by Dean Murray
"I'm not sure, Selene. It's like the Lady said—there's never been an all-out war like this before. Even if she's wrong—or lying—and this isn't the first time that both courts have gone at each other with the gloves completely off, it happened so long ago that none of the journals I've been able to get my hands on have even hinted at the conflict."
"So how does it normally work—for the smaller fights that you do know about?"
"With the fae, it's usually about the memories that they can absorb by disembodying each other. The real powers—the Lady, Fenrir, the Dragon, and the Minotaur—all are pretty careful not to cross paths. Their biggest value has historically been as a deterrent, so none of them have been especially eager to find out who's really the toughest."
"Because once it was established that they would lose against that particular fae they would always have to run away. Why did the Lady agree to come fight Fenrir when he had Kyle and me bottled up inside of Kyle's wards? That doesn't sound like the kind of thing she's usually known for."
"You're not wrong. I had Bethany and Kregor approach her from the angle of this being the best chance she was ever going to get to feel Fenrir out. With Kat and I backing her up—and the possibility of an assist from you—she really wasn't at very much risk of losing.
"I still didn't expect her to come though because once the other side knows that she's left home and therefore can't just step through any of the Seelie Court's many portals, the Unseelie court tends to start acting up. Even the weaker players tend to get more adventurous when they know that she can't materialize more or less on top of them and ruin their fun."
That gelled with what I remembered from the encounter between her and Fenrir. I turned the information over inside of my head for a minute or two.
"So what you're saying is that we have no idea why she would have done that?"
"Not exactly. I can't tell you for sure, but the obvious answer is that she wanted a shot at Fenrir. It could have been that she figured things would be quiet for long enough for her to disembody him once or twice and steal some of the power he's spent so long accumulating. It's also possible that she cared less about increasing her own power and just wanted to try to bring Fenrir down enough that some of her lieutenants would have a chance against him."
"Wait, that sounds important. What do you mean by that?"
"It's harder to say for sure who's the next most powerful Seelie fae after the Lady. The Seelie don't tend to get monstrously big like the Unseelie do. The Unseelie probably have at least a rough idea of the relative ranking of most of the top-tier warriors on the other side, but I'm not really on speaking terms with any of them, and the Seelie tend to be pretty quiet about stuff like that. Kregor can tell you chapter and verse about who's who among the weaker Seelie fae, but that's not the kind of thing that the Lady or her closest advisors tend to share with the newer arrivals in her court.
"So as a result, none of us Awakened really know how close any of the Lady's lieutenants are to being able to step into her shoes, but the smart money says that there has to be at least one or two of them who are approaching her level of power. If that's true, then Fenrir being knocked down a few pegs could possibly make it so that one or two of the Lady's strongest warriors could have had a chance at taking him down without her help."
"Which would mean that they could farm him for energy and gain even more strength."
Jace nodded as he shifted lanes to put more space between us and a pair of burnt-out cars that had been pushed off to the side of the road.
"Yeah, in theory. Of course, Fenrir showed up at Camelot looking just as mean and tough as ever, so if that was what the Lady was hoping for it sounds like she failed. Of course, it's possible that she killed him once or twice and then called for help, but once she was gone whoever she brought in wasn't able to pin him down the next time he re-manifested.
"Actually, that's less likely given that he's Unseelie and doesn't have any wings. On second thought, he probably just disembodied one or both of them."
My head was spinning again. "So what happens in circumstances like that? You've got one or more powerful fae who've been disembodied, and someone else has absorbed some of their power…"
"There are a lot of different variables, but it always has the chance of turning into a hotspot because it means that whoever disembodied them knows roughly where they will materialize when they finish reassembling themselves. If there is enough power at stake and the fae who survived the fight thinks that they have a chance of winning the next one, they will often stay around and try to do it again. Sometimes they are successful, sometimes they lose the next fight, and sometimes the loser of the first fight manages to get away."
I rubbed my temples with my free hand—the hand that wasn't holding onto the Scepter of Storms. "I'm beginning to see what you mean about lots of variables."
Jace chuckled, which made me smile despite the gravity of our situation. "We're just getting started. Sometimes the winner of the first fight isn't sure they can win the second one so they run back to their friends and bring back reinforcements. Sometimes the group gets back in time and kills the first fae, but other times they walk into a gigantic trap because the disembodied fae has powerful friends who knew where he was headed and got worried when he was gone for so long."
I nodded, finally beginning to see the ramifications of a fae being disembodied. "So I'll bet that occasionally fae from one side let themselves be disembodied so that they can set a trap for a much bigger group."
"Yep. That doesn't happen very often though because nobody can guarantee that the winner from the first fight will go back for reinforcements. Honestly, what happens more often is that someone really powerful will let themselves be beaten as a way of luring a big group out of position to defend some asset. If the ploy works, then it's worth the cost of losing a little bit of power."
"And if it doesn't?"
