The Black Queen (Book 6) (26 page)

Seger knelt beside her and touched Arianna, searching for magick. There were two active Links coming in from the outside of Arianna’s body. One was faint, as if it were rarely used, and the other was thicker. Seger didn’t have the magick to tell if either was being used. But she doubted it. The faint Link felt as if no one had used it in a long time. The other Link, the one she would have guessed attached Arianna to Sebastian, had a constant flow of energy through it, but the energy felt like it was part of Arianna, part of Sebastian, with nothing else.

There were no other active Links, no lines, no lights coming in from the outside of Arianna’s body. And there should have been. There should have been countless Links.

And a magickal attack would have left a trail of light.

Tears were streaming down Ari’s face. She made herself lift her head, her skin dark with the strain, her birthmark standing out against her chin.

“There was—a—baby,” she said. Each word was clearly a struggle. She choked on the last. “In—my—mind.”

She sounded so like Sebastian that it frightened Seger. Seger hadn’t realized how close the two of them were until that moment.

“In your mind?” Seger asked.

Arianna nodded, the tears falling harder now, her mouth turned in a grimace. Seger could feel the pain radiating off her. Blood vessels on Arianna’s forehead were standing out from the strain.

“When?” Seger asked.

“I—found—” Arianna closed her eyes, blinked, and then tried again.

“I—found—”

“You found the baby when?” Seger asked, afraid that the strain might actually harm Arianna. Seger could sense the struggle. She just didn’t know where it was coming from.

“Moments—after—”

Seger took Arianna’s hands. They felt like claws. This was clearly an important event, and something within Arianna didn’t want Seger to know about it.

“After?”

“—Links—closed.”

Arianna shut her eyes and leaned back. All the strength seemed to disappear from her body. Her hands were limp and cold.

Then her eyes opened and the look in them was harsh, unyielding, and vaguely amused. “Satisfied now, Seger?” she asked in Fey.

In all the years, Seger had known Arianna, she had never seen her like this. Arianna was right; this was a different person, someone alien. And someone familiar.

“Who are you?” Seger replied in the same language.

Arianna smiled. “Why, I’m Arianna, of course. Who did you think I was?”

But Arianna had never spoken like this. Her voice had never been so deep, so filled with wry contempt. Even the inflections were wrong. Arianna spoke Fey with an accent, the accent found in this, the central part of Blue Isle. She was fluent in the language, but had never—even though she had spoken it from childhood—completely adopted it as her own. She preferred to speak in Islander when she could. Fey was not her natural language.

“What do you want with Arianna?” Seger asked.

The woman’s smile grew wider. “I am Arianna.”

“Not the Arianna I know.”

A single incline of the head, like a gracious ruler to a lower subject, again, something that Arianna had never done before. “I mean to change the way I do business.”

Seger’s chill grew. Arianna had sat up in the chair. Even her posture was different. It was rigid, more in control than Seger had ever seen her.

“Change how?” Seger asked.

“It’s time to stop playing games, to stop ‘learning and growing’ into my role. It’s time I become what I should have been from the start.”

“And that is?” Seger asked.

“The best Black Queen the Empire has ever known.”

Seger had to hold herself rigid to prevent a shudder. “How do you plan to do that?”

“You’ll see.” Arianna stood, took a step forward and nearly tripped over the hem of her gown. Seger had to lean back to get out of her way. Arianna looked down as if she hadn’t known what she was wearing then, with the barely cleaned hand, she lifted her skirt and walked forward.

Then she wheeled around, unsteadily, and looked at herself as if she didn’t know how she had gotten there. She dropped her skirt, leaving a dark hand print on it, her eyes wild. Her mouth opened, then closed, then opened. She looked completely like a woman at war with herself.

“Thought—”

She spoke brokenly in Islander, just as she had been doing before she slipped to Fey.

“—baby—”

Her mouth opened and closed again. The tears were back, tears of effort. Seger took a step toward her, but wasn’t sure if touching Arianna would help her or hurt her.

“—Sebastian—”

She cursed in Fey, grabbed the skirt, and wiped off her face. Then she walked out of the room as if she had said nothing at all. Seger followed a few paces behind, only to see Arianna stumble and catch herself against the wall, hands on her head again.

Seger hurried toward her. Arianna slowly slid down the wall, and fell against the floor. She had passed out, her face gray, her birthmark red. She looked wan and ill. Seger crouched, then picked Arianna up. She was lighter and thinner than Seger had expected. It took almost no effort at all to carry Arianna to her bed.

Gently, Seger laid her down, and then stared at her. The entire thing had left Seger unnerved. She had never seen anything like it.

Seger didn’t want to leave her, but she knew she had to, just to get some help. She ran to the hallway, and crossed to Sebastian’s suite.

“She’s passed out,” she said to Luke with no preamble. “She’s in her bed. I want you to make sure she stays there until I can send a Healer to her.”

“What about you?” Luke asked.

“I’ll take care of her,” Seger said. “But at the moment, you go.”

“What if she wants to get up?”

“Tell her to wait for me,” Seger said. Luke nodded crisply then headed down the hall.

Seger turned to Sebastian. His fingers were threaded together, and his eyes were wide with fear. “All right,” she said. “Tell me about the day Rugad used your Link to invade Arianna.”

“It…will…take…time,” Sebastian said.

“I don’t care about that,” Seger said. “Just tell me. And leave nothing out.”

And so he did.

TWELVE

COULTER THREADED HIS WAY through the five giant swords outside the Place of Power. He put his hand on the polished blade of one of them as he passed. The blade was cool; it felt like a normal sword’s blade, only finer. If he wasn’t careful it would slice his hand and absorb the blood.

