It was pure instinct to fight for breath.
I was encased in ice again the moment I slid through the Silver.
Passing through the dark mirror peeled back a curtain, exposing more forgotten childhood memories. Abruptly, I recalled being four, five, six, finding myself stuck in this alien dreamscape nightly. No sooner did I say my prayers, close my eyes, and drift off to sleep than a disembodied command would infiltrate my slumber.
I recalled waking from those nightmares, gasping and shivering, running for Daddy, crying that I was freezing, suffocating.
I wondered what young Jack Lane had made of it—his adopted daughter who’d been forbidden to ever return to the country of her birth, who was tormented by terrifyingly cold, airless nightmares. What horrors had he decided I must have suffered to be scarred in such ways?
I loved him with all my heart for the childhood he’d given me. He’d anchored me with the day-to-day routines of a simple life, crammed it full of sunshine and bike rides, music lessons and baking with Mom in our bright, warm kitchen. Perhaps he’d let me be too frivolous, in an effort to counter the pain of those nightmares. But I couldn’t say I’d have done any differently as a parent.
The inability to breathe had been only the first of many things my child’s mind had found so terrifying. As I’d gotten older, strengthened by the cocoon of parental love, I’d learned to suppress those nocturnal images and the bleak emotions the Cold Place engendered. By my teens, the recurring nightmare had been buried deep in my subconscious, leaving me burdened with an intense dislike of the cold and a vague sense of bipolarity I was finally beginning to understand. If occasionally images that made no sense to me slipped through a crack, I attributed them to some horror movie I’d flipped through on TV.
Do not be frightened. I chose you because you could.
I remembered that now, too. The voice that had demanded I come had tried to comfort me and promised I was capable of the task—whatever it was.
I’d never believed it. If I was capable, I wouldn’t have dreaded it so much.
I shook myself hard, cracking the ice. It dropped away, but I immediately re-iced.
I repeated the shaking, the re-icing. I did it four or five more times, terrified all the while that if I didn’t keep cracking it, it would build up so thick that I would end up staying right here where I stood forever, a statue of a woman, frozen and forgotten, in the Unseelie King’s bedchamber.
When Barrons came back to life, he would stand and stare through the mirror at me and try to roar me back to my senses and into motion, but there I’d be—right in front of his eyes, eternally out of his reach, because nobody but me and the Unseelie race’s mysterious creator could enter the king’s boudoir. And who knew where the king was?
For that matter, who knew who the king was?
And I really wanted to, which meant I had to find a way to move around in his natural habitat. I’d done it before, long ago, in another life, as his lover, so surely I could figure out how to do it again. It seemed I’d left clues for myself.
Fear, not fact, impedes you.
I was supposed to alter my expectations and do without breath.
When I re-iced again, I remained still and let the ice cover me, instead of resisting and struggling to breathe. I tried to imagine it as a comfort, a soothing coolness to a high fever. I made it all of thirty seconds before I panicked. Silvery sheets rained from me and shattered on the obsidian floor as I moved jerkily.
I made it an entire minute the second time.
By my third try, it dawned on me that I hadn’t actually drawn a breath since I’d passed through the mirror. I’d been so busy fighting the ice that I hadn’t realized I was no longer breathing. I would have snorted but I couldn’t. There literally was no breath on this side of the Silver. My physicality was a different thing here.
Here I stood, fighting for something I didn’t even need, driven by a life of conditioning.
Could I talk on this side? Wasn’t voice comprised of breath to drive it?
“Hello.” I flinched.
I’d chimed like one of the dark princes, only on a different scale, high and feminine. Although my greeting had been comprised of English syllables, without breath to drive it the notes sounded as if slide-hammered on a hellish xylophone.
“Is anyone here?” I iced again, frozen in place by sheer astonishment at the bizarre sound. I spoke in shades of tubular bells.
