by Dean Murray
"Wait, I thought all wards eventually got taken down by another Awakened or one of the fae who wants to drain them to increase their power. I thought that was the only way for them to come down."
"No, there's another way. Something about the creation of a ward results in more power being contained in them when they reach full maturity than was used to establish them in the first place."
"Doesn't that violate a bunch of physics laws?"
That earned me a smile, and I realized that I hadn't seen Byron smile very often. "Spoken like a true researcher. Yes, that seems to violate the laws of the world, which means that we don't understand the laws like we think we do. Under the right conditions, the person who created a ward can bring them down in a controlled discharge that releases all of that power back into the area around the location."
I had another of those moments when the world snapped into focus for me. "That power is easier for the fae to absorb, isn't it?"
The Lady nodded. "Yes, it is. In fact, that's the only real reason most of your kind ever bring down a ward. It's the ultimate reward for a fairy who's served them well. It can result in decades, or even centuries of growth in just a few hours."
I shook my head in astonishment. "There's our solution. Somebody teach me how to cast a ward right now so I can pull it back down and feed it to Bethany. Given what we're all headed into she needs every ounce of power I can spare. Even if it's not enough to allow her to fight and make a difference, it still could be enough to save her if she gets disembodied."
The Lady reached out and clasped my arm. "Your sentiment does you credit. Part of me would like to dismiss all of the rest of your kind as merciless monsters for not doing exactly as you propose, but that wouldn't be fair. The truth is, there are legitimate reasons why an Awakened would be reluctant to bring down a ward and feed it to one of my people. Wards are difficult to establish. The creation of the effect itself is difficult and it requires time for the ward to mature to the point where it can stand up to attacks.
"As Byron indicated, it's like creating a bonfire that all of your enemies can see. Building a sanctuary underground helps shield the ward from detection, but sanctuaries of that kind are not plentiful or cheap."
I nodded. "And given how dangerous traveling is, I guess I can see why some people would be reluctant. That's why you helped Byron though, isn't it? He promised to bring the wards around Camelot down at some point and let you feed off of the energy. That way you win. It will put you well ahead of your enemies. It's the perfect plan."
"Very nearly. The biggest flaw is that it only works as long as Byron is still alive. If he were to die the wards would remain up until they were brought down by force, and it might not be me who brings them down."
She turned to Byron. "You know what I want. Our agreement would leave you with another sixty years before the wards would need to come down, but I want them down now—all of them. I need that power—my people need that power—if we're to have any chance of defeating the Unseelie Court."
For several long seconds Byron didn't respond. I wanted to yell at him that it was stupid to think of refusing. The Lady was right—we needed the power—but I could understand his worries. For all Byron had refused to let Kat run away and hide inside of Camelot for the next two or three hundred years, it was still hard to let it go.
He'd put the wards up knowing that they would have to come down eventually, but I suspected that he'd expected to be in a drastically different situation by then. He'd expected to have a large pantheon behind him, a group of people with hundreds of years of memories saved up, memories that they would gladly sacrifice in order to defend a new sanctuary for long enough that its wards would have time to mature.
He'd thought he was guaranteeing the future by entering into his agreement with the Lady, but now she was asking him to give all of that up at a time when he was even weaker than he'd been when they first entered into the agreement. That had to be hard.
The silence stretched out to the point where I was uncomfortable, but the Lady gave my arm a squeeze before I could intervene.
"Give him time, Selene. There is more at work here than you realize."
"More? What else can there be?"
"He's worried about giving me that much power. It was one thing to do that back when he was confident that he would have a powerful pantheon backing him up, but now it's not quite so easy to rationalize giving me a push that may very well make me strong enough to bring down any ward he could possibly cast. He's worried that the balance of power—so long tilted towards your kind—will now tip irrevocably towards my kind."
Byron nodded. "You don't understand what it's like, Selene. We're individually more powerful than all but the strongest of the fae. I've read histories that go back hundreds of years before my current incarnation. For the longest of times, the fae were nothing more than servants to the Awakened, but we've remained almost completely static for as long as history has been recorded.
"Occasionally someone will pioneer some new effect, or a new Awakened will surface, but our power isn't increasing at the same rate that theirs is. This is part of what is driving Kyle to do what he's doing. I can feel it in my bones. If I do this, there isn't any going back. The power I'll be unleashing will be absorbed by her and her most trusted advisors. If we win we'll be replaced as the masters of our world. The Lady will absorb additional power each time one of the Unseelie fae is vanquished, and by the end of the war she'll be unstoppable."
"And if we lose that power it won't be going anywhere, will it? It will mostly get absorbed by Fenrir and his ilk, leaving us forever outclassed in all of our future incarnations."
The Lady nodded. "I suppose it all comes down to a matter of trust."
Byron took a deep breath. "If I do this, then you pull out all the stops. This isn't just a war between you and the Unseelie Court. You won't be able to declare a victory until all of the Awakened on the other side are dead. Their journals will be preserved and given to us to study."
