Chapter Twenty-One
H is lips were warm in the cold cell, even though his flesh was as chilled as mine. And even more so when my armor, which had steadfastly refused to morph back to its alter ego even to sleep, sensing danger everywhere here, suddenly vanished in a cloud of silver silk. Because there was nowhere I felt more safe than in Pritkin’s arms.
We were both sweaty and grubby, and the surroundings were the least romantic I could think of, and none of it mattered. When incubus energy swirled around us, the dirty room became almost beautiful, the black rock glittered in the slanting light through the bars, the cool, slightly musty air turned clean and fresh, and the straw pallet underneath us became as comfortable as a feather bed. Not that I cared.
The hard arms around me were all I wanted, the harder lips on mine, the scrape of stubble as he kissed my neck, my chest, my breast. I was tired of fighting with him; I hated fighting with him! I wanted us to be in sync, working together, fighting together. That’s what I’d envisioned when I came here.
But that wasn’t what I’d found. Something had been off ever since I arrived, something strange, something wrong. And it still was.
“What is it?” I gasped, breaking away.
“Nothing.”
“Tell me,” because it wasn’t nothing, and we both knew it.
His eyes met mine, and there was no deception in them, but there was none of the hope I wanted to see, either. “I know what you want,” he said, his voice rough. “And I would give it to you. But you have to understand, this time, that may not be enough. I may not be enough.”
“Then . . . maybe we need some help,” I said slowly.
He shook his head. “Bodil made it clear—”
“No, not Bodil. One of ours. You’re allowed a team—”
“A team who could win here?” A blond eyebrow raised.
“I could call on the Pythian Court. I didn’t want to bring them into this, but—”
“And you shouldn’t. Rhea is the only one whose magic would work reliably in Faerie, and she’s your heir.”
No, not Rhea, I thought, seeing my beautiful, kind, and still only half-trained heir. My whole being revolted at the idea. She’d been in Faerie exactly once, and if I had my way, that would be the last time. And not my acolytes, either.
Their power wouldn’t be any more reliable here than mine, and they were all about two hundred, which was old even for a magic user. They’d been heroes recently, every single one, but channeling the Pythian power was hard, and they had enough on their hands keeping my court safe. I needed young blood.
“The covens,” I heard myself say, seeing the three impressive witches who had joined my court to help watch over the little coven initiates that a few well-disposed Great Mothers had entrusted to me.
They’d been needed, as half of the covens were part fey these days. It was a type of magic that few others knew, including the various magic workers at court. But it would be perfect here!
Especially as they were not only powerful but crafty and inventive. They’d had to be to survive the best that the Silver Circle could throw at them all these years while also keeping their people safe from raids by the fey. Unfortunately, the covens weren’t exactly my friends.
We’d had a run-in recently when some of the more radical leaders had decided that the war gave them a perfect opportunity to get some payback on the Circle. I’d stopped it because the last thing we needed right now was to fight each other, but they hadn’t liked it. They’d always suspected me of being a little too much in the Circle’s pocket, as most Pythias had been, and that had only increased their doubts.
I’d stopped a war but gained few friends, and those I had. . .
“Would not be welcomed here,” Pritkin said as if finishing the thought for me. “We have to persuade, not just win, and bringing in an outside army to fight for us, particularly that army—”
“Assuming I could even convince them.” Because that had always been the problem with the covens. They’d sacrificed the best of themselves fighting the Circle all those centuries ago. The ones who had survived were those who had stayed out of it, who went to ground, who took care of their own and let the world hang.
And ever since, that had been the model they’d followed.
They wouldn’t come, not at my call, and even if they did, an army made up of the very people the Alorestri had enslaved and vilified all these years wasn’t likely to gain us many votes.
“War mages then,” I said. “The Alorestri have treaties with them; they can’t claim them as slaves! And they’re supposed to help the Pythia—”
“They’re supposed to protect the Pythia,” Pritkin corrected. “Protecting you means getting you away from here, not helping you win.”
“But Faerie said—” I stopped myself. Because explaining that the spirit of a planet had been giving me orders might not help. That was why Mircea hadn’t given the consul a precis of what he was doing before he took off for the dark fey capital. He’d known how well that was likely to go over.
And while Jonas Marsden, the acting head of the Silver Circle, was a little easier to deal with than a two-thousand-year-old paranoid vampire queen, his forces had also taken some beatings recently. He wasn’t likely to endanger them to get us an army he didn’t trust. Not with half of the fey court on the other side!
“The demons!” I said, getting desperate. Because this place was far worse than I’d expected, and I’d expected it to be bad. But how were we supposed to win when we had to fight for our lives just to make it to the challenges?
