Chapter Twenty-One #2
A younger version, though it only showed in her bored expression and the lack of scarring at her neck.
Her wings, too, not as weighted down, and no mottling to be seen.
She muttered something about babying the baby, sulky with it, her complaint lost to the hiss of current Nahem’s voice, there at his ear.
“Distracted by the pretty trinkets listed. Typical. The Winter Court made the same mistake. They only saw the softness. The pretty bits. But who needs details?”
Robin liked this speech better when he was the one to give it.
The baby to be babied, with his butterfly wings, was ushered aside, while his parent–the seelie Monarch, how fun–greeted the next arrival with a booming laugh. He said something Robin couldn’t make out despite the volume, waving his hand to urge someone closer.
The whispers stopped. The twinkling laughter and talking faded nothing, as the newly arrived fae approached. A selkie, from the look of her, and … a water something. Robin didn’t know. He had feathers and they were wet.
“Oh,” said younger Nahem, her voice sweet and rich and amused. “An actual baby.”
Robin heard, “this is Sheai-” and “My king, we are honored” and the soft scritch scritch of younger Nahem’s quill. Then, her voice.
“Selkie female born to Luething, true name Bohz Sirrehn, and Cephas, true name Vokay Duart Callyth,” she murmured. “Given name Sheai. True name: Ruarie Nycei Voehn. At least it’s not another Aphosia. I might have ripped my wings off.”
Whoever she sat next to giggled and whispered something in kind.
“Births,” hissed the hoarse voice of the Nahem Robin knew, flames crawling up the sides of the vision before it crumbled to black. “Deaths. Bondings. Oaths. Pledges made with words of power. Tucked between children’s trinkets and kinnara is where you find the minutia of running a kingdom.”
Light, again. Firelight, and a room with a sectional, and Nahem with her heavy wings and blazing eyes and bared teeth. Robin’s knees almost gave out. He held on to Zyr, letting out a harsh exhale.
“Whatever you’re planning, beithir, you’d best learn to love the mundane, lest you unleash something upon us that was rightfully put down two thousand years ago. No one thrives in true chaos.”
“Is that how you see it?” Zyr asked, equally hostile. “Things are better now that the seelie rule and keep the chaos at bay?”
Nahem sneered. Robin thought, better never means better for everyone.
And he really, really hoped she wouldn’t say yes. Zyr’d been doing so well at not murdering her.
“Try to twist my words all you wish, child. That doesn’t negate the fact the Winter Court brought it on themselves,” she snapped, tail lashing behind her.
“They grew cruel with their amusements, beyond our natures, and ruled for too long. They refused to see the seelie as anything but pretty, simpering meat.”
“They did this and they did that, but you were a member of the Winter Court too,” Robin pointed out. “You’re unseelie.”
Nahem touched her throat, seemingly unaware of the movement, her long nails a deep red over knotted scar tissue, wings drawing tight against her back.
“And my own queen dismissed my warnings as a paranoid unseelie turned soft. The only ones who acknowledged the merit of the my words on the Summer Court were the seelie.”
“So you joined the side of the now-Monarchs?” Robin asked, curling his hand tighter in Zyr’s shirt. “Or was that after the seelie cut your throat?”
“The Winter Court ruled for too long,” Nahem repeated, fierce. Sharp. “Until those of Summer refused to allow it to continue and went too far. You should understand, dragon. Isn’t that what you aim to do now, yourself? Why you came seeking clarification on something so banal as lesser notes?”
Fuck that bitch.
Like, the patriarchy sucked, and Robin benefited from it as a man, and gendered insults were shitty and perpetuated an oppressive and inequitable system, but ‘fuck that asshole’ sounded too much like his real life private times.
‘That shit’ was too close to how he sometimes thought of Zyr. Bastard? Prick?
And overthinking was a sure sign the Robin was absolutely done with a situation.
(But seriously, fuck that bitch, and whoever had talked to her about what they were looking into.)
“It’s true,” Zyr said, his attention on Robin.
Clarifying, because he never assumed what Robin knew of Faerie.
“The Winter Court grew powerful, and the Summer Court struggled to exert itself. Winter’s mistakes were myriad.
But they never sought to eradicate the seelie or stop the Equinox Rites.
” He glanced at Nahem then. “I’m not fool enough to serve a dead court.
But I won’t pretend the Summer Court is any better, merely because they kill more selectively and out of sight. ”
“The seelie’s greatest flaw was that they played by the rules.
Summer to Winter to Winter-and-human to Winter again, and the seelie did nothing but flounder.
” Nahem’s face twisted up in distaste. “There was no safety for anyone under a constant Winter Court. Protocol, not adhered to. And I don’t mean the petty, ridiculous bits about gifts and greetings.
