Lord of Shadows The Dark Artifices 2

13

D

REAMLAND

Emma looked around in wonder. The entranceway bore no traces of having been carved out of a hillside. It was made of smooth ash-colored stone, the roof of blue marble patterned with gilded stars. A shadowed corridor led deeper into the hill.

The faerie woman, Nene, raised her lamp. It was filled with darting fireflies that cast a limited glow over their small group. Emma saw Julian with his mouth set in a hard line, Cristina holding her pendant tightly. Mark was lowering Kieran to the ground, his hands gentle. It took her a moment to realize Kieran was unconscious, his head lolling back, clothes dappled in blood.

“We are on Seelie Lands now,” said Nene. “You can use your runes and witchlights.” Her gaze on Kieran was troubled. “You can heal your friend.”

“We can’t.” Julian flipped his witchlight out of his pocket. Its illumination rushed over Emma like the relief of water in the desert. “He’s not a Shadowhunter.”

Nene drifted closer, her pale eyebrows arched in consternation. Mark was on the ground, holding Kieran, whose face was drained icy-white, his closed eyes pale crescents in his blanched face. “Is he a Hunter?” she asked.

“We both—” began Mark.

“Is there anything you can do for him?” Emma interrupted, before Mark said too much.

“Yes.” Nene knelt down, setting her lamp on the floor beside her. She took a vial from the inside of the sleeveless white fur jacket she wore over her dress. She hesitated, looking at Mark. “You do not need this? You are not injured?”

He shook his head, puzzled. “No, why?”

“I brought it for you.” She uncorked it. Setting it to Kieran’s lips, she crooned something under her breath in a language unfamiliar to Emma.

Kieran’s lips parted and he swallowed. Pale gold liquid ran from the corners of his mouth. His eyes fluttered open and he pulled himself upright, swallowing a second mouthful and a third. His eyes met Nene’s over the rim of the bottle and he turned his face away, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “Save the rest,” he said hoarsely. “It’s enough.”

He staggered to his feet, Mark helping him. The others had put away their steles. A new Healing rune burned on Emma’s arm, an Energy rune beside it. Still, her body ached, and her heart hurt. She kept seeing her father, over and over, looking up at her from the grass.

It hadn’t been him, not really, but that didn’t make the image less painful.

“Come,” said Nene, putting the vial away. “The drink will only sustain him a short time. We must hurry to the Court.”

She started down the corridor and the others followed, Mark supporting the staggering Kieran. Julian had his witchlight stone out, and the hall was bright. The walls looked like intricate mosaic from a distance, but up close Emma could see that they were clear resin, behind which the petals of flowers and wings of butterflies were pressed flat.

“My lady,” said Cristina. Her hair, like Emma’s, was tangled with leaves and burrs. “What did you mean you brought that drink for Mark? How did you know he would come here?”

“We had guests, here in the Court,” said Nene. “A Shadowhunter girl with red hair and a blond boy.”

“Jace Herondale and Clary Fairchild,” guessed Emma.

“They told me of the Blackthorns. That was a name I knew. My sister Nerissa loved a Blackthorn man, and had two of his children, and died of her love of him when he left her.”

Mark stopped in his tracks. Kieran gave a slight hiss of pain. “You’re my mother’s sister?” he said incredulously.

“I think they usually call that your aunt,” said Emma.

Mark gave her a dark look.

“I am the one who carried you and your sister to your father’s doorstep and left you there for him to raise,” said Nene. “You are my blood.”

“I am beginning to wonder if any of you do not have a long-lost relative in Faerie,” said Kieran.

“I don’t,” said Cristina, sounding regretful.

“Half Mark’s relatives are faeries,” pointed out Emma. “Where else would they be?”

“How did you know I would need saving?” said Mark to the faerie woman.

“The phouka who let you through the moon gate is an old friend,” Nene said. “He told me of your journey, and I guessed your mission. I knew you would not survive the Lord of Shadows’ tricks without aid.”

