The Black Queen (Book 6) (25 page)

He stood perfectly still, staring at something over her shoulder. They were in his quarters, with their spectacular view of the garden. His bed was dented in the middle from the weight of his body, and through the doors she could see the chairs in the sitting room were also dented. He had had these rooms his whole life, and had never asked to change the furniture, had never asked to have anything brought to him or taken away. Even when his father reclaimed the palace from the Black King, Sebastian had taken nothing new, simply had his rooms restored to the way they had been.

The windows were open and a cool breeze was coming through, making Seger shudder. Between the unnatural touch of Sebastian’s skin and the growing chill of evening, she would be very cold by the time she left here.

She had been searching for the place where the strange voice had taken root. So far, she felt nothing, no nodes, no bumps, nothing that would indicate a place where the voice lived. That worried her. It meant it had taken root inside of him instead of outside, and she wasn’t sure if she had the magick to remove it.

She had consulted with several other Healers, as well as Domestics who specialized in creating Changelings. Sebastian had been a Changeling, a lump of rock that was molded to look like Gift when he was an infant, and placed in the crib to decoy Gift’s parents while the Fey stole him. It was an ancient Fey practice, not used much, but one that had come in handy, especially when the Fey were a young people with little power. Most Domestics learned how to create Changelings but had never done so, and the Domestics who had created Sebastian were long dead.

Sebastian’s shift from Changeling to Golem—Changelings usually lived a few weeks at most—was something no one had counted on. That he had shattered and reassembled three times at his own count was nothing short of miraculous. He had a strength that came to him from his formation, and a wisdom that she liked. He also was very childlike, and that concerned her, because it might mean that he wouldn’t know what to fight if he needed to fight for survival.

Her fingers probed the cracks along his neck, hunting for nodes, for anything that didn’t feel like stone. Everything felt right—as right as a Golem could be. She reached out with her magick, searching for the extra voice, the part of him that shouldn’t be there, and finally saw it, threaded into each shattered piece, a strand of black in the gray.

Loosening it would be harder than she thought.

She dropped her hand. “Sebastian,” she said.

“Yes…?” He turned his head and looked at her. His slate gray eyes had so much life. It was as if he were a vibrant, energetic being trapped in a body made of stone.

“Do you feel pain?”

“Here….” He tapped his heart.

“In your body?”

Slowly the stone face scrunched up into a frown of concentration. “Pain?”

“Yes. When you shattered, for instance. Did it hurt?”

“Here….” He tapped his heart again.

She put her hand on that spot. He didn’t have a heart, not in the way that flesh-and-blood creatures did, but he had learned that his emotions lived in this place. She could feel a slight warmth on the stone.

“Anywhere else?”

He shook his head. One movement, very slow.

She took a deep breath and kept her hand on his stone chest. “Sebastian,” she said carefully. “What I’m going to do is attempt to remove the new voice. It’s threaded into all your stone. I don’t believe this will hurt, but it will feel odd. Are you willing to let me try?”

“Please,” he said.

His voice sounded steady, but his eyes held fear. She rubbed her hand on the warm spot on his chest, then smiled at him. “Ready?”

“Yes.”

Seger moved her hand away from the warmth and, seeing with her magick, touched the blackness threading through the stone. She placed her index finger on it, then closed her eyes. The blackness felt harder, somehow, than the stone it was embedded in, but the blackness was thin, like a small band of material, barely thick enough to hold anything.

She slipped her fingernail beneath the blackness and tugged at it gently, like a seamstress would pull a bad stitch. Sebastian’s body tightened, and he took a sharp breath. He could feel what she was doing. She slowed down her movements, careful to make them as gentle as possible.

Soon she was able to wrap some of the blackness around her index finger. She held it there for a moment, debating whether or not she should cut it, when the blackness pulled back.

The pull was so hard that it slammed her finger against Sebastian’s chest. She opened her eyes, lost the magick vision, saw her finger slipping into the stone. It took all of her concentration to look at it, not as it was but as the magick was, and see the blackness pulling small bits of color from her.

She slid her finger away. It ached. Bits of skin were gone and blood was welling from pinprick sized holes.

Sebastian blinked at her, frowning. “It…is…tight.”

“What is?” she asked, struggling to keep her voice calm. She didn’t want him to know how uncomfortable the blackness made her feel.

“The…place…you…touched.”

She almost put her hand on it, then thought the better of it. Something else was going on here. Voices did not thread themselves through a body, although she wasn’t sure how such things worked in Golems. They didn’t have voice boxes like Fey did, nor did they have internal organs. Perhaps this was the only way the voice could attach.

Still, it should have come loose. It shouldn’t have fought back. This was confirmation that the magick she feared was influencing what faced them.

She would need to return with a group of Healers, and when one failed, the other would have to try. If only they had an Enchanter here, or even a group of Spell Warders. The more power she had to fight this thing, the better she would feel.

“It didn’t work this time,” she said. “Can you stand the tightness?”

“It…is…eas-ing,” he said.

“Good. I’m going to try again, but not today. Can you wait?”

“I…do…not…want…to, but…I…will.”

She nodded. She took one more look at him through her magick, saw that the blackness had gathered in that single spot as if it had pooled all its strength together. As she looked at it, her finger ached. She would need to have someone else look at that, to make sure she hadn’t gotten tainted by the foreign magick.

A knock on the door made them both jump. The blackness dispersed along Sebastian’s chest as if it hadn’t gathered there at all. Seger took a step backwards. As she did, the door to the sitting area opened, and Arianna swept in.

Her skin was an odd shade of gray, and there were shadows beneath her eyes. Luke followed her, his own expression carefully neutral. He shut the door behind them.