Assured that I wasn’t going to suffocate, that I could talk, sort of, and that, as long as I kept moving, the ice would keep cracking, I began to jog in place and took a look around.
The king’s bedchamber was the size of a football stadium. Walls of black ice towered overhead to a ceiling too high to see. Spicy black petals from some exquisite, otherworldly rose garden swirled at my feet as I bounced lightly from foot to foot. Clusters of frost that were trying to form on my skin rained down to join them. I was mesmerized a moment by the sparkling crystals against the black floor and flowers.
Falling back, laughing, ice in her hair, a handful of velvety petals fluttering down to land on her bare breasts …
Never cold here.
Sadness overwhelmed me. I nearly choked on it.
He had so many ambitions.
She had one. To love.
Could have learned from her.
The tiny diamonds from the concubine’s—I couldn’t bring myself to say my, especially not standing so close to the king’s bed—side of the bedchamber hadn’t been extinguished at all. They’d become something else when they passed through and now shimmered on the dark air, midnight fireflies winking with blue flame.
The bed was draped with black curtains that fluttered around piles of silky black furs and filled up a third of the chamber, the portion visible from the other side. I moved to it, slid my hand over the furs. They were sleek, sensual. I wanted to stretch out naked and never leave.
It wasn’t the white warm place I found so comforting and familiar, but there was beauty here, too, on the far side of the mirror. Her world was the bright, glorious summer day that held no secrets, but his was the dark, glittering night where anything was possible. I tipped my head back. Was that a black ceiling painted with stars so high above me or a night sky sliced from another world and brought here for my pleasure?
I was in his bedchamber. I remembered this place. I’d come. Would he? Would I finally see the face of my long-lost lover? If he was my beloved king, why was I so afraid?
Hurry! Almost here … Come quickly!
The command came from beyond a giant arched opening far across the bedchamber. The summons was beyond my ability to deny. I broke into a run, following the voice of my childhood pied piper.
Once the king had held the Seelie Queen above all others, but somewhere down the eons, things had changed. He had puzzled over it for thousands of years, studying her, challenging her with subtle tests, in an effort to divine if the problem lay within her or within him.
He was comforted on the day he realized it was through no fault of theirs but that the two who were the eternal glue of their race were coming apart because she was Stasis and he was Change. It was their nature. The oddity was how long they had remained together.
He could not have prevented his evolution any more than she could have prevented her stagnation. All that the queen was at that very moment was all she would ever be.
Ironically, the mother of their race—she who wielded the Song of Making, she who could enact the mightiest acts of all creation—was no Creator. She was power without wonder, satisfaction without joy. What was existence without wonder, without joy? Meaningless. Empty.
And she thought he was dangerous.
He began to slip off more frequently, exploring worlds without her, hungering for things he could not name. The bright, silly court he once found harmlessly entertaining became to him a place of empty pursuits and jaded palates.
He built a fortress on a world of black ice because it was the antithesis of all the queen had chosen. Here, in his dark, quiet castle, he could think. Here, where there were no garish chaises or brilliantly clad courtiers, he could feel himself expanding. He was not drowned by incessant tinkling laughter, in constant petty disputes. He was free.
Once, the queen sought him in his ice castle, and it amused him to see her horror at being leeched of all her bright plumage by the strange light on the world he had chosen, which cast everything black, white, or blue. It suited his need for Spartan surroundings while he sorted through the complexity of his existence and decided the next thing he would be. It was after he had found his concubine, long after he had realized he was no longer capable of tolerating his own people for more than a few short hours at a time, but before he’d begun his efforts to make his beloved Fae like himself.
The queen had been seductive, she had been full of guile, she had been scornful. She had finally tried to use a small part of the Song against him, but he had been prepared for that because, like her, he looked into the future as far as it would permit and foreseen this day.
They held each other at bay with weapons for the first time in the history of their race.