“The burning arrows,” Julian said. The corridor had now turned from stone and tile to packed earth. Roots dangled from the ceiling, each one twined with glimmering flowers that lit the darkness. Veins of minerals in the rock shimmered and changed as Emma looked at them. “That was you.”

Nene nodded. “And a few others, of the Queen’s Guard. Then I had only to stay a few steps ahead of you and open this door. It was not simple, but there are many doors to Seelie, all over the King’s Lands. More than he knows.” She cast a sharp look at Kieran. “You will not speak of this, will you, Hunter?”

“I thought you imagined me Nephilim,” said Kieran.

“That was before I saw your eyes,” she said. “Like my nephew, you are a servant of Gwyn.” She sighed softly. “If my sister Nerissa had known her son would grow to be so cursed, it would have broken her heart.”

Julian’s face darkened, but before he could speak, a figure loomed up in front of them. They had reached a place where the corridor opened into a circular room, with other hallways leading off it in a dizzying array of directions.

Blocking their forward progress was a faerie knight. A tall, wheat-skinned man with a somber expression, he wore robes and a doublet of brilliant multicolored fabric. “Fergus,” said Nene. “Let us go by.”

He arched a dark brow and replied with a torrent of words in an odd, birdlike language—not angry, but clearly annoyed. Nene held up a hand, her voice sharp in response. As Emma watched her, she thought she could detect some resemblance to Mark. Not just the pale blond hair, but the delicacy of her bones, the deliberateness of her gestures.

The knight sighed and stepped aside. “We can go now, but we will be called to an audience with the Queen at first light,” said Nene, hurrying forward. “Come, help me get the Hunter to a room.”

Emma had quite a few questions—how they could tell when it was first light down here, why Nene seemed to dislike the Wild Hunt so much, and, of course, where they were going. She kept them to herself, though, and eventually they reached the end of a corridor where the walls were polished rock, gleaming with semiprecious stones: tiger’s-eye, azurite, jasper. Gaps in the rock were covered with long velvet hangings, embroidered with glimmering thread.

Nene swept one of the hangings aside, revealing a room whose walls were smooth and curved in toward a domed ceiling. White hangings drifted down, half-covering a bed made of thick branches wound with flowers.

Nene set down her lamp. “Lay the Hunter down,” she said.

Kieran had gone quiet since they’d entered the Seelie Court proper. He let Mark lead him over to the bed. He looked pretty awful, Emma thought, as Mark helped Kieran settle onto the mattress. She wondered how many times Mark had done this sort of thing for Kieran when Kieran was exhausted after a hunt—or how many times Kieran had done it for Mark. Being a Hunter was a risky job; she couldn’t imagine how much of each other’s blood they’d seen.

“Is there a healer in this Court?” Mark asked, straightening up.

“I am the healer,” said Nene. “Though I rarely work alone. Usually I am assisted, but the hour is late and the Court half-empty.” Her gaze fell on Cristina. “You will help me.”

“Me?” Cristina looked startled.

“You have a healing air about you,” said Nene, bustling up to a wooden cabinet and throwing the doors open. In it were jars of herbs, dangling strings of dried flowers, and vials of different-colored liquids. “Can you name any of these?”

“Foamflower,” said Cristina promptly, as if they were in class. “Miner’s lettuce, false lily, queen’s cup.”

Nene looked impressed. She pulled a stack of linens, including strips cut neatly into bandage size, from a drawer and handed them to Cristina. “Too many people in the room will slow a patient’s healing. I will take these two next door; you must remove Kieran’s clothes.”

Cristina’s cheeks flamed. “Mark can do that.”

Nene rolled her eyes. “As you like.” She turned toward the bed, where Kieran was collapsed back against the pillows. There were rusty smears of blood all over Mark’s shirt and skin, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Crush some foamflower, give it to him with water. Do not bandage him yet. We must inspect the wound.”

She hurried from the room, and Emma and Julian dashed after her. They went only a few steps down the corridor, to where a dark red curtain hid an open door. Nene pushed it aside and gestured the two of them to come in.

