At the front entrance half a dozen sidhe-seers were clustered around Enyo, talking and taking a brief break.
As I approached, Enyo glanced up and stopped speaking mid-sentence. Her brows drew together in a scowl, her gaze moving from my eyes to my hair and back to my eyes again, and her mouth shaping a silent, What the fuck?
The other sidhe-seers greeted me with equally shocked expressions, their eyes the mirror that told me my transformation was becoming more apparent with each passing hour. I said quickly, “The Faery queen transferred her magic to me so we might save this world. Clear the workers out of the abbey. I think I can rebuild it.”
Enyo’s brows reversed their path and climbed her forehead. “Are you bloody kidding me? Why would the Fae queen—”
I cut her off: “Because she learned who she’d once been and no longer wanted to lead. Enyo, it’s a complicated story and we don’t have time for it. The planet is dying faster than we thought. Get the workers out of the ruins. I need practice and you need the abbey back.”
She studied me a long moment, then shrugged and began to bark orders.
The moment the rubble was unoccupied—I had concerns about potentially putting a wall where a person stood—I tapped into the immense bubbling power beneath my feet. This time I kept my eyes open. Cruce never closed his when he was using Fae magic. I wed the power within me to the soil, sinking deeper than before, and gasped.
The earth possessed some kind of awareness. Gaea in all her totality was a living thing with some kind of vast, incomprehensible consciousness. It knew what had once sat here—at every point in time. I might just as easily have urged it to restore the church that had once stood on these grounds, or gone back further and commanded it to let the ancient shian rise.
So that was why the Fae seat of power was embedded in the occupied planet. Worlds had long memories. And time wasn’t at all the same thing to a planet as it was to a human.
Restore the abbey, I invited the powerful twining of forces.
As I watched the sprawling fortress attain insubstantial shape before my eyes, I was struck by a sudden thought: Just how powerful was I now?
Might I restore Jo, too?
The translucent shape of the abbey vanished.
Dimly, I heard dismayed cries from sidhe-seers and knew they, too, had seen it beginning to form then disappear.
I smiled sadly. Of course, I couldn’t. Or, even if I could, I’d be no better than the Sinsar Dubh or the Unseelie King himself. I had no doubt I could use the power for personal reasons, like, say, sifting to a sunny beach to enjoy a few hours in the sun. But I had to work with Nature, not against it. Death wasn’t mine to undo. It made sense to me on a soul level. Reminding me, with a twinge of unease, how wrong it seemed that I’d gotten Alina back.
I pushed the troubling thought from my mind and refocused my efforts on the abbey.
And when I sifted out a few minutes later, to the sound of deafening cheers, the mighty fortress had never looked finer.
I materialized in the physics lab at Trinity College with the left half of my body inside a wall, gasped, sifted instantly to the right and glanced hastily back at the offending structure, afraid I was going to see one of my arms sticking out of it.
The wall was intact. So was I.
I shuddered. That was horrifying. As if part of my body had been neatly displaced and I had no idea where it was until it was abruptly back again. Maybe Fae didn’t mind the feeling of being amputated by inanimate objects, but I did. Perhaps I’d stop sifting until I talked to Cruce and got a better handle on the mechanics. Or aim for wide-open places like Christian.
“Holy hell, what did that feel like?” Dancer exclaimed excitedly, leaping to his feet. “Your bloody molecules must have been displaced. The wall couldn’t possibly hold the combined mass. Where did the excess parts go? Do you know? Can you explain it to me?”
“Beyond wrong and I have no idea,” I said as I joined them. Dancer was standing in the middle of a U-shaped desk, with a portable keyboard on one side and computers of various shapes and sizes on every other available inch of it.
Alina was sprawled in a chair next to it, and for a moment I just basked in seeing my sister, here, with me, in Dublin, alive.
She grinned, checking me out from head to toe. The grin turned to a smirk and she said, “Hey, Junior, looked in a mirror lately?”
