The moment I’d stepped through the king’s mighty doors, I braced myself for an attack.
It didn’t come.
The stark arctic terrain was a great empty hull of a prison with rusted-out bars.
Even devoid of those once incarcerated, despair clung to every ridge, blew down from mountainous cliffs, and seeped up from bottomless chasms.
I tilted my head back. There was no sky. Cliffs of black ice stretched up farther than the eye could follow. A blue glow emanated from the cliffs—the only light in the place. Blue-black fog gusted from crevices in the cliffs.
The moon would never rise here, the sun would never set. Seasons would not pass. Color would never splash this landscape.
Death in this place would be a blessing. There was no hope, no expectation that life would ever change. For hundreds of thousands of years, the Unseelie had abided in these chilling, killing, sunless cliffs. Their need, their emptiness, had stained the very stuff from which their prison was fashioned. Once, long ago, it had been a fine if strange world. Now it was radioactive to the core.
I knew that if I remained long on this barren terrain, I would lose all will to leave. I would come to believe that this arctic wasteland, this frozen oubliette of misery, was all that existed, all that had ever existed and, worse—was exactly what I deserved.
Was I too late? Was I supposed to have answered this summons long before the prison walls fell? Was that why I kept seeing all those hourglasses with black sand running out?
But I kept hearing the voice in my dreams—and now, when I was awake. That had to mean there was still time.
For what?
I scanned the many caves cut into the sheer façade of jagged black cliffs, frigid homes the Unseelie had clawed into the unforgiving landscape. Nothing stirred. I knew without even looking I would find no creature comforts within. Those without hope didn’t feather nests. They endured. I was startled by a sudden deep sorrow that they’d been reduced to such straits. What a vindictive act on the queen’s part! They might have been brethren to the Light Court, not forced to shiver for eternity in the cold and dark. On sunny beaches, in tropical climes, perhaps they would have become something less monstrous, evolved as the king had. But, no, the vicious queen hadn’t been satisfied with imprisoning them. She’d wanted them to suffer. And for what crimes? What had they done to deserve it, other than be born without her consent?
I was disturbed by the turn of my thoughts. I was feeling pity for the Unseelie and thinking the king had evolved.
It had to be this place’s memory residue.
I crunched over iced drifts, scaled jagged outcroppings, and turned down a narrow pathway between cliffs that were hundreds of feet high. The thin fissure through which I passed was another of my childhood terrors. Barely two and a half feet wide, the narrow passage made me feel crushed, claustrophobic, yet I knew my route went this way.
With each step I took, my feelings of bipolarity grew.
I was Mac, who hated Unseelie and wanted nothing more than to see the prison walls restored, the monstrous killers contained.
I was the concubine, who loved the king and all of his children. I even loved this place. There had been happy moments here before the bitch queen broke everything in those final seconds before she died.
Speaking of dying, I should have. I wasn’t breathing. I had no blood flow. No oxygen. I should have been mortally frostbitten the moment I’d passed through the Silver. There was no plausible way I could be walking through these conditions, yet I was.
I was so cold that dying would have been a welcome relief. It was easy to see why my child’s mind had thrilled to the poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” The notion of being warm again was nearly beyond my comprehension.
Half a dozen times I considered aborting my unwanted mission. I could turn around, go back to the mansion, slip through the Silver, find Jericho, resume our plans, and pretend none of this had ever happened. He’d never tell. He had a few dark secrets of his own to keep.
I could forget I was the concubine. Forget that I’d ever had a past existence. I mean, really, who wanted to be in love with someone they’d never even met—at least not in this lifetime? The thought of the Unseelie King was a big messy knot of emotions inside me that I preferred to leave tangled and unexamined.
Hurry! You must!
Razor-edged snow began to fall. Deep in caves, things chimed horrible, grating sounds. Jericho had told me that there were creatures so twisted and monstrous in the Unseelie prison that they’d stay even if the walls came down, because they liked their home. How was I supposed to have made it through if the place had still been fully populated? For that matter, how was I supposed to have found my way here to begin with? How had things been orchestrated to bring me here, to this moment, in this way—and, more importantly, by whom? Whose puppet was I? I resented being here. I couldn’t have turned back for anything.