As dawn pinked the sky outside, Niall stared bleary-eyed at the pages of notes on the table between him and Bryce. “I’m sorry I can’t remember more. Usually my memory is better than this, but I wasn’t paying much attention at the time.”

“No, you’ve been amazingly helpful.” Bryce threaded his fingers through his hair, looking as weary as Niall felt. “We’ve been looking at this all wrong. The druid circle’s spell looks for movement—that’s the only way to detect anything. But I forgot. In Faerie, time moves differently. Slower than the Outer World.”

Niall shrugged. “Sometimes. It depends.”

“On what?”

“Who knows? Faerie has its own rules and moods.”

“You make it sound like a person.”

“Well, it is, more or less. It’s a child of the elder gods as much as the fae are, if you look at it the right way. Especially since we know its heart—the One Tree—is sort of the same as the Seelie Queen.”

Bryce leaned forward, his gaze intense behind his glasses for all that his eyes were red-rimmed. “But see, that’s where I think you’re missing the bigger picture. I saw that the Queen was the One Tree the first time I met her, but she’s not all of it. The Unseelie King is supposed to be its roots. It’s the balance that Cassie is always after me about. Without the trunk, the branches, and the leaves, the roots have no purpose. But without the roots? The trunk will topple, and the leaves will wither for lack of nourishment.”

“So—”

“So this mating was inevitable. I think the elder gods may have planned it from the first. The tree metaphor gives you something physical to relate to, and if I’ve learned one thing about the fae in the last few weeks, it’s that they have a tough time with philosophical concepts.”

Niall frowned. “Hold on. What about the tenets of both courts? Aren’t those concepts?”

“No. Don’t you see? They were presented to you as fixed. Concrete. Almost as physical as the One Tree. Have you—has anyone—ever seen an actual tree that’s the One Tree?”

“I haven’t. But if I wanted to, I could find it.” He pressed his fist to his chest, below and to the right of his heart. “We can feel its pull, like a compass.”

“So why haven’t you ever tried to follow it?”

Niall frowned, bewildered. “What would be the point?”

“That—” Bryce jabbed a finger toward Niall “—is what I’m talking about. You never even considered asking the question, did you? The primary artifact of Faerie, and none of you has ever bothered to look for it. Because it doesn’t exist. Not as a tree. It’s even more of a concept than the tenets. It’s an . . . an organizing principle. Not a physical thing at all.”

“But you said the Queen—”

“She’s the embodiment of it. She and the King—like an engine that keeps it running. But think how hard that must be. The tenets were a fail-safe, like sub-points in the grand Faerie outline. But really it’s more like a parent-child relationship. I mean an actual parent-child relationship.”

“You mean the Queen and King are the parents of all fae? That doesn’t quite work, since fae procreation is quirky at best and nonexistent at worst.”

“No. Not of the fae. Of Faerie itself.”

Niall reared back in his chair. “How can the parents be enclosed in the child? That doesn’t make sense.”

“That’s because you’re thinking of it physically or biologically. This is conceptual. The parents are responsible for the well-being of the child, but they also have to manage it. Think about it. An infant has no organized thought patterns—it has to learn. It learns from examples and rules until it’s able to make decisions on its own.”

“You mean . . .” Niall’s eyes widened. “The Unification. The Convergence. They’re like . . . like . . .”

“Like puberty and adulthood. Faerie is maturing. Changing. Adapting. The parents—the Queen and Eamon—are guiding the maturation process. But the Queen was essentially a single parent for a long, long time. I think Faerie turned into a juvenile delinquent.”

Niall could relate, since he’d been the equivalent himself. “She certainly got no help from my bloody father.”

“Exactly. So the Convergence is overdue by a couple of centuries at least. The fae are like the neurons of the meta-child’s brain, and it takes cooperation from all the neurons to evolve to the next level.”

Niall quirked an eyebrow. “I think you’re taking this metaphor a little too far.”

Bryce waved a hand dismissively. “Whatever. You get my point, though, right? It wasn’t until I found out about how the elder gods and the druids created the fae for . . . for convenience that I started thinking about it. Because the fae haven’t been allowed to think about it—the only ones in Faerie who had a clue were the King and Queen, and they kept it a secret, cloaking it in freaking bogeyman stories.”