“Pretty sure I don’t want to,” I said wryly. “Did you listen to the music box?”
She sobered instantly. “Yes. It’s horrific. Seriously. Worst. Music. Ever. I’m not sure you can even call it music.”
“Worse than the song you hear coming from the black holes?”
She considered a moment then said, “No, it’s more like the song I hear from the different Unseelie castes. There’s something wrong with it.”
“Why am I the only one that hears a beautiful song?” I said irritably.
Dancer shrugged. “No idea. I’m still working on converting it to numbers. Here, let me play part of it for you and we’ll see if it sounds as bad on my keyboard as it does coming from the box. Maybe there’s something about the box itself that distorts it for us.”
He dropped back into his chair, turned around and powered up the keyboard, then glancing over his shoulder, reading lines of music off the computer, began to play.
“Ah! Stop!” I shouted, hastily covering my ears. “That’s not the song I hear. That’s awful! You must have written it down wrong.”
“Those are the exact notes,” Dancer protested. “I converted them to numbers starting at C.”
“Well, you did it wrong somehow. Maybe you started at a different note than you thought you did.”
He gave me a blank look. “I don’t do things wrong, Mac. I played exactly what the music box plays.” He glanced at Alina for confirmation and she nodded.
I said, “All I know is that’s not the melody I hear. This is what I hear.” I began to hum softly.
Alina said, “But that’s not what we hear at all, Junior.”
Dancer waved a hand at her, shushing her, his eyes suddenly intensely bright. “Nobody talk. Hum, Mac. Just keep humming.”
I hummed. And hummed. And hummed some more. While he sat, eyes growing more and more unfocused, listening, nodding, finally grinning broadly.
“I’ll be damned!” He spun back to his computer. “I hear patterns. I see them, too. It’s one of the quirks of my brain. Everything has structure. Even social interactions. Sometimes it’s hard not to get lost in them. Sometimes,” he said, as he typed away, “I get so distracted designing mathematical constructs out of social situations that I forget I’m actually involved in them.” He fell silent then and typed for several minutes, hummed a few notes, typed some more then pushed away from the computer and beamed up at me. “I know what’s wrong with you,” he announced excitedly.
“Let me have it,” I said warily.
“You’re hearing the song inverted. Perfectly inverted. Every bloody layer of it. Unreal. And you aren’t even intelligent enough to understand how fantastically improbable that is. Do you have Asperger’s?” he demanded. “What other unusual things does your brain do?” He narrowed his eyes, peering at me as if I was a fascinating specimen he’d like to slap on a slide and push beneath a microscope.
“Inverted. Explain.”
“I knew as soon as you began humming that it was essentially the same thing. But not. Inversion is the rearrangement of the top-to-bottom elements in an interval, chord, or melody. In simpler terms, you’re hearing the music the box plays with every last bit of it flipped.” He made a rotating gesture with his hands. “Perfectly flipped, and that’s impossible. People don’t hear music perfectly inverted.”
“Play it the way I hear it on the keyboard.”
“Give me a sec.” He went back to work on his computer, inverting what he’d converted to numbers earlier. When he was done, he opened a program, exported the data, punched a few more buttons, and music began to play through
the computer speakers.
I was instantly transported to a state of bliss.
This time, I was happy to note, I wasn’t the only one.
It ended much too soon and left the three of us shaking our heads and looking slightly lost.
“That,” Dancer said in a low, stunned voice, “was the most extraordinary arrangement of frequencies I’ve ever heard.”
Alina agreed, looking slightly dazed.
I demanded, “Is it the song?”
Dancer snorted. “You’re asking me that? How would I know? You’re the bloody queen who’s supposed to do something with it. Is it?”
“I think it has to be. But that doesn’t make any sense. The king was never able to complete it. We know that for a fact. Or he would have turned the concubine Fae and he didn’t. And he gave the music box to the concubine long before she supposedly killed herself.”
“Then it can’t be the song,” Alina said.