Once inside, Emma had to suppress a gasp. This room was much grander than the other. The roof was lost in shadows. The walls were silvery quartz, and glowed from within, lighting the room with a soft radiance. Creamy white and ivory flowers cascaded down the walls, perfuming the air with the scent of a garden. A massive bed stood on a platform, steps leading up to it. It was piled with velvet cushions and a rich coverlet.

“Will this do?” Nene asked.

Emma could only nod. A hedge atop which grew a lattice of roses stretched across one end of the room, and behind it a cascade of water rushed down the rocks. When she glanced around the hedge, she saw that it emptied into a rock pool, lined with green and blue stones that formed the shape of a butterfly.

“Not as fancy as the Institute,” she heard Julian say, “but it’ll do.”

“Whose room is this?” Emma asked. “Is it the Queen’s?”

Nene laughed. “The Queen’s chambers? Certainly not. This is Fergus’s—actually, he has two. He is much favored in Court. He won’t mind if you sleep here; he has night watch.”

She turned to walk away, but stopped at the curtain and glanced back at them. “You are my nephew’s brother and sister?”

Emma opened her mouth, then closed it again. Mark was more of a brother to her than anything else. Certainly more of a brother than Julian.

“Yes,” Julian said, sensing her hesitation.

“And you love him,” said Nene.

“I think you will find, if you take the time to get to know him, that he is easy to love,” said Jules, and Emma’s heart expanded, yearning for him, for him and Mark together, happy and laughing as brothers should be, and for the challenge in Julian’s eyes when he looked at Nene. You owe my brother the love he deserves; show it, or I turn my back on you.

Nene cleared her throat. “And my niece? Alessa?”

“Her name is Helen now,” said Julian. He paused for a moment, and Emma could see him weighing the mention of Helen’s situation and dismissing it—he did not trust Nene enough, not yet. “Yes, she is my sister; yes, I love her as I love Mark. They are both easy to love.”

“Easy to love,” echoed Nene, in a musing voice. “There are few of our people I would ever have said were easy to love.” She ducked back through the door. “I must hurry back, before that Hunter boy expires,” she said, and was gone.

Julian looked at Emma with arched eyebrows. “She’s very . . .”

“Yes,” agreed Emma, not needing the rest of the words to know what he meant. She and Julian almost always agreed on people. She felt her mouth curve up as she smiled at him, despite everything, despite the incredible, impossible strain of the night.

And it wasn’t as if the risk was over, she thought, turning to gaze at the room. She had hardly ever been in such a beautiful space. She had even heard of cave hotels, places in Cappadocia and Greece where gorgeous rooms were dug out of rocks and draped with silks and velvets. But it was the flowers, here, that tugged at her heart—those white flowers that smelled like cream and sugar, like the white flowers that grew in Idris. They seemed to radiate light.

And then there was the bed. With a sort of belated shock, she realized that she and Julian had been left alone together in a wildly romantic room with only one, very large and very plush, bed.

Definitely, the night’s worries were not over, at all.

* * *

When Nene returned, she cleaned Kieran’s wound gently with damp linens, pressing the edges of the cut carefully with her fingers. He sat upright and rigid on the edge of the bed, not moving or acknowledging what was going on, but Cristina could see from the deep crescent marking his lower lip that he was in pain.

Mark sat quietly beside him. He seemed wrung out, exhausted, and did not move to hold Kieran’s hand, only sat with his shoulder touching the other boy’s. But then, they had never been the hand-holding type, Cristina thought. The Wild Hunt had not been a place where such gentle expressions of affection were welcome.

“There was monkshood on the Unseelie’s arrow,” Nene said when she was done cleaning the wound. She held her hand out for a bandage and began wrapping Kieran’s slender torso. He had been undressed and re-dressed in clean trousers, a shirt folded on the bed next to him. There were scars on Kieran’s back, not unlike the ones on Mark’s, and they stretched to the tops of his arms and down his forearms, too. He was thin but strong-looking, with clear lines of muscles in his arms and across his chest. “If you were a human or even ordinary fey, it would have killed you, but Hunters have their own protection. You will live.”

“Yes,” Kieran said, an arrogant tilt to his chin. But Cristina wondered. He didn’t say, Yes, I knew I would live. He had doubted, she suspected. He had feared he would die.