“Humoring the kids,” Niall murmured.

“Protecting the kids. Druids couldn’t be trusted not to exploit the situation back then—they had to learn to police themselves. It should have been introduced gradually before, but the single mom had enough on her hands dealing with her crazy coparent—”

“Don’t I know it.”

“Not to mention her equally crazy boyfriend and the equivalent of a hormonal teenager.”

:Drama queen!: Niall snorted.

Bryce frowned. “What?”

“Oh nothing. I get these mental text messages from the ethera. They just referred to Faerie as a drama queen.”

“Ethera?”

“Like . . . like spirits, I guess you could say. The embodiment of the Outer World. They like talking to me.”

“Is that why you speak in the current vernacular instead of the language of Georgian England?”

“I suppose. It might be my human mother’s blood. I evolve with the Outer World as much as with Faerie.”

Bryce blinked. “A child of two worlds. Holy crap. And your wounds—you say a god inflicted them?”

“Yes. Why is that making you look as if a giant lightbulb just flashed on in your head?”

Bryce leaped up and grabbed a stack of oversized charts from the breakfast bar. “Remember you said that your father didn’t understand the subtlety of depriving the Queen of her bard without actually killing him?”

“Sure.”

“Well I think the magician who’s driving this spell has trouble with subtle interpretation too.” He spread a chart on the table and pointed to some kind of colorful arcane code. “This is what we’ve been able to determine from the sources available to us—which we’re pretty sure are the same ones that the magician is using too, since they came from the same place.”

“Where’s that?”

“Originally? The library at Alexandria.”

Niall blinked. “The one that burned?”

“Yes. But luckily, a circle of druids had seen this first, and since their—our—traditions are all oral, they’d committed it to memory and it got passed down, then transcribed by a few heretic monks who were burned for their trouble in the Spanish Inquisition.”

“Nobody expected that, I’ll bet.”

Bryce blinked at him. “Seriously? Monty Python?”

Niall smirked. “What can I say? The ethera are fans.”

“Anyway, the spell of binding says this: ‘There at the altar, at the center of all, the heart of the child of two worlds, god-touched, laid open for the good of all.’”

Niall’s veins felt as if they’d been filled with ice. “I was supposed to be a sacrifice? Fionbarr was going to cut out my heart on the altar?” Did Eamon know? He’d begged for Niall’s presence, had given him the token to be presented at the crucial moment. Was that so he could be overpowered by Fionbarr and slaughtered for the good of Faerie?

Would Eamon sacrifice him if he thought it was best for the realm?

“Hey hey hey.” Bryce grasped his shoulder. “Don’t go there, okay? Because you’re not the only one who fits that bill. Not the way I see it.”

Niall took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m . . . I’m fine. Is it— Could it be Eamon? He’s a child of two worlds too.”

Bryce shook his head. “Not entirely, no. His mother was a fae, even if from a different branch. Besides, he hasn’t been god-touched. There’s only one other fae who meets both criteria.”

Bryce met his gaze calmly, obviously waiting for Niall to make the connection himself—and when it happened, the ice in his veins cracked. “Gareth. He’s Gwydion’s pupil. God-touched. But he’s not a child of two worlds.”

“Since your disappearance, he has been. His life is rooted in the Outer World by choice, not by curse. We assumed he was the intended sacrifice, since we didn’t know about you. If the two of you hadn’t bolted, I’m convinced that one or both of you would have been gutted on the altar. And from what we can determine, that would have been entirely the wrong thing to do.”

Niall jumped up, sending his chair toppling onto the floor. “‘Wrong thing to do’? Is that what you call it? My brother wanting to murder me, murder Gareth, all while pretending to want me to be part of the future of Faerie?” Niall barked a laugh. “Well, I guess if my heart created the new realm, that’s one way of ensuring I’d be ‘part’ of it.”

“Niall, that’s not what I mean. I don’t think Eamon or the Queen had any idea about this. He showed you the plans, didn’t he? He asked you to look at the spell and the schematics?”

“Yes. But maybe they weren’t the real ones. Or not the complete set.”

Bryce’s gaze softened. “Niall. Do you really think your brother would sacrifice you? He went to a lot of trouble to rescue you.”

