Unveiled

by Ruth Vincent

  I couldn’t believe I had said that out loud, but the words tumbled out of my mouth before I could think about them.

  My mother’s face grew very pale again. She didn’t say anything, but her hand that was holding mine clenched tight.

  “Maybe there’s a way I can give some of what I have to you? Maybe it’s contagious? If I give you a transfusion of my blood . . .”

  “I wouldn’t want you doing anything that could hurt yourself. I don’t want you taking any risks,” the Queen said quickly, but I wasn’t listening. This was the one thing I could do that might do some good. And focusing on helping my mom, I wasn’t thinking about Korvus, or Obadiah, or the conversation we would have to have.

  I pulled the knife Obadiah had given me out of my pocket with shaking fingers. There was no way to know if this would work, and I felt like one of the kids on the playground about to become schoolyard blood brothers. But it couldn’t hurt to try it, could it?

  Praying that I was right about this, I took the tip of the knife and made a tiny slit in my hand, wincing slightly at the pain.

  “Mab, what are you doing?” the Queen cried out.

  “Give me your hand.”

  She reached her palm out to me, not even asking why. My mother trusted me completely.

  “This is going to sting a little. I hope I’m right about this.”

  I pricked her skin. She shivered at the touch of the blade.

  But I pressed my hand against hers. We locked fingers, pressing together palm against palm.

  I closed my eyes, and whispered inwardly to the Feydust and the human blood that mixed and fused in my veins, as if they were living creatures. Come on, I begged, move from me to her.

  My mother’s hand flinched in mine. I could see the change in her eyes. She had felt something.

  “Mab,” she started to say.

  “If it works, I’ve given you some of what I have, a synthesis of fairy and human. But we can’t get our hopes up yet. We have to see if it takes.”

  She nodded, her eyes still very big.

  She trusted me. I wasn’t sure if I deserved that trust.

  Suddenly, I just felt exhausted. Had I given something to my mother? I felt drained, spent, depleted.

  “Forgive me,” I said, “but I’m so tired. I have to rest.”

  It had taken something out of me, to give that much, I realized. I collapsed back down on the too-soft bed, the urge to sleep sucking at me like an undertow. The last thing I felt was the touch of my mother’s hand on my cheek, and I noticed it was warm this time, instead of icy cold.

  Chapter 15

  I woke up in a bed. An unfamiliar bed. Someone was softly shaking me awake, and I pulled strange coverlets over my head.

  “Please just leave me alone,” I muttered.

  I didn’t want to get up. I didn’t want to face reality.

  Dimly, through half-open eyes, I realized I was probably in my mother’s bedchamber. I’d never seen it before. I could smell Elixir drifting over me, like the scent of a fresh breeze from an open window, permeating the room.

  I huddled down under the blankets, wishing I could fall asleep again.

  For a few hours I’d had a focus: escape from Korvus, save Obadiah, give my cure to the Queen. But now that that was over, the pain inside that had been paused so briefly came rushing back over me again.

  I just wanted to sleep. Because I didn’t want to think.

  “Mab?” I heard a voice calling.

  I rolled over, to face the crystal wall.

  There was a hand on my shoulder.

  My mother was standing over me. She was not using her cane. And her face . . . her eyes were shining, her skin had a healthy glow. She was still terrifyingly thin and frail; some things don’t change overnight. But she looked so much better.

  “I think it’s working,” she said to me, reaching out and taking my hands. For the first time in her eyes I saw something I’d never seen there before: hope.

  I collapsed in relief against the softness of her bed.

  “This changes everything,” she whispered.

  “I know.”

  I sat up in bed at last.

  “Mab, Obadiah wants to see you. He’s here in the palace.”

  I turned away, dread filling my stomach. I had to see him. I had to talk to him. But I couldn’t. Not yet.

  “I . . .” My voice trailed off, not being able to find the words for what I wanted to say. My mother touched my shoulder.

  “You don’t have to see him.”

  “I want to, but . . .”

  “Whenever you’re ready to, he said he’ll be here. I prepared him a guest room, and my butler will bring him food and drink.”

  “Thank you,” I said quietly.

  “There’s something else,” she said, her face an unreadable mask. “I have something for you. You get to choose what I do with him.”

  Panic gripped me at the word “him.” It had to be Korvus. She must have caught him and was holding him here in the palace. My body seized up beneath the blankets. I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t ever want to see him again.

  “If you don’t want to see him, I fully understand,” my mother said, as if reading my mind. “I’ll deal with him. I’ll handle his punishment myself.”

  She was going to kill him, I realized, reading her words. Slowly I rose from the bed. I wasn’t going to leave this to my mother. I had to face him myself.

  I got up and followed my mother into a small antechamber.

  There at the other end of the room, bound from head to foot, staring back at me with sulking eyes, was Korvus.

  His face was covered in bruises, one arm at an unnatural angle, a crust of blood across his brow.

  I turned away; I didn’t even want to look at him.

  “Just say the word, Mab. Or if you’d rather do it yourself?”

  She was giving me free rein to kill him, I realized.

  But I shrank away.

