We waited for a few heartbeats; then Mistral and Abe stood, mud coating their lower legs. No voice from the dark told them to get back on their knees. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
“What did she mean when she said that our court has two hearts?” I asked.
Abe answered, “Once every faerie mound had a garden or forest or lake at its heart. But every court also had another heart of power—one that would reflect the kind of magic the court specialized in.”
“You have brought one heart back to life,” Mistral said, “but I am not certain it is wise to reawaken the other.”
“The hallway is a torture chamber, where most magic does not work. It’s a null place,” I said.
“But once, Meredith, it was more.”
I looked at the men. “More how?”
“Things that were older than faerie, older than us, were imprisoned there. Remnants of power from the peoples we had defeated.”
“I’m not sure I understand, Mistral.”
He looked at Doyle. “Help me explain this.”
“Once there were creatures in the Hallway of Mortality that could bring true death to even the sidhe. They were kept there to serve as methods of execution, or torture, or simply the threat of those things. The queen did not care for them because, as you well know, she likes to do her own torturing. Watching some other being tear us limb from limb was not half so amusing to her as doing it herself.”
“And we healed better if she did it,” Rhys said.
Doyle nodded. “Yes, she could torture us longer and more often if the things did not help.”
“What kind of things?” I asked. I didn’t like how serious they’d gotten.
“Terrible things. A glimpse of them would drive a mortal mad,” he said.
“How long ago did these things vanish from the sithen?”
“A thousand years, maybe more,” he said.
“The forests haven’t been gone so long as that,” I said.
“No, not quite that long.”
“Why are you all so worried?”
“Because if you, or the Goddess’s power through you, can bring this about,” Abe said, motioning at the ever-expanding forest, “then we must prepare for the fact that the second heart of our court can come back to full life, as well.”
“Perhaps Merry is too Seelie to bring back such horrors?” Mistral said, almost hopefully.
“Her two hands of power are flesh and blood,” Doyle said. “Those are not Seelie magicks.”
“I came to the princess for aid for Nerys’s people, but I would not risk her now, not for a house full of traitors,” said Mistral.“If we save them, they won’t be traitors,” I said.
“They still believe that your mortality is contagious,” Rhys said. “They still think that if you sit on the throne, we will all begin to age and die.”
“Do you think that Nerys’s court still has enough honor to realize that I’m trying to ensure that their rulers’ sacrifice wasn’t for nothing? Nerys gave her life so her house would not die, and I want that to mean something.”
The men seemed to think about it for a moment. Finally Doyle said, “They have honor, but I do not know if they have gratitude.”
CHAPTER 9
“DEITY MAGIC BROUGHT US HERE,” RHYS SAID, “BUT HOW DO WE get out? There’s no door anymore to the dead gardens.”
“Meredith,” Frost said.
I looked at him.
“Ask the sithen to give us a door leading out of here.”
“Do you think it will be that easy?” Rhys said.
“If the sithen wishes Merry to save Nerys’s people, yes,” said Frost.
“And if it doesn’t wish them saved, or if it doesn’t care?”
Frost shrugged. “If you have a better suggestion, I am listening.”
Rhys spread his hands as if to say no.
I looked out at the dark wall and said, “I need a door that leads out of here.”
The darkness grew less, and a door—a large golden door—appeared in the cave wall. I almost said, Thank you, but some of the older magicks don’t like to be thanked—they take insult from it. I swallowed, and whispered, “It’s a lovely door.”
Carving appeared around the door frame, vines drawn through the wood as if by an invisible finger. “That’s new,” Rhys whispered.
“Let us go through, before it decides to vanish,” Frost said.
He was right. He was most certainly right. But strangely, none of us wanted to pass through the door until the invisible finger had finished drawing its vines. Only when the wood had stopped moving did Doyle touch the golden handle, and turn it. He led the way into a hallway that was almost as black as his own skin. If he stood still, he’d blend into the background.
Rhys touched the wall. “We haven’t had a black corridor like this in the sithen for years.”
