She’d cut her queenly teeth on legends of the enormously brilliant, terrifyingly powerful, wild, half-mad godlike king that had nearly destroyed their entire race, and certainly condemned it to eternal struggle, with his obsession over a mortal.
She despised the Unseelie king for locking her away. For killing the original queen before the song had been passed on. For dooming them to striking alliances with weaker beings in order to survive, limping along with only a hint of their former grandeur and power.
She despised herself for not seeing through her most trusted advisor, V’lane, and being locked away by him as well, in a frozen prison, trapped in a casket of ice, scarcely daring to hope the seeds she’d planted long ago among the Keltar and O’Connor and various others might come to fruition and she would live. Carry on to try to survive the next test she’d also foreseen.
This—spelled into a chamber with memory residue—was not living. Buried in another coffin of sorts while her race suffered who knew what horrors.
The Unseelie prison walls were down. Even frozen in her casket, diminishing, being leeched of her very essence by the void-magic of the Unseelie prison, she’d felt the walls around her collapse, had known the very moment the ancient, compromised song had winked out.
She, more than any of the Seelie, understood the danger her race now faced. She was the one who’d used imperfect song, fragments she’d found hither and yon through the ages, to bind the Fae realms to the mortal coil. She’d only been able to secure her imperiled court by marrying it to the human planet.
Irretrievably.
And if that coil were devoured by the black holes, so, too, would be all the Seelie realms.
With the king, she’d pretended to know none of this, yet it had been precisely why she’d urged him to take action.
She knew their situation was worse even than that. She’d sought the mythic song herself, striving to restore that colossal magic from which their race had sprung. She’d studied the legends. She knew the truth. The song called an enormous price from imperfect beings, and they all were, to varying degrees. There was no easy way forward. It would cost her many things.
But she knew something else, too: a thing not even the Unseelie king knew. If she were able to manipulate and seduce him into saving Dublin, thereby her court, the price demanded would be levied most harshly against him.
The tapestry she’d become rippled and shuddered as she watched the residue of the Unseelie king’s lies. For if she believed them, it was her on that pile of lush furs and bloodred rose petals, as diamonds floated lazily on the air, illuminating the chamber with millions of tiny twinkling stars.
If she believed him, she had once been mortal, and once been in love with the slaughterer of their race, the maker of the abominations, the one who’d cared nothing for the former queen to whom he’d been trothed, and less for the court he’d abandoned.
Cruce forced a cup from the cauldron of forgetting on you, the king had said before he left.
She’d never drunk from the cauldron. The queen was not allowed.
Before you were queen. When you were mine.
She didn’t believe him. Refused to believe him. And even if she had—how could it matter? She was what she was now. The Seelie queen, leader of the True Race. She’d spent her entire existence as that. Had no memory of his lies. Wanted none.
And yet, she could divine no purpose for this charade.
He needed nothing from her. He was the Unseelie king. He was an it, an entity, a state of existence, enormously beyond any of their race’s comprehension. He needed nothing from no one. Legend was too complex and contradictory to unravel his origins. Or theirs.
She narrowed her fibrous eyes, the threads of the tapestry rippling. How could such a being as the mad king fabricate such depth of emotion as she was now seeing?
Emotion was alien to their race in this, its purest essence. They felt but facsimiles of it, enhanced by living with the primitive race she’d chosen to settle her people among, for that very reason. To expand their pale existence, to amplify their wan desires in order to sate them more amply.
Yet on the great round dais, a woman that looked and moved identically to her, gazed down at the being she’d taken inside her body, inside her very soul, and laughed as Aoibheal had never known laughter. Touched as she herself had never touched. Was moved by the king she loathed far more intimately and with greater sensation than she had ever believed possible.
Forget your foolish quest, the woman on the bed said, sobering suddenly. Run away with me.
The king residue was abruptly angry. She could feel it, even as a tapestry. We had this conversation. We will never have it again.
It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t need to live forever.
You won’t be the one left behind when you die.
Make yourself human with me, then.
Aoibheal narrowed her eyes further. A Fae make itself human for a human? Never. Only one, Adam Black, had ever insisted on such an absurd, devaluing action, and there were reasons for his madness that were her fault entirely.
The king displayed the proper Fae response.
Revulsion.
Refusal to abandon the glory that it was to be of the Old Race, the honored ones, the First Race. Perhaps in his case even—the First One. Still…the song had not been entrusted to him. Rather to a female. For good reason. Women were not blinded by passion. They were clarified by it.
As the king rose and towered over the woman he claimed Aoibheal was, she felt what the woman on the bed felt and it was chafing and uncomfortable: tired of fighting for something she knew she would never attain. Weary of trying to make the blind see. Knowing her lover had passed beyond her ability to reach.
But the woman on the bed felt something else Aoibheal could not understand at all.
That love was the most important thing in the universe. More so even than the song. That without love and without freedom, life was worth nothing.
The woman on the bed wept after the king was gone.
The woman in the tapestry watched in silence.
If she must pretend to be that woman to secure her Court’s existence, so be it.
But it would cost the king everything.
26
“Separate the weak from the obsolete, I creep hard on imposters…”
“It can’t be human,” I protested, staring at the thing that looked so heartbreakingly like my sister. “It’s not possible. I’ve heard of doppelgangers but I don’t believe in them. Not this perfect. Not this detailed.” Except for a few minor things, like the diamond ring on her finger.