Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices #2)(100)

"Julian," said a soft voice. "Awaken, son of thorns."

He sat up straight. Standing at the foot of the bed was a woman. Not Nene or Cristina: a woman he'd never seen before in person, though she was familiar from pictures. She was thin to the point of gauntness, but still beautiful, with full lips and glass-blue eyes. Red hair rippled to her waist. Her dress looked as if it had been made for her in a time before she had been so starved, but it was still lovely: deep blue and white, patterned with a delicate tracery of feathers, it wrapped her body in a downed softness. Her hands were long and white and pale, her mouth red, her ears slightly pointed.

On her head was a golden circlet-a crown, of intricate faerie-work.

"Julian Blackthorn," said the Queen of the Seelie Court. "Wake now and come with me, for I have something to show you."





14


THROUGH DARKENED GLASS


The Queen was silent as she walked, and Julian, barefoot, hurried to keep up with her. She moved purposefully down the long corridors of the Court.

It was hard to wrap one's mind around the geography of Faerie, with its ever-changing terrain, the way huge spaces fitted inside smaller ones. It was as if someone had taken the philosopher's question of how many angels could fit on the head of a pin and turned it into a landscape.

They passed other members of the gentry as they went. Here in the Seelie Court, there was less dark glamour, less viscera and bone and blood. Green livery echoed the color of plants and trees and grass. Everywhere there was gold: gold doublets on the men, long gold dresses on the women, as if they were channeling the sunshine that couldn't reach them below the earth.

They turned at last from the corridor into a massive circular room. It was bare of any furniture, and the walls were smooth stone, curving up toward a crystal set into the peak of the roof. Directly below the crystal was a great stone plinth, with a golden bowl resting on top of it.

"This is my scrying glass," said the Queen. "One of the treasures of the fey. Would you look into it?"

Julian hung back. He didn't have Cristina's expertise, but he did know what a scrying glass was. It allowed you to gaze into a reflective surface, usually a mirror or pool of water, and see what was happening somewhere else in the world. He itched to use it to check on his family, but he would take no gifts from a faerie unless he had to.

"No, thank you, my lady," he said.

He saw anger flash in her eyes. It surprised him. He would have thought her better at controlling her emotions. The anger was gone in a moment, though, and she smiled at him.

"A Blackthorn is about to put their own life in grave danger," she said. "Is that not a good enough reason for you to look in the glass? Would you be ignorant of harm coming to your family, your blood?" Her voice was almost a croon. "From what I know of you, Julian, son of thorns, that is not in your nature."

Julian clenched his hands. A Blackthorn putting themselves in danger? Could it be Ty, throwing himself into a mystery, or Livvy, being willful and reckless? Dru? Tavvy?

"You are not easily tempted," she said, and now her voice had grown softer, more seductive. Her eyes gleamed. She liked this, he thought. The chase, the game. "How unusual in one so young."

Julian thought with an almost despairing amusement of his near breakdown just now around Emma. But that was a weakness. Everyone had them. Years of denying himself anything and everything he wanted for the sake of his family had forged his will into something that surprised even him sometimes.



       
         
       
        

"I can't reach through and change what happens, can I?" he said. "Wouldn't it just be torture for me to watch?"

The Queen's lips curved. "I cannot tell you," she said. "I do not know what will happen myself. But if you do not look, you will never know either. And it is not my experience of humans or Nephilim that they can bear not knowing." She glanced down into the water. "Ah," she said. "He arrives at the convergence."

Julian was beside the plinth before he could stop himself, gazing down into the water. What he saw shocked him.

The water was like sheer glass, like the screen of a television onto which a scene was projected with an almost frightening clarity. Julian was looking at night in the Santa Monica Mountains, a sight familiar enough to send a dart of homesickness through him.

The moon rose over the ruins of the convergence. Boulders lay tumbled around a plain of dry grass that stretched to a sheer drop toward the ocean, blue-black in the distance. Wandering among the boulders was Arthur.