Phantom Pains

by Mishell Baker

  “Nothing you promise matters,” said the wraith. “You can lie.”

  “Then trust the word of your king,” said Winterglass carefully. “I promise to help you to leave this room on the condition that you personally accompany us to find the other wraith you mentioned and release the faun from your control once you have found the wraith. I promise nothing beyond that.”

  “That’s enough,” said the wraith. “I’ll take it. Okay.” Carefully it got to its feet, eyeing Winterglass warily as though it expected him to object.

  “What can you tell us about this other wraith we’re hunting?” I said. Because right now, as far as I was concerned, that thing was Suspect #1 in Tamika’s death.

  “When Vivian died,” the wraith said, “it found itself inside a chapel.”

  “Holy ground,” I said, remembering. “That hurts Unseelie fey.”

  “Hurts Unseelie bodies,” said the wraith. “Bodies resist. A wraith has no resistance, it’s just—repelled. It shot out of the doorway and into the man standing outside, where it became . . . very disoriented.”

  I drew in a sharp breath. “Tjuan. He’s not relapsing; he’s possessed. The wraith is still in him.”

  “And may have cast the spell that killed that woman,” said Winterglass.

  “We’ve got to tell Alvin right away,” I said. “We need him to let Caryl out of the basement if she’s going to help us figure out how to stop these things.”

  “Stop them from doing what, exactly?”

  “They’re still carrying out Vivian’s plans, or trying. And as of last June, Vivian was planning to destroy every noble estate in Arcadia.”

  From the king’s expression, this was the first he’d heard of it. “Impossible,” he scoffed. “The protective wards on noble estates are tied to the fey who own them; it is impossible to unravel them while their owners are inside.”

  “She wasn’t going to undo any spellwork. She was collecting fey blood, lots of it. You know what happens when fey blood is spilled on the ground here, right? All she’d need to do would be to find the right spots on Earth and boom, mass destruction in Arcadia.”

  “Also unlikely,” said Winterglass. “Without a pair of Gate builders it is nearly impossible to map an Arcadian location to its precise counterpart on Earth.”

  “Well, Vivian knew at least one pair of Gate builders; that’s how this well got here. The fey half of that pair was executed for breaking the Accord, so they won’t be any further help. But they must have some other way of moving the plan forward, because you just heard this one say that they’re carrying on without her.” I turned to the wraith. “What’s the plan?” I demanded. “How are you going to destroy the estates?”

  “I only agreed to lead you to the other wraith,” it said. “I never agreed to betray the countess.”

  “Morozov, make him talk.”

  Winterglass slowly shook his head. “I cannot command speech.”

  “I thought Unseelie had to obey the guy with the scepter.”

  “There are limits to its power. My subject must be able to hear me, for instance. And I am forbidden to command speech—which in Arcadia is synonymous with spell casting. If I could command speech, I would have the power to cast any sort of spell known by any of the near-infinite variety of Unseelie fey. The architects of the Second Accord were not willing to grant that much power to any one fey, even a king.”

  “Ugh.” I clawed my hair back from my face. “I’m beginning to see why Caryl got so annoyed that I killed Vivian before the Project could question her.”

  Before Winterglass could so much as draw breath to respond, Claybriar lunged at me, knocking me to the floor.

  13

  As my bolted-together skeleton made impact with the wooden floor, the full-body pain was so intense that at first I didn’t notice Claybriar’s hands around my throat.

  “YOU killed the countess!” the thing possessing my Echo growled.

  Weakly I tried to pry loose his fingers, but I was already starting to lose my vision at the edges.

  “Release the human!” Winterglass cried out sharply, several seconds too late by my count.

  The wraith did as the king commanded, and I gulped a desperate breath. My windpipe felt like it was full of wet sand. I curled onto my side, gagging, trying to get air to flow again. Every cough felt like it was severing my spine.

  “Do not move a single limb until I tell you that you may.” The king’s voice was so icy that I froze for a full second before realizing that he was talking to the wraith.

