Impostor Syndrome

by Mishell Baker

  Once he’d righted himself, he gave me a piercing birdy glare. “It’s her, trash-wit.”

  “Okay,” I said. I felt disoriented, shamed, a little dizzy.

  “This is a fucking large bird,” said Naderi gruffly. Tears glimmered on her lashes. “I’m going to need a masseuse on call if he plans to spend all day up there.”

  “Unfortunately,” said Caryl, looking a little misty eyed herself as she descended the stairs, “we will have to take him back from you, at least for a while. He needs to recapture the escaped wraiths, and he also needs to help us with an important project we are working on.”

  “It’s going to be great,” said Brand. “Millie’s asked me to go around Arcadia telling the—”

  That was how long it took me to get there and clamp his beak shut. “Brand,” I said. “No telling anyone, until it’s done.” I released his beak, tentatively.

  “Not even my Echo?” he said.

  “Especially not your Echo, since she could be, you know, possessed? Remember that bit?”

  “Oh, right.” He ruffled his feathers. “Well, don’t worry, Parisa, if there’s any nasty thing hitching a ride inside you I’m gonna rip it right out of there and find it a better place to hang out. Like maybe that siren’s feathery crotch.”

  “Do not annoy Shiverlash!” I said. “I’ve barely got her pacified.”

  “You be good, Brand,” said Naderi. “You hear me? Don’t you go getting grounded or something, just when I’ve gotten you back. You go with them for now. I’ll wait for you.”

  “What?” I said. “No, no, this just isn’t right. I know you. You’d be fighting us. You’d refuse to give him back. What is your deal?”

  “Honestly?” she said. “I don’t know. I’ve been in an amazing mood all day. Just . . . done with all the anger, the stress . . . life’s too short. Yelling at everyone doesn’t get things done any faster, anyway.”

  “Oh my,” said Caryl suddenly, and put a hand to her mouth.

  “What?” I said. “Caryl, what is it?”

  “The oath of fealty,” she said. “Brand is channeling an entirely different form of arcane energy now. His connection to her is . . . making her happy.”

  “Oh Jesus,” I said, and burst into nervous laughter.

  “I’m not Seelie!” Brand croaked indignantly. “I’m still a manticore, you assholes! I’m not Seelie! I’m not!”

  “Okay, big guy,” I said, scratching at his new favorite spot. “Settle down.”

  He did not, I noticed, tell me not to pet him.

  • • •

  I probably wouldn’t have slept very well Wednesday night even if King Winterglass hadn’t walked into my room in the wee hours. I screamed, of course.

  “Do not be alarmed,” he said in his most silken voice. He stood silhouetted in the doorway; the dim light that burned every night in the hallway highlighted the slender perfection of his facade. “I am not here to harm you.”

  “Well, I doubt this is a booty call,” I said, scooting nervously toward my headboard.

  “My son told me everything,” he said.

  My gut sank. “Everything meaning . . . what exactly?”

  He crossed the darkened room toward me. I pulled the covers up to my chest even though I had on a T-shirt.

  “He told me,” he said, coming to sit on the edge of the bed near where his nemesis Shiverlash had sat not long ago, “that you were going to use him to break into the vault at the White Rose and steal their vials of human essence.”

  “What?” My hands dropped into my lap, taking the sheets with them. “No, seriously, what? Oh boy. Caryl and I are going to have such a talk.”

  “My son also told me that he will no longer take orders from Dame Belinda, nor ‘enslave’ spirits.”

  “Okay, so why are we talking right now? Why aren’t you just . . . making me gouge out my own eyes, or something?”

  His head dropped slightly for a moment. It looked eerily like shame, though I’d never have thought the Unseelie King was capable of such a feeling.

  “I need something from that vault,” he said.

  “Uh, okay. Blood, I’m guessing?”

  “My Echo’s blood.”

  “There’s a vial of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s blood at the Seelie palace?”

  “The vault contains not only the blood of living Project members, but of every human who has signed an Arcadia Project contract since the Renaissance.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “My son believes he can find this vial for me. I want your promise that you will return it to me.”

