Queen of Air and Darkness Read online

  “That’s a glamour,” Julian said. “I know what’s underneath.”

  She rested her chin on her hand. “Most people would not dare to speak that way to the Seelie Queen.”

  “Most people don’t have something the Seelie Queen wants,” said Julian. He felt nothing, looking at her: She was beautiful, but he could not have desired her less if she’d been a beautiful rock or a beautiful sunset.

  She narrowed her eyes and they flickered back to blue. “You are indeed different,” she said, “more like a faerie.”

  “I’m better,” he said.

  “Really?” The Queen sat up slowly, her silken dress resettling around her. “There is a saying among my people, about the mortals we bring here: In the Land of Faerie, as mortals feel no sorrow, neither can they feel joy.”

  “And why is that?” asked Julian.

  She laughed. “Have you ever wondered how we lure mortals to live amongst faeries and serve us, son of thorns? We choose those who have lost something and promise them that which humans desire most of all, a cessation to their grief and suffering. Little do they know that once they enter our Lands, they are in the cage and will never again feel happiness.” She leaned forward. “You are in that cage, boy.”

  A shiver went up Julian’s spine. It was atavistic, primal, like the impulse that had driven him to climb Livvy’s pyre. “You’re trying to distract me, my lady. How about giving me what you promised?”

  “What do you mind about the parabatai bond now? It seems you no longer care for Emma. I saw it in the way she looked at you. As if she missed you though you were standing beside her.”

  “The bonds,” Julian said through his teeth. “How can they be broken?” His head throbbed. Maybe he was dehydrated.

  “Very well.” The Queen leaned back, letting her long hair spill over the side of the chaise and down to the ground. “Though it may not please you.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The parabatai rune has a weakness that no other rune has, because it was created by Jonathan Shadowhunter, rather than the Angel Raziel,” said the Queen. As she spoke she drew on the air with her fingertip, in lazy spirals. “Kept in the Silent City is the original parabatai rune inscribed by Jonathan Shadowhunter and David the Silent. If it is destroyed, all the parabatai runes in the world will be broken.”

  Julian could hardly breathe. His heart was hammering against his chest. All the bonds in the world. Broken. He still couldn’t explain what he was feeling, but the intensity of it made him feel as if he were bursting out of his own skin. “Why would I not be pleased to hear that?” he asked. “Because it would be difficult?”

  “Not difficult. Impossible. Oh, it wasn’t always impossible,” said the Queen, sitting up and smirking at him. “When I spoke to you about it first, it was in good faith. But things have changed.”

  “What do you mean?” Julian demanded. “How have things changed?”

  “I mean there is only one way to destroy the rune,” the Queen said. “It must be cut through and through by the Mortal Sword.”

  11

  SOME FAR-OFF HAPPIER SEA

  The wound was long but not deep, a slice across Kieran’s right upper arm. Kieran sat with his teeth gritted atop the bed in one of the Institute’s empty guest rooms, his sleeve cut away by Cristina’s balisong. Mark leaned nervously against a nearby wall, watching.

  Cristina had been a little surprised at how muscular Kieran’s arm was; even after he’d carried her through London, she’d thought of faeries as delicate, fine-boned. And he was, but there was toughness there too. His muscles seemed more tightly wrapped against his bones than a human’s, giving his body a lean, tensile strength.

  She finished carefully mopping the blood away from the cut and ran her fingers lightly over the skin around it. Kieran shivered, half-closing his eyes. She felt guilty for causing him pain. “I see no sign of infection or need for the wound to be stitched,” she said. “Bandaging it should do the trick.”

  Kieran looked at her sideways. It was hard to discern his expression in the shadows: There was only one lamp in the room, and it was heavily shaded.

  “I’m sorry to have brought this trouble to you,” Kieran said in a soft voice. A nighttime voice, careful of waking those who might be sleeping. “Both of you.”

  “You didn’t bring us trouble,” said Mark, his voice roughened with tiredness. “You brought us information that can help us save the lives of people we love. We’re grateful.”

