The silver was blackened and in some places broken. The crystal itself had shattered, within its wrapping of wire; cracks mazed its surface and extended into its depths. The sight of my ruined focus was a knife in my heart, worse than my face in the mirror.
Because Julian had given it to me, and this was what had become of it.
My teeth sank so hard into my lip I tasted blood. I couldn’t do it. There was too much pain, just waiting for me to drown in it; sharing it with Julian would hurt him, too. He didn’t know what he was asking of me.
Just as I hadn’t known, when we stood in the snow and admitted we loved each other. Lost, Shard had said. I’d been warned, and I went ahead anyway. If that was stupid of me, at least it was my own choice; I’d refused to let Julian take it away from me, even for my own good.
How much of a hypocrite was I, to refuse him that same choice?
My hand crept forward without instruction, hovering, then finally closing down around the focus. The chill silver warmed against my fingers. Liesel said nothing, but I felt her relieved satisfaction.
I wiped my face dry, crossed the room, and opened the door. The guards outside twitched in surprise. “I’m going to Kinfield,” I said. “You coming?”
~
The gods were smiling; Julian was there and Robert was not. I didn’t know if Robert was even living there anymore, or if they’d pulled him away to be with Liesel and the others. My erstwhile roommate left me at the door to Kinfield, and my escort joined Julian’s, leaving us alone in his room.
Julian knew something had changed. He prepared tea while I stood in the middle of their common room, staring at the floor and trying to organize my thoughts.
I accepted the mug and curled my fingers around it. For once I hadn’t even noticed the cold outside. I’d been too preoccupied to pay attention. But that was irrelevant; my mind was just making one last-ditch attempt to escape its fate.
“I’m … torn,” I said at last. The words were harder to force out than I expected, but I had to give him one last chance to decide differently. “I don’t want to talk about what happened. But if I don’t, I know it will only get worse. More, I want to talk to you—but at the same time, I know it’ll hurt you to listen, and as the gods are my witness … I don’t want that.”
Julian wisely didn’t try to touch me. “You know my answer. I can handle a little pain.”
My laugh was bitter. “It won’t be just a little.”
“I don’t hold you responsible for anything they made you do.”
“But that’s just it.” He might as well have jabbed a lance through my guts. “I wasn’t forced to do anything against my will. Don’t you see? I wanted to help them.”
He went very still, very quiet, every hint of his reaction locked away. I blessed him for it. If I knew what he was thinking, I wouldn’t be able to go on.
“They forced me to become like them, it’s true,” I whispered. “I didn’t want to be turned Unseelie. But once I was … I was. Their goals were mine. I was happy to be on their side, because I wanted them to succeed. I wanted them to use everyone I knew as pawns in their game against the Seelie. I wanted you to be their pawn. Failing that, I wanted you dead.”
Bile rose in my throat, but there was no swallowing it down now; I had to purge it, had to cut open the festering wounds and pray there would be healing when I was done. “You can say that was them and not me, but it doesn’t change the fact that I remember, and will always remember, that I once wanted to see my friends as slaves. It wasn’t something consciously imposed on me. It was me. My thoughts, and my desires. Not theirs. Mine. When I tried to turn you, when I tried to break your mind….” I set my tea down blindly, before my shaking hands could spill it all over the carpet. “It was fun. Tearing your thoughts out, dropping them in bloody rags when I was done. Hearing you scream. And I live every day with that memory, knowing what I did, knowing I enjoyed it. And I can’t think about it without wanting to turn myself in to be executed.” I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes, but still the tears came, flooding down my face.
Now Julian reached out and touched my wrist gently. His shields lowered, and the pain in him washed over me, but there was no condemnation. “I understand.”
Choking on a sob, I tried to avoid his hands, but he put his arms around me with gentle insistence. “I heard everything you said,” he told me softly, “and I believe that you believe it. But I don’t believe the very deepest part of you was ever Unseelie.” I flinched, and he held me closer. “Do you know how I know? You didn’t use the deep shield.”
I stopped breathing. Then, slowly, I drew back, and this time he let me go. Meeting his grey eyes, I stared at him in unthinking shock.
He nodded. “You knew how. I’d given you the key. All you had to do was gut me, and I would have been at your mercy. Completely. But you didn’t do it, did you? You fought me, and tried to kill me, but you never used the shield.”
Lowering myself with extreme care into a seat, I searched for words and found none. He was right. In all the painful, bloody memories I had, nowhere was there a remembrance of wanting to use the deep shield, or even thinking of it. Something in me had pretended it didn’t exist. I could have gutted Julian and killed him, or watched as the shield drove him mad. My Unseelie self would have found it the greatest entertainment in the world.
But I hadn’t even thought of it.
“They never really had you,” he whispered, kneeling on the carpet in front of me.
This time, when the tears flooded out, they carried the poison with them.
I don’t know how long I cried, but it seemed an eternity, and when I finally stopped I felt born anew. My memories were still sharp; the pain was still there. But Julian was right, and the knowledge flowed over me like a healing glow.