She rather admired his bravery. She couldn’t help it.

Nene rolled her eyes, finishing with the bandages. She tapped Cristina’s shoulder as Kieran shrugged his shirt on, doing the buttons up with slow, shaking fingers, and indicated a shallow marble dish on the nightstand, filled with damp cloths swimming in a greenish liquid. “Those are poultices to prevent infection. Put a new one on the wound every two hours.”

Cristina nodded. She wasn’t sure how she would set an alarm or wake up every two hours, or if she was simply meant to stay awake through the night, but she would manage, either way.

“Here,” Nene said, leaning down to Kieran with another vial. “Drink this. It will not harm you, only help you.”

After a moment, Kieran drank. Suddenly he pushed the vial away, coughing. “How dare you—” he began, and then his eyes rolled back and he sank down to the pillows. Mark caught him before his wounded back could touch the bed, and helped Nene carefully roll him onto his side.

“Don’t feel bad,” Mark said, noticing Nene’s set jaw. “He always falls asleep yelling that.”

“He needed to rest,” was all Nene said. She swept from the room.

Mark watched her go, his face troubled. “She is not what I imagined, when I dreamed that I might have family in Faerie,” he said. “For so many years I looked and asked, and there was no sign of them. I had given up.”

“She went out of her way to find you and save you,” said Cristina. “She clearly cares for you.”

“She doesn’t know me,” said Mark. “Faeries feel very strongly about blood. She could not leave me to fall into the hands of the Unseelie King. What happens to one member of a family reflects upon the others of that bloodline.”

She touched your hair, Cristina wanted to say. She had seen it only very quickly: As Nene had reached to bandage Kieran’s back, her fingers had brushed the fine edges of Mark’s pale hair. He hadn’t noticed, and Cristina wondered now, if she told him, if he would even believe her.

Cristina sat down on the foot of the bed. Kieran had curled up, his dark hair tangled beneath his restless head. Mark was leaning back against the headboard. His bare feet were on the bed, only a few inches from Cristina; his arm lay outstretched, his fingers nearly touching hers.

But his gaze was on Kieran. “He doesn’t remember,” he said.

“Kieran? What doesn’t he remember?”

Mark pulled his knees up to his chest. In his torn and bloody shirt and trousers, he looked more like the ragged figure he’d been when the Wild Hunt had let him go. “The Unseelie Court beat him and tortured him,” he said. “I expected it. It’s what they do to their prisoners. After I untied him, as soon as I got him out of the clearing, I realized they’d done him some kind of damage that meant he didn’t remember killing Iarlath. He doesn’t remember anything since that night he saw us talking in the kitchen.”

“He doesn’t remember the whipping, what happened with Jules and Emma—?”

“He doesn’t remember it happening, or that I left him over it,” Mark said grimly. “He said he knew I would come for him. As if we were still—what we were.”

“What were you?” Cristina realized she’d never asked. “Did you exchange promises? Did you have a word for it, like novio?”

“Boyfriend?” Mark echoed. “No, nothing like that. But it was something and then it was nothing. Because I was angry.” He looked at Cristina wretchedly. “But how can I be angry at someone who doesn’t even remember what he did?”

“Your feelings are your feelings. Kieran did do those things. He did them even if he does not remember them.” Cristina frowned. “Do I sound harsh? I don’t mean to. But I sat with Emma, after. I helped bandage her whip cuts.”

“Now you’ve helped bandage Kieran.” Mark took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Cristina. This must seem— I can’t even imagine what you’re thinking. Having to sit here with me, with him—”

“You mean because of—” Cristina blushed. Because of the way we kissed at the revel? She searched inside her heart, looking for jealousy, for bitterness, for anger at Mark. There was nothing. Not even the fury she’d felt at Diego at the appearance of Zara.

How far away that seemed now. How distant and how unimportant. Zara was welcome to Diego; she could have him.

“I’m not angry,” she said. “And you shouldn’t be worrying about what I’m feeling, anyway. We should be concentrating on the fact that Kieran is safe, that we can return.”

