The first time the Unseelie-king-residue came to the white, bright half of the boudoir in which he’d left her trapped by magic beyond her comprehension, the Seelie queen melted back against the wall, turned herself into a tapestry, and watched silently as a graphic scene of coupling unfolded before her unenthusiastic but eventually reluctantly fascinated gaze.
Hers was the court of sensuality, and he had once been considered king of it for good reason. Passion drenched the chamber, saturating the very air in which her tapestry hung, draping another bit of sticky, sexually charged residue on her weft and weave.
A visitor would have seen no more than a vibrant hunt scene hung upon the wall of the boudoir, and at the center, before the slab upon which the mighty white stag was being sacrificed, a slender, lovely woman with pale hair and iridescent eyes, standing, staring out from the tapestry and into the room.
She’d cut her queenly teeth on legends of the enormously brilliant, terrifyingly powerful, wild, half-mad godlike king that had nearly destroyed their entire race, and certainly condemned it to eternal struggle, with his obsession over a mortal.
She despised the Unseelie king for locking her away. For killing the original queen before the song had been passed on. For dooming them to striking alliances with weaker beings in order to survive, limping along with only a hint of their former grandeur and power.
She despised herself for not seeing through her most trusted advisor, V’lane, and being locked away by him as well, in a frozen prison, trapped in a casket of ice, scarcely daring to hope the seeds she’d planted long ago among the Keltar and O’Connor and various others might come to fruition and she would live. Carry on to try to survive the next test she’d also foreseen.
This—spelled into a chamber with memory residue—was not living. Buried in another coffin of sorts while her race suffered who knew what horrors.
The Unseelie prison walls were down. Even frozen in her casket, diminishing, being leeched of her very essence by the void-magic of the Unseelie prison, she’d felt the walls around her collapse, had known the very moment the ancient, compromised song had winked out.
She, more than any of the Seelie, understood the danger her race now faced. She was the one who’d used imperfect song, fragments she’d found hither and yon through the ages, to bind the Fae realms to the mortal coil. She’d only been able to secure her imperiled court by marrying it to the human planet.
Irretrievably.
And if that coil were devoured by the black holes, so, too, would be all the Seelie realms.
With the king, she’d pretended to know none of this, yet it had been precisely why she’d urged him to take action.
She knew their situation was worse even than that. She’d sought the mythic song herself, striving to restore that colossal magic from which their race had sprung. She’d studied the legends. She knew the truth. The song called an enormous price from imperfect beings, and they all were, to varying degrees. There was no easy way forward. It would cost her many things.
But she knew something else, too: a thing not even the Unseelie king knew. If she were able to manipulate and seduce him into saving Dublin, thereby her court, the price demanded would be levied most harshly against him.
The tapestry she’d become rippled and shuddered as she watched the residue of the Unseelie king’s lies. For if she believed them, it was her on that pile of lush furs and bloodred rose petals, as diamonds floated lazily on the air, illuminating the chamber with millions of tiny twinkling stars.
If she believed him, she had once been mortal, and once been in love with the slaughterer of their race, the maker of the abominations, the one who’d cared nothing for the former queen to whom he’d been trothed, and less for the court he’d abandoned.
Cruce forced a cup from the cauldron of forgetting on you, the king had said before he left.
She’d never drunk from the cauldron. The queen was not allowed.
Before you were queen. When you were mine.
She didn’t believe him. Refused to believe him. And even if she had—how could it matter? She was what she was now. The Seelie queen, leader of the True Race. She’d spent her entire existence as that. Had no memory of his lies. Wanted none.
And yet, she could divine no purpose for this charade.
He needed nothing from her. He was the Unseelie king. He was an it, an entity, a state of existence, enormously beyond any of their race’s comprehension. He needed nothing from no one. Legend was too complex and contradictory to unravel his origins. Or theirs.