The thing had abruptly changed course and headed straight for us. It had gotten Barrons in its thrall. It had gone for Barrons, not me. There was nothing wrong with me. I was fine. I was the same Mac I’d always been. Daddy himself had said that I was as good as they came. Everybody knew how wise Jack Lane was. “Sure,” I said.
While he gathered the stones and began wrapping them in velvet cloths, I stared at the Unseelie mirror. It had been standing right beneath my nose in his study for months, but I’d never once sensed its Fae presence and that it was part of a vast network of Unseelie Hallows. It was closed now, masquerading as a perfectly normal mirror.
“How does it work?” I asked.
He continued wrapping the stones in silence.
“Oh, come on,” I said impatiently. “It’s not like I’m trying to pry into your head to uncover any of your precious secrets. The Fae are screwing up my planet and I’m going to kick their asses off it. All knowledge, like weapons—good. So, spill.”
He didn’t look up from what he was doing, but I could see a faint smile playing at his lips.
“Sometimes I think you refuse to tell me things just to irritate me.”
“But you never do anything just to irritate me,” he said dryly.
“Not when it involves something that might be important. What if I get trapped somewhere with no escape but a Silver? I wouldn’t even know how to use it.”
“You think you’ve got the balls to step into one of those things?”
“You might be surprised,” I said coolly.
“Not if you do everything like you fuck.”
I wasn’t going to let him discombobulate me by bringing up sex. “I want to learn, Barrons. Teach me. If I knew a fraction of what you know, my odds of surviving would be way higher.”
“Perhaps you’d no longer want to.”
“Would you just cooperate?” I said, exasperated.
“I do not know that word,” he mocked in falsetto.
“I’m trying to arm myself so I can fight like I fuck,” I snapped. “But you refuse to help.” I hated it when he reminded me of when I’d been Pri-ya.
“I was beginning to wonder if you were ever going to say that word again, Ms. Lane. Time was, you had no reservations. ‘Fuck me, Jericho Barrons,’ you’d say. Morning, noon, and night.”
There are two kinds of verbal honey a Southern woman can slather on her words when she feels like it: the kind that attracts flies, melts men’s hearts, and firms up all their other parts, or the kind that makes a man want to curl up and die. I employed the latter. “I didn’t know getting you to talk was so easy, or I’d have said it five minutes ago. Fuck you, Jericho Barrons.”
He raised his head and laughed, teeth flashing white in his face. I dug my nails into my palms.
“The Silvers,” he said, when he’d stopped laughing, “once numbered in the tens of thousands, but some say they’re now infinite. Fae things tend to—”
“I know. Take on a life of their own. Change, evolve in strange ways.”
“When the Seelie King first made them—”
“Unseelie King,” I corrected.
“He was Seelie first. And quit interrupting me if you want me to keep talking. When the Seelie King first made them, they formed a network of absolute precision and predictability. It was a brilliant invention. They were the Fae’s first method of travel between dimensions. Entering one of them instantly deposited you in the Hall of All Days.”
“What’s the Hall of All Days?”
“The Hall is … well, think of it as an airport, the main arrival and departure point of the entire network. It’s lined with mirrors that connect to mirrors on other worlds, in countless other dimensions and times. One can stand in the Hall, examine the individual glasses, and choose from hundreds of thousands of places to go. It was the Fae version of a … quantum travel agency.”
“V’lane told me the king originally created the Silvers for his concubine, not for other Fae at all. He said the king created them so she could live inside the mirrors, never aging, and have other worlds to explore until he found a way to make her Fae like him.” I wondered again what had happened to V’lane earlier this afternoon. Even though I knew I couldn’t count on it, I felt a little naked without his name in my tongue.
“Did he also tell you that when the queen felt the power of the king’s creation spring into existence, she demanded to know what he’d done, and that, to allay her suspicions because she hated his concubine so much, he had to pretend he’d made the Silvers as a gift for her?”
“V’lane said the king gave the queen only part of them.”
“Unfortunately, he had to give the queen the nexus that contained the Hall of All Days. His concubine got only a small portion of what he’d made for her, sealed off from the rest. To compensate, he built his concubine the fantastical White Mansion, high on a hill, a house of infinite rooms, terraces, and gardens. He made that part of the Silvers accessible only through mirrors that hung in his own private chambers.”
“So there are two separate parts to the Silvers.” This was a lot to absorb. “One is a collection of possibly infinite mirrors that connect to other dimensions, worlds, and times, from the main ‘airport’ in the Hall of All Days. The other is a sealed-off smaller network that’s where the concubine lived. I guess once she died, that part was never used again,” I mused. The Silvers were fascinating stuff. I couldn’t imagine being able to step inside a mirror and instantly be transported to some other world or time.
“V’lane told you a lot.” Barrons sounded irritated.
“He tells me more than you do. Makes me wonder who to trust.”
“Motto to live by: Never trust a fairy. Did he tell you how the king’s concubine died?”
“He said she hated what the king had become so much that she left him the only way she could. By ending her own life.”
“Did he bother pointing out that everything the king had done, he’d done for her? Did she think of that before she decided to kill herself? Did it ever occur to her that sometimes a willingness to turn dark for someone else might just be a fucking virtue?”
“It doesn’t sound like he went dark for her. It sounds like he was ticked off that she was going to die and willing to do anything to keep her.”