She cocked her head to one side. "Is that all?"
"No. You'll give us the artifacts you've been hiding so that we can use them against the other side in this war."
"I think that might be arranged as long as I had suitable guarantees that they would be returned to me once the war had been brought to a conclusion."
Byron shook his head. "No, they stay in circulation. They need to be studied and replicated. Those artifacts—more so even than the journals—are our heritage. They deserve to remain in our hands. No Awakened would ever agree to return them to you of their own free will."
"You seek to restore the balance of power that you fear you'd be destroying by giving me the power contained in those wards. Do you understand the damage that those artifacts could do in the wrong hands?"
That earned her a wry smile. "I guess it's just like you said earlier. It's all a matter of trust."
The two of them locked gazes, and the air almost seemed to crackle as the tension in the room continued to climb. Finally the Lady looked away, but I didn't get the feeling that she'd been defeated—more like she'd grown tired of the game.
"Leave us, Byron."
"There's to be no deal, then? I'll warn you that I'm not bluffing. I'm certain you could have our entire party killed if that is your wish, but that won't give you access to that power."
She shook her head. "I'm not going to have you killed. I understand your terms, but frankly they are not sufficient. Something else is going to have to be added into the pot in order for this deal to go forward, but it isn't something that's yours to offer. Leave us—Selene and I have much to discuss."
I could see a protest hovering on the tip of his tongue, could see how badly he wanted to be part of that discussion, but in the end he bowed his head in acknowledgment of the fact that she held most of the cards. He walked out of the room without saying anything else.
The Lady was silent for several seconds before turning back to me. "You must have questions for me, Se
lene. What would you like to know?"
"Why are you willing to answer questions now? I get the feeling that you're not usually this accommodating…"
"I'm not. Let's just say I recognize that it's impossible to negotiate in good faith with someone you don't trust. We don't have all of the time in the world, but it seems only right to give you a chance to get to know me a little."
I didn't even know where to start. She was about my height, which meant that she didn't loom over me like Intravil had, but that didn't make her any less intimidating.
"Why aren't you as tall as the rest of your people? Height seems to be a big deal. The younger fae are stuck being small, but everyone else seems to be racing to hit seven foot two."
"Height is a status symbol, but it's more than that. A bigger frame has an easier time exerting force than a small frame. My people chose bigger forms because it makes them more effective in a fight against something like Fenrir or the Minotaur."
"So your ultimate shape and form is under your control, but you haven't told me why you've chosen to be so short."
She gave me a guarded smile. "You are just as amazing as I was led to believe, Selene. If you'd just come right out and asked me who my creator was I would have refused to answer. Instead you work around the periphery of the issue."
"I can't take credit for that—I was just looking for a question that might give me an insight into you, one that wouldn't result in you picking me up by my throat and throwing me into the nearest wall. My asking that particular question was nothing more than dumb luck."
"It has been my experience that people attribute far too much to luck, Selene. Whether you know it or not, there is some part of you that sensed this was one of the best questions you could have asked me. I will answer, but you must promise to take this to your grave. You can't even write it down in one of your journals."
"Doesn't that kind of reduce the value of the information? I mean, if the name of your creator is really that important?"
"Yes, if you're trying to learn it in order to someday take advantage of me, then it gives the information an expiration date and reduces its usefulness. If, however, you just want to get to know me a little better and decide whether you can trust me, then it doesn't diminish my answer in the slightest."
I cocked my head to one side as I considered her response. She'd…relaxed…once it had been just Byron and I talking to her. It was almost like she'd been putting on a show, but once everyone else had left she finally felt like she could be herself.
This was that, but even more so. She was more at ease with me than I would have believed possible.
"Okay, I promise. You're right, there's no need for me to remember it forever."
"I picked this form as a form of homage to my creator, Selene. She was roughly this height and had similar coloring. I didn't copy her exactly because I am my own person, and because I didn't want to signal to all of my enemies where I'd come from, but I wanted to share that one link with her."
"She's gone now, I take it?"
"Yes, for many thousands of years now. She's an Awakened, so she's been reborn in a new incarnation—several actually—but the woman who sacrificed so much for me is long gone."
"You miss her?"
The Lady nodded. "Every day."
I was shocked. I didn't have any idea how knowing who her creator had been could be used to cause the Lady problems, but she'd just made it easier to connect the dots if that had been my intent. There couldn't be that many female Awakened out there, and if you excluded all of the redheads and blondes there would be a relatively small pool of candidates left.
"Why are you so reluctant to help us? It seems to me like we're on the same side here…"
That earned me a sigh. "I can see why you would think so, but the truth is that you Awakened have always been most afraid of other Awakened. I have a drastically different view of the world. Someone like Kyle is indeed a threat, but mostly that is because of the artifacts he's gathered and his abilities as a researcher."
"You're more worried about the fae, about the Unseelie Court."
