chapter Twelve
Kylah floated in the ether of the witching hour. Upon first becoming a Banshee, she’d been frightened and confused by the daily ritual of spending every hour prior to midnight in a grey nothingness. No sound permeated the eerie, absolute stillness. No light, and yet, no darkness. She had no body but pure consciousness. There was no pain here. Her hand didn’t exist, though it had been greatly improving before she’d left the copse of deadly trees.
After a while, she’d come to yearn for this place night after night. She and her sisters all existed in a similar plane, but never had a trace of each other whilst trapped here. She never had to hide her thoughts and emotions. Or lack thereof. She could hover in this present absence and simply exist. Or not. She wasn’t sure.
Tonight she took sanctuary in this place for a different reason altogether. Not because she blended with the stark nothingness, but because she pulsed with so many different emotions, fears, and desires she could barely contain them all.
Cliodnah appeared in front of her. Kylah would have gasped, had she a voice to produce the sound. She’d only ever laid eyes on the Banshee Queen in her own world. There, the Fae was frigid and resplendent in arctic silver-white, often turning the moisture in the air around her into glimmering crystals of frost, no matter the season.
Here in this plane, she was a being of so much color, that if Kylah had been in possession of her eyes, she didn’t believe they would have contained or comprehended the spectrum. The flawless symmetry of her features was unnatural in its exactness and lent her beauty an unfinished quality which she hid behind layers of glimmering color and riotous translucent robes. She didn’t walk so much as glide through the nether until she filled the same space that contained Kylah.
Behind the Queen, a smaller, more delicate Fae hovered unobtrusively. She often had accompanied Cliodnah to their meetings and Kylah had the impression she was some kind of attendant or Faerie lady-in-waiting. Her robes were more substantial than the one’s draping the Queen’s seductive body, and the spectrum was limited to indescribable, uncommon shades of blue.
“Your Majesty.” Kylah didn’t so much speak as reverberate with the intention to do so. “I’ve never seen you here before. How lovely you are.”
“Banshee.” Cliodhah’s voice was at once atypical and familiar. The infinitely slow, methodically annunciated immortal lack of inflection was at once chilling and strangely melodic. “I’ve come to discuss our pact.”
Fear speared through Kylah. “I understood I had three months more, my lady.”
Pupils twice the size of a human’s slid to pin her with a disdainful glare. “My consort, Ly Erg, tells me you are oft in the company of the Druid of Cape Wrath.”
Kylah was suddenly glad she didn’t require breathing for survival. “Yes, majesty.” She decided not to elaborate.
“I believe you have captivated him,” The Queen remarked with an infinitesimal level of amusement.
“The Druid?”
“Ly Erg.” The Queen’s lip lifted in the terrifying ghost of a smile, but didn’t leave Kylah a chance to contemplate the horror of her announcement. “For a hundred years, the Druid has hidden himself in the earth somewhere, away from our notice. Only recently have we felt his powers stir. This, we think, is largely your doing.”
Did she mean the royal “we”, or that Kylah had garnered the notice of the entirety of the Fae? The possibilities frightened her beyond her wits.
Cliodnah waved her hand, disturbing the swirling grey until it congealed with a foreign sound like vines snapping in a heavy storm. There appeared in front of them a vision of Daroch crouched naked and bathing in the grotto. The lower half of his body remained concealed by the dark water, but his tattooed torso was burnished blue and gold by a fire he’d kept dark while Kylah had been with him.
He’d done that in deference to her, she realized. Regardless of his many verbal dismissals, he’d never once lit a flame in her presence, knowing she feared them.
Perhaps he cared, in his own way.
Kylah, the Queen, and her lovely blue attendant silently played voyeur to Daroch’s private bath. He scrubbed his slick body and long hair with a sort of spongy, colored salt that bubbled and then dissolved in the water. When his skin glowed raw, he took a wicked-looking dirk and gripped the string of shells that hung close to his right eye. Kylah felt like wincing as he took three preparatory breaths before shearing it off.
“What is this?” she whispered.
“’Tis how the ancient Druids prepared for war,” Cliodnah didn’t look away from him and Kylah noted the uncloaked lust dripping from her voice. She resented it. She wanted to hide Daroch from the Queen’s view. He didn’t want to be watched, this she understood absolutely. “He left the Faerie realm promising retribution for his bondage. I fear he has finally found the means to turn his threat into reality.”
“It was you,” Kylah gaped, horrified. “You kept him prisoner in Faerie.”
