Radiant Shadows

Chapter 14

It was finally dark in Faerie, so Rae took advantage of the opportunity to leave the cave for a while. The world around her looked less full than usual, but Rae had long since grown used to the changing landscape of Faerie. The High Queen’s moods determined reality, and some days the queen decided to create a new vista.

Rae drifted over a stream that had been a river previously. On either side, willows clung to the banks in clusters like groups of people in conversation. Thin branches swayed in a light breeze. Reclining on the soil with her bare feet dangling over the edge of the bank was a beautiful faery, one Rae hadn’t met in dreams or in Devlin’s body before. The faery slept on the mud-slick ground, a pile of moss under her cheek as if the earth had formed a pillow just for her. Bits of mud, twigs, and reeds were caught in a fiery mass of hair. Unlike the majority of the High Court faeries, this one looked like she belonged elsewhere, as if she had stepped from some Pre-Raphaelite painting of sensual women.

Rae entered the faery’s dream.

“I don’t know you,” the faery said. In her dream, she was sitting on the bank of a much larger river. Lilacs bloomed at the edge of a lush garden that stretched into the distance.

Rae drew a deep breath. In dreams, her senses were as if real. The perfume of flowers lay heavy on her tongue, so thick that she was near to choking on it.

“Where do you come from?” the faery prompted.

“Perhaps you saw me in the streets, and you’re remembering me.” Rae was used to the High Court faeries resisting her presence in their minds. It wasn’t logical to dream of strangers, so they often needed gentle guidance to accept that she was imagined.

“No.” The faery shook her head. Her hair was unbound, tumbling down her back and trailing behind her onto a flower-dotted ground. There were no twigs or mud entangled in the curls here.

The faery turned away from Rae, staring into the water as if it were a giant mirror. Faces drifted under the surface like Ophelia drowned and tragic. Has she lost someone? Death was so much larger to faeries. When one had the promise of eternity, centuries seemed a blink. Rae had seen the reality of such loss when Devlin considered what he did for his queen. Her orders were blood on Devlin’s hands.

“What do you dream of?” Rae whispered.

The faery didn’t look away from the water. Silver veins like roots crept from the faery’s skin and sank into the earth, anchoring her to the soil. Rae was transfixed by the sight: faeries weren’t ever this unusual in their self- imaginings. They saw themselves much as they appeared in their waking world; their essential representation echoed reality. They were of the High Court, logical in this as in all things.

“My son is gone from me.” The faery looked back at Rae. “He’s gone, and I can’t see him.”

Rae’s heart ached for her. Faeries had so few children that the loss of one must hurt even more than the loss of most faeries. Rae sat beside her, carefully not brushing the roots that extended from the faery’s hands, arms, and feet. “I’m sorry.”

“I miss him.” Six tears slid down the faery’s cheeks. They fell to the soil and rested on the ground like drops of mercury.

Rae gathered them into her hands and carried them to the edge of the river. With her words, she reshaped the water, stretching it and widening it until it became an ocean.

“Seven tears into the sea,” she told the faery.

Then she returned to the faery’s side and knelt. With one hand outstretched, Rae added, “Seven tears for a wish.”

She caught a seventh tear as it fell.

The faery was silent as Rae flung it into the water.

“What do you wish for? As long as you’re sleeping, you can have it.” Rae stayed kneeling beside her. “Tell me what you wish for.”

The faery woman stared at Rae. Her voice was as a slight breeze, but she said the words, made her wish. “I want to see my son, my Seth.”

Behind them the sea vanished, and in its place a mirror appeared. The glass was framed by vines hardened and blackened like they’d been darkened in fire. In the mirror, Rae could see a faery unlike any others she’d glimpsed and very unlike the austere appearance of most High Court faeries. Seth had silver jewelry decorating his eyebrows; a silver ring pierced his lower lip; and a long silver bar with arrow- like tips pierced the top curve of one ear. Blue-black hair framed a face that wasn’t faery-pretty, but mortal-hungry. Seth didn’t look anything like the son of the vibrant faery.

Is he why she sees herself with silvered anchors?

Seth was fighting with a group of faeries with moving ink on their forearms. If they’d been mortals, Rae would guess that they were the sort of people one should cross streets to avoid. In the mirror, Seth wrapped his arms around a muscular female faery and propelled the two of them through a window. Broken glass hit the cement floor inside of a bleak- looking room.

Where are they? Did she see her son die? Is that what this is?

Rae winced in sympathy at the thought that the faery had witnessed her son’s death.

