* * *
Ryssa sat up in a panic. She grabbed at the arms that held her and ripped them away, her chest heaving from the effort. She scrambled back until she could go no further, curling into a ball for protection. How long she stayed that way, she didn’t know. No one came to reclaim her.
It took some time for the realization to sink in that the arms had been blankets wound around her body as she thrashed in the throes of a horrific nightmare. Comprehension soon followed. It had only been a dream. The thought helped her racing heart slow to a more normal pace. A shudder wracked her body as the final release of tension came. Dream or not, it had been so real and so vivid that her hands still trembled as they let loose of her legs so she could unfold them and sit up.
Ryssa stared around the dark room. At least her traumatic awakening hadn’t roused the other girls. She sat quietly for a while, trying to clear her mind so she could go back to sleep. It didn’t work. The darkness was stifling, and suddenly the room was too small. She had to get out.
She rose, so rattled that for the first time she didn’t marvel at having laid her clothes out by the Brownies. She threw them on. Almost as an afterthought, she grabbed Darkwind and headed for the door. The common area was as still as the girls’ bedroom. The Brownie wasn’t even there. It made Ryssa wonder what time it was, but only for the brief moment it took for her to cross the room and head up the ramp out of the Sithin.
The open sky made her feel better, but not much. The air was fresh and clean, and Ryssa thought she detected the sweet scent of night-blooming jasmine in the breeze that rustled the leaves overhead. It was one of Debra’s favorites, and she realized how much she missed her foster mother. Ryssa’s thoughts were as dark and meandering as the streets she walked. She allowed her feet to take the lead, moving her wherever they chose to go. She wasn’t in the mood to think about destinations.
Images of the nightmare kept pushing their way to the forefront of her thoughts—images of fire, death, and pain. Her own death, her teammates’ deaths, the deaths of all of New Faery—all vied for her attention, but she pushed them back, not wanting to give them form again. She glanced around, suddenly realizing her traitorous feet had to take her to the one place she didn’t want to go—the scene of her nightmare.
The competition field was covered in darkness, adding to its sinister element as the stage for her nightmare. A soft glow came from the ground at the base of the tree in the center of the field, a magic glow that added shadowy dimensions to the scene. It cut the darkness of the area, but also highlighted the tree. It was the centerpiece of the fantasy Ryssa was all too afraid would become reality.
She stepped onto the field and walked the edges that took her to the seats where Team Phoenix had been sitting the past two days of the competition. It was where they would be sitting tomorrow. It was where she sat now, staring at the tree, willing it to give her the answers she was trying to find. She didn’t want to die tomorrow, but the hopelessness of escaping that future possibility settled over her like a shroud.
Maybe it would be better—she wouldn’t have to deal with screwing things up anymore. No one would miss her anyway. But she knew the instant the thought crossed her mind that it was wrong. Reggie would miss her—and most certainly Debra and Terry. Ryssa almost cried at the thought of her foster mother. She couldn’t imagine how badly Debra would deteriorate if Ryssa never returned from this so-called summer camp. No, she would never recover. And Reggie—she remembered Knot mourning over the body of his bonded twin. He hadn’t been with Team Hedgehog for the competition. There had been rumors—
Ryssa shook her head. How was she going to get through this?
“A dark place for such dark thoughts.”
She looked up to see Kyellin Nightfall standing a few feet away. She had been so lost in her worries that she hadn’t noticed his arrival.
“Mind if I join you?” Kyellin asked politely, but he didn’t step closer.
Ryssa shrugged, watching him warily. His hair was as black as her aunt’s, but a brown-black, without the sparkling silver highlights. His eyes were a dark and fathomless brown, and caught the reflection of the full moon above. She hadn’t noticed before, but his face had an ethereal quality to it that said not-quite-human. But unlike most Faery, his face showed small lines of weariness.
“I didn’t think the Faery got wrinkles.” She remarked on the telltale signs of wear.
Kyellin sat next to her, accepting her comment as an invitation. His eyes lit with speculative amusement. “Now, I’m fairly certain that that remark was rude, even among mortals.”
Ryssa felt her face go hot. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
“No, I suspect the true problem lies in the fact that you are thinking too much.”
Ryssa nodded glumly.
“You are, however, correct.” Kyellin sighed. “The people of Faery do not usually get wrinkles. There is an appearance of agelessness amongst the Fey—the Sidhe especially. These will fade in a day or two. I have been working with the storm elders to turn the latest attack that is coming our way. This hurricane is the strongest we’ve ever seen. We’ve barely been able to reduce it—and it’s headed directly for us.”
