Kingdom of Shadow and Light Page 4

  After a moment, Severina joined the delicate truce. “As have I. My court is vile as Unseelie, all of them!”

  Not quite all. The lesser castes were younger, possessing shorter memories. Some had even been conceived in this Elysian grove, before the Elixir rendered the Seelie barren. The last born caste, the Spyrssidhe were unaffected by the insanity afflicting the Tuatha De. Ixcythe despised and envied them for it. When the changes had first begun to escalate, her court had hunted them, driving the tiny Fae into hiding. “You speak as if it’s only your court suffering. You feel it, too. The same desires. The hunger. The need.” Obsessive. Consuming. Mind dulling. Painful for beings who’d not suffered pain for time eternal.

  Azar’s face tightened. “Unlike those fools, I control it.”

  Void of emotion, the Fae had long toyed with impassioned beings, to feel some shallow sensation. But they hadn’t always been empty husks.

  Severina shrugged. “We will learn to manage our passions again, and once we do, our existence will be richer for it. The Song hasn’t undone our immortality.”

  Ixcythe seethed, “Yet. It has not undone our immortality yet. Are you fool enough to believe these changes will abruptly stop for no reason?”

  The species from which they’d stolen the Elixir warned them they would regret it, as the price for immortality was the destruction of the soul. They’d deemed it a fair exchange. Why gamble on reincarnation or an elusive, illusory, never-once-glimpsed deity, when they might guarantee eternity with a sip?

  Belatedly, they’d discovered the body was the house of passion, not the source of it. Souls slowly scorched to ash on a forbidden pyre, they’d traded a vibrant, impassioned, up to five-century-long lifespan for an eternity of shallow sensation. Still, they’d considered it a worthwhile trade.

  Ixcythe knew now that they were feeling emotions again, mortality couldn’t be far behind. The Song wasn’t restoring them to the height of their power.

  It was taking them back.

  All the way back.

  To what they’d originally been.

  Mortal.

  Despicably, vulnerably killable.

  Soft-bellied and pathetically weak as mortals.

  The Song had destroyed the Unseelie.

  It was remaking the Seelie.

  Both the Light and Shadow Courts had been deemed imperfect to varying degrees.

  None knew where Aoibheal had concealed the Elixir of Life. Or how much was left. Whatever remained, Ixcythe vowed to have the first drops. She would not become mortal again. She despised these memories, these feelings. She’d torn apart the queen’s bower, searched every glade, brook, and glen around it, every inch of the High Queen’s castle seeking it. She’d dispatched scouts far and wide, to search. None had returned.

  If the Goddess who’d seeded this grove had encountered the Tuatha De Danann at any other point in their history, she’d have destroyed them. But they’d met when the Fae had recently imbibed the Elixir, were celebratory, joyful, still fertile, not yet starved for sensation, and were benevolent, nurturing the land upon which they dwelled.

  “How are we to take back what is ours from the human that holds it, if we cannot control our courts?” Ixcythe hissed.

  Her royal counterparts said nothing.

  Was no one thinking clearly but her? “The three of us must use the Elixir, force it on our subjects!”

  Azar shot a look of such incendiary rage the meticulously sculpted icicles adorning her gown began melting, dripping to her slippered feet. “Do you have it?” he snarled, hands fisting.

  “Am I behaving as if I have it?” she snarled back. “Use your power against me again, Azar—if only upon my gown—and I’ll finish the war you start!”

  “Had I the faintest idea where the Elixir was I would have drunk it instantly then rained it down upon my kingdom! And fuck your ugly gown! You think you can finish a war against me, princess?” he sneered. “Try.”

  By D’Anu, they were behaving little better than their lust-enraged courts. Ixcythe pressed a hand to her breast, beckoning the ice of her kingdom, restoring the frozen accoutrements of her dress, cooling her temper.

  Eyes blazing, shuddering with the effort of subduing his rage, Azar said tightly, “Send a bit of that this way. If you would be so kind.”