As the imperious, unforgiving matriarch of their race stormed from his fortress, he padlocked his doors against her, vowing that until she gave him what he wanted—the secret to immortality for his beloved—no Seelie would ever again walk his icy halls. Only the queen could dispense the elixir of life. She kept it hidden in her private bower. He wanted that, and more: enough to make the concubine his equal in every way.
I shook myself hard and stopped running. I iced instantly, but it didn’t terrify me. I waited a few moments before taking a step and cracking it.
The memories on the king’s side of the Silver didn’t play out before my eyes like the residue of times past on the concubine’s side. Here they seemed to slide directly into my brain.
It was as if I’d just been two people: One had been running down enormous halls of black ice, and the other had stood in a kingly reception hall, watching the first Fae queen fight with a mighty darkness, probing for weaknesses, manipulating, always manipulating. I knew every detail of her being, what she looked like in her true form and her preferred guises. I even knew the look on her face as she’d died.
Come to me …
I began to run again, down floors of obsidian. The king hadn’t been much for decorating. No windows opened onto the world outside his walls, although I knew they once did, in those early days before the queen turned his planet into a prison. I also knew that once there were simple yet regal furnishings, but now the only embellishments were elaborately carved designs in the ice itself, lending the place a certain austere majesty. If the queen’s court was a gaily painted whore, the king’s was a strange but natural beauty.
I knew every hall, every twist and turn, every chamber. She must have lived here, before he’d made the Silvers for her. Me.
I shivered.
So where was he now?
If I genuinely was his concubine reincarnated, why wasn’t he waiting for me? It seemed I’d been programmed to end up here, one way or another. Who was summoning me?
I am dying.…
My heart constricted. If I’d thought I couldn’t breathe before, it was nothing compared to what those three simple words had just made me feel—that I would give my right arm, my eyeteeth, maybe even twenty years of my life to prevent that from happening.
I skidded to a halt before the gigantic doors to the king’s fortress and stared up. Chiseled of ebon ice, they had to be a hundred feet tall. There was no way I could open them. But the voice was coming from beyond them—out there in the dreaded, icy Unseelie hell.
Elaborate symbols decorated the high arch into which the doors were set, and I suddenly understood there was a pass code. Unfortunately, I couldn’t reach any of the symbols to press them, and there was no convenient hundred-foot ladder propped nearby.
I felt him then.
Almost as if he rose up behind me.
I heard a command come out of my own mouth, words I was incapable of uttering with a human tongue, and the enormous doors swung silently open.
The icy prison was exactly as I’d dreamed it, with a single significant difference.
It was empty.
In my nightmares, the prison had always been inhabited by countless monstrous Unseelie who had squatted high on cliffs above me, hurling chunks of ice down the ravine as if they were bowlers from hell and I was the pin. Others darted low, taking stabs at me with giant beaks.
The moment I’d stepped through the king’s mighty doors, I braced myself for an attack.
It didn’t come.
The stark arctic terrain was a great empty hull of a prison with rusted-out bars.
Even devoid of those once incarcerated, despair clung to every ridge, blew down from mountainous cliffs, and seeped up from bottomless chasms.
I tilted my head back. There was no sky. Cliffs of black ice stretched up farther than the eye could follow. A blue glow emanated from the cliffs—the only light in the place. Blue-black fog gusted from crevices in the cliffs.
The moon would never rise here, the sun would never set. Seasons would not pass. Color would never splash this landscape.
Death in this place would be a blessing. There was no hope, no expectation that life would ever change. For hundreds of thousands of years, the Unseelie had abided in these chilling, killing, sunless cliffs. Their need, their emptiness, had stained the very stuff from which their prison was fashioned. Once, long ago, it had been a fine if strange world. Now it was radioactive to the core.
I knew that if I remained long on this barren terrain, I would lose all will to leave. I would come to believe that this arctic wasteland, this frozen oubliette of misery, was all that existed, all that had ever existed and, worse—was exactly what I deserved.