The Queen made a foreign gesture that would have been the human equivalent of a shrug. “Look at him. He’s a paragon of masculinity. One of the most perfectly crafted human beings I’ve seen in millennia. As a youth, he was an especially gifted and powerful Druid. I had to claim him before another Faerie Queen did.”
There were more of them? Kylah’s fear spiked.
“There are more castes of the Fae than there are different races of you humans.” Cliodnah seemed to read Kylah’s mind without tearing her hungry eyes from Daroch, which added to her disquiet. “I am Queen of the Banshees, alone, and only answer to Elphame, or Maeve, as your myths call her. She is chief among the Council of Queens.”
Kylah watched the water embrace Daroch, watched his lips move in silent incantations. He’d sheared his hair to above his shoulders and away from his eyes. He looked more brutal somehow. More stark and ancient and feral. Reaching for a sharp needle and a bowl of blue ink, the muscles in his magnificent body flexed and strained with his fluid movements. He dipped the needle in the ink, and let the wooden bowl float nearby as he reached across his chest to the one empty space on the entire left side of his body.
The one above his heart.
With a series of deep punctures, he painstakingly stabbed the needle into his flesh again and again, all the while his lips whispered magical things in a language no longer spoken. He’d whispered those words into her ear as she’d come apart.
Kylah could hardly bear them now. “What did you mean when you said you’d claimed him?” She already suspected, already knew, but wanted to hear her Faerie liege say the words.
The Queen turned to look at her then, but her attendant first caught Kylah’s eye. It was the look of disapproval on the blue Faerie’s face that drew Kylah’s notice. Not directed at Kylah, but at her Queen.
“Things have not always been as they are now between the Fae, your Gods, and humans.” Cliodnah could have been called wistful, if such a thing were possible for the Fae. “Untold thousands of years ago we, the Fae, and your deities united in war against an ancient evil for supremacy of this world. After we conquered, we tried to share this plane but ultimately began to war amongst ourselves. The Gods had already created many different kinds of warriors to fight evil, and we had blessed many humans with our own Fae gifts. We used these humans as our pawns and as our fodder. As the spoils of war and as slaves.”
Kylah felt as though she might be sick, but knew it was impossible, so she suffered through the Queen’s horrible, dispassionate tale.
“Boredom is an unpleasant side effect of immortality. There are many pleasures that humans afforded us that angered your Gods. There were hunts and experiments and magical debauchery that your mind couldn’t even envisage.” The Queen’s eyes were wide and held an exhilaration that terrified Kylah beyond comprehension. Cliodhah wasn’t glad these times were over. She yearned for them.
She was bored, now.
“I claimed the Druid at the end of these times, when I knew a pact would be decided upon by a court of your Gods and our Queen.” She turned her attention back to Daroch, who precisely punctured his flesh and paused every so often to clear the blood with sea water.
He never even flinched.
“Faeries love consorting with human men. They f*ck like savages. Like they have no time left because their lives are so brittle and finite. Their fear smells delicious and tastes even better.”
Kylah didn’t even want to consider what the Queen meant by that last statement so she, too, kept her eyes locked on Daroch.
“A long and complicated pact was decided upon by your Gods and our Queen that took hundreds of years to write. But the gist of it is that we can no longer meddle among you humans, not without your consent or that of the Gods. The consequences are very— detailed.”
The drop of blood running down Daroch’s chest was the tear of regret Kylah could not produce. She traced it as she addressed the Queen. “Why are you telling me this?” she whispered, horrified.
Cliodnah reached her hand out to Daroch’s specter and made a wanton sound so inhuman that Kylah’s very essence shrank from it. She was glad she hadn’t mentioned the Arborlatix and vowed never to do so. It was the only advantage he had over the Fae and now she hoped he had opportunity to use it.
“Times were different when the Druid was my—guest,” the Queen murmured.
“When he was your prisoner, you mean.” Kylah knew she was being bold, but it didn’t matter. This Banshee Queen ruthlessly stole Daroch’s life from him. Plucked him from his home, his time, and…
“I will not argue semantics with a human.” The Queen’s lip curled in a very human gesture of distaste. “I’m here to offer you more than that. I’m here to give you the chance to save not only your existence, but that of your sister Kamdyn as well.”
The Queen was silent for a moment to allow her offer to sink in.
“How?” Kylah whispered, though she had a sinking fear she knew.
“I want you to kill Daroch McLeod.”