  I hated Korvus with all my being, but I’d never killed anyone before. I didn’t know if I could. We could lock him in prison for life, so that he could never hurt another girl again, and maybe that would finally make me able to sleep at night. But could I draw the knife and end his life? Should I?

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “I wanted to offer, but I would never have asked it of you. I’ll do it.”

  “No,” I cried. “Not yet . . .”

  Korvus was watching both of us, his eyes dull, past caring what his fate was. But when he turned away from me and looked only at the Queen, there was a peace in his face. He’d gotten what he ultimately wanted, I realized; his beloved was going to live, was going to get well. It wasn’t by his own hand, but I wasn’t sure that mattered to him. He would die content, knowing his love was saved.

  Stifling my repulsion at his presence, I walked over to him, trying to see his eyes.

  He turned his head away, as far as he could with his bonds, his gaze fixed on the floor. He was trying his best not to look at me, but I persisted, and he must have felt the pressure of my eyes on him because at last he looked up. His expression was sullen at first, but there was more to it than that. There was guilt too.

  A memory of him standing over me with the knife flashed through me, and I wanted to hit him. And if I was honest with myself, I wanted to kill him too. The thought of the night I’d unwittingly spent with him was crawling around like a bug in my insides. I wanted to have him out of my life forever. And I could do that. I had carte blanche. The Queen had sentenced him to death. No one would ever have to know I had done it. Obadiah would kill him, if he were here.

  I thought of Quinn, lying on her bed in listless misery. And all those other girls—how many other girls?—that he’d seduced, deceived, sucked the life and joy out of. And all the kids, in death-like sleep inside their cocoons. And what he’d done to me. He deserved to die.

  But could I really say the word to end someone’s life? Could I live with myself?

  A smal
l, truthful voice in me whispered, No.

  I kept pacing back and forth in front of him, while he remained utterly silent. My mother was silent too, waiting at the other side of the room. She was going to let this be my decision.

  I looked him in the eyes, and all of a sudden I saw the fear there; he was afraid of death, and he knew at any moment I could give it to him. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that that power, the power to hold someone’s life in my hand like the most delicate egg, didn’t secretly elate me.

  But I stopped myself. If I killed him or had him killed in this moment, what did that make me?

  It made me no better than Korvus.

  “This is what I propose,” I said, a new strength in my voice as I turned towards my mother’s disappointed face. “We punish Korvus to life imprisonment. Keep him somewhere very far away.” Where I don’t have to look at him and have his face be a constant reminder of what happened, a small, wounded part of me whispered.

  “There’s an island, far off in the Elixir Sea, where we keep prisoners. It’s the most secure place we have.”

  I knew of the island she was talking about; it was the Vale’s Alcatraz. No one had ever escaped it. Even someone has crafty as Korvus would be outmatched there.

  “We’ll send him off with the next tide,” said the Queen.

  “Good,” I said quietly.

  The Queen nodded. Her posture had grown straight, the confident mien back in her face. Now she looked like a Queen again.

  She turned to Korvus, her voice like stone. “You are hereby sentenced to life in prison. If you ever attempt to escape, however, this pact is broken and you will be killed. You understand?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Korvus said meekly.

  I spoke up. “All the young women that you preyed upon . . . I want a list of names. If you don’t comply, I’m not above using more drastic means to extract that information. You must rectify the damage you’ve done.”

  I didn’t actually condone torture, but Korvus didn’t need to know that.

  “I will give you a list of every name. But . . . I’m not sure they can ever completely be restored to the way they were before.”

  I bit my lip; he’d said it before and I feared it was true. But there had to be a solution. I wasn’t giving up hope for Quinn, or for the others. Or for myself.

  “Get me the names first. That’s the first step. But we will fix this.”

  “I’ll have my guards supervise Korvus and ensure that list gets made,” the Queen said. “We’ll be sending you away at sunset.”

  “Thank you,” he said in a voice almost too quiet to hear.

  “Just get me the list,” I said. I watched the guards drag him away in the direction of the dungeons, as I imagined killing him a dozen different ways in my mind.

  Chapter 16

  After the guards took Korvus away, I lay down again on my mother’s bed. I felt like I could sleep for a year. When I woke up a few hours later she was waiting by my side. Once that might have alarmed me, but now it was a comfort. I felt, if not better, at least hungry, and that was some sign of feeling alive. So I finally answered my mother’s pleas and ate something.

  She must have sent someone to the human world to fetch the dishes laid out on the table beside the bed, because it was real human food instead of just magicked confections of Elixir and air. My hands trembled as I sipped the soup and broke the crusty loaves of bread. There had been a time I’d been too scared to eat anything in the Vale, scared I’d be trapped forever amongst the fairies, but that was before I’d learned to trust my mother.

  I looked over at her. She looked visibly healthier than she did yesterday, a flush in her cheeks and a light in her eyes that I hadn’t seen for a long time. It made me think—did every fairy suffering from the Elixir Thirst need a transfusion from me, or would the “cure” take root in my mother, make her able to pass along the human-tainted blood to other Fey, curing them too? Could the cure be spread like that?