“Even assuming that you could persuade the Council to send any here,” Pritkin said, “and that their magic worked well enough to help us, and that the fey wouldn’t rebel harder at a demon army than one made up of their slaves, we would have to take the chance that they weren’t working for our enemies.”
“But they’re on the damned menu! The gods want them more than us. It would be like a cow working for a butcher!”
“Yes, but most aren’t very fat cows and wouldn’t make much of a meal for their new overlords. But they might be useful in rounding up others who would.”
“God.”
“That’s how the world works, Cassie, every world. Including this one.”
And yes, it was.
And that didn’t change a damned thing.
“I’m still not going,” I told him flatly.
“I know.”
He kissed me again, and I didn’t have to ask the obvious question because it was all there. He wouldn’t go without me. He wouldn’t leave me here.
Which meant that my blind faith in an alien goddess might get both of us killed.
It had already gotten Mircea lost in another world, and I wasn’t sure I could get him back. Yet I’d sent his daughter there after him. Had I sent her to her death, too?
I didn’t know, just like I never knew anything anymore. Gertie, what if you were wrong about me? I thought desperately. What if we were both horribly wrong?
“Don’t do that,” Pritkin said, pulling back. I guessed that what I was feeling was in my kiss, too.
And then it was in more than that. A chill shot down my body, making my hands shake, my teeth want to chatter, and tears leap to my eyes when I couldn’t afford them, when I couldn’t be this weak! Not now, maybe not ever, but it never seemed to end, not just the war but the pressure . The doubt. The ever-present and all-consuming fear that I was getting this wrong.
What if Pritkin was right?
“Maybe we can win without the army,” I whispered.
And without warning, the world fell away.
I assumed an attack because, of course, I did. That was all we’d had here! But this didn’t feel like one.
It took me another moment to say what it felt like and to realize what was going on, even though I’d been on this ride before. But if this was the Common, the collective consciousness that Faerie shared with her children, it was more chaotic than last time. A lot more.
Usually, most fey experienced it as a flashback: they’d be at a centuries-old tavern and suddenly recall what the local wine tasted like or how bad the stew was, even though they’d never passed that way.
But an ancestor had, and had accidentally “uploaded” the memory to the Common, the hive mind that all fey participated in whether they liked it or not. From what I understood of their religion, they believed that all of them were pieces of Faerie’s soul that had been broken off and given bodies to go out and experience life. And that, after death, they would return to her with the knowledge they had gained.
In the meantime, they were still attached to her on some level and communicated back what they were feeling, seeing, and hearing. And, sometimes, it went both ways, with individual fey getting flashes of memory that wasn’t theirs. They would suddenly know directions to a place they’d never been, recognize someone they had never met, or taste that wine their ancestor had drunk a millennium ago. For them, such flashbacks usually lasted a few seconds or less, but Faerie was like the mainframe of this particular computer, and she got it all.
And was now showing some of it to us, as she had a few times before.
Only this wasn’t the crystal clear version I’d seen on those occasions, which had felt almost like being there. This . . . I didn’t know what this was. Other than dizzying, since we were rocketing through the palace, tearing down misty corridors and passing through indistinct walls and ceilings like they weren’t even there.
And then through the kitchens again, along that same suffocating corridor cut through solid rock, and now scarred with spell-blackened patches on the walls and what looked like drying blood splatter on the floor. And finally, down a dizzying staircase, through a warded wall that I could swear I felt on my skin, rough-hewn and rock-hard with a biting electric veneer, even as we were dragged through the middle of it. And out into—
I wasn’t sure. But it looked like another of those rock-cut storerooms that had been turned into a triage center. Some of Rhosier’s people were on cots groaning by the walls; others were getting bandaged up by some of the bread bakers from earlier, stoic-looking women with nimble fingers who wrapped bandages as quickly as they’d kneaded dough; and some were in a corner with sheets covering their faces, being sobbed over by what I guessed were family members, who must have just been told what had happened.
I saw one woman launch herself onto a soot-covered man, screaming and beating on him, trying to force him to wake up when he never would, and having to be dragged back by others while yelling and clawing at them—
“He’s fine, he’s fine, I know he’s fine—”
It was horrible everywhere I looked, not least because the visual wasn’t the only part of this feed having problems. The voices echoed oddly, with parts weirdly loud and others almost silent. I saw a woman screaming but could barely hear her while a man’s body being dragged over to the pile of corpses scraped deafeningly loud on the floor.
Another person’s heartbeat was sluggish in my ears and getting weaker until I held my breath, waiting for it to stop altogether. Right before a piercing wail so loud that it felt like it punched through my head had me yelling and covering my ears, half bent over, almost mad with it in seconds. Before it suddenly cut out, everything did, except for Pritkin’s cursing.