"If it doesn't, then the fae who was beaten the first time usually just farms the original victor until either they get most of their lost power back or someone even more dangerous comes along. That can take a long time though—weaker fae require a lot more time to come back from being disembodied than someone like the Lady does."
"So there's a time element to everything as well. That must mean that when the stakes are really high everyone has to act quickly or they miss out on the chance to go after the fae who's just been disembodied."
"Yeah. There have been some really terrible decisions made over the years because one side or the other wanted to farm someone powerful who'd either had a bad string of luck or was purposefully trying to lure the other side into making a mistake."
"So what you're telling me is that it's all a gigantic game of chess, and each time somebody falls there are ripples that flow through the entire fae community as everyone tries to adjust to wring the most advantage they can out of the situation without getting themselves killed in the process."
"Yeah. It's a lot bloodier than chess, but that's about how it works. The opening fights in this particular war probably have smoke pouring out of the Lady's ears. I'm with you in wishing that she'd gotten back to us sooner, but I'm not necessarily surprised. Both sides have to be jockeying for position, and given that our side is heavily outnumbered, things are even worse than normal."
"About that. Given that our side is so much smaller than the other guys, what's to stop them from just bringing the Seelie fae down one by one, and then setting up camp in the location where they were killed with two or three times as many people and making sure that they always get disembodied instantly as soon as they manifest a new form?"
"Nothing really. It's been tried a million times, but our side tends to have wings, which means that we're a lot faster than the Unseelie Court. Usually when something like that happens the Lady's warriors just take to the air and put themselves out of reach of the big hitters. It's tough still. When a fae re-manifests they don't come back in exactly the same place as where they were disembodie
d, but there isn't that much variation to where they reappear, and the Unseelie fae are still plenty fast on the ground."
I could practically feel my mind stretching, but it wasn't the unpleasant sensation I'd generally associated with school. This was all stuff that I'd presumably mastered at some point in the past, which meant that I didn't have to doubt my ability to learn it, but it was more than that. This was stuff that could very well keep me alive. It was astonishing how much motivation that provided.
"So if having wings is such an advantage for us, how come the other side doesn't keep their wings as they get bigger? If they were as fast as us, there wouldn't be anything stopping them from farming the Seelie warriors until they managed to destroy them."
"Yeah, more variables. Wings are useful in a certain set of circumstances, but there are reasons to pick a completely earthbound form like Fenrir has done. It takes a lot more power to increase your strength without a corresponding increase in weight. The same thing goes for making your body more resistant to damage. It can still be done, but there is a noticeable difference between the raw combat potential if you stack up a Seelie warrior and an Unseelie warrior both of whom have absorbed the same amount of power."
I nodded. "So it's all about what you're aiming for. The Unseelie Court is a much more brutal place with a lot more infighting, so they go the route that will give them the best chance of surviving. The Lady, on the other hand, favors a quicker, more mobile army, so her people all keep their wings."
"Yeah. The Seelie Court has its own share of heated disagreements, and it's not unknown for things to come to blows from time to time, but at least there the fae don't have to worry about someone from their own court disembodying them again and again in order to absorb their power. Really, when you get right down to it, the Unseelie Court is more like a prison than anything else. Everyone at the bottom of the pyramid has to ally themselves with someone bigger or they have no chance of surviving.
"It goes like that all the way to the top where you have Fenrir, the Minotaur, and the Dragon, all of whom are desperately looking for some kind of advantage against the other two. When you get right down to it, it's always been more like a four-way war than two sides really going at each other with everything they have. That's probably the most amazing thing Kyle has managed to accomplish in the last few weeks. We've all been worried about the possibility that the Unseelie Court would rally behind a single figure, but I'm not sure any of us really believed it.
"It's a bad precedent. We can't just win this war by the skin of our teeth. We need to beat the other side convincingly. We need to disembody them enough times that even Fenrir and the other two are weaker than most of the Lady's lieutenants or they'll just come back after us again in a decade or two. Once they get used to working together, all the mobility and discipline in the world won't be enough to offset their superior numbers."
Chapter 20
We made it to Salt Lake City without any problems, but there were a couple of times that I felt solitary signatures out there a few dozen miles away from us. Normally, where you sensed one Awakened there was bound to be more, but it seemed like all of the pantheons we'd come up against on our first trip had relocated—probably because they'd been recruited by one of the courts.
The only Awakened left were the singletons who were either too weak to offer any kind of value to a pantheon, or who were so bad that nobody else was willing to work with them. It was very reassuring to feel the signatures I spotted move away from us for a change, but it was still a relief when we spotted the club.
It was closed—either because of the hour or because Intravil had shut it down once she knew that she was going to be leaving it unattended. The doors were all locked, and the windows were all barred, which was somewhat ironic considering that nothing short of a bank vault was going to keep someone like Fenrir out.
Then again, maybe that was the point. Locks wouldn't stop the Unseelie fae from breaking in, but it would at least make it obvious that the club—and therefore the security of the portal—had been compromised.