  “Why?”

  Winterglass lifted his head to gaze out one of the large windows in my octagonal room, out into the night. He seemed to love gazing out of windows into the night.

  “It is . . . difficult to explain,” he said. “Arcanely, on a deep level, it is my Echo. It is all I have left of him. It eats away at me that they have it, could destroy it on a whim. It is mine by right.”

  “And if I got it for you?”

  “You and Caryl have already freed my son. If you can free my Echo as well, then I will join your side in this war.”

  “That’s a promise? A bona fide fey promise?”

  “Yes. I promise that if you safely deliver to me that vial of my Echo’s blood, I will swear allegiance to this new Arcadia Project that Alvin Lamb is attempting to create.”

  “That . . . that would win us the war,” I said. I felt like a lottery winner, but then something occurred to me, and I gave him a slanted smile. “Either way,” I said, “you come out on the winning side.”

  “That is correct,” he said, returning my smile, eyes as distant as ever. “So make no mistake: you also have my promise that if my son leaves the White Rose without that vial, I shall inform Dawnrowan of your plan, and I shall join her in the hunt for you.”

  21

  I was so manic after Winterglass left that I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t care about Caryl and Shock; I wasn’t worried about the police; all I had room for in my head was that my idea was going to win this war. I was going to save the world.

  Best of all, with Winterglass on our side, we’d have someone who could command Qualm, just as we’d seen him command wraiths last fall. He could make Qualm walk that Tjuan copy right into a police station with the murder weapon in hand. In theory Shiverlash could do the same, but she seemed unlikely to willingly send a spirit to prison, even though we knew it had murdered Tamika Durand.

  With Tjuan out of commission, Phil was now the agent in charge of the LA4 Gate, so as soon as he was awake Thursday morning, I asked him to get a message to Claybriar. I needed my expert on the White Rose to put together the missing pieces.

  I also sent a message to Shock, trying to make up for our last awkward encounter by thanking him for so effectively bringing his father into the loop. I let him know we’d be in touch as soon as I knew exactly what we needed him to do, and when.

  Claybriar showed up in the afternoon, and I sent a text to Caryl so that we could have a strategy session in my room. I wasn’t entirely sure yet how many people I wanted to bring in on this, so I started with the ones I knew were necessary. I invited Caveat to eavesdrop as well, but if she heard the invitation, she didn’t say anything.

  I started by summarizing the development with Winterglass. Caryl turned my desk chair to face the center of the room as she listened; Claybriar sprawled across my bed like we were gossiping at a slumber party. As usual, I elected to stand.

  “So. We now have the Medial Vessel,” I said, patting the pocket of the sweatpants I’d put it in that morning. “By the way, Caryl, does this thing have any weird One Ring kind of properties? Could it be messing with my mind?”

  “Not at all,” said Caryl. “Why?”

  “Every time I try to put it down I freak out. Last night I slept with it tucked into my pillowcase.”

  “That is called anxiety, Millie.”

  “Gotcha. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between sorcery and ins
anity. Moving on. We have the Vessel, and we have Shock.”

  “You are quite welcome,” said Caryl.

  I ignored that. “And thanks to Brand’s rumormongering, I’ve also set in motion a way to get me inside the palace to help Shock by disabling that guardian spirit.”

  “Bad news,” said Claybriar. “I checked when I went back, and it looks like the spirit is actually bound inside the prison. That’s a completely separate structure—”

  “Under the ground, right? Caryl mentioned that before. Shit!” I scratched at my hair irritably. “I don’t suppose they give tours of the dungeon to curious visitors?”

  “Nope,” said Claybriar. “There’s a guard who will turn away anyone but the queen or the other guards. I mean, you could get yourself thrown in there, but they’d lock you in the cage, and you wouldn’t be able to reach the part where the spirit is bound.”

  “The cage? There’s just one?”

  “Mostly they don’t use cells,” said Claybriar. “Prisoners are held by spellwork. But you they’d have to put in the actual cage, since spellwork wouldn’t hold you. They have one down there, a big wooden thing, for those rare cases when—” He broke off suddenly, and I followed his gaze.