And then Faerie skewed the scene, not letting me see anymore, not letting me hear. Except for what was happening in a corner where Rhosier was talking to Enid. And, suddenly, everything went from hazy to high-def.
“We have to go back for them!” Enid was in the cook’s face, or as much of it as she could reach. His height allowed him to tower over her, but it didn’t look like he was managing to intimidate her much. Possibly because he had to divide his attention between the furious redhead and organizing the chaos of what was essentially an overflowing emergency room.
A couple more people ran in, supporting a groaning man in between them, and Rhosier snapped his fingers and pointed to a space by a wall.
“Over there, someone will see him in a moment,” he said, right before Enid lost her shit and slammed a ward around them, cutting the two of them off from the rest of the room.
But not from us. Faerie didn’t get locked out in her world, so the only thing that happened was that our view rippled a little as we moved forward and through the shield. And then clarified with us up close and personal because the shield was small, Enid being low on power after that crazy chase.
“You know damned well why we can’t!” Rhosier told her, looking furious. “I won’t risk—”
“Anything!” she spat. “You never do! It’s always tomorrow, and wait, and be patient—I’m tired of being patient! If they hadn’t been there, Generys would be dead!”
“If they hadn’t been there, she wouldn’t have been in danger in the first place. You forget why the guards came—”
“I forget nothing!” Enid snarled, those tawny eyes suddenly looking more like a tiger’s. “Nothing. Not the years of abuse, the constant fear, the certainty that nothing will ever change, no matter what we do. We get out a few hundred a year if we’re lucky. More than that are born each year, born into slavery and deprivation and pain—a lifetime of it.”
She dropped her glamourie and got in his face, and I had forgotten just how bad it was. That mangled visage stood out starkly white against the rest of her skin, the scar tissue no longer able to flush. And it was awful, ridge after ragged ridge of a jealous woman’s fury that nothing would ever erase.
“You think I forget when I have to look at this every day? You think they left me that choice?”
“I think you need to calm down,” Rhosier told her flatly, his voice hard. “Or risk angering our patron and cutting off anyone’s chances of getting out. Lady Bodil risks a great deal for us, and your fear doesn’t give you the right—”
“The right?” she laughed, and it was ugly. “What rights do you think any of us have? Even our pathetic excuse for a rebellion depends on one of them!”
She threw out an arm that passed through me, causing me to stumble back into Pritkin. And then to keep on going because we were suddenly snatched up by an impatient goddess and sent rocketing onward. Or downward since she’d just jerked us through the floor.
We passed through a succession of them, flashing by my disoriented eyes in an instant like we were riding an out-of-control, glass-sided elevator. I had a brief flash of more storerooms, of a bunch of guards in what I guessed was a wardroom, playing cards, of a boudoir where a woman was moisturizing her face and a man was walking out of the bathroom in his birthday suit, heedless of the Peeping Tom goddess and her posse. And then they started to slur together, blurring across my vision into a sickening sludge.
What happens if you throw up in the Common? I wondered and was trying to choose between that and passing out.
Or both—because they seemed an equal possibility right now.
I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I’d previously spent what felt like hours in the Common as Faerie caught me up on what was going on. As she wasn’t human and couldn’t speak, she’d had to show me instead and let me experience it myself. And I had, but not like this!
I writhed in her grip, feeling like my brain was liquifying inside my skull. But not so much that it couldn’t shoot me out a reason: Lover’s Knot. Or, to be precise, the absence of it.
Pritkin had given me the ability to access the Common through his fey blood while we were linked. But Mircea had invalidated that when he disappeared into another universe. So, how was I seeing anything?
I didn’t know, but whatever Faerie was doing to compensate, it wasn’t working. The corridor we were flying down darkened perceptibly, leaving me looking at a drunkenly skewed cell striped with dim light through the middle. It was a double exposure, as if two movies were trying to run simultaneously, each jostling for space and just managing to obscure the other.
For a minute, until they both grayed out, and I was left not seeing much of anything, with my vision going dark, my body going cold, and my heart thudding in my chest as if it was about to beat right out of it. And flop around on the floor, only it felt like it was already doing that. And getting ground under someone’s heel into a little bloody lump that was going to stop, just any . . . moment . . . now—
And then we were out, tumbling back into our cell as if dumped there. It left me sprawling on the rough stone floor, breathing hard and clutching the ground underneath me because the whole room seemed to be rotating. Exiting deep immersion in the Common was never fun as a non-fey, and judging by Pritkin’s breathing, for anybody else, either. But that had been especially rough, as if Faerie had lost her grip on me.
Or as if I’d nearly died, which. . . yeah.
And then, my body finally made its choice, and I passed out.