I gasped as I felt something warm and good settle over me like a full body cloak. It draped me completely from head to toe, seeping into my skin, and deeper still, pooling inside me like molten gold. Still, I kept my eyes closed because I’d learned recently how clear a lack of visual distractions kept my mind. As it filled me, I felt as if I was becoming a small star, blazing from within, ancient and calm and watchful and as essential to the universe as any of those stars above me. My head whipped back, my body drew taut, as radiance drenched my being.
I opened my eyes, held out my hand and looked at it. I was glowing, translucent, ethereal, my body no longer solid.
You are not Fae. It was a judgment. Not a favorable one.
I said simply, “I have the blood of the Unseelie King in me and Queen Aoibheal chose me to be her successor. I did battle with the entity known as the Sinsar Dubh and won. The True Race is in danger of extinction. I will do everything in my power to prevent that.”
I felt a sentient presence gust close then. It entered me, joining the brilliance that filled me, and although it was instinct to want to resist—especially after what the Book had done to me—I quelled it quickly and trusted what my gut was saying. This sentience was nonthreatening. It felt vast and wise, gentle and pure. It gusted through my being, leaving no corner untouched by its soft tendrils. I felt as if it was probing into the fundamental elements of my soul, examining every component of every belief I held and every action I’d made.
You recently committed acts of great evil.
There was nothing left in me but honesty. I couldn’t have lied if I’d wanted to. I offered it my sorrow, my sins, my grief. “I did,” I answered sadly.
Why?
Another trick question. An evil book made me do it displayed blame-displacement and weakness; I was possessed and not myself” displayed a lack of personal responsibility, and yet more weakness. “Because I made mistakes,” I said finally, with a strangely nuanced sorrow I’d never felt before. There was a difference between being sad and feeling sorrow. Sad was about yourself. Sorrow was big as the world and encompassed all of it.
Will you make those mistakes again?
I answered without hesitation. “No. I suspect I’ll make entirely new ones. And carry the pain of those, too.”
I felt as if the thing inside me smiled. Then it is yours. As are the Tuatha De Danann. Guide them well.
There was another whooshing sensation and I felt the crate beneath my butt.
I was back in the bookstore, head still in my hands, gasping at the suddenness of the transition, pained by my abrupt eviction from the starry-skied paradise and loss of communion with the wise, gentle thing that had interrogated me and deemed me fit.
I wouldn’t let it down.
Inhaling deeply, I raised my head.
Barrons Books & Baubles looked exactly like it had the day I’d first stepped inside it.
Late afternoon sunshine slanted in the front windows of the bookstore, spilling across the back of the Chesterfield, warming my shoulders. I nibbled on the tip of my pen and scanned my list.
WORLD GOALS: (NOT IN ORDER)
1. Get the music box to Dancer so we can determine exactly what it is. I know it has something to do with the song. I felt it that day in the White Mansion.
2. Dispatch scouts into the Silvers and find a world humans can survive on. Start making plans to relocate them. They’ll have to be fully settled on the planet, not in the Silvers, because I don’t know what will happen to the Silvers if our planet dies.
3. Find Cruce and make him my ally. Persuade him to teach me how to use the magic I have. Find out what he knows. He not only has part of the Sinsar Dubh that allegedly contains information about the song (or was that just one of the many lies he’d told me as V’lane?) but worked beside the Unseelie King for eons as he tried to re-create the lost melody. Cruce has more knowledge of ancient history than anyone.
4. Find out what’s going on with the Fae: Seelie and Unseelie. Figure out how to organize them and unite humans and Fae together toward the goal of finding the song.
I chewed on my pen and thought, yeah, that was going to be a challenge. Like they were going to accept me—a human—as their leader and queen. I knew what the Fae were like. They responded to threats and displays of power, and so far the only thing I’d figured out how to do was clean up my bookstore.
I’d spent the past few hours sitting on the couch in front of a lightly hissing gas fire, doing the closest thing to meditating I’d ever done, trying to fathom what was inside me now. It had all seemed so clear, so pure, the power so tangible and understandable when I was standing on the hill beneath three moons. But I’d been translucent and ethereal then, and I was no longer. I was solid and human again, and although I could feel power rippling beneath my skin, I didn’t know how to access and direct it. I supposed this was how Christian felt, with no brotherly prince to help him understand what he was.
I scribbled another one down.
5. Go to the abbey and rebuild it the way I did the bookstore, restore the sidhe-seers’ home so they can gather all the lore they have and begin searching it. (Do I have the power to re-create things that got burned, like books? How am I supposed to rebuild the abbey? I don’t know what each room looked like. Do I need to?)
6. Talk to Barrons about talking to Dageus to see what he knows.
PERSONAL GOALS:
1. Find my parents and spend time with them. Bring them up-to-date so they can help.
2. Find out if Alina still exists.
I stopped writing and sighed. I had serious doubts on that score. After watching the Book create multiple versions of me with substance, I’d concluded that was all Alina had ever been. And what had I done with my chance to spend time with her again, even as an illusion? I’d driven her away repeatedly, interrogated and bullied her. Only at the end had I finally accepted her, made plans to have coffee and breakfast—a date I’d never gotten to keep. I shoved the tangle of emotion into another handy box and resumed writing.