Chapter 23
Valen
We come up over the last rise and the valley opens underneath us.
Gleann na Sidhe sits in a valley that runs green and gold as far as I can see in either direction.
Nothing down there was built - the city came up out of the valley floor the way the trees did, just as crystal instead of wood, spires twisting as they went.
The light moves through them instead of off them, so the whole place changes color while I stand here looking at it.
There’s water below, more than one fall of it, loud enough to reach us up here.
The air coming up the slope carries a charge that settles on my skin and makes everything I look at a shade sharper than it ought to be.
“Why didn’t you put us inside?” I say.
“I’ve never been inside.” She’s looking at the same thing I am. “It has to be a place I can see or already know. Blind, I’d have set us inside a wall.”
I start marking ways out of a city I haven’t walked into yet. It’s what I do standing over any town, this one gives me nothing to mark. There’s no wall around the valley, no hard line where the streets stop, no place on any road down there where a man could hold a crowd.
We come down off the rise into the valley.
It takes me from the boots up. My chest locks.
I put a hand on the nearest trunk. My breath stops somewhere before my throat.
Everything above my knees goes tight at once and stays that way while I count.
Then it lets go and I can breathe again.
The North Range is still riding me. I keep walking.
Nyxiana passes a hand down her front as she goes, collar to belt.
The road comes off her clothes where her palm has been.
Denim and canvas are court dress by the time she reaches her waist, a green dark enough to read black until the light gets into it.
Her hair comes up off her neck and pins itself there, silver-white against the collar.
She doesn’t break stride doing any of it.
I watch the whole thing happen. Then put my eyes back on the road.
She does the same to me, one pass, and what I walked out of Ash Hollow in is gone.
Anybody else puts a hand on what’s mine, I stop them.
I don’t stop her. None of it changes what’s under the dress though.
I know she came home short this morning and she’s walking into a court on it.
I ease the pace for the last stretch and keep the reason to myself.
I want to put my hand on her back. I keep it off.
“Lachlan is our door,” she says. “The pack has had a road into this realm through him for years. Lyanna was born here. Nova came out of here. This isn’t a cold house we’re knocking at.”
“That’s the part I don’t like,” I say and she doesn’t argue it.
The open country runs out into trees. We go in under them on our own. It’s an enormous wood, the trunks go up straight with no branches for the first thirty feet. What light comes down through the canopy comes down green and never reaches the floor.
The whole sound of the place quits. Every bird, every insect, all of it, inside one breath.
Amber appears between the trunks off to the right.
Two sets, then four. I put myself in front of her before the first one clears the treeline.
It comes out low and fast. Its edges don’t hold.
The outline of it breaks apart along the spine and the legs while it runs, then pulls back together on the next stride.
Two more come out of the dark behind it.
I reach for the shift. I do it on purpose, the way I’ve watched wolves do it since I can remember. It hands me nothing. There’s no time to go after it twice. Nyxiana opens her hand. A blade of light stands up out of her palm. She holds a second one out to me without looking over.
“No.”
I take the low branch off the tree beside me instead.
It comes away green with a crack that goes down the whole length of the wood.
The first one is already off the floor. I get the branch into its chest with everything I have.
It goes over sideways into the roots. I’m on it before it can find its feet.
It’s heavier than it looks and keeps coming up at me with the branch still in it.
I get one hand under its jaw and the other on the back of its skull, breaking its neck.
She takes the second one. She’s inside its reach before it finishes turning.
The blade goes through it at the shoulder, it comes apart into nothing on the way down then she’s standing still with one hand on a trunk.
This morning is still in her. The third one goes for her throat while her weight is on it.
I get in front of it. It takes my forearm instead of her neck.
My other hand goes into its insubstantial ruff.
I get it down into the roots and break its neck the same way.
Then I check her before anything else. Arms, throat, front. She’s whole.
Fae come out of the treeline while I’m still checking, eight of them at a dead run. They finish what’s left before it reaches us. Their leader looks at what’s already down and doesn’t ask a single question.
“The wilds have gone bad since the network came down,” he says. “We were sent out to meet you on the road. We should have got to you sooner.”
He greets us both by name. I’m still getting my wind back and counting them while I do it. Eight of them, hands open, everything they carry slung across their backs. Not one of them stands like a man expecting trouble. That sits worse with me than the wolves did.
The wood opens, city gates stand at the end of it, carved the whole way up with work I can’t read at this distance, lit from inside the stone itself.
The escort takes us through, past the gates Gleann na Sidhe opens up around us all at once.
The street changes color under my boots while I walk on it.
The fae coming the other way barely move it. We light up the whole slab.
At the crossing there’s a fountain throwing light where water should be, up in long slow arcs that come apart before they fall.
A stream runs beside the road with a voice in it, low, in a language I’ve never heard.
