Rogue's Paradise

by Jeffe Kennedy

  “You have the answers,” he insisted. “You must only remember.” He made a great show of digging in his pocket and pulling out an invisible watch. Making a comical face, he exclaimed, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” And he dashed off, dropping through the opening to the stairs as if it were a rabbit hole.

  “That’s another story entirely!” I called after him, torn between amusement and aggravation. In the ticking moments after he left, the frustration won out. “Always with the riddles,” I muttered to myself and went to the grimoire to write down what he’d said. Clues to something. Had Blackbird and Fergus somehow gotten through to my old world? It would explain their absence. There’d been no word, and Starling grew more frayed by the day. Rogue flat refused to give the scepter to me or Walter and had buried the knowledge of where he’d put it so deep even I couldn’t get at it.

  Of course, I hadn’t really tried to dig it out of him, unwilling to upset our current harmony. I respected his reasons for not wanting either of us to have it.

  But he also didn’t care so much about the fate of Blackbird and Fergus. He’d been focused on me. Which I appreciated on one level, but he’d hardly let me out of his sight. In fact, I hadn’t been alone like this in days and days. I maybe didn’t need the scepter—the dome might be enough. Something I’d never quite mentioned to Rogue.

  I moved to the center of the dome to do a light test, my thoughts carefully shrouded just in case Rogue returned unexpectedly. The cat stirred in me with interest as I gathered power and focused it. She seemed fairly docile lately, as sedated by copious food and long naps as I’d been. Like an egg, myself, I’d become simply a shell for gestation. If only my shell had similar flexibility.

  Easing into the mind web, I virtually tiptoed in, using the vast curvature of the crystal dome to diffuse my impact. As always, the network sang with life, an energetic reflection of a tropical jungle night, dense with the chorus of insects, amphibians, birds, reptiles and the occasional predator slinking through the shadows, leaving hush in her wake.

  I steered clear of those, skimming the surface, staying well clear of Titania’s icy supernova. What I sought wouldn’t be central to this network of beings, but rather at the perimeter. So I went away from Titania, farther from the vivid stars of the noble fae, with their complex tumbling surfaces, off to the edges. It felt almost like those graphics of leaving the solar system, the planets falling behind and the brightness of the center fading to a pinprick as I plunged into depthless space.

  Had I expected to hit a wall? Perhaps so. The way the fae spoke of the division between my old world and Faerie implied a barrier. The old tales mentioned the Veil, and when it might be thinner or more penetrable. Gateways, such as standing stones or darkly magical places like Devils Tower, also suggested a passage through a wall. But when Rogue had shown me my old world on another occasion, we hadn’t traveled any sense of distance.

  In fact, if the Castle of the Dark Gods truly did mirror Devils Tower, then physical distance meant nothing. I lived on top of the gateway.

  Not out, but in.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  In Which I Halfheartedly Attempt a Resurrection

  “You can put a pig in a pond, but you can’t make him swim.” I have no idea what this means.

  ~Big Book of Fairyland, “Notes for Further Research”

  I opened my eyes with a snap, the world outside sharp and bright. I really needed to get over this idea of distance. No traveling vast distances through a solar system of life-forms. It took no time to be back in my body because I’d never truly left it.

  Moving to the curved transparent wall, I surveyed the countryside. Any of those green rolling hills—more vividly emerald than ever in the wake of the melting snow—could be the one I had landed on. Did that sort of physical location matter? Perhaps Blackbird and Fergus, on their way to the castle had somehow found the gate I’d used. The temptation for both of them to take the opportunity to search for Baby Brody would have been too great to resist.

  Or maybe it had been more deliberate. Blackbird had discovered something on her journeys—the very answers Rogue and I planned to seek on the sea voyage she undertook instead. If only I’d paid more attention when I glimpsed them through the scepter and discerned more than that they were headed my way. The scepter might let me reach through the Veil to find them, if I could figure out what Rogue had done with it.

  Rogue’s hand fell on my shoulder and I emitted a startled squeak, full of guilty surprise as much as anything. “Deep in thought?” he asked, blue eyes as dark as the throat of one of his lilies.

