Bad Luck Girl (29 page)

That did it. What little calm I’d been able to pull together broke in two, and I kicked out again. This time, though, Papa was ready for me. He stepped sideways and back, twisting my arm firmly around behind me, so the more I struggled, the more it hurt.

Shake pushed the door open for the Seelie king and the king made Ivy walk on through into the ash-covered garden. Papa followed, marching me in front of him.

The Great Chicago Fire had happened over fifty years ago, but that garden smelled of fresh smoke and crackled
with heat. The plants were as blackened and broken as the inside of the house, but fresh sparks shone on the edges of the ashy leaves. But that was only for a little ways. As we walked, I felt the last of the human world melting away into the magic of the Unseelie country. It filled me with the comfortable sensation of coming to a place that knew me inside and out. Up ahead was the world where I fit, completely and without question. Part of me was already aching to get closer. It didn’t want me to try to drag my feet. It wanted me to hurry up. When I got there, I’d be given something I didn’t even know had been kept away from me. When I got there, I’d finally have all my magic, all myself.

Think about Jack
, I ordered myself.
Think about Jack and Mama. Got to get away, got to get back to them
.

That helped. A little. My eyes had adjusted to the dark and silver shadows of this place. I could see the rough stone wall that traced the border of the Unseelie lands. It was jumbled and broken from where the armies had come through, but some of the guardian stones were still alive, and they were opening clay-gray eyes. They were afraid, but they were also happy. Of course they were hungry too, like every other fairy I’d met who wasn’t one of the kings. They were thinking how they’d done their work well. Maybe today they’d be fed.

The Seelie king waved Ivy’s hand. The stone goblins cringed and fell back, widening the nearest gap in the wall. It would be beautiful on the other side of that wall, as beautiful
and perfect as the first ray of sunlight on a winter morning, or the light of the full moon over the water.

I clamped my eyes shut. I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to feel the curiosity, or worse, the longing, bubbling through me. I didn’t want to understand that the whole world beyond the wall had missed me.

“Oh, isn’t that cute!” exclaimed Ivy’s voice. “She wants to be surprised!” There was a little giggle, but then that pretty little-girl voice turned hard.

“Open your eyes,” she, he, it commanded. “Open them, Calliope Margaret LeRoux deMinuit. Open them up, Heir to the Midnight Throne, Bad Luck Girl, Prophecy Girl.”

There was a sharp twisting inside my heart, like a knife blade slicing deep. The Seelie king knew my names. My uncle, who’d been at my side and in my head, had given him all of my names that he’d found out, and my names opened my eyes.

And just like that, I was home.

The human world is alive, but it’s nothing like the life in the fairy world. I couldn’t touch that world the way I could touch the world around me now. I couldn’t know it instantly, couldn’t feel each atom of it like I could feel my fingers and toes, and move them about just as easily. This world was beautiful. It was everything and everywhere I wanted to be. There was no more helplessness or confusion for me here, and there never would be again. I was a part of everything. The Unseelie land was what I was, and who I was and would be forever.

“You should close the gate, Callie,” said my uncle. “We don’t want any uninvited guests at your homecoming, do we?”

As soon as those words reached me, I agreed with them. No. We certainly did not. I understood that instantly and completely, and I knew the Seelie king agreed as well. I
turned lightly on my toes, and just as lightly, I reached out with my powers. I found the ragged edges of that ratty, broken gate that led to Chicago and the human world. I pulled it shut and turned the key.

My father smiled down at me, approval shining in his eyes. I took his hand so together we could follow the king and my uncle as they led us farther into our home.

We passed through the Bone Forest first. Trees with mottled, pale trunks drew down the light from the stars so it pulsed in the ripples of their white bark and the veins of their thick, pale leaves. Ferns made of smoke clustered around their roots. White moss curled and billowed like the morning mist over bone trees that had broken and been left to fall. The ground itself held a thousand thousand separate lives in its insects and the grains of its dark loam.

Next came the Emerald Fields, and the Ebony Road that would lead us to the Twilight Gardens. I knew the name of each place we passed through. I knew how they’d been born and all the lives that made them up. I could have walked through them with my own eyes closed, because there were other eyes everywhere and they all belonged to me.