“It’s made of the same rock as the queen’s chamber,” I whispered. I’d had so many bad experiences in the queen’s shiny black-walled room that seeing the sithen turn black like that room frightened me.
Mistral was the last one through the door. When he stepped through, the door vanished, leaving a smooth black wall, untouched and unyielding.
“The hallway where Mistral and Merry had sex is turning to white marble,” Frost said. “What caused this corridor to change to black?”
“I do not know,” Doyle said. He was looking up and down the black hallway. “It has changed too much. I do not know where we are in the sithen.”
“Look at this,” Frost said. He was staring up at the wall across from us.
Doyle moved to stand beside him, staring at what, to me, looked like blank wall. Doyle made a harsh, hissing sound. “Meredith, call the door back.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.” His voice was quiet, but it vibrated with urgency, as if he were forcing himself to whisper when what he wanted to do was scream.
I didn’t argue with that tone in his voice. I called out, “I would like a door back into the dead gardens.”
The door appeared again, all gold and pale wood, and carved vines. Doyle motioned Mistral to take the lead. Mistral reached for the golden handle, a naked sword in his other hand. What was happening? Why were they frightened? What had I missed?
Mistral went through with Abe behind him, me in the middle, and Rhys and Doyle following. Frost came last. But before I passed thorugh the doorway, Abe stopped, and Mistral’s voice came urgent from inside the dead gardens, “Back, go back!”
Doyle said, “We cannot stay here in the black hallway.” Rhys was pressed against my back, Abe pressed against my front. We were frozen between the two captains of the guards, each trying to get us moving in the opposite direction.
“We cannot have two captains, Mistral,” Frost said. “Without a single leader we are indecisive and endangered.”
“What is wrong?” I asked.
There was a sound from down the hallway—a heavy, slithering sound that froze my heart in my chest. I was afraid I recognized it. No, I had to be wrong. Then a second sound came: a high chittering sound—one that could be mistaken for birds, but wasn’t.
“Oh, Goddess,” I whispered.
“Forward, Mistral, now, or we are lost,” Doyle said.
“It is not our garden beyond the door,” Mistral said.
The high-pitched bird-like sounds were coming closer, outpacing the heavy slithering weight. The sluagh, the nightmares of the Unseelie Court and a kingdom in their own right, moved fast but the nightflyers always moved faster than the rest of the sluagh. We were inside the sluagh’s hollow hill; somehow we had crossed to their sithen. If they found us here…we might survive, or not.
“Do sluagh wait on the other side of the door?” Doyle asked Mistral urgently.
“No,” Mistral called back.
“Then go, now!” Doyle ordered.
Abe stumbled forward as if Mistral had moved suddenly out of the way. We came through the door in a rush with Doyle pushing from behind. He was like some kind of elemental force at our backs. It put us in a heap on the ground. I couldn’t see anything but white flesh, and I felt the muscled weight of them all around me.
“Where are we?” Frost asked.
Rhys moved, drawing me to my feet with him. Doyle, Mistral, and Frost were all on alert, weapons out, searching for something to fight. The door had vanished, leaving us on the shore of a dark lake.
Lake may have been too strong a word. The depression was dry except for a slimy skim of water at the very bottom. Bones littered the floor of the dying lake, and the shore where we stood. The bones shone dully in the dim light that fell from the stone ceiling, as if the moon had been rubbed into the rock. All around the shore, the stone walls of the cavern rose steeply up into the gloom, surrounded only by a narrow ledge before a steep drop-off into the lake bed.
“Call the door again, Meredith,” Doyle said, his dark face still searching the dead land.“Yes, and be more specific about our destination this time,” Mistral said.
Abe was still on the ground. I heard a sharp intake of breath, and glanced over at him. His hand was black and shiny in the dim light. “What are these bones that they could cut sidhe flesh?”
Doyle answered him. “They are the bones of the most magical of the sluagh. Things so fantastical that when the sluagh began to fade in power, there was not enough magic to sustain their lives.”