by SM Reine
Once they arrived in the Summer Court, Seth was glad for the backup.
Because they showed up in the middle of war.
Seelie and unseelie alike were in a froth. The streets were packed with bodies and the fighting extended to the border of the scorched forest. Worn magic smeared on the buildings like half-healed bruises. The surviving sidhe fought and screamed and bled.
“How are we going to get through here?” Seth asked, scanning the area for an alternative route to Alfheimr. He didn’t see one. There was only a single path through the village to the manor.
“I can clear the road.” Charity was holding a fistful of chains. Hounds strained at the opposite ends, pulling so hard that the collars dug into their throats.
“Make a path, if you can do it without hurting anyone,” Seth said.
Charity let go of the chains.
The Hounds cleared a path through the fighting, all right. They plunged right into the battle and everyone who was fighting either ran or turned to fight the dogs instead. There was nothing like Arawn’s Hounds in the Middle Worlds, with those spindly legs and all those teeth. Nobody knew how to deflect them. Sidhe fell underneath infernal paws.
“Without hurting anyone,” Seth said again, gripping Charity’s arm.
She patted his hand comfortingly. “Watch.”
They followed the Hounds into the village, and Seth kept his senses open for the freshly deceased. He felt nothing. The Hounds kept absorbing people—but only the dead ones. They dodged around the sidhe that attacked them rather than retaliating.
“They’re primarily carrion eaters, best suited to keeping battlefields clear of dead.” Charity whistled to the Hounds. “Come back this way.”
Shockingly, they listened. They wheeled around to come back toward Charity.
“When did you turn into the Hound Whisperer?” Seth asked.
“I’ve been babysitting them while Arawn’s getting on his feet in the undercity,” she said. “Training them has been super easy. It helps that they’re really food-motivated.” And she took a strip of raw meat out of her belt pouch, tossing it to the Hounds.
A half-dozen mouths yawned wide and made that meat disappear.
“Yeah,” Seth said. “Okay.”
So this was supposed to be a good thing.
She greeted them by petting their bloodied muzzles, and when she broke into a run toward Alfheimr, they followed. Seth sped to keep pace. “They almost killed me when I was in Sheol,” he said. “Tried to kill Marion too.”
“Well, yeah, they’ll turn to living people if they’re hungry. But…” Charity sighed. “They aren’t going to run out of dead here.”
Now that Charity and Seth could pass through the street without getting caught in the battle, he could see exactly how many bodies there were. Or rather, he could feel them. There were hundreds of souls torn free of bodies. All of them needed to move on.
The most frightening part was that most had died in the last hour. These deaths had cascaded from the moments shortly following Titania and Oberon’s decapitations. When the seelie villagers realized that Alfheimr was changing—that the King of the Unseelie had taken control—they had surged against their captors.
They might have been willing to follow Konig before that moment.
But the sidhe were fueled by love, for better or for worse. They’d loved their rulers. And the grief that tangoed with such love had carried them to madness.
Now the fighting wouldn’t stop until everyone was dead.
The souls of those who had already passed were waiting. Seth looked up to see them waiting just on this side of time.
He needed to take them to the other side.
“Can you see this, Charity?” he asked, reaching up to touch her elbow.
Seth shared his vision with her.
Charity’s face went slack. “Oh my…gods, what is this?”
Marion perceived a white-sand beach when she was helping him walk someone into death. Charity perceived a bedroom overlooking Duat and the foggy Dead Forest. The bedroom was cozier than Seth remembered anything in Sheol, somehow—like the light was warmer, the temperature was balmy, and everything seemed just a bit brighter.
Charity had liked Sheol.
The souls of the dead filled the room. Most of the sidhe who’d fallen in battle looked confused, though many looked angry, disappointed, grief-stricken. Only some of them had realized they were dead.
Seth was shocked to share this vision with Charity. Marion had no trouble acting as a psychopomp, and he’d attributed that to her being the Voice of God. She was special.
But Charity was a revenant, a nurse, a normal person. And she worked just as well.
Rylie’s imaginary face swam in Seth’s vision. You don’t need Marion.
“It’s time to go,” Seth said. “Charity, open it up for them?”
She opened the bedroom’s door. Beyond, there was light—brilliant, burning white light like the very heart of the Pit. There they would be reborn. They would get new lives. They would lose all their memories of suffering to start over again.
One by one, they walked through.
Charity watched them. She half-smiled the whole time, torn between confusion and awe. Just as she’d liked Sheol, she kinda liked this too. She was a great shepherd for the dead.
They stood in that room for hours, urging the sidhe dead into a line so that they could pass through. Seth felt them sucked into the Pit of Souls one at a time. What happened beyond that fell into the realm of Life, not Death. He had to let them go.
The last of the sidhe paused by Seth. It was one of the Raven Knights. He’d seen her hanging around Marion when he’d been disguised as one of her compatriots.
“It won’t hurt, will it?” she asked.
“I don’t think so.” It would hurt so much worse than anything else she’d experienced in life, at the very least.
She stepped through.
The Pit of Souls flared with energy, and the room was left empty.