  She wanted to ice the bastard, case him entirely in a glacial block. Slice the slab into tiny frozen pieces and feed him to her court. But she needed allies. Piercing her palms with her nails, she gusted a chilling breeze in his direction then did him the honor of graciously swirling it around him.

  After a few moments, the heat Azar was throwing off abated and his burning gaze dimmed to banked embers. “My apologies, Ixcythe. The gowns of Winter are the epitome of loveliness.”

  “And the grandeur of your Autumn lands beyond compare,” she rejoined, not meaning a word of it. Then she turned to glare at Severina, who snapped, “Well, I don’t have the blasted Elixir. Have you searched the royal bower?”

  Ixcythe snapped back, “Yes, and clearly I wasn’t the first to do so.” She’d feared one of them had found it first. But their volatile tempers were proof enough they hadn’t. “The chest is nowhere to be found. Aoibheal must have moved it before she was interred in the Unseelie prison by Cruce, divining some inkling of her fate.” Prophecy, a gift possessed by the queen alone, the limited ability to foresee events as they might unfold, now belonged to MacKayla Lane. Assuming the mortal ever discovered and learned to use it.

  Severina shrugged dismissively. “What’s the use? Even if we find it, the Song has been sung. It will nullify the effects of the Elixir again.”

  Azar snorted contemptuously. “Have the suns of summer cooked your brains? The Song destroys what it deems imperfect only while being sung. It doesn’t continuously eradicate imperfections. If it did, nothing imperfect could ever exist. It would have been impossible for the king to create the Shadow Court!”

  Ixcythe said, “Azar is correct. Though the effects settle into the planet’s core, restoring ancient magic, the Song balances the scales a single time.” Leaving sentient beings the free will to do as they wished—which was precisely as it should be. Gods such as the Fae answered to no gods. And gods were another of their problems—the Song had reawakened their old enemies. Should they learn the Fae were handicapped, becoming mortal…She shuddered, unable to complete the thought.

  Azar said, “Which means the Elixir will mute emotion, restore immortality, yet do nothing to diminish the power we’ve regained.”

  Ixcythe inclined her head. “Precisely. MacKayla Lane possesses Aoibheal’s knowledge and will know where the Elixir is.”

  Severina rolled her eyes. “What good does that do? We tried to kill her repeatedly and failed. That beast stands in our way, and she has the spear!”

  “We sought her demise rashly. Before our memories were regained,” Ixcythe said coolly. “Before we recalled this place.”

  “And we have a powerful advantage,” Azar purred, with a smile. “Our memories have been restored, but she has only the knowledge of a queen who abdicated power before the Song was sung; a queen far younger than we are. We know more about our history and the powers we possess than she does, recall magic she never learned.”

  “But she’s vanished,” Severina argued. “None know where to find her.”

  “We send a message and make her come to us. Here. Where our lifeblood can’t be shed by her or the beast with whom she consorts.”

  Comprehension dawned in Severina’s eyes. “And we tell her if she gives us the Elixir, we’ll stop trying to kill her. A splendid plan!” She added with a sneer, “Mortals always hunger for an end to war.” While the Fae hungered for the exquisite pleasures of it, so long as they weren’t in the fray.

  For a moment, Ixcythe couldn’t even speak, she was so stupefied by Summer’s idiocy. “We tell her not
hing, you bloody fool! An end to war for our ‘queen’ would best be achieved by watching us all die. She blames us for the death of billions of mortals! She despises us.”

  Severina huffed, “A queen isn’t supposed to despise her own people!”

  “Oh, by the blessed D’Anu, we’re not her people! She’s mortal! She doesn’t want us any more than we want her. She wants to use our power for her people, not ours!” Ixcythe practically screamed. “Yet you think we should say, ‘Oh, great queen, please help us because we’re regressing and becoming mortal again and if you don’t give us the Elixir, we’re all going to die, leaving your world in peace, granting you the ultimate vengeance against us!’ What is wrong with you?”

