Chapter 27 #2
Hector led me down the hallway. The stone blocks that formed the walls had been set together so precisely there was no mortar securing them.
Torches tilted out from wall brackets, and tapestries hung between them.
Unlike the ones in Blood House, which showed scenes of faeries dancing, fighting, or romancing one another, the patterns stitched into the black fabric were unrecognizable.
There were more runes and roughly sketched faces mixed with swirls leading to sharp corners, and the designs seemed to shift before the eye, as if the geography of those shapes made two types of sense at once.
All of it was worked in shimmering thread that made me think of a rainbow viewed through black glass.
Ink-dark reds, greens found in the depths of untouched forests, purples reminiscent of a bruise.
Threads of gold and silver shimmered throughout, like lightning bolts crossing a midnight thunderstorm.
Each house had their own favored colors and designs.
Void’s had always seemed so simple—black on black, or black with some other dark color.
As opaque and forbidding as the faeries themselves.
These tapestries weren’t for public viewing, though, and I wondered if this reflected Void House’s true idea of beauty.
Something private, something dark yet vibrant that puzzled the eyes and intrigued the soul.
I was drawn to a spiral stitched in rich, drowning blue. Then I realized it was the precise shade of Kallen’s eyes and hurriedly looked away.
Hector stopped before one of the black tapestries. It didn’t look like the others; there was no embroidery, and it rippled as if barely restraining itself from flying away. It was a sheet of Void magic, I realized, fringed in tendrils of night.
“What is this place?” I asked Hector, awed and alarmed.
He shook his head and reached towards that black curtain, which parted around his fingers. Then he held his other hand out to me.
I took a deep breath and slid my hand into his.
“Be kind to them,” he said roughly. Then he turned and walked into the magic, taking me with him.
My vision went black. The darkness bit at my skin, deadly cold, and my bones vibrated like someone had made tuning forks out of them. I shuddered, feeling an awful dizziness, as if I had been plucked out of this world and set in the midst of a vast, empty space that stretched on forever.
Then my feet carried me to the other side, and the world came back. It had been less than a second, yet it had felt much longer than that. As if the darkness hadn’t wanted to let me go.
I released Hector’s hand and rubbed my arms, shivering. “Would I have died if I tried to walk through that on my own?” It had felt like a cold that would kill.
“No,” he said. “You would not have been able to pass through it alone, though, and it would not have been a pleasant wait for someone to come find you.”
This corridor was vastly different from the hall outside.
That had been orderly and smooth, directing the eye in an obvious direction.
This one was crooked: the flagstones, the brick, even the ceiling tilted at a slight angle.
Spots of shadow floated through the air like dandelion seeds on a breeze.
We weren’t inside Void House itself, but we were close, and I wondered if the same darkness drifted through those hallways.
A faint melody shivered through the air, too—a delicate, achingly lonely song played on an instrument I couldn’t name. When I tried to listen more closely, it disappeared. “What was that music?” I asked, pressing a hand over my heart. It had made me want to weep.
Hector grunted. “We call that the song between the stars. An echo of the old world still drifting through ours. It comes and goes, especially near Void House.”
The old world. He meant the place the Shards had come from, a world once inhabited by gods before they’d killed one another. That music was a memory, the way the old language and the Shards were memories. Alive and yet not.
It seemed impossible that gods could die, but I supposed everything did eventually. If they couldn’t come to a natural end, they tore themselves apart.
A more tangible sound split the air: a woman’s laughter.
Be kind to them , he’d said. Who was down here?
Hector abruptly turned to face me. “It was not always a crime to love someone from another house.”
I looked at him, surprised by the abrupt change of topic.
“So the legends say, anyway.” He shrugged, though his shoulders were tense.
“I don’t know how true anything we tell ourselves about the past is.
But a long time ago, the houses mingled and faeries could move freely between them.
An Illusion faerie could become a member of Void House if they felt more kinship there, and couples from opposing houses could live together.
Maybe the magic was even mingled then, not as strictly separated. ”
Drustan had told me something like this, too. Some thought the magic had been separated into those six categories from the start, but he thought the Fae had bred for specialized power.
The laughter was followed by the murmur of voices. A haunted look crossed Hector’s face. “I once thought it would take an eternity to return to that,” he said. “But you’ve already begun.”
“Hector,” I said softly, wondering what was causing that tortured expression. “Where are we?”
He started walking. “Come.”
We turned down a hallway lined with doors, and he opened the first one to reveal a large common area—a combined library and sitting room, full of bookshelves and comfortable couches.
There were six faeries in the room, all dressed in black.
A Noble Fae lady with coiled dark hair was picking through books, while a sylph scribbled at a writing desk positioned beneath a stained glass window.
The window was lit from behind by flickering candles, casting jagged shards of color over his filmy black wings and blond hair.
Nearby, two children were playing with dolls on the floor, laughing as they enacted some drama.
One looked to be five or six years old, while the other was maybe ten.
Una and another faerie were seated on a couch, conversing while they watched the children.
Una’s hair was loose for once, the strands crinkled as if she’d recently taken out her long braid.
She wore wide-legged trousers and a gauzy shirt, and her smile was relaxed in a way I hadn’t seen before.
A Void asrai sat next to her, one with night-dark eyes and sable hair flecked with starlight. Both of them looked up at our entrance.
Una nodded to me, then murmured something to her companion.
The asrai eyed me warily. “If you’re sure,” she said.
Una said something else too quietly for me to make out, then stood and walked over to us, ruffling the hair of one of the children as she passed.
The littlest girl grabbed Una’s leg to stop her, then held her doll up. “Ria lit it on fire,” she complained, pouting. And indeed, the doll was smoking, flame licking up its thread hair.
My brow furrowed as I looked at the doll. That had to be Fire magic, but what would a Fire child be doing in a secret location this close to Void House? They weren’t hostages, were they? Leverage Hector was holding over Drustan?
“I’m sure it was an accident,” Una said, smiling down at the older girl. “Can you put it out, too?”
The older girl—Ria—made a face. “Probably not.”
“Come on,” Una urged. “Try for me.”
The girl sighed, then narrowed her eyes at the doll and raised her cupped hand above it. I expected the flames to wink out of existence, but instead she tipped her hand and poured out a stream of water. The flames hissed and extinguished.
I gasped, realizing all at once who Hector had brought me to see.