“Maybe it’s part of the song and he was never able to figure out the rest,” I proposed.
Dancer raked both his hands through his hair, looking as if he was on the verge of tearing it out. “Bloody hell, you’d better hope not. Do you know how impossible it is to finish someone else’s symphony? Completely. Look at all the brilliant minds that worked on Mahler’s Tenth. None of the versions ever sounded right to me. I got so frustrated listening to them that I actually took a few stabs at it myself. I did no better. Impossible to precisely duplicate another’s creative vision.”
“But if this particular song is made of frequency that affects matter—which I’m sure you can devise some way to test—wouldn’t even part of the song give you insight into what frequencies can affect the matter of the black holes? And you could extrapolate from there?”
“Sure,” Dancer said exasperatedly. “If I had a few centuries to work on it and countless, perfectly contained black holes to test my theories on.”
I sighed, pressing my fingers to my temples, thinking hard. “I know there’s something to it. I don’t know how I know it, but I do. Just convert it all and invert it and let’s try playing it to one of the smaller black holes, okay?”
He shrugged. “It’s worth a try. It’s not like we have much else to go on.” He spun back around in his chair and began typing. After about three seconds he tossed over his shoulder, “Leave. You’re disturbing my brain space.”
With a snort of laughter, I held out my hand to Alina and took my first stab at sifting tandem.
MAC
I banged into the bookstore a short time later with Alina on my heels, both of us holding our faces and muttering beneath our breath.
My first tandem sift had not gone well.
The Compact negotiating crew had arrived and was waiting for us. My dad was on the Chesterfield, on the middle cushion, his arms spread along the back. Barrons and Ryodan were in their usual corners, while Cruce leaned lightly against the mantel of the fireplace.
Barrons surged to his feet in a ripple of muscle and aggression the moment he saw me. “Who the bloody hell gave you a black eye?” he growled.
“That would be you,” I said with mock sweetness, pressing a hand to my bruised cheekbone. “And your bloody wards. It felt like slamming into a brick wall.” Fortunately, I healed quickly. Unfortunately, my sister didn’t.
The corners of his mouth twitched then he gave up the ghost and just flashed me one of those rare, full-on smiles that always made me catch my breath and stare. He’s so damn beautiful and his smiles are sunshine in a black velvet sky, improbable and stunning.
“You sifted. You figured out how to use it,” he murmured. “Without Cruce.”
“And rebuilt the abbey,” I told him proudly. “It’s never looked better.”
“You will sign the Compact and restore my wings,” Cruce growled.
“I intend to.” I wasn’t signing it merely to figure out how to use the True Magic. I wanted full, unstinting access to Cruce’s wealth of information and knowledge. I wanted to know if he’d ever caught even the remotest whisper that the king might have come close to re-creating the song. I wanted to play the music box for him. Pick his brain for days.
I stood motionless, feeling the lovely, wounded earth beneath me, and invited it to restore his torn wings.
Cruce inhaled sharply, stretched to his full, enormous height, tossed his head back and pushed away from the fireplace. “Ah,” he purred. “Yes, that is what I was missing.” He closed his eyes a moment, adjusting and resettling his massive velvety wings. Then he opened his eyes and glared daggers at me. “Sign the Compact. Now.”
Ignoring him for the moment, I moved to the small fridge behind the counter, retrieved one of the many ice packs I had from my early days in Dublin when I’d kept getting beat up all the time, and gave it to my sister. She pressed it lightly to her eye and sank down on the sofa next to Daddy.
“Hey, Daddy,” I said, and kissed him on top of his head, beaming. The only people missing were Dani and Mom and my family would be complete.
“Hi, baby.” He smiled up at me. “It’s finished. That is, if you still want to sign it.”
I slid over the back of the Chesterfield and dropped down on the other side of him, opposite Alina. He draped his arms around both our shoulders. “I do.” I took the packet he was offering me, flipped through it and laughed. Our Compact was fifty-two pages long. “Looks like you covered it all.” With lengthy codicils for virtually every possibility.
