“Fomoiri,” the king murmured. “And it will help. At the moment, I am captured. If we get out, then we have escaped.”
“Getting out is good but not enough. How do we get away?”
“Daybreak. We’ll wait until they come back at dawn.” The king must have seen the confused look on her face, because he added in a low voice, “Like the manacles, Claire. Symbolically, I am captured. I must symbolically escape or we won’t get very far.”
The creatures would, presumably, not return until they were forced to by morning light, since they would not find the trail they sought. If the king and Claire fled outside at that moment, the fomoiri would be unable to follow until nightfall, and would be unable to send a runner to inform Taibhseach until dark either.
Claire said thoughtfully, “If we get away, they might not send word to Taibhseach as soon as it gets dark. If they can’t find our trail, they won’t want to tell him they lost us, because without evidence, there’s no reason they can admit for them to know we were near.”
There was a long silence. “You think they would not inform their king?” the king said.
“If they can’t point to a trail, the only way they’d know about us is to admit they’d had us and lost us. I bet Taibhseach wouldn’t like that; no one would want to carry that message. As long as our trail starts here, I bet the morrigan won’t alert him; she’ll want to cover up this end of the trail first. She won’t want to admit she held us captive, looking for…” Her voice trailed away. What was the witch looking for, again? That’s important. I should know this. “Looking for the thing she’s looking for. She won’t want to admit it, because Taibhseach will be angry. So as long as the trail clearly shows we started here, she’s stuck until she can hide that.”
There was another silence, and Claire wondered for a moment whether the king had lost consciousness.
“I agree,” he said finally. “Draw the door. I will prepare the magic. It will await only the trigger, which will be that you draw the door handle and grasp it. It will be open for only an instant; I have only a bare breath of magic, and anyway, we want it to close quickly behind us.”
Claire drew the door shape, stretching upward to make it tall enough for the king, then pulling the charcoal down to the packed earth floor. The king sucked in a breath as he moved; she imagined him reaching for the wall and pressing his fingers to the line of charcoal, though she couldn’t see him in the darkness.
The door above opened with a bang. “Nothing!”
“Nothing?” raged the morrigan. “How can there be nothing? She’s human! She knows nothing of these lands! How can you be so incompetent?”
“Dawn comes,” scratched another fomorach. Other fomoiri voices filled the room, arguing about which of them was at fault for their failure to pick up the trail.
The king whispered, “As soon as the trapdoor above begins to open, complete the door, open it, and step through. I will hold them off while you do this. It will take a moment for the spell to take effect.”
“No. I’ll hold them off.” The objection came without thought, and it terrified her, but she knew the words were right. “You can work the door magic faster and better, even if all I have to do is trigger magic you’ve prepared. As for fighting, they’re afraid of me, and I don’t think they fear you at all.”
“Oh, but they should fear me! That I can teach them.” The king’s voice carried grim satisfaction.
“Perhaps, but remember our goal. We want to escape. The goal isn’t to show them you can fight but just to get out of here. I’ll wave the knife and act fierce. I don’t think they’re particularly brave, and we’re trapped in a hole, so they won’t see any reason to hurry. They’ll take their time figuring out what to do. So then we slip out the new back door and leave them behind, preferably with no fight at all.”
“Far be it from me to hide behind a lady when danger threatens. Think you so little of me?” the king said stiffly. “Get thee behind me, Claire Delaney.”
Claire blinked, then scowled at him, wishing she could see in the dark as he could. “Someone once told me about right and just service. You’re a king! Call it my right and just service if it makes you feel better. I want to get out of here alive as much as you do, and I think this is our best chance. I’m not impugning your honor.” You noble, self-sacrificing, arrogant jerk, she added mentally.
The king’s breathing hitched a little, and she heard him shift in the darkness.
“Wearing the mask taught me something. Stay focused. Let’s not get distracted, all right? It’s not noble to sacrifice yourself to save your own pride. You don’t have to prove anything to me or anyone.” she hissed desperately. “Just open the door, please!”
The morrigan shrieked in rage above their heads. “You’re all equally useless! The lot of you should be staked out by your toes to crisp in the sun! None of you found the trail, and it had to start right at the door!”
“You couldn’t smell it either!” whined a fomorach.
“She’s tricksier than we thought, that’s all!” the morrigan cried. “Now what shall we do? Same plan, I think. Sun is coming up, we can’t do more today.” There was a brief silence, and then she said, “I count only twenty. Where is the missing one? Was there trouble?”
“No, Glik ran ahead to the river to check there. Too eager. Didn’t think, should have known he had to turn back. Told him, we did! We barely made it back. He thought he could run fast enough, but caught out in the sun, he was, unless he found a hole to hide in. Serves him right for being stupid.”
The morrigan said, “Well, if he found her, he will have killed her, and we will find out tonight. If he killed her before he died, it was worth the loss. So tonight we send runners to get Taibhseach and tell him we have the king, and we send others to see if Glik is ashes and whether he found the girl. If we don’t have a trail or the girl, then so far as Taibhseach knows, we never saw her. Got it? Now, go get some sleep down in—wait.”
Silence fell.
“Open the door,” Claire breathed.
