Impostor Syndrome

by Mishell Baker

  Radical acceptance: I could not stop myself from being captured. I would go to an Arcadian prison. They might execute me; they might not. But the world would go on either way. It could either go Belinda’s way, or it could go my way. My way mattered. My way mattered more than me, more than anything.

  More than this priceless artifact.

  I couldn’t get the vials to L.A.—in fact it was possible I myself would never see L.A. again—but I could keep them from Belinda.

  With what I hope was a very dramatic sweep of my arm, I hurled the Vessel into the void.

  The guards all cried out at once, and their outrage overcame their fear. They charged toward me, void be damned, and I let them come, raising my hands in a gesture of surrender.

  All at once, everything was all right.

  It happened very suddenly. All my problems vanished. I couldn’t even really remember where I’d come up with the whole idea of “problems” to begin with. Life was a beautiful song.

  So beautiful.

  The guards all seemed to agree. They stopped and stood there, enjoying the song with me. We all understood now that there was nothing to fight, never had been. Nothing much to do at all but relax and listen to the perfect, nihilistic sound of our own utter surrender.

  There was a lot of wind then, which was fine. There were huge talons wrapping around both of my arms, which was also fine. The song continued, so that meant that everything was fine, even the ground falling away, way down below me, moving away, my feet dangling over it. Maybe especially that. I was flying! What could possibly be wrong with that?

  41

  When the music stopped, I found myself sprawled on the sand behind a wall of rock, staring at Shiverlash and Caveat.

  It took a moment for the fog of the siren song to dissipate, for the sluggish processes of my cognition to work themselves back up to normal speed. Shiverlash just sat waiting, watching me.

  “Am I losing my mind,” I said to Caveat, “or did the Beast Queen just rescue me?”

  “I told her you were in trouble,” said Caveat. “I asked for her help. But she sure sat there watching for an awfully long time before she pitched in.”

  “I’m not saying I’m not grateful,” I said to Shiverlash, assuming Caveat would translate for me. “But it would have been awesome if you could have performed your heroic rescue before I lost the Vessel.”

  The queen’s cool voice washed over me from the general direction of her unmoving face. “Have you not noticed, human, the great pains I have taken to avoid revealing myself to the Seelie?” she said. “I am stranded behind enemy lines, and I do not yet have the gathered strength to defend myself against a unified counterattack. So long as there was any hope of your escaping on your own, there was no reason for me to expose myself.”

  “But now you have,” I said. “And those guards are going to start looking for both of us any minute. So why don’t you give me a lift back to the Gate, and we can both have a nice cup of tea at Residence Four, safe from Seelie justice.”

  “I do not trust your ‘Project’ not to hand us both back over to the sidhe. From what I can see, the interests of the sidhe and the interests of the ‘Project’ are one and the same.”

  I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. I wanted to argue, but aside from Alvin and his allies, she was right. And I wasn’t sure how much longer Alvin was going to be able to protect me. We still had absolutely nothing to entice the other nations to hear us out. No fey court, no Medial Vessel, no blood samples.

  “You have another problem,” said Shiverlash.

  “Yes,” I said irritably, “I have a shitload of them. I’m sure you don’t mean my court date, or the fact that I really need to piss, but that only leaves about a hundred others. How the fuck do you even keep track of my problems, anyway? How is it you keep scheming and counter-scheming? You’re supposed to be a wild fey; you should be forgetting I even exist by the end of the week. Do you have an Echo I don’t know about?”

  “Does Winterglass?”

  I stared at her. “Are you saying you had your own little baby human in a cage at some point?”

  “Nothing so crude and desperate. But where do you think your Queen Belinda acquired the idea? She was well familiar with my legend, and one of the few truths that survived was that certain humans sacrificed their unwanted offspring to me. I was exposed to infant blood in great quantity and diversity.”

  “Wow,” I said. “You know, I really love our little chats, but I think I’ll take my chances going home.”

  “There is the problem you have still not addressed.”

  “Which is?”