Ryssa’s eyes widened with a trace of panic. Kyellin chuckled.
“No, child. I’m not here to drag you to that lot. They’re against the idea as much as you are, I suspect.” He politely ignored her shivers. “I thought you’d be interested to know that they now take serious consideration of how their actions affect the mainland. Although that’s getting to be a moot point, since they aren’t having any luck turning the storm from its path.”
“I never thanked you for getting me out of there that day.”
“Don’t—”
“I won’t.” Ryssa shook her head. “I don’t trust you enough. But I sort of wanted to acknowledge what you did.”
Kyellin laughed again. “It’s refreshing to find one who is not only honest—because honesty abounds in Faery—but someone who is honest and direct. You’re right. You shouldn’t trust me. And your acknowledgement was handled superbly.”
“So who’s doing it, Kyellin?” Ryssa looked at him point blank. “Who is sending the storms to attack Faery?”
He was silent for a long moment. “We have suspicions but no proof. Not that it would do us any good.”
“So who do you suspect?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Can’t—or won’t?”
“Can’t—won’t, take your pick.”
“Why?” Ryssa locked gazes with him. Kyellin was the first to turn away.
“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” The annoyance was heavy in his voice. “Knowledge is power. That’s true everywhere, but it is especially true in Faery.
“We live in a world that thrives on secrets, Ryssa. Knowledge is a tool here as much as magic is. When you hold it, you can get others to do things they otherwise wouldn’t, in the hopes you will share it—or keep it from others.”
“They have a name for that where I grew up.” Ryssa made a disgusted face. “It’s called blackmail.”
“Here, too. Nevertheless, it is still power.”
“Darkwind once told me that magic isn’t dark or light, but how it’s used is what makes it dark or light.”
Kyellin nodded. “I agree with that, to a point.”
“Well, then, if knowledge is power, like magic is, and you use it to force someone to do something, isn’t that as bad as using dark magic against them?”
“I suppose you could look at it that way.”
“What other way is there to look at it?” She took her gaze away him and focused on the tree in the center of the field.
“Knowledge can be withheld from a person,” Kyellin said. “Or fed to them in pieces, if the holder of it feels a person might not be ready to properly understand or assimilate it.”
“But what gives them the right to decide whether the person is ready or not? Or is that rea
lly just another way of leading someone in a direction you want them to go?”
“Wisdom and experience, for starters, are just two of the things that can be used to decide whether or not the person is ready.” Kyellin’s face held a trace of arrogance.
“Yeah,” Ryssa kicked moodily at the dirt with her toe, “you guys have done a bang-up job with all that wisdom and experience.”
“Now you’re just being impertinent.”
“I didn’t ask to be here. Neither did Reggie. But we’re here in Faery with the secrets and deaths and whatever else is going on. Everyone wants to put the potentials through their paces, expects them to do the job, and oh yeah—don’t screw this up! And, by the way, it’s all up to you—no pressure. Well, it’s not. It’s not up to me or Reggie, or any of the other potentials, because the elders have decided to give us all the angst but none of the information that could clue us in on what we’re supposed to do. All because they’ve decided we’re not ready.
“When will we be ready enough, Kyellin? Before or after Faery gives in to the Wilt and the mortals discover you’re here? After the attacks on New Faery succeed and the island is destroyed? Or will it be after the potentials are all dead and gone? Who will you all lay the blame on for the destruction of Faery then?”
Kyellin frowned. “I wonder at the wisdom Lord Aurelius was showing when he sent you and your brother into the mortal world.”
“It was probably the best thing he could’ve done. Jet said it was because he wanted us to come back to Faery with a different perspective than we would’ve had if we’d been raised here.”
“A different perspective is one thing.” Kyellin shook his head. “But to leave children with so much talent clueless as to what they’re getting into—”
“You’re doing the same thing.”
“So I am,” Kyellin replied quietly.
He sounded so unhappy that for a moment Ryssa almost felt sorry for him—but not sorry enough.
“Okay. So you can’t tell me about the storms, and you don’t know what’s happening with the potentials. What can you tell me? How about what you felt Dahlia’s story would mean to me if I asked around? A whole bunch of nothing—that’s what it means to me. Maybe it gives me a clue about the whole emotional thing. Other than that, it’s just an added fear to my growing list of phobias—like maybe I’ll go crazy and snap in the middle of the competition and end up killing me and all my teammates.”