He’d seen that happen more than once when his people had cleaned the swords. The jewels were polished as well, and they glinted in the fading light. It had been a long time since he had been up here at twilight. It made him think of the days when he was living in the cave with Arianna, Adrian, King Nicholas, Gift, Scavenger, and Leen, when they were the only thing that stood between Rugad and his desire to conquer the world.

Coulter sighed. Those days were long gone, the unity he had felt then was gone as well. He had failed them when Adrian, who had been like a father to him, had died—and even though Arianna had made it clear that she wanted Coulter beside her, he had refused. He thought she felt strongly about him because they had been through so much together, because he had actually found her inside her own mind. That day, she had seen him as he saw himself, and she had still cared for him.

He valued that then, and he valued it now. His upbringing as an orphaned and unwanted Islander living with the Fey, had left him with a loneliness that he couldn’t articulate, a desire to be accepted that made him needier than he cared to think about. He was afraid, especially after his total devastation when Adrian died, to allow that neediness to come out again, afraid that he would make similar, very serious lapses in judgment.

Now it was his fear that was holding him back again. His fear for himself, and his fear for Arianna.

He could feel her at odd times as if she were in pain, as if part of her were trying to reach out, but unable to. Lately he had been dreaming about her as he had first seen her, a lithe Fey balanced at the border of adulthood, terrified because she was lost and yet unwilling to show it. She had been trying to save herself, and she probably would have done it without him. But she had allowed him to help her—she had allowed him to kiss her—and in his dreams, he felt that moment again and again.

She had been so beautiful, and she had looked at him with such trust. She did so in his dreams as well, looking at him with longing, and need, and with that same terrified plea in her eyes:
Help me
. She wouldn’t say it—Arianna would never say that—but he could read it as clearly as he could read words on a page.
Help me
.

He would wake in a cold sweat, wondering if she were really reaching out to him, or if it was just his neediness showing itself again. He didn’t know, and he had to know before he could make any kind of decision.

He stepped toward the mouth of the cave and stopped, as he always did when faced with the incredible light. The cave was always light. Some internal force made it glow inside. Gift used to say it was as if a small star had been captured and placed in a corner. Sleeping in here, Coulter remembered, had been like sleeping with the afternoon sun full on the face. His eyelids felt thin, and he could see shadows moving across them, and his dreams then had always been full of light.

Only the light was no longer white. On this level of the cave, the floor had turned blood red. Red light was what he saw now, and the change always startled him.

With the light came a dry heat that was welcoming. He stepped inside and let it embrace him as if he were an old friend.

There were no magick presences, at least not yet. He had hoped to feel one immediately. Instead he surveyed the cave to make sure no one had tampered with it.

The swords still gleamed on the walls. Some of them were damaged, and a few had been added by Scavenger when he brought his own personal arsenal here. They were on a separate side. The swords that belonged in the cave had been made with varin, a metal that was only found in the Cliffs of Blood. It was deadly to the touch, and could slice a man’s arm off with no effort at all.

Coulter glanced behind him. The chalices were untouched, as they had been for centuries. There had never been any use for them, unlike the swords and the other items in the cave. Some of those items were ruined, used in the battle, and never replenished. No one knew how to make them. That magick was apparently lost forever.

The red light was an odd light, almost as if there were a dying fire under the floor. The walls were still white, but the upper stairs were not. The red had flowed into them. Even places like this, places that felt permanent, could change.

He was still alone. Whenever a Mystery appeared, he could sense it, even though he couldn’t see it. He had always hoped for Adrian’s appearance. Adrian had been slaughtered, but that had been in war, and apparently the Powers didn’t think war a form of murder. Perhaps because it wasn’t so personal. Perhaps it wasn’t as easy to grant the soul who had died in war the power over his greatest enemy: most—maybe all—Mysteries chose the one who murdered him. And the one who had given the order to kill Adrian was dead.

Still, it would have been nice to see him again. Adrian was the closest thing to a father that Coulter had ever had, and sometimes, Coulter believed, Adrian had loved him more than he had loved his own son, Luke. That had caused a rift between Luke and Coulter that still existed. They hadn’t seen each other since Coulter left Jahn, years ago.

The fountain below burbled as it always did. Coulter looked at it, at the bottom of the stairs, its water spilling into a basin. Nicholas had drank that water, and had some sort of seizure. He had never told anyone what happened to him when he did that, and he had forbidden anyone else from doing the same thing.

Gift had continued to follow that command as if it were gospel. No one had tasted the water since Nicholas. Only Coulter knew that the magick in the cavern had spiked at that moment Nicholas drank. Coulter had told no one that, not even Nicholas.

Coulter had been outside, and he had come to the mouth of the cave, even though he hadn’t been supposed to, and from there, he had felt the air fill with presences, with life that he could not see. He had felt drawn to it and repelled by it at the same time, knowing that it had not come for him, but wanting it, wanting it so badly….

Coulter sat down. The stone was warm against his legs. He looked down. The stairs went on for a long way. The fountain looked the same, and so did the table, rising out of the same white stone. The many tunnels leading off the cavern beckoned, as they always did. He wondered what made Nicholas finally go down one. Had he drunken more water? Had he been guided by all that magick? Or had he finally followed what was left of Jewel to his death?

The emptiness here was a tangible thing. Coulter felt like shouting out, but knew it would do no good. He put his hands on his thighs and peered at the fountain. If he drank, would the presences come for him? Would they help him? Or would they see this as a trivial problem, one a simple mortal could solve?