  “It wasn’t even us. It was the bloody Unseelie!” Azar said, his eyes blazing with fire and fury. “We scarce killed any humans at all compared to the Shadow Court! Who knows to what heights we might have risen by now had we not been twice deceived, twice enslaved to a human queen!”

  “Precisely,” Ixcythe spat savagely. “Hundreds of thousands of years wasted, obeying a queen we believed was one of us, only to have that traitorous bitch pass our power to another human who was born and bred to hunt and kill us. If MacKayla Lane catches even the faintest whiff that we are becoming mortal again—” Ixcythe couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence. Their own queen would destroy them. The idea of Fae being hunted by humans, helpless foxes scattering, terrified, on a reverse Wild Hunt, to be slaughtered like lesser beasts—how their “queen” would enjoy that! Never! “She must never know what’s happening to us. That we’ve regained our memories, and we’re reverting. No one can.”

  “If we do become—” Severina broke off, shivering, before managing to grind out the detested word. “—mortal, we could always move our courts to this sacred place.”

  Ixcythe fisted her hands so tightly the sharp tips of her nails slid through her flesh, puncturing the backs of her hands. That was it. At the appointed hour, when they met with the queen, the princess of Summer would no longer be speaking. “So that in our madness, rendered unkillable by the Grove, we could torture each other until we finally died of natural causes? Have you forgotten how many centuries that would be?” She soothed herself a moment, envisioning the sunny warmth leaching from Severina’s skin, as she iced her blue and pale, forever frozen yet fully aware of her imprisonment, erecting her as yet another statue in one of her many glacial gardens where she was wont to store those she despised. “And that’s assuming countless stolen eons don’t instantly catch up with us once we reach a critical point in devolution, and we crumble into piles of ash!”

  Azar went still, rendered immobile by the abhorrent thought. After a moment he growled so savagely the ground trembled beneath their feet, “That will never happen! You summoned us. That means you have a plan. What is it?”

  Ixcythe smiled. “We want something back,” she purred venomously. “We make that thieving human bitch want something back, too.”

  3

  Anybody want a drink before the war?

  MAC

  Cruce lied.

  No surprise there.

  Technically, he counters mockingly in my mind, although he no longer exists, I didn’t.

  Technically, he’s correct. The seductive master of deception was also a master of precision. Loopholes, details, omissions, and evasions were his forte.

  After confirming the key to using the High Queen’s power lay in forging a connection to the planet itself, Cruce also told me new queens were weak queens and required anywhere from fifty to five hundred years to attain their full strength and powers.

  What he failed to share is fifty to five hundred years is the approximate length of time required to be able to wield the full powers of the High Queen only if the queen is already Fae and, although the True Magic can be passed to another species, the passage of it alone isn’t enough to turn that species Fae. Which I recently discovered in the tenth or eleventh millionth file I’ve reviewed during my incarceration in this chamber wherein time moves differently than in the mortal realm.

  I assumed the transfer of Aoibheal’s power would transform me completely. My hair changed. Last time I saw myself in a glass, my eyes were eerily backlit, banked with luminous fire. I possess considerable Fae magic, from sifting to transforming elements to rebuilding things that once existed, to affecting the weather with my mood. I assumed all of me would change. Like Christian. Sean O’Bannion. Inspector Jayne.

  I assumed wrong.

  There are only two ways for a mortal to become truly, fully Fae: be transformed by a fully Fae High Queen, or reside for a lengthy period of time at the Light Court without ever leaving (bet the First Queen never shared that with the Unseelie king!).

  Five thousand years at the Light Court, to be precise. I don’t have that much time. I suspect I’ve already burned through months, mortal time, sequestered here.

  After I sang the Song of Making and destroyed the black holes, Barrons and I went to Faery to meet the courts I was to rule. At first, the Light Court had rolled out the red carpet and made a great show of willingly embracing me as High Queen.

