge of the plateau, and I am startled by the valley dropping sharply away before me.
Across that valley, on an oceanic swell of hill, it looms. It soars. It sprawls for miles in every direction.
The White Mansion.
Again I get that uncanny feeling of inevitability that, one way or another, life would have deposited me here, that in any reality I would have made the same choices that drove me to its door.
Home to the Unseelie King’s beloved concubine for whom he killed the Seelie Queen, it is so enormous it boggles the mind. I turn my head from side to side, up and down, trying to take it all in. One could hope to behold its entirety only from miles away, as we are now. Was this where Barrons had been trying to lead me? If so, why? Had Ryodan been lying when he found me on the cliff’s edge and told me that the way back to Dublin was through an IFP, an Interdimensional Fairy Pothole, as I’d dubbed the slivers of Fae reality that splintered our world now that the walls were down?
The walls are alabaster, reflecting the sun, and blaze with such brilliance that I narrow my eyes to slits. The sky beyond the House—I cannot think of it without a capital; it is far more than a mere residence—deepens to a dazzling blue that exists only in Faery, a shade that will never be seen in the human world. There are certain Faery colors that have dimension, are comprised of myriad seductive subtleties upon which the eye could linger for time uncounted. The sky is nearly as addictive as the golden floor in the Hall of All Days.
I force my gaze back to the White Mansion. I explore its lines, foundation to rooftop, terrace to tower, garden to fountain to turret. A M?bius strip of tiered structures on an Escher-esque landscape, it turns back on itself here and there, continuous and unbroken, ever-changing and unfolding. It strains the eye, tests the mind. But I’ve seen Fae in their true form. I find it … soothing. In my dead black heart, I feel something. I don’t understand how anything could stir in there, but it does. Not a full-blown feeling, but an echo of an emotion. Faint yet undeniable.
Darroc watches me. I pretend not to notice.
“Your race has never built a thing of such beauty, complexity, and perfection,” he says.
“Nor has my race ever created a Sinsar Dubh,” I parry.
“Small creatures create small things.”
“Large creatures’ egos are so big they don’t see the small things coming,” I murmur. Like traps, I don’t say.
He intuits it. He laughs and says, “I will remember the warning, MacKayla.”