“As you wi—,”
The king’s words were cut off by the morrigan’s scream. “The latch is open! She never left! That’s why we can’t find her trail! She’s hiding in the cellar with him!”
Footsteps stampeded toward the trap door.
There was snuffling at the crack around the door. “Yes! Yes, we smell her now! Oh, how foolish! No way out. We have you now!”
The trap door opened and faces crowded around the opening. Claire’s eyes, adjusted to the pitch dark of the cellar, made out their bloodthirsty leers easily.
“There! On the far wall! There they both are. We has them both!” The vampiric creatures cheered and chittered, bouncing up and down in excitement.
“Go down and seize them! We must find the foinse cumhachta, or at least that burny thing.”
The fomoiri flowed down the ladder as if they had been poured from a bucket, but kept to the far side of the small cellar.
Claire had her back to the king, facing the fomoiri and trying to look confident. She held the knife out in front of her, waving it a little so they wouldn’t see how her hands were shaking and so they would be sure to see it.
Their gazes were fixed on the knife. One of them, in the very back, said, “That’s it! That’s the… the thing! Burned my fingers off, it did. Careful, now. Be quick, and don’t let it touch you!”
Not one of the fomoiri moved to attack, though they shifted nervously.
Another fomorach asked, “Does it only burn if it touches you? Can it do anything else?”
There was a brief silence, then the first said, “Don’t know. Burned me when I touched it.”
Claire hissed at the king, “Now would be a good time!”
“Seconds. Stall.”
“You want to see what I can do? Come closer then! I’ll burn more than your fingers!” Claire waved the knife as menacingly as she could.
From the trap door at the top of the ladder, the morrigan cri
ed, “She can’t handle all of you! Just charge her! All of you! If she burns one or two, you still have more hands than you need! Just do it!”
The vampire creatures hissed, and one asked, “But… they be stuck here. All we have to do is hold them through the day, and then Taibhseach will come. We should go up and keep them here while we wait. House is dark enough.”
“I want the burny thing! I want the foinse cumhachta if we can find it! Taibhseach would take it all! Hm. Wait.” The morrigan turned her attention to Claire. “You, girl. I only need the king. And I want that… that thing, whatever it is. Put it on the floor and step away, and you can go.”
Absolute conviction washed over Claire that the witch was telling the truth. If she put down the knife and walked away, she would be allowed to leave safely.
That’s how she knew it was another lie, and the witch was trying to trick her.
Claire laughed aloud. Perhaps the laugh was hysterical laughter, born of terror and disbelief, but the fomoiri didn’t seem to realize that, and it frightened them, which was good.
There was a burst of light from behind her as the door opened to a bright morning. The king said, “NOW!”
The fomoiri hissed, the hag screamed, “Get them! Before they escape!” and the creatures actually moved hesitantly toward her.
Claire waved the knife and the creatures scrabbled backward.
The king’s hands gripped her by the collar and waistband and snatched her backwards so fast her teeth clicked together. The doorway vanished just as she passed through it.
The king stumbled back and let her go. They both sprawled on their backs on the grass outside the hovel.
Loud screeching could be heard from inside and down in the cellar. A breeze rustled the leaves in the nearby trees, and some sort of bird cawed in the distance.
The king said in a low voice, “We can rest a minute. They won’t come out into the light.” He added, “That was a very, very near thing.”
“I don’t know. I think they were too afraid of the shiny, burny thing. They weren’t going to do anything soon.” She felt a little proud of that, and hysterical giggles threatened to escape her lips.
“Look at your shoe,” the king murmured.
Claire raised her foot into the air, too tired to contemplate sitting up quite yet. About a quarter inch of the tip of her right shoe was gone, cut off as if by a razor sharp blade.
“I only opened the door for long enough for us to jump through. I didn’t intend for you to linger and debate them. I had to pull you through or you would have been stuck behind by yourself. If you were part way through when it closed… well, the tip of your shoe is still in there.”
“What about your arms?” Claire was past feeling terror, and besides, the danger was already past.
The king frowned faintly. “Yes, that would have been quite unpleasant.”
“I understand how the burny… I mean, the knife… works, I think. It’s that iron and magic are incompatible, and iron cancels magic. Nothing magical can touch or affect iron, right?”
The king snorted softly. “It’s more complex than that, but I suppose that explanation will suffice.”
“What if the knife had been caught in the door instead of my shoe?”
“I… don’t really know.” He let out a soft breath, staring up into the bright blue sky. “I think it would have been Very Bad.”
Still lying on her back, Claire turned her head slightly to look at the king. He stared upward, his eyelids half-closed, looking dazed.
She pushed up to one elbow to look at his wounded shoulder, which was on his other side. Dark blood crusted the torn fabric and glistened damply in the golden morning light.
Exhaustion, thirst, and hunger pulled at her, and she closed her eyes and sighed.
“We should probably go,” she said in a low voice.
“Undoubtedly.” The king’s voice rasped, and she opened her eyes to see him roll over and push himself to his hands and knees, taking only a little weight on his injured arm. He paused, blinking, then rose to his feet.