At last I wiped my eyes and swallowed hard. Reaching for my now lukewarm tea, I took several long gulps, then finger-combed my hair out of my face. Julian watched me with his eyes warm and loving. I could look at him now and not feel the bone-wrenching agony that had plagued me since I woke from my golden nightmare. That was a boon greater than almost any other.
“All right,” I said thickly, and swallowed again. “Enough of my cowardice. We’re going to figure out what happened—what you did to free me.”
Julian nodded, and rose to pull a chair closer to mine. “I was trying; you felt that. It didn’t do any good, though.”
“It was like you were trying to pull me somewhere, but your hands—or maybe mine—were greased with butter. You kept sliding off.” That won the terrible metaphor award for the day, but even being able to speak of it was a victory.
“Whatever I did at the end, it was when I had stopped consciously doing anything,” Julian said. “Truly. I’d given up completely; I figured I’d lost, and there was no way to save you, and the only thing I could think to do was to take you down with me.”
“Was that it?” I said, my brow furrowing in thought. “You giving up? Except I don’t see how quitting could lead to victory.”
He shook his head, agreeing with me. We both sat for a moment, trying to wrestle it into some form of logic. Then he rose to pour us new cups of tea. I took mine gratefully and sipped it. He said, “If you think you’re up to it, can you tell me what you felt? What were you doing when it happened? And what was I doing, that you could see?”
That trod painfully on memories that would take a while to heal, but I made myself think. It was that or live with the cowardice Liesel had thrown in my face. “It … burned. Like fire and acid and ice, all at once, and all over. I touched something that felt like … anathema.”
“What did you do then?”
“I tried to pull away. Something in me knew it was burning whatever made me Unseelie. So I tried to fight it. There was nothing I could do, though; I couldn’t run from it, and the more I tried to focus and shove it off, the worse it hurt. And it went on, and hurt more and more, except that the worse it hurt the more I began to welcome i
t. I guess it had done enough of its work by then that I was myself enough to want to be free. I started trying to help it. And then it got unbearable, and then it ended.” I shrugged helplessly. “That’s it.”
“That’s not it,” Julian said, insistent. “Something started that burning. What was it?”
“I don’t know.” Putting my mug down again, I rose and paced, feeling alive for the first time in days. “It was something in your mind; it had to be. Right at the end, you must have been doing something.”
He shook his head. “I wasn’t even thinking. I was in too much despair.” His voice tightened with his own remembered pain. “All I knew was if I loved you, then I had to kill you. As a final mercy.”
Once again I stopped breathing. Then I lifted my head from where it had sunk to, and turned to face Julian.
My voice should have trembled with the force of what lay behind it, but the words came out perfectly steady. “Do you remember when we were first talking about the sidhe?” I asked. Julian nodded slowly. “I suggested that we might be able to learn more about magic from them, but you told me that wouldn’t work. You said….” We were staring at each other now, not blinking. “The words you used, were they yours?”
“No,” he whispered, barely audible. “I was paraphrasing Shard.”
“What did she say? Tell me exactly.”
He closed his eyes to think. “I asked her to explain to me how it was that she spoke prophecies that were so clear. She said … she said, ‘I cannot tell you. Could you tell me how it is that you love another, or how you can feel hope?’”
“Gods.” I sank onto the futon and stared at him as he opened his eyes. “It was right there.” Then my hands flew up in sudden epiphany. “Hell, Liesel told me! After she met Falcon. She said they didn’t think or feel the way we do. But neither of us realized what that meant!” His flat affect—the Unseelie had it, too. They were capable of emotion, of a sort. But it wasn’t the same.
They had no empathy.
Julian shook his head again, this time in stunned disbelief. “I never once, during the entire fight, let myself feel. I didn’t let myself admit guilt, or think about how I loved you—because I knew that would only interfere with my gifts. Until the end, when it was all over, and I gave into my feelings. Despair. Guilt. Love.”
“And their strength burned me free,” I whispered. “All this time, we’ve been afraid, because the sidhe have stronger magic. But on this count, they’re little more than animals. What we feel—it’s anathema to them.”
“Even with Falcon.” Julian laughed, a bright, delighted sound, one I hadn’t heard in months. “You should have seen me, Kim; I took a page out of your book. I’ve always tried so hard to stay controlled around him, but you showed me how to get the upper hand: let go of control, and bite his head off instead.”
I could trace the lines of it in my head—no, in my heart. Fear wouldn’t do it. Nothing animal, nothing that belonged to the id. But higher emotions, yes: hope and despair. Compassion. Love.
I echoed Julian’s laugh. “Turning this into an actual defense will be interesting. ‘Just think keeping positive thoughts, people!’ But … I think it can work.”
Julian reached out and took my right hand. “It will.”
I’d been living under the sword of this threat for so long that it felt strange to know we had a weapon against it. The fingers of my left hand curled around the arm of my chair as though I would float away without that anchor. We had a defense. At last. It was like the sun on my shoulders, bringing light and warmth back into the world.
With a jolt, I realized I’d been staring sightlessly at the carpet. I stood, drawing Julian up with me, and planted a kiss squarely on his surprised mouth. “Come on. Let’s go tell the others.”