Not all life held the shape of plants or insects. Those were the lesser of our kind. There were people too. My true kindred, the Unseelie, were all tall and beautiful, with the light of our world in their eyes. Like my father. Their skin was midnight or ochre or amber or sand or pure white. Some had translucent wings and carried the scent of jasmine or hyacinth with them. Others were like the purest, most perfect
ideal of the human form. My uncle wanted all these to see our passage to the palace of the Midnight Throne, and they came at his wish. They lined the Ebony Road. The Seelie king made Ivy’s mouth smile and Ivy’s hand wave, and the Unseelie nobles cheered. But as soon as we passed by, they all fell silent. I thought about glancing back to see what was going on behind us, but that idea didn’t last, and I never did see.

Beyond the Twilight Gardens waited the palace of the Midnight Throne, but not in its full glory. There had been resistance to the Seelie king’s arrival, and it had broken the palace apart. The towers were cracked like the oldest trees in the Bone Forest, and smoke moss and blood ivy were already crawling up their sides. The great star dome of the center was broken open like an eggshell, and I thought I saw the memory of crow men rising out of it toward the indigo sky, which held both the stars and the distant promise of full night. A sadness hung about the broken palace, but that was no surprise to me. I’d known it was coming, after all, just like I knew the road to the palace and all its history.

No one was concerned much with my reactions just then. My uncle and the Seelie king were looking at my father. Papa gazed at that shattered palace, seeing it both for the first time and the hundredth, because he was wholly a part of the Unseelie Lands, just like me. He was sad but accepting, just like me. What were the king and my uncle finding to look at? We were all one and the same here. None of us could surprise
the other. That was a human thing, and we’d left all human things far behind.

We entered the palace through the Blue Moon gates, and the First Hall, and the Great Hall, and the Antechamber. The guards, servants, and messengers scurried or stumped or glided past the stones that had fallen from the dome and the moss and mist creeping through the cracked walls. Ten guards pushed open the great doors to the Throne Room, even though those doors were cracked so badly we could have stepped through without effort.

The Throne Room was made of midnight-black marble shot through with veins of starlight, so it looked like the stone had captured lightning in its heart. Like everything else, the room was alive, though badly wounded from the war. It hoped if it held out long enough, it would be fed. The dais at the far end of the great room was still in one piece, though. So were the two thrones carved from pure darkness, one for the king and one for the queen. My grandparents were also in one piece. Mostly.

The king and queen of the Midnight Throne sat as still as wooden puppets in their places of honor. I could feel they were alive. But they’d been cut off from the land and pushed deep down into themselves until they couldn’t even see up anymore. Their heads lolled on their shoulders, their eyes were wide open, and their jaws gaped. They looked so funny I had to laugh.

“You’re gonna catch flies!” I giggled. I couldn’t remember
who’d said that to me, but they’d said it a lot, and I liked the sound of it.

Grandma’s diamond crown had slipped down over one ear and that only made her look funnier. I nudged at it with a flick of magic, and it fell clattering to the stone floor. My uncle laughed and with an even lighter flick, sent the crown rolling across the floor to scatter a pile of tough, papery leaves that had fallen from the new bone trees sprouting outside.

There was memory here too. It cowered between the shadows and the shining marble. In memory, Grandfather barred the door against his own army after the Seelie king had turned it against him. Grandmother stationed herself on the dais, and raised her spear, because they already knew the doors would not hold. The door split open with enormous thunder, so the Seelie king in the skin of his lovely, golden dead daughter could walk through, with my uncle right beside him. The king spoke my grandparents’ names; Faelen, Twilight Lord, King of the Midnight Throne. Luigsech, Midnight’s Consort, Twilight’s Queen, Daughter of the Ebony Road and the Bone Forest. All his will and desire infused those words. He wished that they would fall into their thrones, unable to move until someone said those names again. Because the Seelie king wished it, because he knew the names, and because he was the strongest here, that was exactly what happened.