“I can’t stop worrying about what you’re feeling,” Mark said. “I can’t stop thinking about you at all.”

Cristina felt her heart thump.

“It would be a mistake to think of the Seelie Court as safe ground where we can rest. There is an old saying that the only difference between Seelie and Unseelie is that the Unseelie do evil in the open, and the Seelie hide it.” Mark glanced down. Kieran was breathing softly, evenly. “And I don’t know what we will do with Kieran,” he said. “Send him back to the Hunt? Call for Gwyn? Kieran will not understand why I would want to be parted from him now.”

“Do you? Want to be parted from him now?”

Mark said nothing.

“I understand,” she said. “I do. You have always needed Kieran so badly, you never had the chance to think about what you wanted with him before.”

Mark made a short noise under his breath. He took her hand and held it, still looking at Kieran. His grip was tight, but she didn’t pull away.

* * *

Julian sat on Fergus’s massive bed. He could see nothing of Emma behind the high hedge that blocked the rock pool, but he could hear her splashing, a sound that echoed off the shining walls.

The sound made his nerves crank tighter. When she was done with the pool, she’d come out, and she’d get in bed with him. He’d shared beds with Emma a hundred times. Maybe a thousand. But it had meant nothing when they were children, and later, when they weren’t, he had told himself it still meant nothing, even when he was waking up in the middle of the night to watch the way strands of her hair tickled her cheek while she slept. Even when she started to leave early in the morning to run on the beach, and he’d curl up in the warmth she left against the sheets and inhale the rose-water scent of her skin.

Breathe. He dug his hands into the velvet pillow he’d pulled onto his lap. Think about something else.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t have plenty of other things to think about. Here they were in the Seelie Court, not quite prisoners and not quite guests. Faerie was just as hard to escape as it was to enter, and yet they had no plan for how to leave.

But he was exhausted; this was the first time he’d been alone in a bedroom with Emma since she’d ended things, and for this rare instant, his heart was doing the thinking, not his brain.

“Jules?” she called. He remembered the brief days when she had called him Julian, the way the sound of the word in her mouth had made his heart shatter with pleasure. “Nene left me a dress, and it’s . . .” She sighed. “Well, I guess you’d better see.”

She came out from behind the hedge that hid the pool, her hair down, wearing the dress. Faerie clothes were usually either very ornate or very simple. This dress was simple. Thin straps crisscrossed her shoulders; it was made of a silky white material that clung to her wet body like a second skin, outlining the curves of her waist and hips.

Julian felt his mouth go dry. Why had Nene left her a dress? Why couldn’t Emma be coming to bed in filthy gear? Why did the universe hate him?

“It’s white,” she said, frowning.

For death and mourning, the color’s white. White was funerals for Shadowhunters: There was white gear for state funerals, and white silk was placed over the eyes of dead Shadowhunters when their bodies were burned.

“White doesn’t mean anything to faeries,” he said. “To them, it’s the color of flowers and natural things.”

“I know, it’s just . . .” She sighed and began to pad barefoot up the stairs to the dais where the bed was centered. She stopped to examine the enormous mattress, shaking her head in wonderment. “Okay maybe I didn’t immediately warm to Fergus when we met,” she said. Her face was glowing from the heat of the water, her cheeks pink. “But he would run an awesome bed-and-breakfast, you have to admit. He’d probably slip a mint tenderly under your pillow every night.”

The gown fell away slightly as she climbed onto the bed, and Julian realized to his horror that it was slit up the side almost to her hip. Her long legs flashed against the material as she settled herself onto the bedspread.

The universe didn’t just hate him, it was trying to kill him.

“Give me some more pillows,” Emma demanded, and snatched several of them from beside Julian before he could move. He kept firm hold of the one on his lap and looked at Emma levelly.

“No stealing the covers,” he said.

“I would never.” She pushed the pillows behind her, making a pile she could lean against. Her damp hair adhered to her neck and shoulders, long locks of pale wet gold.