  “That bag you carried. You said it was what Winterglass required of you, in order for him to ally with you.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “That’s fucked now—I get it.”

  “But there was a personal favor, as well, that you required of him. Was there not? Something you dared not ask of me?”

  Oh shit.

  That was the one thing I’d not thought through sufficiently at the edge of the abyss. Without Dostoevsky’s blood, Winterglass had no reason to do me even the one small favor of ordering Qualm to go to jail in Tjuan’s facade. Even his loyalty to Caryl only seemed to extend to keeping her safe; he’d refused her any number of lesser favors already. Which meant that by tossing away those vials, I’d cut off Belinda’s nose, but sliced up my partner’s face pretty good in the process.

  “Perhaps I can be of use in this matter, after all?” Shiverlash said.

  She wasn’t offering to be nice, I knew damned well. She was still trying to find some way to put me in her debt. I could take the deal—assuming she’d even agree to it—and then just not hold up my end, but this weird fantasy Shiverlash had of us being allies in the revolution was the only thing that had kept her from tearing me limb from limb by now. If I went back on a promise to her, even that thin thread would snap.

  “I’m afraid to tell you what I need,” I admitted. “Either you’ll use it to bind me to you, or you’ll refuse and use that knowledge to screw me in some all new way.”

  “We all take risks,” said Shiverlash. “I just took a tremendous risk in revealing my presence here to the Seelie Court.”

  “Passive-aggressive really isn’t your color,” I said. “But fine. I’d need you to imprison a spirit.”

  Shiverlash tipped her head. “I can see why you assumed I would refuse. I will at least let you explain further. Why must I be the one to cast this spell?”

  “It isn’t a spell. It would be an actual prison that you would order this spirit to go to. It’s the wraith, Qualm, who murdered an Arcadia Project employee last fall. You’d order him into the facade you used to destroy the Rose, order him to stay there for, oh, let’s say, twenty years. You’d order him to retrieve the weapon he used to commit the crime, then order him to walk into a police station in Los Angeles. They’d take care of the rest.”

  “This spirit you speak of was serving Countess Feverwax, and Countess Feverwax was attempting to do my will. Why should I punish my own ally?”

  “Because the woman he killed was innocent. She wasn’t even a spell caster; she’d never harmed a spirit in her life. In my world, if you kill an innocent woman, you go to jail. Qualm was in my world when he committed that crime, and when he shot another innocent human a few weeks back. Honor demands that he be punished for those crimes.”

  Shiverlash seemed to think this over. “If you can give me what I need, then I will give you what you desire.”

  “So what is it you want of me in return? I’m guessing not a pedicure.”

  “Instead of facing this trial by the Seelie High Court, you will return with me to my lands and assist me in freeing the spirits there.”

  “That will put me directly at war with Winterglass.”

  “In the end, as I think you have always known, you will be at war either with Winterglass, or with me. You have lost all chance of using the usurper for your own purposes. And he will be far ea
sier to vanquish, as conflicted and weak as he is.”

  “I don’t choose my enemies based on who’s easiest to kill. And I haven’t heard great stories about your homeland.”

  “You will be under my protection. No one there would dare harm you. I will see to it that you are treated with respect and that you have all you desire.”

  “How long would I have to stay?”

  “Until the war is won. Until all the spirits are freed.”

  “Just in Unseelie lands? Or are you going to keep running around kicking Seelie sand castles too?”

  “Destruction of the White Rose was not about freeing spirits,” said Shiverlash, “but about destroying their slave masters, the sidhe. In truth the Seelie spirits are not my subjects, and so I will leave them enslaved at the Seelie estates if it secures your agreement. You should be ashamed, however, for bargaining their freedom away.”

  I cradled my head in my hands, leaning my elbows on my knees. “I hate the way you twist my mind all around. I can’t tell which end is up after talking to you for five minutes.”

  “Yes, complexity can be bothersome.”