  “Yes.” I stood on tiptoe to slide my hands behind his neck. He returned my kiss with interest but brushed through my mind at the same time. “How did it go?”

  “We have retrieved the corpse,” he replied, a lingering shadow of distaste in his words, like the scent of rot. He ran his hands down my sides and snugged me against him as best he could with the iron beach ball of my belly between us. “I wish to extract a promise from you.”

  Uh-oh. “I thought we were done with bargains. Fully in sync, one with each other, what’s mine is yours and so forth.”

  “I think you know full well what I’m asking. Seeing that human woman...” He looked over my head, out to the meadow of Stargazers.

  “The whole mortality thing got to you, huh?”

  His gaze shot back to me. “Will you mock even this?”

  “Death? Yes. Humankind has a rich and varied history of mocking death because we have no other choice. It’s the one guarantee we have, that we all die. I tried to make the point previously that you were in denial over this.”

  The left side of his mouth, entwined with the black lines of the Dog’s presence under his skin, lifted in an unamused smile. “I preferred to focus on other topics at the time.”

  “Yes, well—then you’ve clearly mastered the art of it.” I started to step away, but he held me in an iron grip.

  “Your promise,” he reminded me.

  I couldn’t quite meet his gaze anymore, though surely he sense how my heart pounded. To soothe myself, I released the band holding his hair and twined my fingers in the silky texture. “The terms?”

  “You will not attempt to retrieve and use the scepter.”

  “How could I? I don’t know what you did with it.”

  “Gwynn.” He pronounced my name in warning.

  “I can’t promise that.” I risked a look at his face. As I’d suspected, the inky lines writhed, a manifestation of his deep upset. “What if I need it...after.”

  His hands tightened on me and he dropped his forehead to touch mine. Even now, dim as thunderclouds barely cresting the horizon, the black cord of his tether to Titania snaked through the back of his mind. “Should things become that dire, not even that will save me. Promise me you won’t use it.”

  “Why not just destroy it, as you threatened to?” I stroked the back of his neck, soothing him.

  “I tried.” He sounded both grim and chagrined. And needed to say nothing more. The fact that he couldn’t affect the thing spoke volumes.

  “How about if I promise not to attempt to use it until after the baby is born?”

  “I don’t want you to use it at all.”

  “Believe me, I’m clear on that point. I promise not to use it before the baby is born or in any way that will jeopardize our child. That’s as good as you’ll get.”

  “Or for my benefit.”

  “No dice.”

  “Stubborn Gwynn, you—”

  “That’s right. I am stubborn and you know full well that I’m better at it than you are. That’s my offer. You can’t ask me to love you with one breath and then expect me to stand by and not do whatever I can to protect you. This is my version of fighting death.”

  “I cannot die.”

  “No. But, as you’ve pointed out to me, there are far worse things than death.” I kissed him and his lips were cool, unresponsive. So I deepened the touch, reaching in and care
ssing him emotionally, pouring love and desire into him. With a gasp, he opened his mouth to me and drank me in with fierce need. I pressed tightly to him, entwining my own arousal with his, wanting his skin against mine.

  And the baby kicked, hard enough for Rogue to feel and for my bladder to protest fiercely. He looked with bemused consternation at my belly and I laughed at his expression.

  “I guess that’s a no,” I told him ruefully.

  “Just as well. Cecily’s corpse grows no fresher. We may as well deal with that.”

  * * *

  He wasn’t exaggerating. They’d created a table in the middle of the magic arena that looked much like my workbench. I would have made something more like the metal tables we used in anatomy, but I supposed it didn’t really matter. Besides, it touched me that Rogue tried to make things the way he thought I liked them, so I didn’t want to impugn his choice by changing it.

  As he’d implied, Cecily’s corpse had long passed any sort of freshness. Contained in a close-fitting bubble of Rogue’s stabilized magic, the body looked almost mummified rather than decomposed. It had been wrapped in a blanket—Nancy’s doing, no doubt—with a withered blossom clutched in the hands folded over her collapsed chest. If I looked, her abdomen would be emptied, carved open by Fafnir’s blade.

