His mouth twisted. “Aye, she does that. Fucks with us.”
“She? Who?”
He nodded at the coffin. “The queen.”
I blinked. “What queen?” This wasn’t making any sense.
“Aoibheal, Queen of the Seelie.”
“That’s who’s in the coffin?”
“Who were you expecting to find?”
All hesitation gone, I moved to the side of the tomb and stared through the lid.
Beneath smoky ice and runes, I could see the hint of pale skin, golden hair, a slight form.
“We’ve got to get her out of here, and fast,” he said, “if she’s even still alive. I can’t tell through the ice. I tried to open it but couldn’t budge it. A few times, I thought she moved. Once, I could have sworn she made a sound.”
I barely heard him. Why would the queen be here of all places? V’lane said he was keeping her safe in Faery.
V’lane had lied.
What else had he lied about?
Had he brought her here? If not, who had? Why? And why would opening the lid make me scream? I raked my hair back from my face with both hands and tugged on it, staring down. Something was eluding me.
“Are you absolutely certain it’s the queen of the Seelie in this coffin?” Why would the queen have been summoning me—the concubine? How did she even know who I was, once I’d been reincarnated? It wasn’t as if I still looked like the concubine. It was absurd to think she’d accidentally chosen me. None of this made sense. I couldn’t think of any reason seeing the queen of the Seelie would make me scream.
“Aye, I’m certain. My ancestors have been painting her for millennia. I’d know her anywhere, even through the ice.”
“But why would she call me? What do I have to do with any of this?”
“My uncles say she has meddled with our clan for thousands of years, preparing us for the moment of her greatest need. Uncle Cian saw her four or five years back, standing behind the balustrade of our Great Hall, watching us. He said she came to him later, in sleep, and told him that she’d been killed in the not-so-distant future and needed us to perform certain tasks to prevent it—and the destruction of the world as we knew it—from coming to pass. She foretold that the walls would come down. We did our best to keep them up. He said that even in the Dreaming, she seemed hunted, weak. I suspect now she was projecting herself from her tomb here in this prison somehow. She said she would return to tell him more but never did. It sounds like she must have meddled with your family, as well.”
She’d used me. The queen of the Fae had figured out who I was and used me, and I resented it. Though I knew she was a far-distant successor, not the original queen who had refused to make me—the concubine, I amended—Fae and grant the king’s wish, and despite that she wasn’t actually the bitch who’d sown hatred and revenge when she might have used her vast power for good, how dare any queen of the Seelie use me to rescue her? Me, the concubine! I hated her without even seeing her.
Would it never end? Would I eternally be a pawn on their chessboard? Would I just keep getting reborn, or forced to drink from the cauldron, or whatever had happened to me to screw up my memories, and used over and over again?
I turned away, bile rising.
“What’s important now is that we get her out of here. I can’t go back the way I came. The Silver that dumped me was two stories up, in the side of a cliff. I was stunned by the fall and can’t find the bloody thing again. Where’d you come in, lass?”
I dragged my gaze from the coffin to him. How to get him out of here was an entirely new problem I hadn’t even thought about. “Well, you certainly can’t go out the way I came in,” I muttered.
“Why the bloody hell not?”
I wondered how much he’d learned about Fae lore in this place. Maybe my sources were wrong and Barrons had died from some other coincidental cause, not because of the mirror at all. Maybe Christian would hear my answer, laugh at me, and tell me my version was a bunch of baloney, that lots of people and Fae could use that mirror, or that Cruce’s curse had messed it up. “Because I came in through the Silver in the king’s bedchamber.”
He was silent a moment. “Not funny, lass.”
I didn’t say anything, just looked at him.
“Not possible, either,” he said flatly.
I pushed my hands into my pockets and waited for him to deal with it.
“That legend is famous on every world I visited. There are only two who can pass through the king’s Silver,” he said.
“Maybe Cruce’s curse changed it.”
“The king’s Silver was the first he ever made and of a completely different composition. It was unaffected. It continued to be used as a method of execution long after Cruce’s time.”
Damn. I’d really been hoping he wouldn’t say that. I turned my back on him and moved to the side of the coffin. The queen of the Fae would make me scream. I wondered why. I was sick of wondering. It was time for truth.
Behind me, Christian was still talking. “And, duh—you’re neither of those.”
“Doona be duh-ing me, laddie,” I mocked something he’d said to me once, taking a stab at humor before my life got totally wrecked by whatever I was about to discover.
I pressed my hands to the runes at ten and two. Something clicked. There was a soft hiss of air as the lid raised beneath my hands. I could feel the spring in it. All I had to do now was push it aside.
“Only the Unseelie King and his concubine can use that mirror.” Christian was still talking.
I slid the lid away and looked down.
I was silent for a long moment, absorbing it.
Then I screamed.
29
To my credit, I didn’t scream for long.
But the short burst in their hellish language was enough to disturb precariously packed snow and ice. My chiming scream echoed off sheer cliffs. Unlike an echo, however, it grew louder with each rebound and I heard a rumble that could presage only one thing: an avalanche.
My head whipped around. “Grab her!”
Christian shook his head, cursing. “Christ, you open your bag of stones. You feed me Unseelie. You scream. You’re a walking—”
“Just grab her and run! Now!”
He raced to the coffin, then stood, hesitating.
“What’s wrong with you? Pick her up!”