  “I’m feeling much better,” my mother said, noticing my gaze, “thanks to your cure.”

  “I wonder if you could pass it on,” I said. “We should try doing another transfer to heal the Elixir sickness, but this time from you. That way, we can see if it will take.”

  Her eyes held a sparkle in them as she looked at me. “I’ve already done it, my darling. While you were resting. One of the members of my court had begun to suffer from the Elixir sickness. I performed the same ritual you did for me. She’s already healing. She’s going to transfer it to someone else.”

  “Each fairy who receives a transfer can transfer it to someone else. The cure will spread exponentially,” I said, my voice hushed with awe. This really did change everything.

  “Yes. We will spread the cure throughout the Vale.”

  Through the haze of depression that still hung over me, I smiled. We sat together in silence as I finished my soup. There was a lot I still hadn’t told my mother. I hadn’t told her the full extent of what Korvus had done to me, and I felt like I could never tell her. My mother could sense that something was still wrong, something that even the joyful news of the Elixir cure couldn’t fix, because she kept stroking my hand and trying to get me to eat more. The Queen had no sense of how much food a human being required, not requiring food herself. She kept refilling my bowl with stew, pushing more loaves of bread into my hands. It was touching.

  But each time she asked about Korvus, I just shook my head. I wasn’t ready. So I decided to try a new subject, one that had been weighing on my mind.

  I squeezed her hand across the table. “I need you to promise me one thing,” I said.

  “Anything.”

  “If we’ve found an alternative means of saving the fairies, you have to release the kids.”

  She bowed her head. “I will. You have my word. If we can do this ourselves, we don’t need them anymore.”

  A tension that had been coiled in my heart all these many months lifted at the thought, but I wasn’t finished.

  “And I don’t just mean not kidnapping new kids. I mean every kid who is alive currently in the Vale needs to be freed.”

  The Queen opened her mouth as if to protest, but at last she said softly, “Agreed.” She added quietly, “Some of them were taken a very long time ago.”

  I grimaced. “I know.” It would be a huge problem. She was right; some of these kids were taken fifty, a hundred, two hundred years ago. They had no human lives to go back to. They would be furious when they found out how long they’d been asleep. The shock of it could make them go mad. How could they transition back into society, what kind of lives could they possibly live, all these lost boys and lost girls? But we would have to deal with that later. All I could do was make my mother promise they would be freed.

  “What sort of records did you keep on these children?” I asked her. “Did you keep track of where they were from, who their parents were? Maybe there are some we could still return to their old lives.”

  “I can give you every record I have. Perhaps for some that would be possible. But there will be many for whom too much time has elapsed. Everyone they knew would be long dead. I’m sorry, Mab.”

  It was going to be a nightmare, and I shuddered at what the implications might be. But I thought of Obadiah. He’d come back after being held captive for two hundred years. And he’d turned out okay. Of course he’d been angry, of course he’d been bitter, but eventually he’d found peace. He’d built a life that brought together his past and his future. Maybe I was being overly optimistic, but maybe there was hope for these children? I wasn’t sure I could survive an emotional shock like that, but Obadiah had, and if he could be so resilient, maybe these children could be too.

  Thinking of Obadiah, my chest ached. I wanted to see him. I needed to see him. As soon as I finished with my mother and the children, I resolved to go visit his room.

  Later that afternoon as we made our way down to the dungeons to visit the formerly hostaged children, the tiny spark of
joy I’d felt began to flicker out. What would it be like for them, once they were released? How would we break it to them as to how much time had passed? It would be like that Robin Williams’ movie Awakenings, and there was a reason that story turned inevitably tragic. You couldn’t just throw something of that magnitude on someone without repercussions.

  And yet that was exactly what we were going to do.

  My heart was heavy with dread as we walked deeper and deeper into the earth. The thought of my Shadow, of her madness, of her fear of seeing the light, pressed down on me, and I had no answers.

  “I’ve set up some House Trees for them,” the Queen was saying as we made our way to the base of the stairs, “if they don’t want, or are not able, to return to their human lives. They are welcome to remain here in the Vale.”

  I nodded.

  “I also contacted your old bear nurse, Ursaline,” the Queen added, and my heart leaped up. “She has significant experience as a foster parent, and I figured she could help them with their transition.”

  I felt slightly better about this whole arrangement, knowing that Ursaline would be there. Ursaline might be the only one who could give solace to children like these. I remembered how she used to comfort the fairy orphans in her care, the ones who’d been old enough to remember their parents. She’d be perfect.

  As we walked down the low passage together, and stooped to crawl under the small arched door, I couldn’t help but remember the last time Eva and I had come here. I’d felt so powerless then. But now I wasn’t. Now I could do something to make it better.

  Entering the cavernous room, I expected to see all those silent, still, little bodies again. But instead, the kids were rising up from their cocoons, yawning and stretching.

  “I already started the spell to free them, before you came,” said the Queen.

  A few had climbed down from their stone bunks on the wall, and were skipping along the floor, pointing at the stalactites, giggling shyly at one another.