Her eyes were red-rimmed, as if she’d been crying. Emma rarely cried. He realized her chatter since she’d come into the bedroom was false cheer, something he ought to have known—he, who knew Emma better than anyone.

“Em,” he said, unable to help himself, or the gentleness in his voice. “Are you all right? What happened at the Unseelie Court—”

“I just feel so stupid,” she said, the bravado draining from her voice. Under the artifice was Emma, his Emma, with all her force and intelligence and bravery. Emma, sounding shattered. “I know faeries play tricks. I know they lie without lying. And yet the phouka said to me—he said if I came into Faerie, I would see the face of someone I had loved and lost.”

“Very Fair Folk,” said Julian. “You saw his face, your father’s face, but it wasn’t him. It was an illusion.”

“It was like I couldn’t process it,” she said. “My whole mind was clouded. All I could think was that I had my father back.”

“Your mind probably was clouded,” said Julian. “There are all sorts of subtle enchantments that can blur your thoughts here. And it happened so quickly. I didn’t suspect it was an illusion either. I’ve never heard of one so strong.”

She didn’t say anything. She was leaning back on her hands, her body outlined by the white gown. He felt a flash of almost-pain as if there were a key embedded under his flesh, tightening his skin every time it was turned. Memories attacked his mind ruthlessly—what it was like to slide his hands over her body, the way her teeth felt against his lower lip. The arch of her body fitting into the arch of his: a double crescent, an unraveled infinity sign.

He’d always thought desire was meant to be a pleasurable feeling. He’d never thought it could cut like this, like razors under his skin. He’d thought before that night on the beach with Emma that he wanted her more than anyone had ever wanted. He’d thought the wanting might kill him. But now he knew imagination was a pale thing. That even when it bled from him in the form of paint on canvas, it couldn’t capture the richness of her skin on his, the sweet-hot taste of her mouth. Wanting wouldn’t kill him, he thought, but knowing what he was missing might.

He dug his fingernails into his palms, hard. Unfortunately, he’d bitten them down too far to do much damage.

“Seeing that thing turn out not to be my father—it made me realize how much of my life was an illusion,” Emma said. “I spent so much time looking for revenge, but finding it didn’t make me happy. Cameron didn’t make me happy. I thought all these things would make me happy, but it was all an illusion.” She turned toward him, her eyes wide and impossibly dark. “You’re one of the only real things in my life, Julian.”

He could feel his heart beating through his body. Every other emotion—his jealousy of Mark, the pain of separation from Emma, his worry for the children, his fear of what the Seelie Court held for them—faded. Emma was looking at him and her cheeks were flushed and her lips were parted and if she leaned toward him, if she wanted him at all, he would give up and break down and apart. Even if it meant betraying his brother, he would do it. He would pull her toward him and bury himself in her, in her hair and her skin and her body.

It would be a thing he would remember later with agony that felt like white-hot knives. It would be a further reminder of everything he could never really have. And he would hate himself for hurting Mark. But none of that would stop him. He knew how far his willpower went, and he had reached its limit. Already his body was shaking, his breath quickening. He had only to reach out—

“I want to be parabatai again,” she said. “The way we were before.”

The words exploded like a blow inside his head. She didn’t want him; she wanted to be parabatai, and that was it. He’d been sitting there thinking of what he wanted and how much pain he could take, but it didn’t matter if she didn’t want him. How had he been so stupid?

He spoke evenly. “We’ll always be parabatai, Emma. It’s for life.”

“It’s been weird ever since we—ever since I started dating Mark,” she said, holding his gaze with her own. “But it’s not because of Mark. It’s because of us. What we did.”

“We’ll be fine,” he said. “There’s no rule book for this, no guidance. But we don’t want to hurt each other, so we won’t.”

“There’ve been parabatai in the past who started hating each other. Think of Lucian Graymark and Valentine Morgenstern.”

“That won’t happen to us. We chose each other when we were children. We chose each other again when we were fourteen. I chose you, and you chose me. That’s what the parabatai ceremony is, really, isn’t it? It’s a way of sealing that promise. The one that says that I will always choose you.”