Was I too late? Was I supposed to have answered this summons long before the prison walls fell? Was that why I kept seeing all those hourglasses with black sand running out?
But I kept hearing the voice in my dreams—and now, when I was awake. That had to mean there was still time.
For what?
I scanned the many caves cut into the sheer façade of jagged black cliffs, frigid homes the Unseelie had clawed into the unforgiving landscape. Nothing stirred. I knew without even looking I would find no creature comforts within. Those without hope didn’t feather nests. They endured. I was startled by a sudden deep sorrow that they’d been reduced to such straits. What a vindictive act on the queen’s part! They might have been brethren to the Light Court, not forced to shiver for eternity in the cold and dark. On sunny beaches, in tropical climes, perhaps they would have become something less monstrous, evolved as the king had. But, no, the vicious queen hadn’t been satisfied with imprisoning them. She’d wanted them to suffer. And for what crimes? What had they done to deserve it, other than be born without her consent?
I was disturbed by the turn of my thoughts. I was feeling pity for the Unseelie and thinking the king had evolved.
It had to be this place’s memory residue.
I crunched over iced drifts, scaled jagged outcroppings, and turned down a narrow pathway between cliffs that were hundreds of feet high. The thin fissure through which I passed was another of my childhood terrors. Barely two and a half feet wide, the narrow passage made me feel crushed, claustrophobic, yet I knew my route went this way.
With each step I took, my feelings of bipolarity grew.
I was Mac, who hated Unseelie and wanted nothing more than to see the prison walls restored, the monstrous killers contained.
I was the concubine, who loved the king and all of his children. I even loved this place. There had been happy moments here before the bitch queen broke everything in those final seconds before she died.
Speaking of dying, I should have. I wasn’t breathing. I had no blood flow. No oxygen. I should have been mortally frostbitten the moment I’d passed through the Silver. There was no plausible way I could be walking through these conditions, yet I was.
I was so cold that dying would have been a welcome relief. It was easy to see why my child’s mind had thrilled to the poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” The notion of being warm again was nearly beyond my comprehension.
Half a dozen times I considered aborting my unwanted mission. I could turn around, go back to the mansion, slip through the Silver, find Jericho, resume our plans, and pretend none of this had ever happened. He’d never tell. He had a few dark secrets of his own to keep.
I could forget I was the concubine. Forget that I’d ever had a past existence. I mean, really, who wanted to be in love with someone they’d never even met—at least not in this lifetime? The thought of the Unseelie King was a big messy knot of emotions inside me that I preferred to leave tangled and unexamined.
Hurry! You must!
Razor-edged snow began to fall. Deep in caves, things chimed horrible, grating sounds. Jericho had told me that there were creatures so twisted and monstrous in the Unseelie prison that they’d stay even if the walls came down, because they liked their home. How was I supposed to have made it through if the place had still been fully populated? For that matter, how was I supposed to have found my way here to begin with? How had things been orchestrated to bring me here, to this moment, in this way—and, more importantly, by whom? Whose puppet was I? I resented being here. I couldn’t have turned back for anything.
I have no idea how long I trudged through despair and futility so palpable that every step felt like slogging through wet cement. Temporal divisions did not exist in this place. There were no watches or clocks, no minutes or hours, no night or day, no sun or moon. Just relentless black and white and blue matched by relentless misery.
How many times had I walked this path while I slept? If I’d been having the dream since birth—more than eight thousand.
Repetition had made every step instinctual. I skirted dangerously thin ice that I couldn’t have known was there. I intuited the location of bottomless drifts. I knew the shape and number of the entrances in the caves in the black walls high above my head. I recognized landmarks too insignificant to be noticed by anyone who hadn’t walked this path countless times.
If my heart could have pounded, it would have. I had no idea what awaited me. If I’d ever gotten to the end of my journey in my dreams, I’d blocked it thoroughly.