  Kieran frowned, as if he weren’t too fond of the word “grateful.” Before Cristina could add anything, a cry split the night—a howl of miserable terror.

  Even knowing what it was, Cristina shivered. “Tavvy,” she said.

  “He’s having a nightmare,” Mark confirmed.

  “Poor child,” said Kieran. “The terrors of the night are grim indeed.”

  “He’ll be all right,” Mark said, though worry shadowed his expression. “He wasn’t there when Livvy died, thank the Angel, but I think he heard whispers. Perhaps we shouldn’t have brought him to the funeral. To see the pyres—”

  “I believe such things are a comfort,” Cristina said. “I believe they allow our souls to say good-bye.”

  The door creaked open—someone ought to see to the hinges—and Helen stuck her head in, looking distressed. “Mark, will you go to Tavvy?”

  Mark hesitated. “Helen, I shouldn’t—”

  “Please.” Helen leaned exhaustedly against the doorjamb. “He’s not used to me yet and he won’t stop crying.”

  “I’ll take care of Kieran,” Cristina said, with more confidence than she felt.

  Mark followed Helen from the room with clear reluctance. Feeling awkward at being left alone with Kieran, Cristina took a bandage from the kit and began to wind it around his upper arm. “I always to seem to end up tending your wounds,” she said half-jokingly.

  But Kieran did not smile. “That must be why,” he said, “whenever I suffer, I now long for the touch of your hands.”

  Cristina looked at him in surprise. He was clearly more delirious than she had thought. She laid a hand on his forehead: He was burning up. She wondered what a normal temperature for faeries was.

  “Lie down.” She tied off the bandage. “You should rest.”

  Her hair swung forward as she bent over him. He reached up and tucked a lock behind her ear. She went still, her heart thudding. “I thought of you at the Scholomance,” he said. “I thought of you every time anyone used Diego’s name, Rosales. I could not stop thinking of you.”

  “Did you want to?” Her voice shook. “Stop thinking of me?”

  He touched her hair again, his fingers light where they brushed her cheek. The sensation made goose bumps flood across her skin. “I know that you and Mark are together. I do not know where I fit into all of that.” His cheeks were fever flushed. “I know how much I have hurt you both. I feel it, down in my bones. I would never want to hurt either of you a second time. Tomorrow I will leave here, and neither of you need ever see me again.”

  “No!” Cristina exclaimed, with a force that surprised her. “Do not go, not alone.”

  “Cristina.” His right hand came up to curve around her other cheek; he was cupping her face. His skin was hot; she could see the blotches of fever on his cheeks, his collarbone. “Princess. You will be better off without me.”

  “I am not a princess,” she said; she was leaning over him, one of her hands braced against the blanket. His face was close to hers, so close she could see the dark fringe of his eyelashes. “And I do not want you to go.”

  He sat up, his hands still cradling her face. She gave a little gasp and felt her own temperature spike at the warmth of his hands as they moved from her face to her shoulders, to the curve of her waist, drawing her toward him. She let herself fall atop him, her body stretched along his, their hips and chests aligned. He was tense as a drawn bow, tight and arched beneath her. His hands were fever hot, carding through her soft hair.

  S
he placed her palms against his hard chest. It rose and fell rapidly. Her mind was spinning. She wanted to press her lips against the fine skin over his cheekbone, graze his jaw with kisses. She wanted, and the wanting shocked her, the intensity of it.

  She had never felt such intensity for anyone but Mark.

  Mark. She drew away from Kieran, nearly tumbling to the coverlet. “Kieran, I—we shouldn’t, you—you have a fever.”

  He rolled onto his side, eyes bright as he studied her. “I do have a fever,” he said. “I am not out of my mind, though. I have been wanting to hold you for a long time.”

  “You haven’t even known me that long,” she whispered, though she knew she was lying in a very human way, hiding what she really meant behind irrelevancies. The truth was that she had wanted Kieran, too, and she suspected she had for some time. “Lie back. You need to rest. We will have plenty of time to . . . talk more if you do not leave.” She sat up. “Promise me you won’t leave.”

