“You never finished it,” Cruce growled. “Or you would have turned your precious concubine into one of us, a thing she was never meant to be. You abandoned us for hundreds of thousands of years, created and discarded us, obsessed with your quest. You betrayed us again and again.”
“Grudges. Glories. You name them. They become it.” The Dreamy-Eyed Guy’s eyes shifted, expanded exponentially, becoming voracious whirlpools of swirling darkness, sucking us down, stretching us as thin as threads, yanking us away, and abruptly I stood with Cruce and the Dreamy-Eyed Guy on a familiar grassy knoll beneath an enormous moon, with a pine-board fence unfurling high on a ridge, jutting planks into the sky like dark fingers reaching for the cool white orb.
Tiny, between towering black megaliths, I stood with Cruce on my left, the Dreamy-Eyed Guy on my right. The wind tangled hair around my face while, above me, Hunters gusted a fragrant breeze, gonging deep in their chests to the moon as the moon chimed back. Power pulsed and surged in the soil and rocks beneath my feet, and I could feel it so much more intensely now that I had the True Magic. This power was ancient, enormous, far more vast and potent than anything the Earth had ever possessed. I might sink into it, become one with it, become a world myself or perhaps a star, instead of a mere human or queen.
“This is the First World,” I breathed, understanding.
The DEG nodded but looked past me, at Cruce, “Your king never betrayed you.”
“That was all you did. At every opportunity,” Cruce snarled.
“And now we will see if you are as great a king as he.”
I narrowed my eyes, gripped by a sudden inexplicable apprehension. Danger! the marrow in my bones screamed. Wherever this conversation was going, I wasn’t going to like it. What did he mean, the king had never betrayed Cruce?
“Answer me,” the DEG said softly, but there was such immense compulsion in his words that I instantly began to puke every word I knew in an incoherent babble of random associations. “Not you,” the DEG said absently, and I shut up.
Cruce gritted, “Yes, you manipulative fuck. I have been hearing music.”
I glared at Cruce. “And you didn’t think to mention this to me when you knew we were hunting for a bloody song?”
He shrugged. “I assumed it was miscellaneous detritus from the Book. It sounded like the Unseelie castes so I believed it part of their True Names and didn’t give it a second thought.”
I narrowed my eyes, trying to decide if he was telling the truth. I was getting a mixed read from him. I turned back to the DEG and scowled. “That means you finished it. And you didn’t bother to tell us that?”
“Long before Zara was gone.”
I protested, “But you didn’t turn the concubine.” That was the fact that convinced me the king had failed, that he’d not even been an avenue worth pursuing. Now he was telling me he’d succeeded? Then why hadn’t he used it? And according to what I understood of the time line, given how long ago the king had gifted the concubine the music box, he’d had a small eternity to reconsider his decision.
“No, the king did not,” he said, and such exquisite pain lanced through me that I doubled over, holding my sides. “There’s a price to sing that song.”
“But you couldn’t have sung it. You’re not the queen,” I protested.
He turned his star-filled, apocalyptic gaze to Cruce and smiled faintly. “Rules. Malleable. He could have. He chose not to.” His expression changed to one of paternal pride. “Your turn to choose.”
“Why are you looking at Cruce? I thought I was supposed to sing the song.”
His head swiveled back to me and I got tangled in his enormous regard, stuck like a fly on sticky tape, unable to move. “You will owe me three boons,” he intoned.
I nodded instantly. Refusal was not an option.
“At the time I come to you next. You will obey without question.”
I nodded again.
“The music box contained half. The other half was concealed within the Sinsar Dubh.”
“It was not,” Cruce growled. “You never finished it. Admit it, you fuck. It was beyond you. I would have known.”
I said to the DEG, “You mean, I could merge with the part I left behind—”
“It was not in the part that split off and entered you.”
“So, who’s supposed to sing it, me or Cruce? Our world is ending!”
“Worlds do.”
“What the fuck is your game, old man?” Cruce demanded.
“Will you gift MacKayla your half?” the DEG said.
“To save my race? Yes. I have always been willing to lead them. As a true king should.”
“But it won’t,” the DEG said. “Save your race. It will doom it. The price of perfect song”—his dark, starry gaze encompassed both of us, and suddenly Cruce and I were standing shoulder-to-shoulder; he’d moved us together with a mere gaze—“is the death of all sprung into existence from imperfect song.”