“Yeah.” Niall swallowed. “But maybe that’s why. He needed an . . . ingredient for his bloody spell.”

“From what you know of Eamon, would he be likely to read the arcana of the incantation? Would he understand it if he did?”

“He . . . I don’t know. He’s smart, but he’s . . . well, upstanding and straightforward. He never expects deviousness. It’s one of the reasons Tiarnach was always able to keep him in line. Eamon always expected the best from him—took him at his word.” Shame swamped him, because he’d exploited that quality once himself: his brother had been the first target of Niall’s pranks when they were boys. Eamon had fallen for it every time, never holding a grudge, but never learning caution either.

Niall stared at Bryce, shame banished by dawning horror. Shite. He still hasn’t learned. “Someone’s lying to him. But why?”

Bryce leaned forward on the table, the chart crinkling under his elbows. “We think it could be one of two reasons: either the magicians made the wrong assumptions about the nature of the spell, but expect it to deliver the desired results; or they deliberately chose the bloodier path because they know it will yield a different outcome.”

Niall frowned. “A different outcome. What kind of a different outcome?”

“That . . . we’re not quite sure of. The only thing we know for certain is that the addition of blood to the equation will not result in a peaceful and uneventful merging of the two spheres.”

“What will it do?”

“We’re not sure of that either. The Convergence might succeed, but not peacefully—when bloodshed initiates the event, odds are it will generate more bloodshed. The spell might be intended to create a new order of things—cement the privilege of the high fae, for instance. Eliminate certain races either by design or as a by-product of the energy needed to power the spell.”

“‘Eliminate’?” Niall croaked. What a sterile fucking word for murder. And Niall would wager another two hundred years at the forge that the Daoine Sidhe wouldn’t be the ones eliminated. It would be the lesser fae. Peadar. Heilyn. The entire Keep staff. “Why not call it what it is? Genocide.”

Bryce inclined his head. “No argument here. Aside from the humanitarian and ethical considerations of that kind of horror, targeted extinction of that sort never works. It would completely destroy Faerie, which depends on the symbiosis of the races to maintain balance. I mean, the high fae literally cannot take care of themselves. Do they imagine that eradicating the species they see as inferior will make their lives better? Are they that shortsighted?”

Niall snorted. “Easy answer: yes. Plus they’re precisely that entitled and arrogant. The way they see it, if they want to keep or increase their influence when the spheres merge, then somebody else’s influence needs to diminish.” :Zero sum!: “Even if the ones who lose were never in the game in the first place, like the lesser fae.” Niall punched his palm. “As if Eamon would allow that to happen.”

Bryce traced a blue line across the paper under his elbow. “That’s the other thing, though. The spell may not have been intended to retain any of the former power structures. Including Eamon, the Queen, or even the One Tree.”

“You mean—they’d want to put someone else in charge? Who, for fuck’s sake?”

“It could be the magicians themselves, setting up a theurocracy. But there’s another possibility that came up when Mal and I helped Eamon. Someone gifted Rodric Luchullain with a silver prosthetic hand, and he was convinced he was the second coming of Nuada Airgetlám. If the magicians have found another candidate—”

“They don’t need another one.” Niall’s belly knotted as he remembered the conversation in the throne room, which hadn’t sounded like a conversation between guard and prisoner. “They’ve got Rodric.”

Bryce went pale. “Luchullain? They can’t. Eamon escorted him to the underworld himself.”

“Well, he got out. Fionbarr convinced Eamon he and Tiarnach had to be present for the Convergence. Shite.” Niall let his head fall back against the wall behind him. “He needed him all right—but not for the reason we assumed. Although why they’d see him as a viable King . . .”

“You mean because he’s an overly ambitious, narcissistic sociopath who craves power and doesn’t care what he has to do to get it?” Bryce’s tone dripped disdain. “Trust me, the magicians aren’t the first shortsighted idiots to pick that kind of candidate.”

“So what do we do? Can the druids cast some kind of counterspell? Use the binding stone somehow?”

“Not from out here. To send the spell into a different path, complete the Convergence without undue bloodshed, we need to be there, and there’s no way to get in.”

Niall swore under his breath. Then froze. Slowly, he straightened in his chair. “What if there were a back door?”