Shadowfever

The king’s bedchamber was the size of a football stadium. Walls of black ice towered overhead to a ceiling too high to see. Spicy black petals from some exquisite, otherworldly rose garden swirled at my feet as I bounced lightly from foot to foot. Clusters of frost that were trying to form on my skin rained down to join them. I was mesmerized a moment by the sparkling crystals against the black floor and flowers.

Falling back, laughing, ice in her hair, a handful of velvety petals fluttering down to land on her bare breasts …

Never cold here.

Always together.

Sadness overwhelmed me. I nearly choked on it.

He had so many ambitions.

She had one. To love.

Could have learned from her.

The tiny diamonds from the concubine’s—I couldn’t bring myself to say my, especially not standing so close to the king’s bed—side of the bedchamber hadn’t been extinguished at all. They’d become something else when they passed through and now shimmered on the dark air, midnight fireflies winking with blue flame.

The bed was draped with black curtains that fluttered around piles of silky black furs and filled up a third of the chamber, the portion visible from the other side. I moved to it, slid my hand over the furs. They were sleek, sensual. I wanted to stretch out naked and never leave.

It wasn’t the white warm place I found so comforting and familiar, but there was beauty here, too, on the far side of the mirror. Her world was the bright, glorious summer day that held no secrets, but his was the dark, glittering night where anything was possible. I tipped my head back. Was that a black ceiling painted with stars so high above me or a night sky sliced from another world and brought here for my pleasure?

I was in his bedchamber. I remembered this place. I’d come. Would he? Would I finally see the face of my long-lost lover? If he was my beloved king, why was I so afraid?

Hurry! Almost here … Come quickly!

The command came from beyond a giant arched opening far across the bedchamber. The summons was beyond my ability to deny. I broke into a run, following the voice of my childhood pied piper.

Once the king had held the Seelie Queen above all others, but somewhere down the eons, things had changed. He had puzzled over it for thousands of years, studying her, challenging her with subtle tests, in an effort to divine if the problem lay within her or within him.

He was comforted on the day he realized it was through no fault of theirs but that the two who were the eternal glue of their race were coming apart because she was Stasis and he was Change. It was their nature. The oddity was how long they had remained together.

He could not have prevented his evolution any more than she could have prevented her stagnation. All that the queen was at that very moment was all she would ever be.

Ironically, the mother of their race—she who wielded the Song of Making, she who could enact the mightiest acts of all creation—was no Creator. She was power without wonder, satisfaction without joy. What was existence without wonder, without joy? Meaningless. Empty.

And she thought he was dangerous.

He began to slip off more frequently, exploring worlds without her, hungering for things he could not name. The bright, silly court he once found harmlessly entertaining became to him a place of empty pursuits and jaded palates.

He built a fortress on a world of black ice because it was the antithesis of all the queen had chosen. Here, in his dark, quiet castle, he could think. Here, where there were no garish chaises or brilliantly clad courtiers, he could feel himself expanding. He was not drowned by incessant tinkling laughter, in constant petty disputes. He was free.

Once, the queen sought him in his ice castle, and it amused him to see her horror at being leeched of all her bright plumage by the strange light on the world he had chosen, which cast everything black, white, or blue. It suited his need for Spartan surroundings while he sorted through the complexity of his existence and decided the next thing he would be. It was after he had found his concubine, long after he had realized he was no longer capable of tolerating his own people for more than a few short hours at a time, but before he’d begun his efforts to make his beloved Fae like himself.

The queen had been seductive, she had been full of guile, she had been scornful. She had finally tried to use a small part of the Song against him, but he had been prepared for that because, like her, he looked into the future as far as it would permit and foreseen this day.

They held each other at bay with weapons for the first time in the history of their race.

As the imperious, unforgiving matriarch of their race stormed from his fortress, he padlocked his doors against her, vowing that until she gave him what he wanted—the secret to immortality for his beloved—no Seelie would ever again walk his icy halls. Only the queen could dispense the elixir of life. She kept it hidden in her private bower. He wanted that, and more: enough to make the concubine his equal in every way.

I shook myself hard and stopped running. I iced instantly, but it didn’t terrify me. I waited a few moments before taking a step and cracking it.

The memories on the king’s side of the Silver didn’t play out before my eyes like the residue of times past on the concubine’s side. Here they seemed to slide directly into my brain.

It was as if I’d just been two people: One had been running down enormous halls of black ice, and the other had stood in a kingly reception hall, watching the first Fae queen fight with a mighty darkness, probing for weaknesses, manipulating, always manipulating. I knew every detail of her being, what she looked like in her true form and her preferred guises. I even knew the look on her face as she’d died.

Come to me …

I began to run again, down floors of obsidian. The king hadn’t been much for decorating. No windows opened onto the world outside his walls, although I knew they once did, in those early days before the queen turned his planet into a prison. I also knew that once there were simple yet regal furnishings, but now the only embellishments were elaborately carved designs in the ice itself, lending the place a certain austere majesty. If the queen’s court was a gaily painted whore, the king’s was a strange but natural beauty.

I knew every hall, every twist and turn, every chamber. She must have lived here, before he’d made the Silvers for her. Me.

I shivered.

So where was he now?

If I genuinely was his concubine reincarnated, why wasn’t he waiting for me? It seemed I’d been programmed to end up here, one way or another. Who was summoning me?