The faery didn’t look away from the mirror at all. She raised one hand as if she’d touch the images. “My beautiful boy.”

Seth was laughing at the scowl on the muscular female faery’s face. “Got you,” he said.

“Not bad, pup.” The cruel-looking faery in the image plucked glass from a long gash in her shoulder. “Not bad at all.”

Another faery tossed a water bottle at Seth. Only the inked arm was in the frame, but even without seeing the face, Rae knew that this was another fighter. His voice carried like a rumble of thunder: “Go another round with Chela?”

Seth shook his head. “Can’t. Summer Court revels tonight. Ash… we’re talking, and she wants me with her there.”

“Keenan?”

“Still MIA.” Seth grinned, but just as quickly looked away, as if his happiness was wrong.

“Pity.”

“Do you know where he—”

“Don’t,” the female faery, Chela, interrupted. “It’s not Gabe’s place or mine to tell you things that we learn for our king.”

Seth nodded. “Got it. Good fights today?”

“You’re still broadcasting your next move too much,” the voice, presumably Gabe, said.

“Tomorrow?”

“By the time you’re awake, it’ll be evening. If you do it right, pup”—Gabe stepped into the frame and grinned— “revels aren’t the sort of thing one follows with early mornings.”

The words spoken by the faeries in the frame felt far too precise to be a memory. Moreover, this wasn’t a scene that ended in Seth’s death. This is not good. As Rae watched, she had the sinking suspicion that she’d done something new: she’d somehow given the dreaming faery a glimpse into the mortal world in that very instant. How did I do that?

“Your son isn’t dead?” she asked.

“No. He is in the mortal world.” The faery turned to stare at Rae with unblinking eyes. A clear lens slid over her inhuman pupils, reminding Rae of reptiles she’d seen. Faeries were Other. She’d known that from her first day in their world, but it was rarely made as obvious as it was in that instant.

“Where do you come from?” the faery demanded.

“I am but a dream,” Rae said, as she had to so many other sleeping faeries. Her voice wavered though, making her words sound false. “This is all but a dream.”

“No.”

“Your imagination? Perhaps you’ve seen me in a painting, something you saw in the palace—”

“No.” The faery crossed her arms and stared at Rae. “I know every detail of every painting in my palace. You are new. What you did here was… impossible. I cannot see the threads of those tied to me. I saw him.”

Rae froze.

“My palace”? Threads of seeing? Sorcha.

Rae stood and stepped backward, away from Sorcha and the mirror where Seth was walking down a street that looked nothing like the mortal world Rae remembered. Devlin’s going to be furious… if I live through the next few hours. Words were suddenly far more dangerous than she’d imagined possible. Dreams were her domain. Here, she should be safe; here, she should be omnipotent. Sorcha, however, was omnipotent. Within Faerie, the world remade itself at her whim and will, and Rae wasn’t sure if that extended to dreams.

Or the mortal world.

“Who are you?” Sorcha didn’t rise from the ground. Even without a throne or trappings of power, she was fierce. The sea swelled in towering waves that did not fall. It hovered, threatening to crash yet frozen. The water iced over, capturing the waves in stasis. Sorcha’s dreaming mind was taking control of the images Rae couldn’t hold on to.

Except the mirror. It stayed in front of her, untouched by the shards of ice that were cracking from the waves and falling like rocks at the start of an avalanche.

“A dream. I’m merely the face you’ve called into being for your amusement. Nothing more.” Rae hoped that the expectation of truth from faeries’ lips was enough to buy her time to escape. “If you’d rather I vanish”—Rae turned her back as if to walk away—“it is your dream.”

“Stop.”

Rae paused mid-step. Then, resolute that the safest course of action, the wisest plan, was to keep going, she continued walking.

In a blink, Sorcha appeared directly in front of her. “I said, ‘Stop.’”

“You can’t control dreams, Sorcha,” Rae whispered. “You can’t control anything here.”

“I control everything in Faerie.” Her haughty look reminded Rae so much of Devlin that she wondered how she hadn’t recognized Sorcha immediately.

“We aren’t really in Faerie though. Dreams aren’t your realm.” Rae smiled at Sorcha as gently as she could. “There are mortals, seanchaís, with the ability to twist dreams. But you? You’re just another faery in my land of dreams.”

“You’re not just another faery, though.” Sorcha’s gaze took in every detail of Rae’s appearance. “Who has been hiding you from me?”

“No one,” Rae lied. “I’ve always been here. You’ve simply not interested me before now.”

And then, before the High Queen could learn dangerous secrets, Rae slipped out of the dream and back into Faerie.