  My legs still seemed to be nestled firmly in their prosthetic sockets, which seemed like good news until I tried to sit up and found out why. I’d landed almost entirely on my back and thrown out something badly in the process. Any attempt to get myself off the floor was like a lightning bolt to my entire nervous system, so I lay faceup on the floor, moaning and watching Winterglass pace back and forth like a panther in a cage.

  Clearing my throat also hurt. My voice came out rough.

  “Surprise surprise,” I said. “Maybe the queen’s hard-bodied champion isn’t the best wraith container.”

  “Do you propose a better one?” said Winterglass.

  “I propose we kick it out of him and just leave it here. I don’t much care what that thing wants anymore.”

  “I am bound to my promise that I would help it leave this soundstage, and to do that it needs a body.”

  “Not Clay’s.”

  “Do you volunteer, then?”

  “No!”

  “You must admit, that would limit its power, particularly if we were to remove your artificial limbs.”

  “I—” My heart sank. It was a horrible thing for him to say. It was also sickeningly true. “I just—God, I’m already so messed up in the head . . .”

  “It seems it must be you or the faun,” said the king with a cold smile. “Just how devoted are you to your Echo?”

  I realized with a sick wave of self-loathing that I was not devoted enough. Maybe if I’d had access to the magical part of our bond I’d have been less selfish, but the thought of taking off my legs and letting that thing— No, I couldn’t. I lay there burning with shame; I couldn’t admit my weakness to King Winterglass, but he was smiling as though he already knew. I had the sudden uncontrollable urge to find his own weak spots, to hurt him.

  “Maybe you should bring Caryl here,” I said, “and give it her body. It wouldn’t be the worst thing you’ve ever done to her.”

  I wasn’t actually expecting the barb to hit home, but it did. He took a step back as though struck in the chest. Remorse choked me instantly.

  He murmured something in Russian I couldn’t understand, but it conveyed so much pain that my eyes stung with tears. As hard as it was for me to apologize, I was working myself up to it when the king gave a weird shudder. At the exact same time, Claybriar went as limp as though someone had cut his strings.

  “Clay!” I called out from the floor. My throat still hurt a little from where his hands had been wrapped around it. He lay senseless, but I could see him breathing steadily. I tried to move, but pain jolted through my spine again, and I could do nothing but lie on my back, eyes filled with tears.

  Then I heard King Winterglass begin to laugh. The sound made my blood run cold.

  “Oh shit,” I said. “You’re possessed now.”

  “Oh, it tried,” said Winterglass in a strange, brittle voice. “That’s what’s so . . . delightful.” He smiled, gazing into the middle distance. “Oh yes, I feel you struggling, little one. Stay there inside me until further notice.” With that alarming command, he swept across the floor to kneel next to Claybriar, turning his limp body over. “Don’t worry about your faun; I think he is merely stunned.”

  “Explain what just happened,” I said between clenched teeth.

  “The wraith rode the current of sorrow you so helpfully provided,” he said. “I can feel it in me now, fighting the inevitable, but it is trapped. You see, my little subject can
neither command me nor cause me harm. I am in full control.”

  “How do I know you’re not the wraith cleverly pretending to be you?”

  “Because I just told you that I was not, and neither I nor the wraith can lie.”

  “Oh, right.”

  Winterglass continued to examine Claybriar, listening to his breathing, gently lifting one wrist and then the other.

  “What’s the matter with him?” I said.

  “He seems unharmed; he should come round any moment.”

  “And you? You seem strangely okay with being possessed.”

  “It has not ‘possessed’ me. It would be more accurate to say that I possess it for the time being. I could not have been certain of this beforehand, but I can feel now, as clearly as I can feel my own breath, that because of the scepter it cannot control any part of me. Not for want of trying.”

  “And yet you can still carry it out of here, fulfilling your promise.”

  “Then decide at my leisure how to dispose of it.”

  “Well. You’re welcome, I guess.”

  King Winterglass looked up from his examination of Claybriar to fix me with a chilly look. I averted my eyes.