We pulled up to the underground parking garage and Jace pressed the call button while Bethany anxiously danced from side to side on my shoulder.
A couple of seconds later, a voice asked us our names and then told us to look into the cameras that were mounted prominently all around the entrance to the garage. We all smiled prettily for whoever was watching us, and then the heavy steel doors opened and we were allowed inside.
Apparently looking like a known ally to the Seelie Court was enough to get us inside the parking facility, but it didn't buy us any more than that. A group of six Seelie warriors were waiting for us as we got out of the Viper, but once they'd had a chance to look us over, one of them asked if we needed any help with packing our things into the club.
Bethany brought me up to speed while I trailed along behind everyone else, the scepter in one hand and a bag containing changes of clothes and toiletries in the other.
"The cameras can be fooled. They don't put much stock in them. Really they were just buying time for the security group to get down here. They let us in because they figured they could handle us if we turned out to be someone other than who we said we were."
"I'm not sure if that's reassuring or terrifying."
Bethany gave me a big smile. "I think that's kind of the point. Welcome to the professional paranoia inherent to fighting people who can make themselves look like anyone they want."
Intravil was waiting for us inside of her private suite. She looked me over, confirming that I still had the scepter, and then ushered us through the portal without any of the pleasantries I'd learned to expect from seventeen years of dealing with humans.
I tried to thank her for saving my life back outside of Camelot the day before, but she cut me off with a curt gesture and I could feel Bethany tugging on my ear as though to tell me not to go there. It was frustrating—I wanted to acknowledge that she'd sacrificed some of her hard-won power on my behalf, but now apparently wasn't the time.
Once we were on the other side of the portal, we found Dad, Ari, and Sandra waiting for us. Dad swept me up into a hug that made my ribs creak, and then let me go so that I could give Ari a hug.
"I'm so glad that you're okay. Nobody is telling us anything. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this. We've been basically abandoned here. They left us with a pile of food that all had dates on it and told us not to eat anything after it had been here more than five days. Since then we're lucky if someone checks in with us once a day. How are Kat and Byron? They aren't—"
I shook my head quickly. "They're both okay—at least they were when we last saw them. We got separated, but they made it inside the wards that surround Camelot before we got chased away, so there's every reason to believe that they're still fine."
"What about the wards? Did Byron manage to bring them down?"
I'd spent almost my entire life with Ari. For a brief time after my memories had crystalized, I'd probably remembered a time before she'd been born, but that had been lost somewhere during the fight with Mephistoles and Sandra. Now I couldn't remember a time when Ari hadn't been around. I'd seen her in almost every circumstance and I couldn't remember a time when she'd been so subdued.
"Yes. Byron managed to bring down the outer ward, but things didn't exactly go as expected. We had a couple of minutes where our side got to siphon off as much energy as they could absorb, but then something like a third of the Unseelie Court showed up and started leeching off the energy feed."
Sandra frowned. "So we didn't actually come out at all ahead?"
Jace shrugged. "It's hard to say for sure. The Lady and some of her most powerful warriors got some time to themselves, and they're extremely powerful, so they absorbed quite a bit of energy while that was going on.
"Once the bad guys showed up the pendulum probably swung the other way—simply because there were so many of them, but with all of that power discharging into every fae within a hundred
feet, they were all in sort of a state of shock. Kat, Selene and I took advantage of that to disembody a bunch of them. We were making progress reversing any gains they might have gotten, but then Kyle's Awakened buddies showed up."
I was glad that Jace was so willing to take point on most of the interactions with Sandra. I knew it wasn't fair to dislike her—she might have some of the same tendencies and flaws as the version that had killed me at the end of my last incarnation, but she wasn't that same person any more than she was the same person who'd stabbed my dad when ordered to by Mephistoles.
My dad seemed to have forgiven her—I should be able to do the same, but I was having a harder time doing that than I'd expected. I was starting to see why it was so rare for someone to be recruited into another pantheon after being completely drained of memories—not that it was common for total memory loss to happen in the first place. It took extremely strong emotions to achieve that, emotions so strong that you could make the case that in order to feel them you had to be—temporarily at least—a little insane.
I forced a smile on my face instead of the scowl that wanted to hang out there and picked up the thread of the conversation.
"By that time, Kat, Jace and I were all pretty much depleted. We got cut off from the Lady and all of her people, so we retreated back into the tunnels inside of the mountain and Kat collapsed the entrance.
"We were hoping to get inside the second ward before anyone made it inside there with us, but Byron only managed to get the wards keyed to Kat before Fenrir jumped us. Jace, Bethany and I were lucky to make it out alive.
"From there we headed home and spent a few hours inside the wards in the basement recuperating and catching up on our sleep. At that point, the Lady got hold of me and ordered us to Salt Lake, presumably so that we could join back up with everyone."
Dad shook his head. "Judging by what we've seen so far, there isn't anyone here to join up with."