  Fafnir himself hovered over the body, as if he might protect it. The stabilizing shield of Rogue’s magic kept him from touching her. Otherwise I thought he might be holding her as close, with as much fearful love, as Rogue had just held me. The usually grim fae wore an expression of tender joy and he looked at me with such hope that I banished my uneasy thoughts that whispered nastily of necrophilia.

  “You see?” Fafnir gestured at the corpse with a grand flourish.

  Taking some time to gather my thoughts, I edged up to the table and studied her more closely. I’d seen corpses plenty of times in anatomy teaching labs and done more animal necropsies than I could count, so the sight didn’t make me squeamish at all. The flesh had decayed remarkably little, though I had no idea how much subjective time had passed for it and I wasn’t at all familiar with what to expect for an unembalmed human body buried in dirt.

  Still, her saucy curls still clung to the desiccated skull more than seemed likely. And I made out no sign of the insects, nematodes and bacteria that made their living in my world by recycling no-longer-living flesh. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  Not for Cecily’s abandoned flesh.

  “What do you want me to see?” I finally asked Fafnir, glancing up at his lined face.

  He gestured at the table. “She’s still here. She’s not gone at all.”

  Was that an insane glint in his eye? His thoughts roiled with jumbled excitement, hope and dread, making it difficult for me to sort.

  Treading carefully, I said, “The flesh she wore remains, but it no longer lives. The person she was, the life that occupied this flesh, has gone.”

  Rogue’s hand trailed lightly down my spine. In comfort or warning, I wasn’t sure.

  Fafnir cocked his head in that listening way. “I don’t understand.”

  “This is simply a...leftover. It’s not her.”

  “I know it’s not her,” he replied, full of impatience. “That’s why I need you. Remake her.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.” My own impatience simmered up. “Look—what happens if one of the lesser fae die?”

  Fafnir gave me that look, like I’d said something absurd, and Rogue’s thoughts tracked along with curiosity. I wasn’t making any more sense to them than they were to me.

  “Back when I was at Falcon’s camp, a page caught on fire. He was too damaged to survive and his body stopped functioning. What do you say would have happened to him?”

  Come to think of it, I didn’t know, myself. I’d observed his lifeless body, just as I’d seen Dragonfly’s, which Rogue had sent out to sea. But what of funerals and so forth?

  “They...” Fafnir seemed to be searching for the words. “Go into the water and come back out again.”

  “How?” I pounced on that, thinking of the hatching cavern and how that cycle might work.

  “By swimming.” he answered, clearly pleased to give me a finite answer. I wanted to clutch my skull in frustration, but that would get neither of us anywhere.

  “Let me try this—let’s say that page who burned went into the sea and reemerged alive again. Would he remember what had occurred?”

  Fafnir gazed down at Cecily’s mummified corpse with utter adoration. “I don’t need for her to remember. Perhaps it’s better if she does not. We’ll make a new life. Without...” His gaze shifted behind me to Rogue. “Perhaps we shall triumph and we can simply live.”

  “Perhaps so,” Rogue answered.

  “All I ask, Sorceress, is that you try.” Fafnir transferred his urgent gaze to me, silver-gray eyes tumbling with a dust storm of long-dry feeling. “I beg of you. If not for me or for her, then for your own future.” In his mind, he held an idea, of a time and place that could be real for us all, free of the horrors he’d suffered. Of a kind of paradise.

  He didn’t have to explain more. Rogue held his mind closed, but in the core of him, where we seemed to remain entirely open to one another, his quiet dread grew like a mold over Fafnir’s image of paradise. He hated that it could be me on that table. Not like I hadn’t tried to warn him.

  Still, I sighed and stretched out my senses. The cat, interested, flowed along too and I didn’t dissuade her. She liked the arena and remembered the fun we’d had play-fighting here. As long as she behaved, I didn’t mind her being awake. In some ways, it seemed her presence helped buffer the nagging pains in my body.