“What do you mean?”
Ryssa told him about the crystal vision in the Hall of Futures.
“And then there was this nightmare that woke me up. It started in a huge room with a bunch of people I’ve never seen before. I didn’t understand what was going on, but there was a bunch of yelling and that tree.” She pointed at the one in the field. Her voice began to rise with a hint of hysteria as the words came faster. “It grew up out of the floor and suddenly everybody was wearing Team Phoenix uniforms—and then the whole thing exploded in fire and everyone died.”
She realized she grasped the bench tightly. Kyellin place a steadying hand on her shoulder, and she felt warmth spread through her body. Looking down, she saw the warmth, a magical pattern of silver lines. She watched the pattern fade, not away, but into her body. She looked at Kyellin with wonder.
“What did you just do?”
“I just gave you something to hold over my head.” Kyellin took his hand from Ryssa’s shoulder and ran it through his hair.
“I don’t understand.”
“No, you don’t,” Kyellin sighed. “And that is both your greatest asset and your greatest liability. That was a part of what they call dark magic.”
She could tell he expected her to be alarmed. Maybe she should be, but she wasn’t. It didn’t feel like bad magic—or at the very least, it didn’t feel bad.
“It seems to me that there’s a lot of difference between what you just did to me and what was done to Woody Landstrider.”
“And that’s the distinction.” Kyellin scowled. “Or at least the one I’ve been trying to get others to see all these years. The type of magic I just used with you, Ryssa, is what they consider to be the dark side of Celestial magic. What was done to Woody Landstrider was a warped combination of the blackest magics that Faery has to offer.”
“Okay. What is the difference between light and dark Celestial magic?”
“Celestial magic is the branch of magic that connects all things together. Almost everyone who works with the Earth-link in Faery works with it to some degree. The Earth-link is Celestial magic.”
“I get that.” Ryssa nodded. “But how is it separated into light and dark magic?”
“The next step, as you should have found by now, is that once you connect, you have to have control.”
“Yeah. That’s where I fall apart. I can’t control the magic.”
“I disagree. You can’t control it within the unemotional Seelie constraints. But if you were to use the more emotional, Unseelie parameters, I think you would find a great deal more success.”
“But since the Unseelie use of Celestial magic was banned,” Ryssa frowned, “I’ll never learn control. Is that what you’re saying?”
“You’re already using it.”
“What do you mean?” Ryssa eyed him suspiciously. “I can’t be—it’s not allowed.”
“Haven’t you wondered, Ryssa, why everyone fears you so much?”
“Because of the Black Knight,” Ryssa said sullenly. “The whole prophecy thing. They think Reggie and I are the twins of darkness and light—the doom of Faery—and that I’m the bad one.”
“Not the bad one, child, the dark one. They are afraid of the Black Knight and what he represents—change. I don’t know if you noticed this or not,” he smiled wryly, “but we Faery aren’t very big on change.”
Ryssa was quiet, trying to absorb what Kyellin had told her.
“The light side of Celestial magic controls things,” he continued. “It works with the inanimate forces—the elemental magics, connecting to the Earth, weather, gravity, and so on. The dark side of the magic can control the animate——creatures, plants—”
“And people,” Ryssa said with unexpected insight.
“And people.”
“But what you did—that didn’t feel wrong to me. It actually felt good, and it helped—a lot.”
“If you hadn’t wanted to calm down, and had fought against the magic, I would have stopped. Don’t get me wrong—I could have kept going and forced you to calm down. But then I would’ve crossed the real line here, from dark magic into black magic.”
“Oh,” she was confused. “But doesn’t that mean I crossed the line when I forced the storm elders to feel the emotions of those people on the mainland?”
“No.” Kyellin chuckled, and then sobered. “But just barely. You never completed a weave, so they could have pulled out at any time. They wanted to understand what you were doing, so they would have a chance to fight off future attacks. You did something to them that deep inside every member of Faery longs for, but have become so jaded by the longevity of their lives that they have forgotten how to do.”
“What’s that?”
“You made them feel. And not just surface emotions guided by their sense of what they think is necessary. You made them feel at the true, deepest emotional level.”
“Oh.” Emotions were such a big part of who she was that she had never considered the concept of not-feeling.
“Kyellin, if I’m doing dark magic and it’s banned, then why haven’t they stopped me—like throwing me into Faery jail, or whatever it is they do to someone who breaks the rules here?”
“Because you haven’t stepped over the line. Believe me, if you had, we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation right now. They’d have turned you over to the Slaugh.”