  Kieran’s eyes were averted, his lashes like the rays of a dark star. “I should not stay. I will only bring sorrow to you and to Mark.”

  “Promise me,” Cristina hissed.

  “I promise I will stay,” he said at last. “But I cannot promise that you will not regret that I did.”

  * * *

  Nene showed Emma into the room she and Julian had stayed in the last time they’d been in the Seelie Court. The silvery-quartz walls pulsed with low light, and the rose hedge Emma remembered was gone. Instead the waterfall cascaded fiercely down the rock wall as if powered by a flood, pouring into an unshaded pool several feet below the floor.

  “It’s kind of Fergus to let us stay in his room,” Emma said as Nene ushered her in.

  “Fergus has no choice,” said Nene serenely. “It’s what the Queen desires.”

  Emma blinked. That seemed odd and not auspicious. Why did the Queen care where they stayed? Her gaze strayed over the rest of the room—there was a table she could put her bag down on, there was a sofa made of vines twining closely together. . . . She frowned. “Where’s the bed?”

  “Behind the waterfall, in Fergus’s bower.”

  “His what?”

  “His bower.” Nene pointed. Sure enough, a set of stone steps wound behind the curtain of the waterfall. Apparently Fergus liked to mix it up in the design area. “What is wrong with a bower?”

  “Nothing,” said Emma. “I was thinking of getting one myself.”

  Nene gave her a suspicious look before leaving her alone. Emma heard the key turn in the lock as she shut the door and didn’t even bother to try the knob. Even if she escaped from the room, she’d have no way of finding her way through the corridors. And it wasn’t as if she’d go anywhere without Julian, who wanted to be here anyway.

  The last thing she felt like was sleeping, but she’d learned to snatch rest at any time on missions. She changed into her nightgown and mounted the stone steps behind the waterfall. They led to a stone platform hidden behind the water.

  Despite her miserable mood, Emma was struck by the beauty of it. The bed was massive, piled with cloudy white cushions and a heavy coverlet. The waterfall sheeted by past the foot of the bed in a curtain of glimmering silver; the rush and roar of water surrounded the space, reminding Emma of the crash of waves against the beach.

  She sank down on the bed. “Nice room,” she said, to no one in particular. “Sorry. Bower.”

  Time to sleep, she decided. She lay down and closed her eyes, but the first image that sprang up against her lids was the image of Julian holding Livvy’s body in the Council Hall. His face against her blood-wet hair. Emma’s eyelids popped open, and she turned over restlessly. It didn’t help; the next time she tried, she saw Dane’s open, staring eyes as the kelpie sank its teeth into his body.

  Too much. Too much blood, too much horror. She wanted Julian badly; she missed him as if it had been a week since she’d seen him. In a way, it had been. Even her parabatai rune felt strange—she was used to the pulse of its energy, but even before they had come to Faerie, reaching for that energy had been like slamming into a blank wall.

  She turned over again, wishing for Cristina, who she could talk to. Cristina, who would understand. But could she tell even Cristina about the spell that had stripped Julian of his emotions? And what about his deal with the Queen? It had been an ugly sort of brilliant, she thought, to make a copy for the Fair Folk. They were both tricky and literal enough to at least consider the copy as sufficient for their purposes. It was too bad Julian couldn’t simply have given the copy to Horace, but he would have laughed in their faces: Even a Dearborn knew what printer paper looked like. He didn’t want to perform the spells in the book, after all; he simply wanted back the property he believed Annabel had stolen, the Black Volume that had lived so many years on the shelves of the Cornwall Institute.

  She heard the door of the room open, voices, Julian’s tread on the stairs, and then he was by the bed; she hadn’t realized how the light pouring through the water would turn him into an effigy of silver. Even his dark hair was silvered, as if she was seeing him the way he might look in thirty years.

  She sat up. He didn’t move or seem as if he was about to say anything. He stood looking at her, and when he raised his hand to push his hair back, she saw again the stained cloth tied around his wrist.

  “So how’d it go?” she asked finally. “Did you find out how to break all the parabatai bonds in the world?”

  “As it turns out, it’s not possible.” He leaned against a bedpost. “You must be pleased.”

