When Christian pushes into the brick wall of the building catty-corner to the rear of BB&B—first left on the Dark Zone side—and disappears, I melt down in a fit of the giggles. I toss a rock at the spot where he vanished. It bounces off the brick and clatters to the cobblestone. I’m feeling twenty shades of Harry Potter’s train station, especially when he pokes his head back out of the wall and says impatiently, “Come on, lass. This is hardly my favorite place to be.”
I approach the wall and study it, trying to decide if I’d be able to find the spot again without knowing exactly where it was. His head disappears. I wouldn’t. I want to chalk a big X on it, in case I need it again, but that would betray its location to everyone else, too, being as “X marks the spot” and all, so I back up partway down the alley and lock the scene down on my mental grid, permanent-like. I got that kind of memory. If I deliberately file something, I can always find it again. Hard part is remembering to deliberately file it. I’m usually so excited by the life I’m living I forget to take pictures.
Then I follow him in. Dude! I step into a brick wall! It’s the freakiest thing I’ve ever felt. Like it’s a sponge and I’m a sponge and for a second there all our sponge parts are one and I don’t just have square pants, everything about me is squarish because I’m part of a wall, then I’m me again and the wall kind of squirts me out on the other side in a completely white room.
White floor, white ceiling, white walls. Inside the white room are ten mirrors. Just like that. Standing there, in thin air. You can circle all the way around them. Nothing is holding them up that I can see. They’re all different sizes and shapes, in different frames. Some of the glass surfaces are dark as pitch and you can’t see a thing. Others swirl with silver fog but the things that move in their cloudy shadows are too fast and strange to define.
“Good,” he says. “They’re where I left them.”
“Where else would they be?”
“They used to hang on the wall. I shuffled them around so if anyone else knew where they went, they’d lose track. Used to be the one we’re taking was fourth from the left. Now it’s second from the right.”
I take one last look around, I don’t know, maybe looking for tired starlings, but there aren’t any, and push into the mirror behind him. I get all spongy again and this time it’s like I pass through a lot of things and just when I’m starting to get a little tense about it, wondering if all my parts are definitely going to come back together, I squirt out into Christian’s back. “Ooof! What are you doing, standing there blocking the mirror?”
“Hush, I thought I heard something.”
I perk up my superhearing. “I don’t hear nothing and I can hear everything.”
“There are things in here,” he says. “You never know what you might find.”
“Bad things?”
“Depends on your definition. And who you are. Being a prince has its advantages.”
I look around. “Where are we?”
“The White Mansion.”
“Duh, like I might never have figured that out,” I say, because we’re in yet another white room. “Is the whole place this boring? Don’t the Fae ever use paint, maybe a little wallpaper?”
He chimes softly.
“Dude, you’re ringing like a bell.”
He stops abruptly and I realize he was laughing. I’m beginning to understand how to interact social-like with an Unseelie prince.
“The White Mansion isn’t boring, lass. Never boring. It’s the grand demesne the Unseelie King built for his concubine. It’s a living, breathing love story, testament to the brightest passion that ever burned between our races. You can follow the scenes through if you’ve time enough and are willing to risk getting lost for a few centuries.”
I heard of the White Mansion from eavesdropping but never paid much attention to the talk. I was always more interested in the Sinsar Dubh. “What do you mean, you can follow the scenes through?”
“Their residue is still here. They loved so intensely that moments of their life have been etched into the very fabric of the mansion. Some say the king designed it that way, so if one day he lost her he could come live with her residue. Some say the mansion was built of memory-tissue and is a living creature, with a great brain and heart hidden somewhere in the house. I’ve no wish to believe it’s true because that would mean the White Mansion can be killed, and she must never die. The record of the greatest love in the history of History would be lost, along with countless artifacts from myriad universes that could never be collected together again. This place is home, love story, and museum all in one.”