  Caryl had gone dead white.

  “Oh shit,” I said. “Caryl, sweetheart, put your head between your knees or something.” I moved to her to ease her into position. “Clay, maybe we shouldn’t talk about . . . wooden cages underneath palaces right now?” I rubbed her back.

  “No . . . ,” Caryl murmured faintly, head still down. “I’m all right. Also . . . if I could get into the prison, with Caveat cloaking me, I might be able to release you.”

  “Without triggering your PTSD?”

  “I will . . . be better prepared at that time.”

  “It’s not an unreasonable idea,” said Clay. “There’s only the one guard down there, and that guard would have a key to the, uh, to your situation.”

  Caryl sat up, some of her color coming back as she engaged with the problem. “The easiest thing might be for you to convince the guard to open your door for some reason, and the moment it is unlocked, Caveat could remove herself from the cloaking spell and paralyze the guard. But . . .” She frowned. “At that point the guardian spirit wouldn’t be freed yet, and it would be able to see me.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Spirits can see each other. Wouldn’t the guardian spirit see Caveat there cloaking you anyway, and alert the guards way before that?”

  “Nah,” said Claybriar. “Remember last fall at Cera? Even the spirit possessing that woman couldn’t tell that Tjuan and Winterglass were there cloaked.”

  “A good cloaking spell cloaks its own spellwork,” said Caryl, “and Caveat should have no trouble with that.”

  “You listening, Caveat?” I said to thin air. “You on board?”

  She popped into view. “Yep,” she said, and then immediately vanished.

  “Okay,” I said. “So, I get out of the cell, I touch the guardian spirit, and only then should Shock start stuffing vials into the bag.”

  “Problem,” said Claybriar. “I know the queen. If you’ve just gotten yourself thrown in prison, she’ll be panicky. Checking in with the spirit constantly, even if it doesn’t alert her. So the second she goes ‘blind,’ she’s going to know something’s up.”

  “Unless we give her something else to worry about,” I said. “Could you pick a fight with her or something? When you’re around, she doesn’t pay attention to anything else.”

  He looked uncomfortable for a moment, then nodded slowly. “Yeah, actually. I could do that. But then how do we get the message to Shock that it’s safe to start stuffing vials into the bag?”

  That one stumped me. We all sat in silence for a moment. Then Caryl spoke up, quietly. “Elliott.”

  I gave her a dubious look. “Isn’t he a little busy keeping Fred from telling Dame Belinda we were at L1?”

  “There are ways we could reduce the risk, if I timed Elliott’s withdrawal just right. And if we had him, he could serve a similar function to the captive guardian, but voluntarily. He could convey images and messages between members of our team, because in Arcadia he can be anywhere he wishes simultaneously.”

  “Why not use Caveat?”

  “She’ll be needed for the other spells, and also, she does not like to be intimate with humans.”

  “You sure he’ll be up for it?”

  “Yes. He wants victory here as badly as any of us, if not more so.”

  I nodded, satisfied. “In that case, we have the beginnings of a solid plan. But I want contingencies covered this time. I want a catchall cover-your-ass exit strategy if things go pear-shaped, and I do have a vague idea about that. Brand said something about standing stones keeping the palace in the air?”

  “Right,” said Claybriar. “An ancient spell that even you couldn’t undo, and don’t take that as a challenge.”

  “I don’t want to undo it,” I said. “I just may want them to think I will. Use it as a gun to hold to their heads to cover our escape if necessary.”

  “They’ll all know you can’t do it,” said Claybriar. “One doesn’t exactly hinge a palace’s integrity on a spell like that unless there’s a rock-solid way of keeping it from coming apart.”

  “Which is?”

  “The spirits inside the two standing stones in the forest are aware; they’re volunteers who have pledged to protect the White Rose for eternity. What keeps them sane, I think, is their relationship to each other. They’re half a mile apart or something, with the White Rose between them, but they’re in constant communication. If one of them were freed, the other would simply recast the spell, rebind its partner.”