  “Yes.” She kicked a pillow down to the foot of the bed. “I mean, that’s a relief, but I’m still curious why you suddenly decided to trust the Seelie Queen when she’s literally never been trustworthy.”

  “She didn’t betray us before,” said Julian. “We made a deal with her, but we never brought her the Black Volume—until now.”

  “She did terrible things to Jace and Clary—”

  “Maybe they just didn’t know how to deal with her properly.” His blue-green eyes glittered. “The Queen only cares about the Queen. She isn’t interested in causing pain for the sake of causing it. She just wants what she wants. If you remember that, you can deal with her.”

  “But why did we ever have to—”

  “Look, it was obvious we couldn’t trust Dearborn from the beginning. This isn’t just a secret mission like Clary and Jace’s. He brought us to Brocelind alone. He sent us through the door to Faerie without anyone else there. Horace Dearborn is not on our side,” Julian said. “He thinks we’re enemies. Downworlder-lovers. Sure, he thinks we can get the Black Volume back for him—but he planned for us to die doing it. What do you think happens, Emma, when we go home if we don’t have it? In fact, how do you think we even get back—do you really feel like we can trust some guy standing at Bram’s Crossroads on Horace’s orders?”

  She’d been so caught up in anger at Julian she hadn’t stopped to think about how they might get home from Faerie. “Dane said it wasn’t just him,” she said. “Do you think he meant there’ll be someone waiting at Bram’s Crossroads to kill us?”

  “There could be someone waiting around every corner to kill us,” Julian said. “Dane was an idiot—he came for us too fast, before we had the real book. But they may not all be. Our lives are in danger here every second. If we have a deal with the Queen, we’re under her protection.”

  “We need an ally,” Emma said. “And she’s weird and opportunistic and terrible but better than nothing. That’s what you’re saying?”

  “Every plan involves risk,” Julian said. “Not going to the Queen was a risk. Strategy is choosing between the risks—there is no safe way, Emma, not for us. Not since the minute Horace called us into his office.”

  “And if we return with the real Black Volume, he’ll just kill us and take it,” said Emma. “That was his plan anyway.”

  “No,” Julian said. “That was his plan when he thought he was controlling how we returned. If we
decide how and where we return, we can walk into any Council meeting and present the Black Volume, bravely rescued from our faerie foes. Horace thought he could get rid of us easily because we were in disgrace. It’ll be much harder to do if we return in triumph.”

  “Fine,” she said. “I get what you think we’re doing. I don’t know if I agree about working with the Queen, but at least I understand. But you know what would have been better? If you’d included me in the part where you chose what risk we were going to take.”

  “I didn’t see the point,” he said. “You would have worried, and for what?”

  Emma felt tears burn behind her eyes. “This isn’t you. You’d never say that.”

  Julian’s eyes flashed. “You know I’ve always done whatever needed to be done to keep us safe. I thought you understood that about me.”

  “This is different. Remember—Julian, remember what Dane said, that you were the kind of guy who would have a girl for a parabatai?” She knelt up on the bed, raising her chin to look him directly in the eye. “That’s what I always loved about you, even before I was in love with you. You never thought for a second about it diminishing you to have a girl as your warrior partner, you never acted as if I was anything less than your complete equal. You never for a moment made me feel like I had to be weak for you to be strong.”

  He looked away. Emma pressed on:

  “You knew we were always stronger together. You’ve always treated me as though my opinion matters. You’ve always respected my ability to make decisions for myself. But you’re not acting like that now. It’s not some small thing that you lied to me, Julian, it’s a betrayal of everything we swore in our parabatai ceremony. It’s one thing for you to not want to treat me like your girlfriend, but it’s entirely another for you to not treat me like your parabatai.”

  Julian crawled onto the bed beside her. “This isn’t what I planned,” he said. “I was concerned that you’d refuse to go to the Seelie Court, and I was just trying to move fast.” The shimmer of the waterfall altered, and Julian’s hair was dark again, his lashes making shadows against his cheeks. “I had no idea you’d be so upset about—everything.”