It comes up louder as we pass and settles again behind us.
The trees along the road bend as we go by.
They bend for everyone, but they bend further for us.
Fae stop what they’re doing to look at us. Every one of them looks glad. Nobody in any place I’ve stood ever looked at me like I was welcome before I’d proved I was worth feeding.
Castle Dubhshláine stands over the valley on its own rise.
Its gates are a separate thing from the city’s, deeper in and half again as tall.
Lachlan is standing there himself instead of sending anyone.
Natalie is beside him. I get between them before he’s close enough to reach either of us. I’d do the same for anybody.
He comes to me first with his hand out. “Valen.” I take it then step back level with her. He has Nyxiana by both hands and is talking before he’s finished arriving, easy with her.
“Your people are our people,” he says. “That makes the pair of you family, and family doesn’t get walked to a guest house.”
Natalie greets us the same way he does. I watch him the whole time he’s talking to Nyxiana. He means every word of it. That’s the part I can’t do anything with.
The Great Hall runs longer than the whole Ash Hollow compound.
The walls carry tapestries that won’t hold still, the figures in them going through what they’re doing and then starting it again, one length of fae history after another the whole way down the room.
Lights the size of my fist drift through the air over everyone’s heads, in no hurry, going nowhere.
At the far end there are two thrones with King Finnian and Queen Aoife in them.
I go through the doors first and have the room twice before she’s all the way across the threshold.
Lachlan presents us. The crown receives us the way Briarstone received us, and Briarstone had a reason.
Niko is her uncle. Nobody on that dais is any blood of ours yet the welcome is the same size.
When the presenting has finished I fall back to the wall where I can hold the doors and the room together.
Every face in here belongs to Faelan’s kind.
I work the crowd one at a time the whole way around.
Nothing. I start again from the other end going the other way.
The same nothing comes back. She goes out into the middle of the room. I stay on the wall.
Nobles close around her inside a minute and she lets them.
She’s a head shorter than every man in that ring, turns her face up to whoever’s talking.
The light in this hall gets right into her eyes and the violet in them shows from across the room.
She’s trading the first courtesies while I’m still on the wall counting doors, three steps into the politics of this room before I’ve finished my second pass.
Watching her is harder work than watching the room.
I can’t get to her from the wall. I walk over to her, stand so the doors are behind me and there’s nothing in front of me but whoever gets close to her.
A council fae in worked robes asks her what the pack came to Doria for. She tells him. When she’s finished, he doesn’t know anything new. I keep my eyes on the room. Lachlan takes me aside with a host’s excuse about wine and then asks me something real.
“How bad was the North Range? What came down to us here was thin.”
“They set a price at the border. I paid it.”
Lachlan waits to see whether there’s more. There isn’t.
“Your rooms are ready,” he says. “Come and eat.”
They put us inside the castle on the same corridor, four doors apart.
I walk hers before she’s in it and don’t ask her first. Two windows open onto a balcony.
It’s twenty feet off that balcony to a stone walk with no cover on it.
The door is heavy and the bolt is strong.
I do my own next. Then I walk the corridor between the two rooms.
The welcome meal runs long. They eat at long tables down the length of the hall.
Light gathers over them in slow turning patterns.
Nobody put it there. Down at the far end somebody starts singing and others come in.
It keeps going under everything else for the rest of the night.
They drink to Ash Hollow. Then to Lyanna, Nova, Lachlan, the three who tie the pack to this valley.
Nyxiana sits inside all that warmth and works it.
My attention goes to her instead of the room more than once, and every time I have to bring it back myself.
I’m not eating. I don’t eat in a house until I know what’s in it. Nobody in this valley has asked us for one thing back. I keep waiting for the catch. It doesn’t come. The trouble isn’t that I found something - it’s that I can’t.
I walk her to her door at the end of the night. She opens it and stands there. She took the court dress off with one pass of her hand on the stairs, the same way she put it on. Her hair is down again. There’s still no color in her face. I’ve been putting this off since the gates.
“This is the most dangerous place we’ve been.”
“Go on.”
“It’s his kind, all of it, top to bottom. They’ve given us the road, the escort, the hall, the crown. Rooms four doors apart. Nobody has asked us for one thing back.” I keep my voice down. “A welcome that size has a price on it. I haven’t found it.”
She doesn’t tell me I’m wrong.
“You’re right,” she says. “The warmth is real. So is the price. We’ll find out what it is soon enough.”
She looks at me for a while without saying anything.
She’s near enough now that one step would close it.
The last time one of these got this close she put a step of rock between us.
I don’t take the step. Neither of us says goodnight.
She stands in the open door while I stand a stride off it and it runs on too long before I walk away.
I check the latch on the window, set my boots where my hands will find them in the dark, then I sit where I can see the door and keep watch inside the most beautiful place I’ve ever stood.