Abe went to him, touched his arm. “I hear you, so honorable Darkness, but I tell you that this power is a generous thing. Goddess is a generous Goddess. God is a generous God. They do not give with one hand and take with the other. They are not so cruel.”
“I have found their service most cruel.”
“Nay, you have found Andais’s service cruel,” Abe said, voice soft.
A bird twittered out in the twilight woods — a sound of settling in for the night, sleepy and questioning.
A voice came out of the dimness: “I thought you a drunken fool, Abeloec, but now I realize that it wasn’t the drink making you so. It’s simply your natural state.”
We all whirled toward the voice. Queen Andais stepped from the far wall, where she had emerged earlier. We had been more than careless not to realize she might come back.
Abe dropped to one knee in the mud. “I meant no offense, my queen.”
“Yes, you did.” She walked only a little way toward us, then stopped, grimacing. “I am happy to see the rain and clouds, but the mud, I could have done without.”
“We are sorry that you are displeased, my queen,” Mistral said.
“The apology would sound better if you were on your knees,” she said.
Mistral dropped to his knees in the mud beside Abe. Their hair was too long, wet and heavy; it trailed into the mud. I didn’t like seeing them like that. It made me afraid for them.
She waded through the now ankle-deep mud until she could have touched them, but she walked past. Instead, she reached out to trace her fingers across Doyle’s chest. “Puppy dogs,” she said, smiling.
Doyle stood impassive under the caress of her hand, though Andais had made a torture of caresses. She would tease and torment, then deny them release. She’d made a game of it for centuries.
She touched Frost’s arm. “Your tree is dark against your skin now.” She moved to Rhys, touching the dual fish. She moved to me, and I fought not to cringe away from her. She put her hand on my stomach where the exact imprint of a moth stood, like the world’s most perfect tattoo. “A few hours ago this moth fluttered, struggling to escape your skin.”
I looked down at where she touched, hoping she wouldn’t go lower. She didn’t like me, but she might touch my intimate parts because she knew I loathed her. Sex and hatred always mixed well for my aunt.
“My guards told me that it would become like a tattoo.”
“Did they tell you what it was?”
“A mark of power.”
She shook her head. “The others have the outline of a creature, or an image, but your moth looks real. It is more like a photograph imprinted on your skin. That is not something that Abeloec’s magic can give you. This” — she pressed hard against my stomach — “means you can mark others. It means that those you mark are lesser powers flocking to the warmth of your fire.” She curled her arm around my waist, and pressed my body against the black robe of hers. She whispered against my ear, “The men don’t like this, no, they don’t. They don’t like me touching you, not one…” she licked the edge of my ear, “little…” she licked down the curve of my neck, “bit.” She bit me, hard and sudden, not to draw blood, but to make me jerk.
She drew her head up and said quietly, “I thought you liked pain, Meredith.”
“Not straight out of the box, no.”
“That’s not what I heard.” She let me go and walked around the group of us. “Where are all the other men who vanished from the bedroom with you?”
“The garden has taken them,” Doyle said.
“Taken them, how?”
“Taken them into tree and flower and ground,” he said, not meeting her eyes.
“As Amatheon rose from the dirt, will they return to us, or was their death the price for this miracle?” She whispered it, but her voice seemed to echo.
“We don’t know,” Doyle said.
A bird began to sing again. A high, trilling cascade of music fell from the sky, dancing over us. And as if sound could be touch, it wrapped us around in something beautiful, something just out of sight. It seemed a reminder that the dawn would come and death would not be forever. It was the sound of hope that comes each spring to let you know that winter will not last, and the land is not dead.
I could not help but smile. Mistral and Abe raised their faces upward, as if turning gratefully into a spill of warm sunshine.
Andais began to back away as the last sweet note fell upon the air. She backed toward the part of the wall that still held darkness, as if the magic’s return could not touch it. “You will make of the Unseelie Court a pale imitation of the golden court that your uncle rules, Meredith. You will fill the darkness that is our purpose with light and music, and we will die as a people.”
“Once there were many courts,” Abeloec said, “some dark, some light, but all faerie. We did not divide ourselves into good and bad as the Christians do for their religion. We were everything at once, as we were meant to be.”
Andais did not bother to respond. Instead she simply said, “You have brought life to the dead gardens. I will not try to pixie on my promise. Come to the Hallway of Mortality and save Nerys’s people if you can. Bring that bright Seelie magic into the other heart of the Unseelie Court and see how long it survives.” With that she was gone.
We waited for a few heartbeats; then Mistral and Abe stood, mud coating their lower legs. No voice from the dark told them to get back on their knees. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
“What did she mean when she said that our court has two hearts?” I asked.
Abe answered, “Once every faerie mound had a garden or forest or lake at its heart. But every court also had another heart of power — one that would reflect the kind of magic the court specialized in.”
“You have brought one heart back to life,” Mistral said, “but I am not certain it is wise to reawaken the other.”
“The hallway is a torture chamber, where most magic does not work. It’s a null place,” I said.
“But once, Meredith, it was more.”
I looked at the men. “More how?”
“Things that were older than faerie, older than us, were imprisoned there. Remnants of power from the peoples we had defeated.”
“I’m not sure I understand, Mistral.”
He looked at Doyle. “Help me explain this.”
“Once there were creatures in the Hallway of Mortality that could bring true death to even the sidhe. They were kept there to serve as methods of execution, or torture, or simply the threat of those things. The queen did not care for them because, as you well know, she likes to do her own torturing. Watching some other being tear us limb from limb was not half so amusing to her as doing it herself.”
“And we healed better if she did it,” Rhys said.
Doyle nodded. “Yes, she could torture us longer and more often if the things did not help.”
“What kind of things?” I asked. I didn’t like how serious they’d gotten.
“Terrible things. A glimpse of them would drive a mortal mad,” he said.
“How long ago did these things vanish from the sithen?”
“A thousand years, maybe more,” he said.
“The forests haven’t been gone so long as that,” I said.
“No, not quite that long.”
“Why are you all so worried?”
“Because if you, or the Goddess’s power through you, can bring this about,” Abe said, motioning at the ever-expanding forest, “then we must prepare for the fact that the second heart of our court can come back to full life, as well.”
“Perhaps Merry is too Seelie to bring back such horrors?” Mistral said, almost hopefully.
“Her two hands of power are flesh and blood,” Doyle said. “Those are not Seelie magicks.”