  “Let’s make sure Clay’s okay,” I said, “and then get the hell back to Residence Four so you can order the other one out of Tjuan and ‘dispose of’ them both.”

  “Agreed.” With that, Winterglass gave Claybriar a smart slap on the cheek. Claybriar groaned and levered himself to a sitting position, looking bewildered.

  “Thank God you’re all right,” I said.

  “What happened?” said Claybriar, cradling his head in his hands as though it hurt.

  “Weren’t you aware that whole time?” I asked. Hadn’t the wraith said as much?

  “What whole time?”

  He’d clearly missed at least the last bit, given that he wasn’t immediately falling all over himself to apologize. “What’s the last thing you remember?” I asked.

  “The well,” he said vaguely. Then his gaze sharpened. “My sister!”

  I shook my head. “It wasn’t your sister. It was a spell, like the one that made me see Teo.”

  “What happened to you? Why are you on the ground?”

  I touched my fingertips to my throat and exchanged a glance with Winterglass. The king spread his hands in a graceful shrug.

  “Let’s—let’s talk about that a little later,” I said. “We need to get back to the Residence as soon as possible.”

  “But you’re hurt.”

  “Just a little. Mostly my back. I fell.”

  “Let me try and fix it.”

  “Fix it?”

  He shrugged. “Seelie thing. If I catch an injury before the mind gets used to it, I can convince the body it never happened. I’m not great at it, but—”

  “I don’t think any kind of body magic works on me. What did Caryl call it? Somatic spellwork?”

  “Let me at least try.”

  He came and knelt beside me; his face took on the same distant, reaching expression I’d seen when he was drawing. After a moment, he shook his head.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I can’t get the spellwork to hold. It just sort of melts on contact with you. But there doesn’t seem to be any serious damage. Bump on the back of the head, bruising around your throat but no real damage to the windpipe. Your back is what’s going to give you trouble, but even that will be fine in a few days.”

  “In the meantime,” I said, “I’m going to be even slower than usual. Let’s call a cab and get back to the Residence.” I hesitated, then looked between the two of them. “I hate to do this to you boys, what with my iron and all, but . . . I’m going to need someone to help me up.”

  • • •

  By the time we got back to Residence Four, my back hurt so badly that getting out of the cab took three tries and brought tears to my eyes. It was bearable if I sat down and rested against something upright, so I made a beeline for the couch as soon as we were inside.

  I’d already texted Alvin, who was busy doing Caryl’s managerial maintenance stuff at Residence One. He’d promised to be there by a quarter to two, which meant I had at most fifteen minutes to pull myself together. Winterglass went down to the basement to speak with Caryl while I sat on the sofa and tried to breathe. Monty the cat decided this would be a great time to jump onto my lap; I grudgingly stroked my fingertips down his bony spine as Claybriar settled onto the other end of the couch.

  “Well,” I said. “Turns out King Winterglass is a pretty useful guy to have around. Thanks for fetching him.”

  “Fetching?” His gaze was a little sullen. “I’m your dog now?”

  “For a guy who speaks English as a second language, you’re annoyingly alert to nuance.”

  That got a smile. “Sorry. I’m cranky. Sidhe make me uncomfortable, and Unseelie make me really uncomfortable, and Winterglass is the ultimate example of both.”

  “Explain again how some kind of Irish fairy ended up in Russia?”

  “What?” Claybriar looked baffled.

  “Sidhe,” I said. “That’s an Irish word, right? But isn’t his palace in the equivalent of Russia somewhere?”

  “Well, sidhe isn’t our word,” said Claybriar. “When stuff got named by the Arcadia Project, it got named whatever the people in London thought it should be named.”

  “So what are the sidhe exactly?”

  “I dunno. Just a kind of fey. The assholes who rule everything.”

  “But they didn’t always? Winterglass said something about the Time of Beasts, and a Beast Queen.”

  “Yes, yes, I know how the sidhe see the world. I’ve worked for them all my life.”