She leaned against his arm, just the lightest touch of her shoulder against his, but it lit up his body like fireworks over the Santa Monica Pier. “Jules?”

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

“I will always choose you, too,” she said, and, laying her head on his shoulder, shut her eyes.

* * *

Cristina woke out of an uneasy sleep with a start. The room was dim; she was curled on the foot of the bed, her legs drawn up under her. Kieran was sleeping a drugged sleep propped against pillows, and Mark was on the floor, tangled in blankets.

Two hours, Nene had said. She had to check on Kieran every two hours. She looked again at Mark, decided she couldn’t wake him, sighed, and rose to a sitting position, edging up the bed toward the faerie prince.

Many people looked calm in their sleep, but not Kieran. He was breathing hard, eyes darting back and forth behind his eyelids. His hands moved restlessly over the bedcovers. Still, he did not wake when she leaned forward to push up the back of his shirt with awkward fingers.

His skin was fever-hot. He was achingly lovely so close, though: His long cheekbones matched his long eyes, their thick lashes feathering down, his hair a deep blue-black.

She quickly changed out the poultice; the old one was half-soaked with blood. As she leaned forward to pull his shirt back down, a hand clamped around her wrist like a vise.

Black and silver eyes gazed up at her. His lips moved; they were chapped and dry.

“Water?” he whispered.

Somehow, one-handedly, she managed to pour water from a pitcher on the nightstand into a pewter cup and give it to him. He drank it without letting go of her.

“Maybe you do not remember me,” she said. “I am Cristina.”

He put the cup down and stared at her. “I know who you are,” he said, after a moment. “I thought—but no. We are in the Seelie Court.”

“Yes,” she said. “Mark is asleep,” she added, in case he was worried.

But his mind seemed far away. “I thought I would die this night,” he said. “I was prepared for it. I was ready.”

“Things do not always happen when we think they will,” Cristina said. It didn’t seem that convincing a remark to her, but Kieran appeared comforted. Exhaustion was sweeping over his face, like a curtain sliding across a window.

His grip tightened on her. “Stay with me,” he said.

Jolted by surprise, she would have replied—perhaps even refused—but she did not get the chance. He was already asleep.

* * *

Julian lay awake.

He wanted to sleep; exhaustion felt as if it had soaked into his bones. But the room was full of dim light and Emma was maddeningly close to him. He could feel the heat from her body as she slept. She had pushed away part of the bedspread that covered her, and he could see her bare shoulder where the dress she wore had slipped down, and the shape of the parabatai rune on her arm.

He thought of the storm clouds outside the Institute, the way she’d kissed him on the Institute steps before Gwyn had come. No, best to be truthful with himself. Before she’d pulled away and said his brother’s name. That had been what ended it.

Perhaps it was just too easy to fall back into inappropriate emotion when they were already so close. Part of him wanted her to forget him and be happy. Part of him wanted her to remember the way he remembered, as if the memory of what they had been like together were a living part of his blood.

He ran his hands restlessly through his hair. The more he tried to bury such thoughts, the more they bubbled up, like water in the rock pool. He wanted to reach down and draw Emma toward him, capture her mouth with his—kiss the real Emma and erase the memory of the leanansídhe—but he would have settled for curling her close against his side, holding her through the night and feeling her body expand and contract as she breathed. He would have settled for sleeping through the night with only their smallest fingers touching.

“Julian,” said a soft voice. “Awaken, son of thorns.”

He sat up straight. Standing at the foot of the bed was a woman. Not Nene or Cristina: a woman he’d never seen before in person, though she was familiar from pictures. She was thin to the point of gauntness, but still beautiful, with full lips and glass-blue eyes. Red hair rippled to her waist. Her dress looked as if it had been made for her in a time before she had been so starved, but it was still lovely: deep blue and white, patterned with a delicate tracery of feathers, it wrapped her body in a downed softness. Her hands were long and white and pale, her mouth red, her ears slightly pointed.

On her head was a golden circlet—a crown, of intricate faerie-work.

“Julian Blackthorn,” said the Queen of the Seelie Court. “Wake now and come with me, for I have something to show you.”