It had always been a woman’s voice commanding me, ordering me to obey. Had my inner concubine been taking over every time I’d fallen asleep and fed me dreams, trying to force me to remember and make me do something?
Darroc had told me that some said the Unseelie King was entombed in black ice, slumbering in his prison eternally. Had he been tricked into a trap and he’d been reaching out to me in the Dreaming to teach me all I needed to know to free him? Was that what my whole life had been about?
Despite the love I knew he and the concubine shared, I resented that my mortal existence had been used up without regard for what it might have been, what I might have been. Hadn’t she lived long enough once before, waiting for him to wake up, to pull his head out and live?
It was no wonder I’d always felt so psychotic in high school! I’d been walking around since childhood with the suppressed memories of another fantastical lifetime embedded in my subconscious!
I suddenly found everything about myself suspect. Did I really love sunshine so much, or was it a leftover feeling from her? Was I really crazy about fashion, or was I obsessing over the concubine’s closet of a thousand stunning gowns? Was I truly enthralled by beautifying my surroundings, or was it an outlet for her need to change the face of her confinement while she waited for her lover?
Did I even like the color pink?
I tried to remember how many of her dresses had been some shade of rose.
“Ugh,” I said. It came out as a deep, booming gong.
I didn’t want to be her. I wanted to be me. But, as far as I knew, I hadn’t even been born.
A terrible thought occurred to me. Maybe I wasn’t the concubine reincarnated; maybe I was the concubine and somebody had forced me to drink from the cauldron!
“Right, then sent me to a plastic surgeon and re-created my face?” I muttered. I didn’t look anything like the concubine.
My head was spinning with fears, each more disturbing than the last.
I stopped, as if a homing beacon that had been beeping faster and faster inside me had abruptly become a single long sound.
I was there. Wherever “there” was supposed to be. Whatever fate awaited me, whatever, whoever had brought me here, was just over the next ridge of black ice, some twenty feet away.
I stood still so long that I iced again.
Despair filled me. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to top the ridge. What if I didn’t like what I found? Had I blocked this memory because I was going to die here?
What if I was too late?
The prison was empty. There was no point in going on. I should just give in, turn to ice permanently, and forget. I didn’t want to be the concubine. I didn’t want to find the king. I didn’t want to stay in Faery or be his forever love.
I wanted to be human. I wanted to live in Dublin and Ashford and love my mom and dad. I wanted to fight with Jericho Barrons and run a bookstore one day when our world was rebuilt. I wanted to watch Dani grow up and fall in love for the first time. I wanted to replace that old woman at the abbey with Kat and take tropical vacations on human beaches.
I stood, torn by indecision. Go greet my destiny, like a good little automaton? Freeze and forget, as the overwhelming stain of futility in this place was trying to convince me to do? Or turn and walk away? That thought appealed to me a lot. It smacked of personal will, of choosing to set sail on my own course and terms.
If I never crested that ridge and never discovered the end of this dream that had been plaguing me all my life, would I be free of it?
There was no higher power forcing me to go on, no divine being charging me with tracking the Book and getting the walls back up. Just because I could track it didn’t mean I had to. I didn’t have to fight the Fae. I was a free agent. I could leave right now, move far away, shirk responsibility, look out for myself, and leave this mess to somebody else. It was a strange new world. I could stop resisting, adapt, and make the best of it. If I’d proved nothing else to myself over the past few months, I was good at adapting and figuring out how to go on when things weren’t remotely what I’d thought they were.
Still … could I really walk away now and never know what all this had been about? Live with unresolved bipolarity shaping all my choices? Did I want to live that way—a conflicted, screwed-up, half-afraid existence of someone who’d chickened out at the critical moment?
Safety is a fence, and fences are for sheep, I’d told Rowena.
Were it put to the test, she’d replied tartly, I wonder where you would truly stand.
This was the test.
I cracked the ice, shook it from my skin, and headed for the top of the ridge.