  “If I were fast enough,” I said, “could I take out one and then the other?”

  “No. Like I said, they’re half a mile apart. So unless we could get another Ironbones, this isn’t a threat you could believably make.”

  “And if we had another Ironbones,” I said glumly, “I wouldn’t dare make the threat. Too much chance we actually would touch the damn things at the same time by accident. Well, fine. I’ll think of something while we put all the other pieces in place.”

  “Let us not pull Elliott back from London,” said Caryl, “until we have those pieces. I shall confer with Shock on the fastest way to load so many vials into the bag. Perhaps there is a spell that can help.”

  “Claybriar, you plan your distraction,” I said. “I’ll work on how to get us the hell out of there safely.”

  • • •

  As soon as Claybriar returned to Arcadia and Caryl returned to her apartment, I started shaking like a kite in a strong wind. When we’d been talking, it had felt like directing a film again: My job was to project confidence like a visible light, changing the color of everything in the room. But now the reality of it was hitting hard: I had just volunteered to somehow get myself tossed into prison.

  Ironic, given I was doing it to keep my partner out of one. What counted as a prison-worthy crime in Arcadia? I’d have to look into it. Would they give me a choice, like that poor coyote, between execution and rotting in a cell for eternity?

  My head was starting to hurt; a snack would help. I went down to the kitchen, only to find Alondra there stirring some coffee into her mug of cream.

  “Hi,” she said shyly. She looked as though she’d been crying. I was really not in the market for a fresh batch of drama at the moment.

  “Hey,” I said. “Just grabbing a banana.”

  “Can we— Do you have a minute to talk?”

  “I really, really don’t right now. Sorry.”

  Her complexion turned as pallid as the pitiful excuse for coffee in her mug, and her lower lip trembled. I braced myself for hysteria, but she didn’t make a sound. She just left the mug there and walked slowly from the room.

  Well, shit.

  “Alondra,” I called out after her. She was already climbing the stairs and didn’t respond. I went after her, but I was slow going
up, and by the time I got to her door—which had once been my partner Teo’s—I could hear her sobbing.

  For fuck’s sake.

  No, no; I reminded myself that this was no more stupid than my own Borderline freak-outs. I’d cried myself into an incontinent stupor in an alley last summer; who was I to judge? I knew this intellectually; I could feel the exact place inside me where compassion was supposed to bloom, but there were tumbleweeds blowing through it.

  I tried one of my DBT tricks: opposite action to emotion. When I knew I was feeling the wrong thing, I just acted as though I felt its opposite, hoped my actions would get the right feeling going. What would I do if I genuinely wanted her to feel better?

  I knocked on her door. “I’m sorry, Alondra,” I said.

  “It’s fine,” she said from inside. But she didn’t come out.

  Crap. She had BPD too, so a half-assed apology wasn’t going to cut it if she thought I was the bad guy. I’d have to subvert her devaluation of me by doing something genuinely nice. Ugh.

  I didn’t know what she liked, besides opera and show tunes and cake, and I was fresh out of all those. So I just looked around a little while for her still-lost phone. I looked in any kitchen cabinets she might have absentmindedly placed it in, checked behind the toilets, under living room couch cushions, and even, as difficult as it was to get down there, under the couches themselves. With her laundry habit in mind, I checked between the dryer and the wall, and—miracle of miracles—there the goddamned thing was.

  I felt a burst of elation. It was like I could do no wrong today! I grabbed a broom from the kitchen and nudged the thing out where I could reach it.

  When I grabbed it, its screen lit up, and even before I had finished marveling at its battery life, I spotted a missed call from a 212 number.

  212. Wasn’t that Manhattan, where the Project’s New York office was located? Why would they be calling her now?

  Paranoia started to gnaw at me again. Or was it paranoia? She had really seemed upset about losing her phone. Panicky, even. No matter how often Caryl told her she wasn’t fired.

  I poked and swiped at the screen, tried to get in to see more, but the phone was password and fingerprint protected. Of course it was.