Jack Lane looked at me carefully. “Are you certain you want to sign this, honey? I agree with your mother. You’d make a fine queen.”
I couldn’t wait to sign it. I stretched my hand out behind me, in the general direction of Barrons. “Can I have one of your knives?” He was always carrying. I’d nearly pulled my spear from my holster before remembering how much I never wanted to poke myself with that thing. Then Barrons’s mouth was on my wrist. I felt the touch of his tongue, the sting of fangs, a kiss, and his mouth was gone.
He had to do it five more times because I kept healing so quickly, but finally, with an ancient quill Barrons had produced, the Compact was signed by one MacKayla Evelina Lane, Queen of the Fae, cross-signed by Cruce, then signed secondarily in sharp, dramatic script that shimmered even when dried, with a name that defied translation into any language known to man. It was formally witnessed by Jack Lane, Barrons, Ryodan, and Alina Lane.
“There must be an exchange of precious metals, imbued with power,” Cruce said. “I will accept the bracelet you had the other night.”
“No,” Ryodan said. He shot me a look that said, if he wants it, it’s important.
“Then it is not binding,” Cruce said flatly. “I have not demanded the Amulet, which I know you have and should be mine. That is my offering of precious metals. You may keep it, a gift from the Fae race.”
Barrons looked at me. I have other objects of power to offer.
I narrowed my eyes and glanced back at Cruce. “You may have one of the lesser three amulets.”
“Only for the bracelet will I agree to this pact.”
“And his demands just keep growing,” Ryodan mocked. “No surprise there.”
I met Cruce’s dark, turbulent gaze and was shocked to hear clearly in my head, I do not seek to take anything from you that you would ever desire to use, MacKayla. It is important only to me.
His words carried the knell of truth, resonated clearly and simply inside me. But then, he was the great deceiver. Regardless, it was a bracelet I had no idea how to use, and if we were successful, the Fae would soon be gone from our world forever. That made it another item that didn’t signify.
After a moment, over the protests of others, I went upstairs, got the bracelet, and gave it to him.
It was done.
Once we saved our world, I would transfer the weight of mantle and scepter to someone else, the Fae would be gone, life would be incredibly normal, and I would finally be “just Mac” again.
Hours later I sat on the Chesterfield,
gaze unfocused, doing the equivalent of reading Fae files on ancient history. After confirming that the key to using my power lay in forging a connection to the planet itself, Cruce had also told me that new queens required anywhere from fifty to five hundred years to grow into their power, due to the sheer enormity of information transferred.
Yeah, so not sticking around for that job curve.
If there was a way to instantly internalize it all, no queen had ever found it. A large part of my new, lofty position was little more than file clerk. If I focused on, say, “Song of Making,” every single one of the 9,722,342 records, legends, myths, and songs about it swam up in my mind with the equivalent of tabs and a filing system that made no bloody sense to me because I knew nothing about Fae history. The information had been logged under the name of the Fae that most largely signified in that bit of information. To any other queen, those names might have been recognizable and she could have immediately sought the most credible ones.
They meant nothing to me. I’d spent hours blurting names while Cruce had either shaken his head to pass, or inclined it to indicate I should continue to read.
With Barrons watching, scowling darkly.
Imagine having access to a million years of human history, every myth, legend, or factual (yet biased) news clipping. Imagine having the Internet inside you, becoming a walking Google search engine.
It felt exactly like that. I’d become a human computer. It was one more reason I was enormously grateful Cruce would be taking over. By the time he left, I’d begun to seriously question both the queen’s decision to give me the True Magic and the sanity of the one on the planet who’d deemed me a worthy choice.
Barrons departed shortly after Cruce.
Christian’s efforts to remove soil from beneath the spheres had proved successful but time-consuming. He’d retrieved the other Keltar druids from Scotland, and Barrons and Ryodan were assisting, using small bobcats to push soil far from the danger zone of the most immediately threatening black holes.