Realm of Mirrors (The DeathSpeaker Codex Book 3) (15 page)

The realm of the guardian was a treehouse.

In defense of its mystical-sounding name, though, it was a hell of a treehouse. The structure spanned a group of three trees, with hanging wooden bridges connecting buildings so high up, they looked like ornate birdhouses. A light mist swirled the air above the mini-compound, glinting blue in the blazing moonlight.

The banshees led me up a spiral staircase that seemed to be carved into one of the trees—the one supporting the largest house. When we reached the top, Pyn and Alice disappeared.

“Where’d they go?” I said.

“Oh, they’re just following the rules. Realm of the guardian, only one may enter, et cetera and so forth.” Pan smiled crookedly and gestured at the arched wooden door in front of us. “Ye’ll have to open that,” she said. “What with my being incorporeal.”

“Got it.” I grabbed the tarnished brass doorknob, turned it, and pushed the door open.

Inside was a living room with a green carpet, wooden walls, and off-white furniture. At least, that’s what my brain saw at first. I gradually realized that the walls were living branches, the floor was a carpet of moss—and the furniture was made out of bones.

Okay. That was a little unsettling.

“Nyantha,” Pan called as she drifted past me into the center of the room. “Ye’ve a visitor here. Isn’t that exciting?”

There was a throat-clearing sound from a shadowed doorway on the other side of the room.

Pan slumped and let out a long-suffering sigh. “Presenting Nyantha the wise, daughter of the spirits and guardian of the Trees-of-Ankou-come-seeker-of-knowledge-and-speak-your-questions-forthwith.”

Another deliberate cough.

“Really, Nyantha,” she muttered, extending her arms wide. She threw her head back, and light poured from her white eyes, filling the room with blinding light.

When it faded, Pan was gone, and someone else stood in her place.

Nyantha was surprisingly tall. Long, straight white hair fell to her waist, and her eyes were the purple of a twilight sky. Not a single line, crease or wrinkle marked her elegant face, but she still seemed ancient, timeless. She wore a simple black, shimmering gown and silver rings on every finger, and on every toe of her bare feet.

She smiled. “You know my grand-niece. What a delight,” she said. “How is Shade?”

“I think she’s fine, ma’am,” I stammered, trying to remember if I’d actually said that.

“Such lovely manners.” The Sluagh seemed to drift when she walked. Her feet barely whispered on the moss beneath them. “Welcome, DeathSpeaker. How can I help you?”

I had no idea where to start. I wanted to know about the barrier Pan had mentioned, and why it hurt when I spoke to the dead. Why sometimes I had to physically touch the corpse to contact them, and other times they just started talking to me. Why I couldn’t do it for very long, and what made me pass out when I did. Whether there was anything else I could do besides force dead people to speak.

“I see.” Nyantha smiled again. “You’d like to know everything.”

I got over the surprise pretty fast. “Right. You’re psychic,” I said. Couldn’t help wondering if it worked the same as Shade’s abilities, if she’d only hear what I wanted her to. Or if she could read anything she wanted in my head.

Nyantha raised an eyebrow. “I can read anything,” she said. “But I’ll try to stay away from your dark secrets, Gideon Black.”

This time I was a bit unnerved. “I’d appreciate that.”

“I know.” She winked and held a hand out. “Shall we, then?”

“Okay,” I said hesitantly.

I took her hand, and the world went away in a dizzying swoop of weightlessness.

And then we were in a cemetery.

C
HAPTER 21

“I
t’s quite simple, really. You merely decide to be somewhere else.”

“How did you do that?” I blurted, before my mind processed that she’d already answered the question I hadn’t asked. “Um, right. Simple.” It didn’t sound simple to me. I decided I wanted to be somewhere else all the time, but I’d never suddenly found myself there. Of course,
anywhere but being shot at by bad guys
wasn’t a very specific destination.

Daoin had done something like that. Once, and probably by accident.

“You are the child of Lord Daoin?” Nyantha said. “How is he…oh. Oh, my.”

“Yeah. That.” I must’ve thought about Daoin and Taeral, and Reun, and why we’d come here unprepared and desperate instead of the way Taeral planned. Sadie had told me to hurry, but I didn’t need the prompt. I knew the longer this took, the more they’d suffer. And maybe we were too late. Despite Uriskel’s assurances, I couldn’t help thinking that if the Unseelie Court wanted them dead—they would be.

Nyantha smiled sadly. “They live yet,” she said. “Moirehna has no intention of destroying them. She seeks revenge, for a heart she believes broken.”

I stared at her. It wasn’t easy getting used to this psychic stuff.

“The Unseelie Queen,” she said as I opened my mouth to ask
who’s Moirehna.
“And yes, I’ll try to wait until you ask a question.”

Damn. I hadn’t even thought that far ahead. The question didn’t form in my mind until after she’d answered—and I had to force myself not to say it out loud anyway.

“Thanks,” I said. At least that was in the right place.