  I ran over and over it in my head, trying to think of another way. I couldn’t ask one of our friendly spirits to walk the facade to jail. They couldn’t just bail afterward, because then the empty facade would shatter the Code of Silence and open up an investigation into the arcane at a moment when the Arcadia Project was already on the verge of imploding. And even if we decided that didn’t matter at all, to let the Code of Silence crash and burn, the spirit would still have to stay inside the facade until “John Doe” was officially convicted; otherwise they could still come after Tjuan. And conviction could take forever; we’d be punishing a spirit simply for being useful, which is exactly the kind of thing we were supposed to not be doing anymore.

  Furthermore, unless we used Elliott, whose status as our ally was iffy at this point, we’d have to get Shock to cast another of those dangerous linking spells, and I’d literally just told him he was done helping us. Once he found out what had happened to the bag he had risked his life for, I wasn’t sure I could count on him, either. The likelihood of striking another deal with Winterglass himself at this point was nil. In fact, the chance of his murdering me the next time he saw me was higher than the chance of his ever trusting me with something that mattered to him again.

  Here I had someone offering, someone willing. And all she wanted was for me to help her do what I kept saying I wanted to do anyway. I kept saying I wanted to free the spirits, as long as it wasn’t too inconvenient for me. Well, fuck that.

  “I can’t think of another way to get Tjuan out of there,” I admitted. “Can you, Caveat?”

  Caveat didn’t choose to project any particular emotion, but something about the quality of her hesitation suggested that the question had surprised, even startled her. “I should stay out of this,” she said. “I can’t really do two parts of a conversation.”

  I sighed. “If this were just up to me, I’d take the deal and run. A life sentence in Unseelie hell is probably better than I deserve at this point. And who knows, maybe the place would suit me. The thing is, though, I can’t just do this unilaterally. I’m making a decision for my partner, too, about the fate of the guy who put him in there, about the way he gets freed.”

  Shiverlash rustled her wings impatiently. “If you wish to confer with your ‘partner,’ I suggest you do it quickly. No doubt Dawnrowan’s lackeys search for us even as we speak.”

  “I can’t just ‘confer’ with Tjuan,” I said. “He’s in jail, on Earth. And I’m awaiting a trial date there myself—yes, a completely separate trial in another world; I’m a well-traveled criminal.”

  “You have guards looking for you on Earth as well?” said Shiverlash. I couldn’t tell if she was appalled or impressed.

  “Well, I’m out on bail. But if I walk back in there—which I am not at all keen on doing—and ask to talk to Tjuan, everyone and their cousin is going to be listening in. I can’t be talking to him about Unseelie queens and spirits. Getting off on insanity sounds great in the movies, but I’ve been in a psych hospital, and no thanks.”

  “Well, then,” said Shiverlash. “It sounds as though you must make this decision yourself.”

  “No,” I said firmly. “No. This is his life. I’ll have to . . . I don’t know. Maybe I could get Alvin to go in my place. Maybe they could come up with some kind of code . . . I need to think.”

  Caveat spoke up then, quietly. “I have a thought.”

  I looked at her with interest. “You know him better than anyone,” I said. “Do you think he’d go for this?”

  “I don’t,” she said. “But . . . you don’t have to take my word for it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I possessed him before,” she said bluntly. “I can go back to him anytime I want.”

  During the ensuing silence, a whisper of a breeze made its way around the rock wall that sheltered us. I heard a sound that made me think of wings stirring air, and I remembered the guards that were looking for us. My stomach knotted, and I glanced up. Seeing nothing untoward, I turned my attention back to Caveat.

  “I know you could go to him,” I said, “but I can’t ask you to do that. That would be . . . traumatic for both of you.”

  “I think at this point,” Caveat said, “it would be like bombing rubble. You said I should come clean with him. Maybe this is fate telling me now’s the time.”

  “And you’ll tell him what Shiverlash proposed to me? See how he feels? How will you get back to us?”

  “The queen knows my name.”

  “Right. So she can call you back. After how long?”

  “I’m not restrained by distance,” said Caveat, “so just as long as it would take to introduce myself and explain. Then I can go back and forth, and you can converse with him, in a sense.”