"Yes. It speaks volumes to Byron's intelligence that he's keyed into the same worries that I myself have. He's worried about a day when Awakened are as far beneath even the weakest of the fae as humans currently are to you and him. He's a brilliant man, but he's also incredibly stupid not to have seen this ages ago.
"You and your pantheon think in terms of a war that can be won, of enemies who can be killed, who eventually come back, but come back as children who have lost all of their previous power and knowledge. I think in terms of a war that has been going on for thousands of years, of enemies who outnumber us, who rise again each time they fall, who come back with all of their knowledge and only slightly less power than they had before they were defeated.
"You worry about what Kyle will do to the world for the next few hundred years if he comes to power. I worry about the world a thousand years from now when it is ruled by immortal beings like Fenrir, beings who have nothing in common with the humans or the Awakened either one, beings who would have to be killed a hundred times before they would be in peril of truly dying."
My legs were shaking and tears threatened to fill my eyes. Every time I thought I had a handle on what we were up against, someone came along and showed me just how little I actually understood.
She was right. I loved my dad and Ari because I'd lived with them for more than seventeen years. Just as important, I'd lived among humans for my formative years and even now that I knew I wasn't really human I would still be living among them in the future.
They looked like me, acted like me and sounded like me. Even at my worst, I would feel a bond, a similarity between them and me. Even Kyle wasn't as inhuman and unconcerned with human life as Fenrir had been. Even Mephistoles still largely thought like the human he'd at one time thought himself to be.
Kyle and the Awakened he'd recruited to his cause might be the most pressing threat, but it was the Unseelie fae who were helping them who represented the greater long-term threat to the survival of humans and Awakened alike.
"What do you want from me? I think I finally understand. You're concerned you'll waste too much of your strength fighting against Kyle and the rest of the Awakened if you join in the battle, which would be disastrous later on, but you're equally worried that sitting the war out will just result in the Unseelie Court farming the rest of us for power. How is it that nobody other than Byron has seen this?"
"It's very easy to get caught up with smaller concerns and ignore the bigger concerns, the ones that you can't possibly impact working by yourself or even with a few friends, Selene. But Byron isn't the only one to have realized what we are eventually going to be up against. Even assuming that Byron is right and this is part of what is causing Kyle to make his play right now, the two of them weren't the first to realize that the true threat is the fact that it's always easier to be evil than it is to be good."
Her words weren't accusatory, but they still pierced me right to the core. The problem wasn't that it was easier for the fae to be bad than it was for the fae to be good. The problem was that most of the Awakened were themselves bad. Even if they weren't bad, too many of them let negative emotions fuel their effects.
Part of me wanted to point a finger of reproach at Kat, but I wasn't any better than her. She was fueled by a combination of anger and fear, but I wasn't sure that the sliver of happiness I injected into my workings was much better than the fear she'd defaulted to.
We were both still primarily working from so-called neutral emotions, emotions that still had the possibility of producing an Unseelie fae. I'd gotten lucky with Bethany, but I couldn't count on that always being the case.
I resolved then and there to work harder at increasing my reserves of happiness. If I didn't work on that now, there wasn't any guarantee that the next fairy I created would go down the path of light and goodness.
"Please. Just tell me what it is that you need me to
do. How can I help? I'll get someone to teach me how to create wards and I'll put them up from sunup to sundown every day so that they are there to feed power to all of you once they've finished crystalizing."
The Lady reached forward and cupped the side of my face. It should have felt weird, but it didn't. It felt like the way my mom had touched me when words just wouldn't suffice.
"Your offer is one of the most selfless I've ever heard, but it's too late for that, Selene. Even very small wards will take weeks to fully mature to the point where the power released will be more than the power expended to create them. We don't have that kind of time. We're going to have to take the fight to Kyle and the dark court. It's the only way.
"In order to do that we need a symbol, someone who can convince the remaining Awakened—everyone who hasn't already allied with Kyle—to join our cause. We need someone who can stand toe to toe with Kyle and have a chance of surviving the confrontation."
"I don't understand. Why are you telling me this?"
"I wish I could let you spend the next hundred years here in my court, researching better ways of fighting our enemy, Selene, but you're going to have to be that symbol. Byron is right about the fact that our side is going to need an equalizer if we're going to survive. I believe the power from the wards around Camelot will go a long way towards evening the balance of power, but that's not going to be enough. Our enemies have at least two artifacts in their possession. We need someone to wield an offsetting power."
I could feel the edges of what she was trying to get at, but my mind seemed unwilling to put the final pieces together. I had to be reading the wrong message into what she was saying. I opened my mouth to ask her to explain, to beg her not to say what I feared she was about to say, but she beat me to the punch.
"The artifacts are dangerous. They each free the Awakened that holds them from the normal constraints, constraints that I believe are the only thing that has kept our shared world from being destroyed long ago. I refuse to trust just anyone with objects of such power."