He offered her a gallant hand. She hesitated and then put her hand in his; his blue-gold-silver eyes gleamed with a sudden spark of pleasure.
“Thank you for that,” he murmured softly. “Hope springs eternal.”
She glanced at him sharply. What exactly did he mean by that? He closed his eyes and swallowed as if he was fighting dizziness, and the moment was broken.
Look for the truth.
“Your blood is blue!” she exclaimed. The torn flesh of his shoulder was open to the air; the crusted blood was dark navy blue, which appeared much lighter, nearly cyan, where it had smeared over his marble-white skin.
He stared back at her blankly. “Yes?” he said.
“Why?” And why did I see it as red?
“Why should it not be?” He tilted his head and studied her face. “Oh, you expected it to be red, didn’t you?” he murmured. “And so you saw it.” A wondering smile flashed across his face, and he raised a hand, then let it drop. “No hemoglobin, of course.” He pressed a hand to his forehead, wincing as if his head ached.
“What’s wrong?” Claire asked.
“I can’t remember.” The king’s voice cracked with grief. He took a deep, shuddering breath and raised his head. “We must move quickly. Taibhseach and his searchers passed over us once; for that we can thank the morrigan.” He glanced over his shoulder at the hovel and narrowed his eyes. “Though I have little inclination to thank her for anything; there were moments of my imprisonment by Taibhseach that were more pleasant than the company of her fomoiri.” He twisted his lips in disgust and turned away.
Claire hurried after him. “When I saw you in the infirmary, there was a boy with you. Who was he, and what happened to him?”
The king’s steps slowed slightly to allow her to catch up. “Ciardha. The son of a friend. He lived.”
“You were worried about him, weren’t you?”
The king was silent so long that she wondered whether his brief period of lucidity had ended. But then he murmured, “Worried? Yes, I suppose that word will do.” He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye.
“The morrigan wanted something.” Why can’t I remember what she wanted? “What was it?”
“The foinse cumhachta.”
“What is that?”
“Seelie power. Authority. A symbol of a reality that…” He sucked in a quick breath. “She must never have it. Taibhseach would burn both our worlds to dust if he found it.” But he smiled grimly as he looked ahead. “He won’t. I hid it.”
Claire forgot.
For all the time she had spent thinking of that nightmarish journey to save the captive fairy, she had not really stopped to consider the role the nightmare king had played.
He had given her the task of rescuing the fairy. She had assumed he was the fairy’s captor and thus her opponent. Feighlí had spoken of His Majesty and how terrible he was. But Feighlí had been speaking of Taibhseach, and that implied that Taibhseach was the fairy’s captor.
Now she remembered the distant cries she had heard while traversing the endless corridors of the maze, a sound of fighting that had never drawn too close to her.
Could that have been him?
Had he been helping her?
And if so, why?
The fairy, Fintan, had been grateful to the king for his release, as if the king were more responsible than Claire herself. She had assumed Fintan would be frightened or resentful, and his gratitude had always struck her as strange.
She had imagined the king the villain, and so he had acted, with his cloak of crawling void and his velvet-and-gravel voice, his threats and his snide arrogance.
Perhaps her assumptions had been wrong.
Chapter 27
In late afternoon they stopped to rest awhile. The king was staggering with weariness, and Claire felt bleary-eyed and light-headed with hunger and thirst.
Claire curled up on the ground with one ar
m under her head. For a few seconds she thought resignedly that one of them should probably stay awake to watch for the morrigan or other dangers, but she drifted off to sleep before finding the words.
“You said you trusted me. When we were awake, I mean, before the morrigan captured us.”
He motioned gracefully for her to continue.
“Was that true? Why would you trust me?” She frowned at him. “You hardly know me, and…” Her frown deepened. “Well, we haven’t exactly been the closest of friends.”
A faint smile flickered over his lips, and the tension in her shoulders relaxed a little.
“Of course it’s true. I’ve never lied to you.”
She raised a skeptical eyebrow, and his lips tightened. “You think I have? You wound me, Claire. What do you think I have told you that is untrue?”
She licked her lips, thinking back over all his words, shifting and elusive and oh, so slippery. “You sent me to rescue a fairy with you as the captor, but I don’t think you were the captor.”
“I never said I was.”
Claire’s eyebrows drew downward as she thought. “You told me I was the hero and you were the villain. I don’t think that’s entirely accurate.” She glanced up to meet his eyes and actually looked at him. His eyes were dancing with a dangerous, terrible intelligence that knew her, dancing with dry humor that waited for her to understand something, waited while laughing at his own fading hope.
“I played the villain for a time in the story you told yourself about yourself. I did what was necessary.”
“Necessary for what?”
“An excellent question, Claire Delaney.” He smiled, and his teeth seemed too white and too sharp. “That is a very, very good question indeed. I wish I could answer it for you. But,” he glanced away, “That is a question you must discover for yourself.”
“Why?” She frowned. “Why can’t you answer it?”
“Because I don’t know,” he said simply. “I don’t know because I knew I mustn’t know. I was one, and I should have been two in one.” He frowned, looking distractedly off into space. “Or perhaps I was two, and I should have been one.”
The Lord of Dreams Page 16