Seth came back to reality kneeling in blood in Alfheimr’s village, Charity at his side, and Hounds surrounding them in a ring. They were so close that Seth could feel their breaths blasting on the back of his neck.
The sun was well past its midday peak. They had lost hours to helping the dead move on.
Seth stood with a thought. Charity moved more slowly, stiff from immobility. “What was that?” she asked, blinking confusedly at the sky, the darkening forest. “What just happened?”
“We helped,” Seth said.
There were no signs of the battle that had waged around them. Either the unseelie had cleared everyone out, or there was nobody left to fight.
The path to Alfheimr was clear. It gleamed darkly on the edge of the beach. After a major victory, there should have been music and dancing, but it was utterly silent except for the quiet ocean rumble.
Seth and Charity were flanked by the Hounds on their way through the wrecked town.
Alfheimr’s front doors stood open. And the entryway was empty. Seth’s steps echoed when he entered.
People were screaming elsewhere in the manor.
Seth burst through the dining room, the kitchen, and the rear hallway, exploding into the seelie equivalent of a throne room. It was actually a patio, with three walls open to the beach. The throne stood at the far end. Past the fountains of wine. Past the shriveled vines.
Konig was sitting on the throne, alone.
Screams drifted through the air.
It was so empty.
“What the hell happened here?” Seth asked, easing forward. Charity had taken the Hounds to investigate the fighting on the beach. There was nobody on the patio except Seth and Konig.
Konig turned blank eyes on Seth. He was seated beside an empty throne twin to his. “Here?”
“Yeah, here, the Summer Court,” he said.
Konig pointed to a spot on the patio a few feet away. “Executions.” Gem-colored blood had sunk into the wood. “And then�
�”
Seth’s ash heart plummeted to the bottom of his stomach. “What did you do to her?”
The king stood. He straightened his cropped jacket, scraped his fingers through his hair. “I’ve got the Summer Court now, so whatever happens from here doesn’t really matter. I think I’ll just consider this a courtesy—a service that empties the whole plane of everyone who inconveniences me.”
“What did you do to her?” Seth asked again, panic surging in his chest.
She wasn’t there.
Goddammit all, she wasn’t there.
“Marion ran.” Konig strode smoothly across the patio, uninjured by all indications. Hundreds of sidhe had died, but Konig hadn’t even broken a toe. “My army would have protected her if she’d just stayed here, but she took off toward the beach after that thing showed up.”
“What thing?”
“With the four arms,” Konig said. “It’s going to kill Marion.”
The Godslayer.
Seth bolted for the edge of the patio.
“Leave it alone.” Konig lifted a fist, and the beach rose up in a serpentine pillar of damply glistening sand.
And then he punched.
Seth was slammed into the rear wall of Alfheimr. He was crushed. Flattened. He hadn’t even used his cosmic powers, but the ash heart still ached from the strain.
The sand sprayed around him, formless.
“You’ve got nothing to do here,” Konig said, descending from his throne. He strode toward Seth. “I’ve gotten all the Middle Worlds now, and I don’t need anyone’s help. Not my dad’s, not Marion’s, and not yours!”
He raised his fist again.
This time, Seth bolted out of the way before he could be crushed. Beach exploded around him. People screamed out on the beach as the fight raged on, and Marion might have been somewhere out there, but he couldn’t reach her. He couldn’t help.
If he used his power to escape Konig, it would break the ash heart down, and he might not have the power to save her.
But if he didn’t she might die.
It was a very cold night, after all.
“I’m going to leave right now,” Seth said, “and you’re going to let me.”
“Or else what?” Konig asked.
Another arm of sand slammed into the patio.
Seth did the only thing that he could think to do—the only thing that required insignificant amounts of power, and which wouldn’t make him vanish from the mortal worlds.
He seized Konig like a psychopomp and pulled him toward death.
Seth and Konig shared a vision.
Sludge filled Myrkheimr’s throne room all the way up to Seth’s hips. Even though he knew it was a manifestation of Konig’s inner landscape, Seth still felt like he was going to be sucked under by the current, down into that murky brownness from which nothing could emerge.
That sludge was dripping from the walls. The ceiling. From the large-breasted female statues that posed along either side of the room, supporting the roof atop their heads.
“What have you done?” Konig ripped away from Seth and slipped, splashing into the sludge. He struggled to come up for air. His mouth opened wide, gasping, and something greenish stained his teeth.
“This isn’t me,” Seth said. “This is you.”
The real Konig.
Few souls were left behind from the battlefield. They milled around the edges of the room, as pensively quiet as the dead always were. They’d lost their lives after seeing their home turned to a battlefield. Being dropped into the middle of a foul throne room couldn’t make it worse.
What made it worse was the one extra soul clinging to Konig.
It wasn’t as fresh as the others. It was much brighter, more powerful, and yet totally indistinct, without form or facial features. This soul should have already passed on. But it was still glued to Konig with unfinished business.
“What did you do?” Seth asked, lifting Konig higher, shaking him hard. “If that was Marion, I swear I’ll—”
“Dad,” Konig rasped.