  “Caveat . . . are you sure?”

  But she was already gone.

  42

  Just about the time I was wondering if I should ask Shiverlash to hypnotize me again to spare me the misery of several minutes alone in her nonverbal company, the manticore landed heavily on the sand between us.

  “I knew it,” I said, still sitting on the sand with my legs asprawl. “I knew I heard wings earlier. Glad it was you and not the guards.”

  “Oh, I saw a couple of them snooping around,” he said. “But I cast a cloaking ward around this spot and they fluttered right on past. When I saw Caveat vanish, I was a little worried about you being alone with Birdbrain.”

  “Brand,” I said. “Did you ask the spirit to cast a cloaking spell, or did you enslave it?”

  “Hey. You wanted me to find more permanent homes for the wraiths in the book, right? Well, now one of them is making a nice little hidey hole for fugitives in Skyhollow.”

  “But isn’t cloaking an Unseelie spell, anyway?”

  “I haven’t instantly forgotten everything I knew how to do,” Brand said. “It feels different now, though. Weird. Like I swallowed a human or something.”

  “Awesome analogy. By the way, is it just the way the light looks here when the sun’s about to go down, or are you a little more . . . uh . . .”

  Brand bristled. “A little more what?” he said in an ominous tone.

  “Uh, nothing,” I said. “Definitely wasn’t going to say ‘pink.’ ”

  “Not allowed to shed human blood in Arcadia, so I’d have to swallow you whole, and we’ve talked about how much that would hurt. So what have you been talking about with Birdbrain? Couldn’t hear from where I was perched.”

  “We’re trying to come to some kind of agreement, to get Tjuan out of jail.” I glanced at her. If she could tell we were discussing her, it didn’t show in her body language or in her awful scarecrow face. “I may end up going back with her to Unseelie lands and trying to free the spirits.”

  “I like that idea,” said Brand. “Mostly because you’d be miserable, but also because then maybe it’d be saf
e for Birdbrain to take me back, and I could shed these fucking feathers. Should I go ahead and swear fealty to her now, you think? While I’m here?”

  “That would be spectacularly stupid,” I said. “Wait until the deal is done, at least.”

  “Where did that little spirit of yours fuck off to? Carrot or Cadillac or whatever.”

  “She’ll be back in a minute. She’s going to talk with Tjuan about our potential agreement, and then Shiverlash is going to call her back. I wonder if I’ve given them enough time yet. I don’t want to interrupt, but what if they’re both just sitting there in awkward silence?”

  Brand settled onto his haunches, wrapping his spined scorpion tail around himself like a contented cat and tucking his wings against his back. “So I’ve saved your life like eight times now. Do I get a Project contract yet?”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, I seem to be having trouble getting to our files.”

  “Well, I can’t wait to tell Naderi everything. This has been kind of fun. Haven’t worked with anyone since Vivian, and that wasn’t exactly a picnic.”

  “Glad to hear I’m a better boss than a vampiric supervillain.”

  I glanced at Shiverlash and found her blank face turned steadily toward Brand in a way that gave me the screaming creeps.

  “Hey,” I said to her. “Go ahead and call Caveat.” I pointed vaguely in the direction Caveat had last appeared, since the siren probably couldn’t understand me.

  Shiverlash inclined her head slightly and then whispered a chilling four syllables that I could only assume was Caveat’s name.

  When Tjuan appeared, I nearly fell over.

  It wasn’t him, of course. Caveat was just copying the image of him she’d seen. He was sitting on the edge of a cot, a gray wall behind him, a gray expression on his face as he stared in my approximate vicinity. The edges of the wall blurred out as they met reality, making a bleak halo around his image.

  “So Caveat’s the one who fucked up my brain,” he said without preamble. I searched his face for any sign of emotion, though I should have known better. To all appearances he was reacting to this revelation as though we’d just told him the soup of the day. “She won’t tell me what you want, though,” he went on. “Said you needed to explain it yourself.”