  “Is there some other version of the story?”

  “Can we not talk about this?”

  I stared at him. “I said something wrong, didn’t I?”

  “It’s fine. You didn’t mean any harm. This is just me being dumb. I was raised—I was raised a certain way, and sometimes it’s hard to shake off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t want to talk trash about my own people,” he said. “But the sidhe aren’t all wrong when they think of us as animals. We’re not as much like humans as the sidhe are. Not sure if that’s because we hardly ever interact with humans, or if our idiocy is the reason we don’t interact. Either way, most fauns have awful memories and no ability to reason. Can’t learn about arcana or science or how things work. So we just—make up our own stories based on how things feel.”

  “And part of you still believes these stories?”

  “No,” he said emphatically. “No, now that I can think clearly, I understand the logic of it all. But I remember how the old beliefs felt, and—I don’t know—sometimes I miss it. Is it weird to miss ignorance?”

  “Not at all,” I said gently, starting to reach out before I remembered he didn’t have his gloves on. I returned my hand to the half drowsing cat in my lap. “I understand wanting to unlearn something. Like . . . Professor Scott.”

  He turned his eyes to me, something like anger still faintly simmering in them. “The guy you jumped off a building over.”

  “It’s complicated. I didn’t jump because of him, but because of the—brutality of that paradigm shift. I had this idea of who he was: a tortured angel, keeping his heart locked away to protect himself. Turned out he was more like—an abandoned house where nothing worked anymore except the security system.”

  “Ouch.”

  “What destroyed me more than losing him was having to go back and rewrite everything that had ever happened between us, everything I’d thought was romantic and magical. To see it from his perspective and realize how hollow and sleazy it all was. It broke me.”

  “Ah, Millie.”

  “It’s all right. A bunch of people worked pretty hard to put me back together. I’m not the same person, but maybe I’m better. My point is, I know what it is to just think, Please, let me go back to believing the lie.”

  To
my surprise, Claybriar’s eyes filled with tears.

  “Oh no,” I said. I shifted awkwardly, not sure what to do, and I was rewarded with another twinge of agony from my back.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Just don’t say anything to Winterglass about my weird fits of nostalgia. He already thinks I’m an ignorant savage.”

  I was about to tell him exactly how little I cared about Mr. Morozov’s opinion, but then I heard a key in the front door. After a few failures, it finally unlocked and opened to admit Alvin Lamb.

  “So,” he said, shoving what I recognized as Caryl’s key ring back into his pocket. “I really hope the ‘smoking gun’ you referred to in your text message was metaphorical.”

  “Mostly.”

  “This had better be good,” said Alvin. “Belinda’s called a summit in London, and I need to have something to tell her.”

  “King Winterglass is in the basement with your prisoner,” I said. “I suggest you bring them both up here for this.”

  “If you don’t mind,” said Alvin while his eyes said even if you do, “I’d rather leave Caryl in the basement until after I’ve seen this smoking gun of yours. I hope you’ll forgive my skepticism.”

  Not only did I forgive it, I was fully prepared to give it last rites. I rested my back until Alvin and Winterglass returned, and then recounted the day’s events to Alvin, only skipping the part where Claybriar had assaulted me. I also glossed over how we’d arrived at the decision to trap the wraith inside King Winterglass, since I didn’t think His Majesty would appreciate my explaining that I’d managed to hurt his feelings. When I was finished, Alvin stared at me for a long moment.

  “If this is true,” said Alvin, “then it sheds doubt on Caryl’s guilt. But you have to understand that from my point of view this sounds like the most utter, irredeemable bullshit.”

  “Confirm with His Majesty, if you like,” I said, trying not to sound smug.

  Everyone turned to look at Winterglass.

  The king’s eyes widened. “This puts me in an awkward position,” he said.

  “What’s so awkward about it?” I asked.

  “Perhaps more than anyone here, I wish to see Caryl’s release. But as much as I might desire it, I cannot confirm your story, as I lack the ability to lie.”