  The bubble of Rogue’s magic, a seamless field of black-edged blue, resisted my efforts with a sense of inertness that reminded me of the dragons’ null magic. Interesting. “I need you to drop the field,” I said to him aloud, so Fafnir would know I made an effort.

  “Not the whole thing,” he murmured, sliding his hand back up my spine to settle at the nape of my neck. “But a window. Where do you want it?”

  It didn’t matter. I picked anyway. “Over her forehead.”

  The ancients might have thought the seat of the soul resided in the heart or the center of the body. I, however, was a neuroscientist and I believed in the brain.

  I almost saw the hole open. Very small, a pinpoint flaw in the shield. Slipping a mental probe in the opening he made, I quickly agreed with Rogue’s reasoning. The corpse tasted of ash, indeed. The tissues fluttered in the slight breath of my thought’s passage as dried leaves stirred by autumn winds, losing their tenuous hold on the branches that once gave them life.

  Nothing of life remained in the dried corpse of Fafnir’s lady love. No cords of life bound her to him or to anything in the world.

  Except.

  Anchoring myself to Rogue, like grabbing his hand so I could lean over the edge of a cliff, I looked not out, but in.

  There, deep in some internal dimension, something remained. An echo that connected forward in time instead of repeating the voices long past. As if the essence of Cecily, the mitochondrial-powered vestiges of her DNA, lingered on in some pool of racial memory, feeding forward to something else. No, to someone else. Someone who yet lived.

  Her child.

  Fafnir’s child.

  Lit with excitement, I followed the trail down a tunnel that blazed with light at the end, to something familiar. As I moved, though, my steps slowed, my mind tugging me back. Rogue pulling on me, mental hand firmly in mine. Keeping me from going over the edge of the cliff.

  Right. Don’t go into the light.

  I withdrew from Cecily’s corpse and leaned back against Rogue, soaking in his relieved gratitude that I remained with him. I would, I let him know, as long as I could humanly manage.

  Fafnir watched me with guarded hope.

  “Cecily—the woman you knew—is beyond reach,” I told him, as gently and firmly as I could. “She is gone. I’m sorry for it.”


  His face crumpled, the hope fleeing and leaving dust behind. “I felt so sure. There’s still a connection...”

  “There is,” I confirmed. Rogue’s hands stilled, every cell of him listening. “I think the connection is to—” Now his fingers flexed in definite warning. How to say it without speaking the words?

  But I didn’t need to. Fafnir’s gaze sharpened, gray dust forging into steel. “Where?”

  “I don’t know. No.” I put up a hand to stop whatever he might be about to harangue me with. “I have an idea. And that’s what we’ll work on next.” A wave of dizziness washed over me. The cat purred as I drew on Mother Earth’s font through the dirt beneath my feet. The baby kicked, hard, and I gasped, abruptly breaking out into a sweat. “Though I think I may have been standing too long.”

  A wash of fluid poured down my legs. Oh, dammit all to hell and gone.

  “Or not.” I looked up at Rogue. “Time to pay the piper.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  In Which Things Proceed Exactly As I Should Have Seen They Would

  Be careful what you wish for.

  ~Big Book of Fairyland, “Rules of Magic”

  I protested when Rogue swept me up into his arms, hating that my skirts were soaked through with amniotic fluids. Then I wised up and wished them clean and dry. Not like the dress could be ruined more and I figured Starling would forgive me in this extremity.

  “Not that I care for such things anyway,” Rogue reproved me, carrying me with his long, ground-eating strides toward our tower.

  “I can walk. It’s probably better for me, from what I hear.”

  “Indulge me,” he gritted.

  Coming as we did from the gruesome great cautionary tale of Cecily’s corpse, I figured I could give him this. Still. “We don’t need to hurry,” I pointed out. “This will likely take hours and hours.” If not days, but no use contemplating that possibility. On the tail end of my words, as if to put lie to them, a major contraction seized me, squeezing the breath out of me on a long wheeze of surprised pain.