“Why?” asked Papa. The word echoed back and forth in
that broken chamber, and the stones themselves strained to listen. “Why leave them alive at all?”

“Because it would not do for Princess Calliope to take on her heritage before we’re sure she’s ready,” said my uncle. “While our parents live, the throne is theirs, not hers, and wiser heads can act as regents for her.”

“Of course.” Papa smiled. “Just how it should be. We must be completely certain all things are in readiness before we make the final move, mustn’t we?”

“Oh, yes,” agreed the Seelie king. “They were careless, those two. They kept themselves too sated, too happy, and dabbled too much in the dangers of creation.” Ivy’s head shook sadly. “They gave their names to others.” He meant my uncle, of course, and my father a little, but mostly my uncle. “You should always keep one name back.” The king was looking at me, but I couldn’t understand why. I did know my grandparents had been careless, and now they were funny. I started to laugh again, but an uncomfortable sensation rumbled through me, and I pressed my hands to my stomach.

“What’s the matter, Callie? Hungry?” asked my uncle.

“They are … They’re hungry.” I meant my grandparents. Cut off from the magic of the Unseelie country, they were slowly starving. But it wasn’t just them. “The whole world is hungry. Why are they hungry?”

“What else will keep them in line?” asked the Seelie king mildly. “If the lesser ones are fed, they’ll only grow stronger.
If we let them be strong, what will stop them from challenging us if they feel like it?”

I felt my face scrunch up. I was seeing something from far away. A crowd of mismade creatures gathering around a table. They were talking about payment for what they’d taken. I was thinking about a white boy and a dusty street and the shame of not having payment for food.…

Why was I thinking of such ugly things?

“Do you want to feed them, Your Highness?” my uncle asked. “And perhaps you’d like something to eat for yourself?”

Another image flashed through my mind. I saw the goblin stones split open and pale Seelies scooping up the life as it ran out of them like liquid silver. My uncle laughed, and the vision was gone. “Oh, no, Your Highness. That is for the lesser ones. For us, there are much daintier foods.”

“But so soon?” murmured my father. “We just arrived. Perhaps she should see her room first.”

“I disagree,” said the Seelie king. “I think Her Highness should see the Kitchen Garden.”

So, of course we went to the Kitchen Garden, which was less a garden and more a greenhouse. A bunch of its frosted panes had shattered, but some were still whole, and they shone down bright daylight for the garden. There were gardeners—lean and knob-jointed Unseelies with broad, forked hands for digging, or scissor fingers for pruning. They picked their way between beds of earth that held the fruit trees and ordered rows of plants. Not that all of them looked
like the plants I’d gotten used to in the human world. One tree had the shape of a bearded man with boots and a sword in his arm that had become a branch and hung now with bloodred cherries. I knew as soon as I looked at him that he was Feodor Alexi Alexeovich. In another bed, a mottled brown-and-white woman stretched out on the earth like she’d lain down for a nap. She was Berta. Mushrooms sprouted from her, in a way that made me think of feathers. Another tree had gotten itself tangled. A long, colorful strip of paper twined around it like a vine. The tree held the paper tightly, though it rattled in the breeze like it was trying to get free. Bunches of grapes dangled from twisting paper stems. I couldn’t see anything left of her real shape, she’d been twisted so tight, but I knew this paper was named Tola. I’d called her and Berta both something else before, but that didn’t matter now. They couldn’t hide their real names from us here. They weren’t strong enough. Neither were any of the others. I looked at the beds that stretched out for long yards in every direction. Many were filled with trees and plants. Every one of them had a name, and every one grew a new fruit or other tasty treat. Some were empty, though, nothing but bare dirt waiting to be planted over.

“We know you came here planning to bargain for your Undone, Callie,” said my uncle. “But you can see now that simply isn’t possible, can’t you?”

Of course it was. Had I ever had such a silly plan? I couldn’t take the food from my family and my king.

“What do you think, Callie? Are you still hungry?” The
king turned Ivy’s face toward me. The blue of her eyes was only a thin ring around her black, blank pupils. “Maybe you should try the grapes.”