He nodded to the entrance of the competition field where Ryssa’s ever-present guard was standing. She hadn’t even noticed he was there. A thought came to her, and she looke
d at Kyellin with concern.
“Are you supposed to be telling me these things? Aurelius was angry and came down on Queen Medwyn pretty hard, and she didn’t even come close to saying this.”
“Lord Aurelius isn’t happy about it. But his concern, not only for you, but for all of Faery, overrides his Seelie sense of propriety. When Aurelius first came to live with the Sidhe, he was given to the Slaugh for a hundred years of ‘reconditioning’. He doesn’t want you to face that.”
Ryssa shifted her eyes toward creature standing off to the side and shivered. She knew how its eyes could peer so deeply inside of a person. The thought of being at the mercy of the Slaugh for any amount of time—let alone a hundred years—she couldn’t comprehend what that would do to anyone.
“You never answered my question,” she said. “If I’ve been using dark Celestial magic, why haven’t they stopped me?”
“Very perceptive.” Kyellin smiled tightly. “But I’m not sure how to answer that without going beyond the limitations of what Queen Medwyn and Lord Aurelius agreed I could tell you.” He thought about it for a moment. “Or, for that matter, what I could say that wouldn’t take you in a different direction.”
“Lord Kyellin,” Ryssa tried the respectful approach, but he shook his head.
“I am a Lord no longer, child. Until the day comes that the House of Nightfall is reinstated, if ever, I will not hold that title. Others from the House of Nightfall have allowed themselves to be reorganized into different Houses, but I refuse.”
“And that’s what this is really about for you, isn’t it? They haven’t stopped me because black magic destroyed the balance of Faery, not dark magic. But for whatever reason, they lumped the dark Celestial magic in with the black magic, and they’re afraid they may have screwed up.”
She paused, considering the thoughts unraveling in her mind. “But why not the dark magics, or the Unseelie magics, of the other Houses? I don’t—oh wait—the balance Aurelius talked about. There has to be some sort of balance in the way the magic is used. They’re afraid of the dark side of the Celestial magic, because they fear its ability to control them.”
Kyellin nodded without looking at her.
“So what’s going on here is that I’m the true test of the difference between the dark and black magics, aren’t I? If I use it and the Lia Fial eliminates Team Phoenix from the competition, it justifies the dark magic ban. But if the Lia Fial doesn’t eliminate us—”
“Then they might have a clue as to where the real upset of the balance may have started,” Kyellin finished softly. “And the House of Nightfall has a better chance of being reinstated.”
“And if the ban is justified by the Lia Fial eliminating Team Phoenix from the competition?”
“Then they’ll turn you over to the Slaugh and wash their hands of the whole thing.” Kyellin wouldn’t look at her. “Just as they would if you’d stepped over the line into black magic.”
“Oh, that’s real fair. The rest of my life is in the balance and no one was going to tell me? They were just going to let me wander through this blindly? And what about Reggie? What happens to him?”
“Because the two of you are bonded, he’d experience much of what you would, affecting him deeply. We’re not exactly sure how, though. It’s never happened before. We didn’t tell you because we didn’t want it effect how you proceed.”
“Of course it would have an effect!” Ryssa snapped, kicking at the ground harder. “The way you people think you can play with other peoples’ lives amazes me.”
“It’s not just your life that’s hanging in the balance here,” Kyellin shot back. “This has the potential of destroying New Faery!”
“Yeah? Well, forgive me if I show them the same lack of consideration they’re giving my twin and me right now. New Faery is already being destroyed. I don’t appreciate being a trial drug, hoping it cures Faery so it can pass FDA standards.”
“FDA?”
“Federal—Faery Dim-witted, um, Attitudes.”
The two glared at each other, but it was Ryssa who looked away first this time. She got up from the bench.
“I’m going back to bed,” she said. “I’ve got a big day tomorrow.”
She started walking to the entrance of the field. Kyellin called out softly, the sorrow in his tone carrying to her, but she didn’t stop.
“Good luck tomorrow, child.”
“Yeah, sure.”
As Ryssa walked through the streets of the City, a sudden thought struck her. She closed her eyes and said under her breath, “I wish all the members of Team Phoenix will come out of the competition alive tomorrow.”
She opened her eyes and looked around expectantly, waiting for the heavy pressure that never came. Her mood spiraled back into depression. The wish hadn’t been accepted. It sent her spiraling into a deep depression that left her awake and wondering what it meant long after she crawled back into her bed.