Radiant Shadows

Chapter 27

Rae returned to the room where Sorcha slept. Outside the window, the sky appeared to have dimmed, not into darkness but into a chalky palate as if the color was being leeched away. Neither day nor night existed, only perpetual dusk. It meant Rae was free to roam, but that freedom was of little consolation when the world was vanishing.

“Could you go to the other world?” Rae asked the queen’s attendants. “The mortal world—”

“No.” One of veiled mortals turned to face Rae. “We stay with our queen. If she dies, we die.”

“Why?” Rae stared at them.

“There is nothing for us there. Our queen brought us here, and here is where we stay.” The mortal paused, and longing crept into her voice as she added, “The lives we had there are gone; the people we knew are dead; the rules… it’s not our world now, not with the way time passes.”

The muted light that fell through the window threw gray shadows over the glass-encased bed. The bed had shrunk and now had a more funereal shape. Rae wasn’t sure if the casketlike appearance was a reflection of the shrinking of the queen’s world or something more; regardless of the reason, it was unnerving.

With nothing else to do but await dissolution of the world, Rae entered the queen’s dreams once again.

The leonine guards hissed at her.

“I don’t want to see you,” Sorcha said. Her gaze did not leave the mirror.

“Devlin is bringing Seth to you, but he says that Faerie must be as it should be so Seth can reach you.”

Sorcha gestured at the image in the mirror: Seth was walking down a street. “I can see him. He is not in Faerie.”

“He will be,” Rae insisted. “Maybe you should wake to ready yourself.”

At that, Sorcha did pull her gaze from the mirror. The look she gave Rae was withering. “I need a heartbeat to ready myself, child. I am the High Queen, not some mortal who must work at attempting to achieve perfection. When he comes, I’ll wake, but not before. Go and do not disturb me until he is here.”

There were no more words. One of the winged creatures licked its maw and gave Rae an approximation of a smile. The High Queen’s dreaming guards were extensions of her will, and her will was that she not be disturbed.

Rae shuddered and stepped back into the darkened room in Faerie.

Hours later, the stillness was broken by a scream—and another, and then several more. Through a tall glass window on the far side of the cavernous room, Rae could see an unfamiliar faery striding down the street. As she walked, she slashed out with a battle-ax and flung knives at fleeing faeries. All the while she smiled.

I know you. Rae wasn’t sure how, but the new faery felt familiar. The faery had thick feathered wings, dark tresses that were a combination of hair and feathers, and patterns drawn on her face. Her gaze was darting around assessingly.

She paused across the street and looked at Rae. The smile she gave Rae was familiar, an unpleasant match to Devlin’s. Devlin’s other sister. Bananach.

“There you are, girl.”

Rae heard the words; through wall and glass they flew as if they were physical things sent crashing toward her. She stepped backward, putting herself between Sorcha and the faery who must be Bananach, the High Queen’s mad twin. It wasn’t that Rae could stop Bananach: the insubstantial couldn’t impede the physical. It wasn’t even that she cared to protect Sorcha: the High Queen had done nothing to earn Rae’s loyalty. Rae’s action was the instinctual movement to keep safe the entity that created the world around them. Sorcha created; Bananach destroyed. That simple fact was enough to align Rae’s loyalty for the moment.

Bananach grabbed a sleeping faery and tossed him through the window. Shards of glass crashed on the stone floor in a dangerous shower. The faery she’d thrown lay unaware and bleeding. The queen’s two mortals didn’t react at all. They stayed beside their queen’s casket.

“Run. Now,” Rae said to them. She didn’t turn to see if they obeyed.

The destructive faery looked to her left and right, reached down and uprooted a small sapling, and used it to knock out the remaining glass in the window frame. Shards hit the stone floor like a glittering rain shower.

Rae didn’t move, couldn’t move, as Bananach stared at her.

Bits of glass crunched under Bananach’s boots as she stepped through the window frame into the room.

“You belong to my brother,” Bananach said by way of greeting.

The raven-faery leaned close enough to Rae that for a breath it felt like she was going to walk into Rae. Rae moved to the side.

Bananach sniffed, circling Rae as she did so, and then paused. She tilted her head so close to her own shoulder that it looked as if her neck muscles had been severed. “You smell like him. He’s not here.”

“He’s not,” Rae agreed.

Beyond Bananach, Rae could see a few still-awake faeries who stood in the street. They watched the raven-faery as she stalked and circled Rae. They didn’t move, not to help or to flee. They stared with very un–High Court looks of horror on their faces.

“You have worn his skin”—Bananach sniffed again— “more than a few times. He let you inside of his body.”

“Devlin is my friend,” Rae said.

Bananach cackled. “He has no friends. He wasn’t made for such things.”

Rae straightened her shoulders and stared at the faery. “I am whatever he wants me to be.”

The faery stared at Rae as if she could see things, and Rae suspected she was seeing things, looking at the threads of Rae’s future. The sensation of being studied thusly was disquieting. Bananach was weighing and measuring her, and if the results weren’t to her liking, there was no reason to believe she’d ignore Rae.

Can she kill me?

But whatever Bananach saw as she peered into Rae’s future apparently wasn’t cause to try to strike her. Does she see anything? The expressions on the faery’s face were unreadable. She merely nodded and stepped around Rae.

“And there you are, sister mine.” Bananach reached out as if to touch the glass casket. Her talon-tipped hand hovered in the air over the blue glass. “Do you hear me?”

Rae had an unpleasant moment in which she wanted very badly not to respond, not to draw the raven-faery’s attention back to her. It was a normal response: prey rarely wanted to summon the predator’s gaze. It was also not the acceptable response. If Bananach could injure Sorcha, could further disrupt the High Queen’s grasp on reality, the consequences were too large to fathom.

“She can not hear you,” Rae said.

Bananach’s head swiveled at an inhuman angle. “But she hears you, doesn’t she?”

Rae shrugged. “Sometimes.”

“And what does she dream, the mad queen?” Bananach’s hand lowered to the glass even as she stared at Rae. Absently, she scraped her talon-nails over the glass, making a screeching sound.

“Ask Devlin.”

Bananach’s wings flexed, opening so that the shadows blocked the scant light from the window. “He’s not here, child.”

“He will be.”

“Aaaah, he will be… do you suppose he and the Hound received my message then?” Bananach asked. “I left them a gift.”

“A gift?”

“Bloodied, but no longer screaming.” Bananach looked crestfallen for a moment. “If I could have saved the screams, I would’ve, but they died with the body.”

Rae didn’t know what to say or do.

Bananach shook her head. “I have faeries to kill before I speak to my brother, Dreamwalker, but I’ll be back soon.”

Even as she spoke, she brought both fists down on the glass. A large clang echoed throughout the hall, the sound loud enough that Rae winced and covered her ears. The walls seemed to shudder—but the glass was unbroken.

“Alas.” Bananach laid her cheek on the glass over Sorcha’s face. “I’ll slaughter them all while you rest. Well, not all”—she stroked the glass—“today. I needed a bit of discord to soothe me, to help me make ready to destroy the betrayer.”

She left as calmly as she had come, stepping through the window frame. As Rae stood helplessly, Bananach departed, resuming her slaughter as she went down the street—stabbing abdomens, twisting necks, and flinging bodies. She did not distinguish between the sleeping and the alert. The world of Faerie shifted around War. Fires for the dead flamed into existence; screams echoed long past the ends of lives; and a charnel scent rose in the air in a sickening cloud.

Come soon, Dev.