Fragile Eternity (Wicked Lovely 3)

And Seth didn’t see many choices. The veil he’d crossed was impermeable. He could continue standing in the street, or he could follow her farther.

I didn’t come here to run away at the gate.

Hoping he wasn’t making a mistake, he crossed over to the moss carpet and into the bright doorway.

The hotel lobby was filled with faeries talking in small groups, curled into chairs reading, and in a few cases staring silently at focus objects. Books were stacked in orderly piles on side tables. A white-veiled man was dusting a faery who’d apparently been meditating for some time.

Glancing neither left nor right, Bananach walked past them into a sterile-looking corridor. The faeries who’d noticed her tensed. Some slipped away. Whispered words twisted into an overall breathy hiss in the still of the room as Seth passed among them. Their Otherness was more pronounced than the Summer and Dark Court denizens. Many of them looked almost mortal, but they radiated a stillness that felt alternately rapacious and dismissive. It was frightening.

The raven-faery seemed oblivious. Her feather-hair fluttered like pennants trailing behind her as she swept through hallways, went up and down stairways, and took sudden turns. He felt and heard the low sound of battle drums throughout the building. Pipes and horns wound through the thunder of the drums. The noise sent his pulse racing in dread, but he continued to follow Bananach.

The tempo of the music increased as they raced through empty spaces, building to a fierce cadence that would burst a heart if it tried to keep pace. Then it stopped mid-beat just as Bananach put her hand, flat-palmed, on a closed door and murmured, “There you are.”

She opened the door into a vast ballroom. The floor was cut blue marble. Tapestries and art that belonged alongside the most revered masterpieces lined the walls. Some art was framed by pieces of silver that had been left in their natural threadlike state; others were held by simple wooden frames; still more were in what seemed to be glass frames. Vine-wrapped marble pillars stood at regular intervals in the room, supporting a star-scattered ceiling. Seth knew they couldn’t be real stars, but he gaped at the illusion all the same.

While he stood awed by the stars and the art, Bananach put herself in front of him and said, “I brought you a lamb.”

Reluctantly, Seth took his attention from the wonders around him to look at the faery who sat on a stiff-backed chair in the empty expanse of the room. She was the one who could save him—or crush his every dream. Her hair was like fire: flickering shades of heat shifted in and out of sight as he tried to watch her. Her skin was the same as the moonlight veil he’d crossed to enter Faerie, as if she herself had been formed of that cold light. Yet, as he watched, her skin shifted too. It became as dark as the depths of the universe. She was shadow and light, flame and coolness, white and black. She was both sides of the moon, all things, perfection.

The High Queen. Sorcha. It could be none other. She sat in her empty ballroom, pondering a game board, surrounded by nature and art.

He reached up to grip his charm and ran his thumb over it as if it were a worry stone. Even wearing it, he felt pulled to revere her. The temptation to drop to his knees and offer her his soul was the same sort of insistence a body felt to draw breath. It was automatic and near impossible to resist.

“A lamb?” The High Queen’s gaze passed over him with the attentiveness of a hummingbird, pausing and darting away. She returned her eyes to the board in front of her. The game looked to be something akin to chess but several times larger and with six sets of gemstone pieces.

“All of his wet parts are still inside.” Bananach reached over and stroked Seth’s head. “Do you remember when they brought us sacrifices?”

Sorcha picked up a translucent green figure with a sickle-looking weapon in its hand. “You shouldn’t have brought him here. You shouldn’t even be here.”

Bananach tilted her head in that disturbing birdlike gesture. Her voice was singsongy as she asked, “Shall I keep him then? Shall I carry him back through the veil, take him from the field of play? Shall I leave him on the right regent’s threshold; tell them I brought him to the door from inside your demesne? Shall I, sister mine, take the lamb?”

Seth paused as something unreadable flickered in Sorcha’s eyes. He’d only just arrived here, so he couldn’t imagine where Bananach could leave him or what she could say that would cause trouble. The only regents who know me are Ash, Don, or Niall, and I could explain—the thought stopped as clarity hit: she wouldn’t be leaving him alive at anyone’s door. If Sorcha didn’t allow him to stay, he was about to die.

He looked around, as if a weapon would suddenly be lying in reach. There wasn’t anything. Sentences from the lore he’d read rushed to mind in a jumble. Hawthorn and Rue, thistle and rose… He knew there were herbs and plants that offered protection. He kept a number of them in his train and often with him. He began rummaging in his pockets. Words…vows… What could he offer not to die? Bananach had promised to deliver him safely to Sorcha, but nothing beyond that.

Sorcha held the figure aloft before setting it in a square adjacent to the one it had been in when she lifted

it. “Fine. He can stay.”

The raven-faery pressed one taloned hand over his chest, her fingers curling in ever so slightly, as if she’d pierce him with her fingertips. “Be a good boy now. Make me proud. Make our dreams come true.”

Then she turned and left.

For a few heartbeats, Seth stood and waited for Sorcha to speak. He’d heard enough about her—not in direct revelations but passing comments that painted her as impeccably proper and uptight—that he thought he should wait for her to speak.

She didn’t utter a word.

Boomer shifted, sliding down Seth’s arm and lower until the boa was resting at Seth’s feet.

Still the High Queen sat silently.

Now what?

Waiting her out was unlikely. He glanced at the doorway through which Bananach had just left and then back at the High Queen. She wasn’t looking at her puzzle board now; she gazed into the distance, as if she saw things in the empty air.

Perhaps she does.

After several still moments, he figured he’d try to speak. “So, you’re Sorcha, right?”