  Their feigned acceptance had lasted exactly four days. Then the attacks had begun, forty-two of them in twelve hours, each more cunning and treacherous than the last. They’d tried to trap us with wards, separate us, spell us, imprison us, so they could steal my spear and use it against me. They were so determined to kill me in order to put a pure-blooded Seelie on the throne, they were willing to die to accomplish it. Barrons and I had been forced to slay countless Fae, primarily Winter Court, who proved my most savage, relentless enemy.

  We’d sifted back to the bookstore, to find a way to buy time so I could learn to use my power. It wasn’t as if it came with a convenient instruction booklet, or, if it did, that booklet had been buried somewhere within a gazillion chaotic files inside me.

  When Barrons told me about the chamber the king created for his concubine before he finished the White Mansion, wherein time moved differently than the mortal realm, I realized it was exactly what we needed.

  There, I would sequester, study, and learn to use the Song of Making so I could restore the walls between the realms of Mortal and Fae. If I couldn’t rule the Fae—and they’d made it clear they would never accept me—at the very least, I needed to contain them.

  Barrons had no idea how time moved in the suspended chamber, only that it was much more slowly. I might spend a few centuries within, while only a few months passed in Dublin. Or, he warned, it might be longer.

  We deemed the lost time a risk worth taking. If I attempted to stay in Faery or the mortal realm, the Fae attacks would only keep coming, and I’d never learn to use my power. That was the Light Court’s plan; so long as they kept me on the defensive, I could never go on the offensive.

  Once I was inside the chamber, Barrons would stand guard beyond it, in the corridor of the White Mansion, until I exited. At some point during my confinement, I figured out how to attach the chamber to the bookstore and moved them both, better concealing us from our enemies.

  I have no idea how long I’ve been in here, but it feels like centuries to me, and I’ve just discovered what I need isn’t within my reach. I intended to walk out only when I was adamantine; a lethal High Queen capable of doing whatever must be done. But unless I move to Faery and manage to survive five thousand years in the thick of a court that wants me dead, I’ll remain a partially endowed queen, unequal to my predecessors, forever.

  Although I now know the true names of the Seelie, with a mortal tongue I’m no more capable of summoning my subjects than I was V’lane/Cruce. That alone will give me away to my court. She is not fully queen, they will hiss. She cannot even command our attendance, they will laugh. And do their best to kill me for eternity.

  The problem is I hold power that, if taken from me by a Fae, will be u
sed to enslave and, likely, eventually eradicate all humans. I must succeed at seizing my rule and governing the Fae. If I fail, I fail the entire world.

  A little pressure there for a bartender from Georgia.

  I’d sigh, but I seem to have forgotten how. Time in this place has left me feeling as disembodied as the Sinsar Dubh when it scraped me from my skin. I’ve suffered no physical demands. No urge to eat or drink, relieve myself, or stretch stiff limbs. I’ve sat, staring inward, sorting through a deluge of files and, although I’ve found much of use, I’ve uncovered nothing about the Song of Making other than legends, myths, and tall tales.

  Still, it hasn’t been a complete waste. I’ve learned how to do disturbingly horrific things. I’ve acquired an assortment of ancient, revolting spells. I rediscovered my lethal crimson runes, along with a cruel assortment of other weapons within the queen’s arsenal. I know how to create wards and barriers, have memorized names and places, Fae history, possess an understanding of the Light Court I didn’t before. I feel the burn of magic in the earth, can amplify and direct it in stunningly cruel ways.

  Unfortunately, I still confront the same two choices I had the day I entered: find a Fae to whom I can transfer the burden of power, trusting them to leave our world forever and never return (never going to happen—our planet is steeped more richly in magic than ever before, and the seat of their power is bound to it—they will never relinquish it willingly) or get out there and try to govern the deadly Fae with what tools I possess.

  If only Cruce had lived. I never thought I’d think that.

  We’d made a Compact, he and I. I pledged to give him the queen’s power once we saved our world, and he pledged in return to remove the Fae from our planet and never disturb us again.