“I’m sorry to intrude,” Arianna said. “Is it all right?”

Sebastian smiled. “I…am…hap-py…you…are…here.”

“Did it work?” Luke asked Seger.

She shook her head. “We are facing some powerful magick.” She almost showed them her finger, but did not, worried that they wouldn’t understand.

“Yes,” Luke said. He glanced at Arianna. Color filled her cheeks. She opened her mouth, then closed it, and then sighed.

“I—, oh, Seger.”

Seger held herself very still. “What is it?”

Arianna took a step forward. “I need to talk with you. Alone.”

“She has been losing time,” Luke said as if he didn’t approve of the private conference. “She has said things she doesn’t remember saying, and then, today, she got hit with another headache. Only this one was different, wasn’t it?”

Arianna didn’t say anything.

“This one caused her to Shift.”

Arianna reddened even more. Sebastian put a hand on her arm. “Are…you…all…right?”

“For now,” Arianna said. “Seger, please. Some time alone.”

Seger nodded. It wasn’t unreasonable for the Black Queen to ask for a private consultation at a moment like this. “Luke,” she said, “would you mind staying with Sebastian? I don’t think he should be alone for a while.”

“All right.” Luke sounded frustrated. Seger had noticed that he never quite knew what to do around Sebastian. So many didn’t. They saw only his slowness and didn’t realize how intelligent the creature—the person—hidden by it was.

“Let’s go to my suite,” Arianna said.

It was just across the hall. Arianna led the way, moving quickly. Her gown flowed around her as she did so, making it seem as if she moved even faster than she was. When she opened the door to her suite, she walked through it as if to satisfy herself that it was empty. Then she closed her windows and the door before offering Seger a chair.

Seger sat, but Arianna did not. She paced in front of the fireplace, her fingertips brushing against the stone as if she were trying to dust it.

“What I tell you cannot leave this room, ever,” Arianna said.

“It will not,” Seger said.

“You will listen to me, and take only the action I want on this matter.”

“As you wish,” Seger said, not sure she was liking the direction this was taking.

Arianna turned, her gown whirling around her. She glanced at her fingertips, which were now blackened, and wiped them on her skirt. Then she sat in a chair.

Seger had never seen her look so forlorn. Before Arianna had always been in control of herself, always been extremely powerful, even when she was a young ruler learning everything.

Now she was uncertain, almost frightened. Her gaze met Seger’s. “I think I’m losing my mind,” she said.

Seger made herself listen to the words and not the emotions. That way, she could stay calm. “Let me diagnose.”

“I have, apparently, said things I do not mean, given orders I do not remember, and this afternoon I discovered myself in the North Tower, with no memory of getting there. Luke said I treated him badly, trying to throw him out, even though he would not go. I’ve asked for troop reports, and I have had thoughts that don’t feel like my own.” She swallowed. “And then I Shifted. Without planning to, without even wanting to, I Shifted into a robin. I had to make myself Shift back. It was hard.”

Despite her resolution not to feel anything, chills ran through Seger. “Describe how you feel when you’ve lost time.”

“Just confused,” she said. “I don’t even realized it’s happened.”

“And the strange thoughts?”

“As if someone other than me is thinking them.”

“Then a Visionary has traveled your Links,” Seger said. “You have been invaded.”

Arianna shook her head. “I closed my Links fifteen years ago, and I haven’t reopened them.”

“Not even your Link to Sebastian?”

Arianna paused. “I don’t know. Maybe. We’re still close. I didn’t consciously open it, if I did. But this doesn’t feel like a Visionary has invaded me.” She leaned forward. “My mind has been invaded once by Rugad when I was fifteen, and he couldn’t control me. He couldn’t make me Shift. He traveled along my Link to Sebastian, and Sebastian followed him into my mind, and saved me. But in doing so, I got lost.” She blinked. “Are you following this?”

Seger shook her head. “I have heard of invasion, and I know that a powerful Visionary like Rugad can take over a mind. I did not know that he had been thrown out of yours, and I don’t know how you could get lost.”

“There was some kind of—explosion. Sebastian shattered, and the force of it sent me tumbling away from our Link,” Arianna said. She held her hands apart. “I don’t know any other word. I went tumbling back inside my own mind—it was like I was a little person inside my brain and I got sent into darkness and couldn’t find my way out.”

“So how did you?” Seger asked. This was all new to her. So many of the magicks on Blue Isle were. She had never heard of anything like this.

“Coulter traveled across my father’s Link and found me. He traced my trail in the darkness of my own brain, got me out, and told me to close the doors, the Links.”

“Which explains,” Seger said more to herself than to Arianna, “why you have not made friends or fallen in love since you have become Black Queen.”

Arianna looked shocked. “What do you mean?”

“A Link is an opening, a vulnerability. You not only closed your current Links, you prevented any more from forming.”

Arianna let out a small sigh. “That’s bad, isn’t it?”

“If someone is trying to cross your Links, no, it is not. But if you are under no threat, of course.” Seger leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “Arianna, if you had a child, or a loved one, you would not be feeling the fear you are now. You have only me to trust, and there is no bond between us. You simply know you can trust me because I am a Healer and I have done as I was bound, no more.”

Arianna’s nod was small, her eyes sad.

“This seems to me that you are suffering a magickal attack, but unlike any I’ve ever known, which makes me wonder if an Islander hasn’t provoked it.” Seger frowned. “Unless you are leaving something out.”

“There was a child.” Arianna’s voice sounded faint, as if she were having trouble remembering. “A baby—”

She gagged, and put her hands on her head. Then she wrapped her arms around her skull as if the pain were too much to bear.