Protocol around who is prey, when they could be prey.
Those were broken. Chaos without constraints is not change, but wanton, meaningless destruction. ”
“It’s a good thing we’re not looking to recreate the Winter Court, in that case.
” Robin’s words came out pissy and snippy, and he gave absolutely no fucks.
He could be a bitch, too. (That whole ‘backed by powerful, muscular person’ surety again.
A bad, horrible habit he didn’t regret.) “Like, at all. That’s no way to get balance—”
Nahem slashed the air with her hand, surprising Robin into silence. She didn’t look at him—typical—not with her fire-glittering gaze on Zyr.
“Your generation were ill done by, child. The seelie overcorrected, in unforgivable ways, but you never had to learn the taste of your sibling’s flesh because your House head lacked appropriate entertainment for the evening.
No ‘Wild Hunts’ without quarry, picking what they chased from among their own.
You wished to speak of poison? They would have given your bookish princeling a full dose and left him to his own devices for the amusement of someone more powerful than you and forced you to watch.
” Those teeth again. Smile or grimace or snarl.
“You should burn the records. Destroy them. Heed my warnings the way the Winter Court didn’t. ”
Zyr’s breath came in a long, indrawn hiss as he very carefully unwound his tail from Robin’s leg, jaw set.
Probably not the best move, telling the knowledge and book obsessed historian dragon from a forgotten generation whose childhood had been marked by the deaths of his friends and pseudo-siblings to burn the records.
“Would you move your hand?” Zyr asked quietly. Asked and waited until Robin nodded and withdrew his hand to crackle with lightning, flashes of it dancing across his skin and flashing in his eyes.
“I’m with you,” Robin murmured, grateful for Zyr’s sharp, short nod before the beithir took a step closer to the diminutive, ancient unseelie.
“Ill done by,” Zyr snarled, with thunder behind his words.
“Is that what you call it? An ‘overcorrection?’ Unseelie parents smothering their own babes in their swaddling, while their seelie mates looked on. Was that you? Silent in the face of it? Or were you one of those who gave us up when the Monarchs came calling, sent us off to better ourselves? You’re right, lidérc.
We weren’t hunted. We didn’t need to be.
We were given up to the table by those who were meant to protect us.
Didn’t poison us for their amusement but for our own good, wouldn’t handle the knives, so we had to slit our own throats.
And for those who failed to bleed out quickly enough, they had bonds waiting.
Good seelie bonds who stripped us of our very aspects, who taught us starvation was the answer to hunger, until we died loving them and hating ourselves.
Ill fucking done by. You had a Court. A culture.
And because you and yours decided to play the tyrant, I have nothing but the records you want destroyed.
And still they hate us. They’ll burn the whole of Faerie if they can be sure the unseelie will be caught in the flame.
Burn the house with themselves inside, just to be sure the doors stay locked. ”
“So instead you propose we allow the unseelie do the same? Because that’s what will happen, child. Seelie infants, dead in their bassinets, used as garnish and little gauze wings plucked-”
Robin laughed, sharp, short. Loud, too. Faerie, making it echo.
“Don’t try to pit your straw man against an actual genocide.
We’re not doing that. No,” Robin said, at her snarling hiss.
His hair was frizzy from Zyr’s electricity, his glasses a little steamy from the fires, and he was more than done.
“You invited us over as guests and have been the rudest host I’ve ever had, and I’m counting the time I was kidnapped. You want Protocol? Then stick to it.”
“You are children. You’ve no concept of what you’re attempting to unleash.”
“And you have no idea of what we’re trying to do. Beithir,” Robin let himself look at Zyr then. His beithir. Lightning and thunder and enraged pain, and if Robin didn’t get them gone, he’d die. They both might. “We’ve heard what we needed to. I don’t want us to be here anymore. Take me back.”
Nahem made a rude sound. “Ordering around a man who wants you to be reduced to an entrée. How wise.”
“I have it on good authority that I taste like grapefruit.” He didn’t bother to look at her. His eyes stayed on Zyr. “Take me to our allotment, Zyr.”
Zyr had started to snarl, bloodlust in his vicious glare at Nahem. His focus snapped to Robin with our allotment, and the sparks settled on his skin.
“You should read those records you wish to burn,” Zyr said, his voice shockingly level and his eyes never leaving Robin’s face.
“The Winter Court played its part for millennia upon millennia without such excess. That your generation descended into atrocities says much about you and nothing about the unseelie.”
Zyr nodded to Robin, a gesture that came close to a bow without quite becoming one. “Our allotment, Robin. As you require. There’s nothing of interest here.”