Shadowfever

“Did the Seelie feel the same?” I couldn’t imagine they did.

“The Seelie were completely unaware the Unseelie existed.”

“Until someone betrayed the king to the queen.”

“Betrayal is in the eye of the beholder,” V’lane said sharply. He closed his eyes a moment. When he opened them again, the angry gold glints were gone. “I shall rephrase that properly for you: Someone should have told the queen the truth long before she learned it. The queen is to be obeyed in all things. The king disobeyed her repeatedly. When the king refused Cruce, the Unseelie knew he would never stand up for them. They spoke of mutiny, civil war. To avoid it, Cruce went to the queen to speak on his dark brothers’ behalf. While he was away, the other princes designed a curse to be cast into the Silvers. If the king would not give up his mortal, they would forbid him access to her, by blocking him from entering the Silvers and ever seeing her again.”

“So it wasn’t Cruce who corrupted the network of the Silvers?”

“Of course not. Among my race, the name Cruce has become synonymous with one of your humans … I believe his name was Murphy and a certain edict was passed? If something goes wrong, it is blamed on Murphy. It is the same with Cruce. If Cruce had indeed cast the curse into the Silvers, it would not have corrupted their primary function. It simply would have prevented the king from entering. Cruce studied with the king himself; he was far more adept than his brethren.”

“What did the queen say when he went to her?” I asked. It almost seemed that Cruce was a renegade hero. Really, although the Unseelie were vile, so were most of the Seelie I’d met. As far as I was concerned, they deserved each other. They should have reunited in one court, policed their own, and stayed the hell out of our world.

“We will never know. Upon hearing what he had to say, she confined him to her bower. She then summoned the king and they met in the sky that very day. Although I possess no memory of it, according to our histories it was me she sent for Cruce, and when I brought him to her, she lashed him to a tree, took up the Sword of Light, and killed him before the king’s eyes.”

I gasped. It was so strange to realize V’lane had been alive during that time. That he’d had firsthand experience of it all yet recalled none of it. He’d had to read about it in written histories to recall what he’d willingly forgotten. I wondered: What if whoever wrote Fae histories, like our humans, distorted things a bit? Knowing their penchant for illusion, I couldn’t see any Fae telling the whole truth. Would we ever really know what had happened back then? Still, I imagined V’lane’s version was the closest I might ever get to it. “And war broke out.”

He nodded. “After the king killed the queen and returned to his court, he found his concubine dead. According to the princes, when she learned of the battle and discovered that the king had begun to slaughter his own race in her name, she stepped from the Silvers, lay down in his bed, and killed herself. They say she left him a note. They say he carries it still.”

What ill-fated lovers! It was such a sad story. I’d felt their love on those obsidian floors in the White Mansion, even though both of them had been deeply unhappy: the king because his beloved was not Fae like him, and the concubine because she was trapped, waiting alone, for him to make her “good enough” for him—that was how she’d felt, inferior. She would have loved him as she was, one small mortal life, and been happy. Still, there’d been no question of their love. They were all each other wanted.

“The next we heard of the Sinsar Dubh, it was loose in your world. There are those among the Seelie that have long coveted the knowledge in its pages. Darroc was one of them.”

“How does the queen plan to use it?” I asked.

“She believes that the matriarchal magic of our race will enable her.” He hesitated. “I find that you and I trusting each other appeals to me. It has been long since I had an ally with power, vitality, and an intriguing mind.” He seemed to be assessing me, weighing a decision, then he said, “It is also said that any who knows the First Language—the ancient language of … I believe the only human word that suffices is ‘Change,’ in which the king scribed his dark knowledge—would be able to sit down and read the Sinsar Dubh, once it was contained, page after page, absorbing all his forbidden magic, all the king knew.”

“Did Darroc know this language?”

“No. I know that for a certainty. I was there when he last drank from the cauldron. Had any of our race known the Sinsar Dubh had been rendered inert beneath your abbey before they’d drunk from the cauldron so many times that the ancient language was lost in the mists of their abandoned memories, they would have razed your planet to get to it.”

“Why would they want the knowledge the king had so regretted acquiring that he’d banished it?”

“The only thing my race loves as much as itself is power. We are drawn to it without reason, much as the mind of a human man can be so numbed by a stunningly sexual woman that he will follow her to his own destruction. There is that moment you call ‘before,’ in which a man—or Fae—can consider the consequences. It is brief, even for us. Besides, while the king chose to do foolish things with his power, another of us might not. Power is not good or evil. It is what it is in the hands of the wielder.”

He was so charming when he was open, speaking freely about the shortcomings of his race, even comparing his people to ours. Maybe there was hope that one day Fae and human could learn to—I shook my head, terminating that thought. We were too different, the balance of power between us too exaggerated.

“Repay my trust, MacKayla. I know you went to the abbey. Have you learned how the Book was originally contained?”

“I believe so. We found the prophecy that tells us the basics of what to do to re-inter it.”

He sat up and removed his sunglasses. Iridescent eyes searched my face. “And this is the first you think to mention it?” he said incredulously. “What must we do?”

“There are five Druids that have to perform some kind of binding ceremony. Supposedly they were taught it long ago by your race. They live in Scotland.”

“The Keltar,” he said. “The queen’s ancient Druids. So that is why she has long protected them. She must have foreseen that such events might transpire.”