It’d take a few minutes for my head to stop spinning, from trying to follow a conversation that somehow happened before I had it. So I leaned on a nearby gravestone to catch my breath and look around.

Grass covered the grounds here, like the marshlands—but it was glossy black. A low-lying blue mist, like the stuff above Nyantha’s treehouse, drifted around and between the thick, inky stalks, occasionally splashing against a stone and billowing up the surface until it poured down the other side like ghostly water.

The grave markers themselves weren’t uniform, and there were few that resembled traditional headstones. Some were obelisks, like the one I’d leaned against. Others were cairns, or boulders, or rough stone sculptures. They were marked with runes instead of names, and they didn’t seem to be arranged in any particular pattern. No rows or columns or grids.

Or so I thought, until I spotted the tower of black stones in the center of the place and realized the graves formed a widening spiral from there.

“Okay,” I finally said, hoping to start a normal conversation this time. “Shade says you knew the guy who was the DeathSpeaker before me, right?”

Nyantha nodded. “I did. Poor, mad Kelwyyn,” she said.

“Er. Mad Kelwyyn?”

“Yes, he was. Eventually.” She sighed and folded her hands together. “He’d learned to kill with a word, you see. One word that could rip the very soul from you and destroy it forever—a feat only the DeathSpeaker can accomplish. He’d used it just once, to stop a power-hungry sorcerer with designs to enslave all of Arcadia. But the High Fae decided that Kelwyyn himself was too powerful…and so, to keep him in line, they murdered his daughter.”

“Jesus Christ.” Somehow I didn’t see pissing off someone more powerful than you as being an effective way to stop them.

“Indeed, it was not,” Nyantha said, and I ignored the fact that I hadn’t said that out loud. “His grief drove him to slaughter anyone who came near him. The more he killed, the harder they tried to destroy him. But they could not touch him. Their final attempt, thirty of the oldest and strongest nobles armed with lethal weapons and spells, lasted less than half a day against him.”

“Wait. I thought they killed him,” I said. “He’s still alive?”

“Perhaps…but no one will ever know for certain. In the end he removed himself, the only way he could.” She looked off to the distance. “The Fae are not capable of taking their own lives,” she said. “And so, Kelwyyn walked into the Mists.”

Uriskel had mentioned those, too. “What are the Mists?”

“Agents of change,” she said. “The Mists…take things, and sometimes leave other things in their place.”

I frowned. “What kind of things?”

“Cottages, fields, ponds. Forests and villages. Once, an entire realm. Those sorts of things—sometimes along with the living creatures they contain.” She looked at me, and added, “No one knows what happens inside them, because nothing alive has ever returned from the Mists.”

“Great.” So being the DeathSpeaker meant I’d eventually go crazy, kill a bunch of people, and wander off to vanish into who-knows-what forever.

“Not necessarily,” Nyantha said. “All right, then, DeathSpeaker. Let me show you how to speak to the dead properly.”

That was definitely going to be my next question.

The marker she led me to was a cairn of stones, carefully placed to form a flat-topped pyramid about four feet high. There was a large, flat stone with carved runes embedded in the top of the cairn.

She didn’t mention who was buried there.

“The barrier between the land of the living and the world of the dead exists all around us.” Nyantha took a seat on a stone bench alongside the grave. “You’ve the ability to reach through that barrier, and pull souls through to the living side.”

“Is that what I’m doing?” I said, vaguely horrified.

“Yes, but the souls take no harm in visiting this side. Many do so voluntarily. My banshees, for example,” she said. “The remains of the dead serve as a kind of touchstone, an anchor to the living realm. In a sense, they are always connected to their remains, no matter where they roam. That is why you can reach them when you’re near a body.”

I nodded, trying not to think too hard about the world of the dead. “So that’s why it’s easier when I touch them?”

“That’s right. But you do not need physical contact with the remains to compel a soul. It simply helps you to focus your efforts.” She smiled. “With practice, you’ll be able to call on them without touch.”

“Practice. Terrific.”

Her brow furrowed. “You are concerned about the pain,” she said. “The act of crossing the barrier is painful, and always will be—for you, and the soul. But once you’ve brought them over, you can speak to them without damaging yourself or the dead.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m hoping,” I said. “I just don’t know how to do it.”

“You must release the soul.” She pointed at my head. “The reason for the pain, the bleeding, is that you hold them in your mind. And you’ve no room in there for more than one. Every word, every movement of the soul tears at you…and the soul is constantly crushed, causing them pain as well.”

I felt a little sick, knowing I’d done that to people’s souls. Most of them were bad guys—but not all of them had been. “So how do I release them?”

“Kelwyyn always projected them outward, like a glamour,” she said. “But be cautious. You must hold part of them back, because if you lose your grip, a determined soul may escape back to the world of the dead—or worse, free itself to the realm of the living.”

Oh, good. Another whole new way for me to screw things up.

“Have confidence in your abilities, DeathSpeaker.” She nodded at the cairn, and said, “Go on, then. Give it a try.”

“What, now?”

“Yes, now. You cannot improve your abilities merely by talking about them.”