~
The winter light was thin but piercing as the sun made its descent. The cold didn’t bother me as I stood with Julian in the snow; I was capable now of warming myself without much effort. One small benefit from what I’d been through. We waited patiently, not speaking much, until the last sliver of sun vanished below the horizon.
There was no visible sign, and not much of a palpable one. The shiver that ran through us both might have been as much psychological as psychic. But with the sun’s departure, the longest night of the year began, and the doors to the Otherworld opened in full.
A second, very definite tingle danced across my skin. That was all the warning we had before Shard and Falcon were there.
The seer didn’t bother with simple greetings. “Are you ready?” she asked.
“Does it matter?” I said. “Time won’t stop for us to get our bearings. But I think we’re about as ready as we can be. The coming chaos may well make First Manifestation look pretty; who knows. But humans are a resilient bunch. We’re good at surviving.”
She cocked her head to one side and considered me. “The more I try to understand you, the less I succeed. I would think you would be afraid.”
That made me smile. She misunderstood, but not in the way she thought. “I am. I don’t want to see society fall apart trying to figure out how to deal with you. And I know it’s not going to be easy or painless. I can deal with that fear, though, because we’re not helpless. The world may look very different when it’s all over, but I’m no longer afraid that it’s going to be destroyed. The rest, I can live with.”
Shard shook her head. “That still makes no sense.”
I grinned. “Hope. It’s a human thing.”
“Do you have any prophecies for us?” Julian asked her.
“I am not that reliable,” Shard said dryly. “The future is too clouded.”
“We should not keep you,” Falcon said, obviously eager to move on. “The solstice has begun; the passage is open. I imagine we all have tasks to accomplish tonight.”
Julian and I didn’t, not beyond this ceremonial meeting with them here on the blasted riverbank where contact had first been made, but Falcon didn’t need to know that. Let him think we were busy. We would enjoy our first chance in months to breathe.
The four of us shook hands. I hoped the sidhe weren’t planning on practicing that human custom with everyone; anybody but a wilder would find their touch unbearably jarring. I didn’t much like it myself.
“We shall speak again soon,” Shard said.
Provided none of us were killed by the coming chaos. I didn’t think we would be, though. My outlook these days was optimistic, and not just because hope was a defense. I put one arm around Julian, drawing him close.
With a slight bow, the sidhe turned and melted into the solstice night.
About Marie Brennan
Marie Brennan is an anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly pillages her academic fields for material. She most recently misapplied her professors’ hard work to the Onyx Court historical fantasy series (Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, A Star Shall Fall, and With Fate Conspire). She is also the author of the doppelganger duology of Warrior and Witch, the upcoming adventure A Natural History of Dragons, and more than forty short stories.
When she’s not obsessing over historical details too minute for anybody but her to care about, she practices shorin-ryu karate and pretends to be other people in role-playing games (which sometimes find their way into her writing).
Other Books By Marie Brennan
Doppelganger series
Warrior
When a witch is born, a doppelganger is created. For the witch to master her powers, the twin must be killed. But what happens when the doppelganger survives?
Mirage, a bounty hunter, lives by her wits and lethal fighting skills. She always gets her mark. But her new mission will take her into the shadowy world of witches, where her strength may be no match against magic.
Miryo is a witch who has just failed her initiation test. She now knows that there is someone in the world who looks like her, who is her: Mirage. To control her powers and become a full witch, Miryo has only one choice: to hunt the hunter and destroy her.
Witch
Mirei’s extraordinary magic makes her the most powerful witch alive. By some, she is hailed as a miracle, while others proclaim her to be an evil abomination … and vow to destroy those who champion her.
Now the different factions of witches engage in a bloody war, with magic, treachery, and murder. But both sides may be fighting for nothing. For the power that the rebel witches fear, the magic that Mirei alone possesses, is killing her.
The Onyx Court series
Midnight Never Come
England flourishes under the hand of its Virgin Queen: Elizabeth, Gloriana, last and most powerful of the Tudor monarchs.
But a great light casts a great shadow.
In hidden catacombs beneath London, a second Queen holds court: Invidiana, ruler of faerie England, and a dark mirror to the glory above. In the thirty years since Elizabeth ascended her throne, fae and mortal politics have become inextricably entwined, in secret alliances and ruthless betrayals whose existence is suspected only by a few.
Two courtiers, both struggling for royal favor, are about to uncover the secrets that lie behind these two thrones. When the faerie lady Lune is sent to monitor and manipulate Elizabeth’s spymaster, Walsingham, her path crosses that of Michael Deven, a mortal gentleman and agent of Walsingham’s. His discovery of the “hidden player” in English politics will test Lune’s loyalty and Deven’s courage alike. Will she betray her Queen for the sake of a world that is not hers? And can he survive in the alien and Machiavellian world of the fae? For only together will they be able to find the source of Invidiana’s power—find it, and break it….
A breathtaking novel of intrigue and betrayal set in Elizabethan England, Midnight Never Come seamlessly weaves together history and the fantastic to dazzling effect.