Seth dropped him. Now he could see more features in the glistening soul—which was not like Marion, with her narrow shoulders and sad eyes, but like the former king of the Autumn Court. Konig had killed his own father.
Seth trudged toward the throne. “When? How?” he asked.
Rage didn’t have to answer, because Seth could experience the moment of death as he always did.
He witnessed the way that Konig accidentally struck his father with magic. He saw the long hours that Konig had grieved compressed into the span of an instant. And he saw Konig kicking Rage’s body into the water, dismissing his corpse with no respect.
No wonder the soul was still clinging to Konig, threatening to drown him. This wasn’t how the dead were meant to pass.
“Dad,” Konig cried again, more desperately this time. He tried to swim toward the throne. The harder his arms pumped, the slower he went. “Dad!”
Rage didn’t move. His eyes remained open, unresponsive.
“Dad!”
Seth took no pleasure from the horror in Konig’s voice.
“Sit in this lake of shit you’ve made, King ErlKonig,” Seth said. “Know what you did and suffer in it.” He gripped the back of Konig’s head and shoved him under the sludge. He thrashed and fought and drowned, and it was the least he deserved.
Seth snapped out of the vision, leaving Konig behind.
That moment still existed within Konig’s mind, right on the boundary between life and death. Konig was theoretically safe within that vision. His soul was still firmly attached to his physical form. Unlike his father, he wasn’t dead.
But Konig was mentally stuck.
His body slumped on the throne, eyes glassy, staring into nothingness without blinking. His chest rose and fell rapidly. He was hyperventilating.
“I found her!” Charity shouted, slipping up the beach, feet sinking into the sand. The Hounds had an easier time of it. They seemed to run atop the surface. “She’s in the Wilds!”
Marion’s alive.
“Stay right there,” Seth told the king.
Of course, Konig said nothing. He stared at Alfheimr with glassy eyes.
Seth swirled over Charity to seize her, and then swept into the Wilds. Moving that quickly made his ash heart ache. But it was worth it. Traveling quickly meant that Seth and Charity descended in time to see Marion was still alive.
For the moment.
But Marion was standing at the edge of a ley line, face-to-face with the Godslayer, and swords were poised on either side of her neck.
18
Compared to the likes of Seth and Marion, Charity didn’t know much about the big ugly world of preternatural politics. But she used to be a member of a sorority. She knew what a powder keg looked like, and she could tell when things were about to result in devastation.
Marion was facing off with the Godslayer in conflicted territory.
That was easily as much a powder keg as a sophomore stealing a senior’s eyeshadow.
Charity skidded to a halt a few meters away from Marion. She managed to grab the Hounds’ chains at the last minute, before they could rush in and break the tension. The Godslayer had a blade on either side of Marion’s neck. Breaking tension was likely to break blood vessels, too.
She could only control herself. There were sidhe battling in the forest with flashes of magic, explosions that shook the trees, screams of pain. She still had a foot on the death side of things—like that room in Sheol was waiting behind just where she couldn’t see it—and she could feel souls moving from life into that room as they were killed in battle.
If that fighting got too close to the Godslayer. She might be surprised. She might twitch.
Marion might lose her head.
Seth stopped at Charity’s side, his hand a reassuring weight on her elbow. “I’ll take care of this,” he muttered. “Get the sidhe out of the area.”
Charity gawked at him. “Which sidhe?”
>
“Anyone we don’t want to die,” Seth said.
“But…how?”
“Same way you emptied the village.”
Charity had forgotten she was even holding the Hounds. She yanked them back again, and their claws dug trenches into the soil. “All right. Are you going to be okay?”
“I’m fine.” He was growing as he said it, losing the vestiges of his human form. If he weren’t careful, he’d lose all the ash and have no human form left to return to when he was done.
“Be careful, Seth,” she said.
And then she plunged into the fray in the forest.
It was hard to separate seelie from unseelie. She wasn’t actually sure that there were different factions. The magic swirled together in an indistinguishable silver mess, and there was a lot of shouting, pushing, yelling from every direction.
Charity thought most people were just trying to escape the Summer Court before Konig killed them. There might have been unseelie defectors among them, but they mostly looked like frightened seelie who’d been under siege for weeks.
Yeah, she didn’t want any of them to die.
Charity released the Hounds, whistling to urge them forward. They bolted straight toward the Veil. A dozen seelie exploded from the bushes, screaming as they fled from the demon dogs.
She plunged after them, running blindly through the trees, hands protecting her face from the branches. She was slapped in the face by cold metal. Even now, the Wild was transforming to steel with Konig’s anger. It sliced at her.
Charity had to drop her hands when she started bumping into people. She’d caught up with the back end of the chaos. All the magic meant she could barely piece together the stimulus assailing her senses. Were they fighting? Running? She had no idea.
“You guys have to get as far from the beach as possible!” she shouted, head throbbing from the warping world. “You have to run!”
She had no idea if anyone even listened.
Her foot caught on a bush. She stumbled and smacked into a wall of ice. She bounced off.