Odette tugged at her messy bun. “Quick question: what if the Morrígan hears this magic shout but takes one look at us and decides we’re not worth her time?”
“Then we move on to option two,” I answered. “We scry her.”
“You think a scrying spell can penetrate all the magic in this place?” Indira slowly spun in a complete circle, her nose scrunching at the myriad magic signatures that wafted through the air. There were so many lingering auras layered on top of one another that you couldn’t even discern the individual colors.
They had melded into a faint whitish haze, visible in your peripheral vision even when you tried your hardest to block out your magic sense.
“I believe we can overpower all the residual noise,” Graham said, emphasizing the “we” so that no one would mistakenly believe she was including us mortals. “But it will be a tricky maneuver, and one likely to rankle more than a few feathers, and claws, and fangs. The creatures of the old forests live here because they value their privacy, so they will take much more offense to a scrying spell trying to sniff out one of their own than to a loud shout waking them from a nap.”
“Here’s to hoping that yelling at her does the trick,” Drake muttered.
“Quite so.” Orlagh raised her hand to the hilt of her sword. “I would much prefer to avoid another battle with beings whose natures I am unfamiliar with. Such battles rarely end in our favor, in my experience.”
“The natures of most of the creatures in the forest are simple enough to understand,” McDermott said, “and for those whose souls are more opaque, there’s a universally helpful piece of guidance
for dealing with them: Do not confront them. And if they confront you, run away as fast as you can.”
“Wow,” Odette drawled, “the sídhe actually run away?”
McDermott scowled at her. “When it is prudent to do so, yes. We may be slightly more prone to resolving our problems with physical violence than the people of Earth, but suicide is a far less popular pastime among the sídhe.”
Odette, annoyed by the morbid jab, flipped him off.
Defusing the tension, Indira said, “Okay, so, anything else we need to do before we try this big shout?”
In response to that question, all the sídhe drew their swords.
“Now we are ready,” Graham replied, smiling facetiously.
“Who will perform the shout?” Kavanagh asked McDermott.
McDermott peered down at me. “The one who’s been charged to deliver the queens’ offer would be the most appropriate choice.
Do you possess enough power to perform the spell on your own, Vincent Whelan, or do you require supplemental energy?”
I would’ve accepted the help of the sídhe, as I was still worn out from the collective beatings I’d taken over the past day and a half, and my stitched-up iron wound was throbbing like a bitch.
But the snide way McDermott asked the question, looking down his long nose at the little half-sídhe who’d garnered so much more of Mab’s attention than most full-bloods ever would, stoked my pride and prompted me to decline.
“Nah, I got it,” I replied while frantically digging up a spell that would appropriately amplify my voice from a very dusty shelf in my brain.
The only spell I knew wasn’t designed for a range so wide, but I didn’t have time to rewrite it. I would just have to go for it and hope I didn’t embarrass myself.
I did a silent run of the spell to re-familiarize myself with the words, then I sucked in a deep breath and began the invocation aloud. I imbued it with a generous helping of energy, digging deep past my natural magic store, into the life force side of my soul, and further still, to that strange funnel at the base of my soul that connected me to some source of power I hadn’t yet identified.
That tertiary source of energy had helped me keep fighting during the extended struggle with Abarta and Vianu over the summoning of the Hunt. I prayed it would now help me ruin their well-laid plans before the Hunt ruined my world.
When the last few words of the invocation struck the air, I felt the eyes of the soldiers bore into the back of my neck. They had sensed my abnormally large power draw, riding the upper edge of what the strongest half-sídhe could produce. Now they were probing my soul, trying to discern how much more energy I possessed.
All but Orlagh and Boyle, who’d already noticed I had more tricks up my sleeve than the typical half-sídhe. They had set aside the allure of the mystery in favor of focusing on the tasks at hand.
Not that they would let it go.
When we finally had a break in the action, they would bombard me with questions.
The sídhe could be nosy bastards when they were interested in something.
On my sharp exhale, the spell rippled outward in all directions.
Far and wide it went, over hills and troughs, around trees and bushes, covering hundreds upon hundreds of acres with a paper-thin blanket of my cold Unseelie energy.
The strain of the casting was immense. The shell of my soul tore in several places, the spider-web cracks from the Interloper’s attack reopening. My soul didn’t lose any critical integrity, but I felt as if I might unravel at any moment.
My magic went on and on, soaring across the expanse of the forest for what seemed like hours, my sense of time distorted by the forest’s own distortions of space. I sensed my energy jump great distances between one patch of forest and the next. Yet I also sensed it move with uninterrupted continuity through a seemingly endless expanse of trees.
The dissonance from the conflicting sensations made me dizzy and nauseous, and I almost keeled over and heaved up the hot bile rising in my throat.
Only my pride held me steady until the spell finally, finally hit the edges of the old forests. The spell set and didn’t immediately fail, but I wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. So I only took two seconds to catch my breath, and then I started speaking. “My name is Vincent Whelan, scion of the Unseelie Court, and I seek to present the Morrígan, Queen of Phantoms, with an offer of alliance from Her Majesty, Queen Mab, and her royal counterpart in the Seelie Court.”
My voice wasn’t loud, wasn’t actually a shout, but it carried across the forest all the same. It bounced off the tree trunks and dipped into the gullies. It climbed up the branches and dug into the burrows. It rattled the leaves of the thick canopy and unsettled the rich earth beneath. It wove through the air and
caught the ears of a million creatures hiding just beyond our sight.
As the proclamation faded into what seemed like a thousand echoes sounding off at once, my spell faded with it, and a wave of intense vertigo almost sent me to my knees. I stayed upright only because I grabbed the saddle of Orlagh’s horse as I started to pitch forward. The maneuver earned me a raised eyebrow from Orlagh, wordlessly asking if I was okay, and an irritated snort from the horse, who didn’t appreciate the added weight.
McDermott, Kavanagh, and Graham noticed my moment of weakness, their gazes still pinned to the back of my neck. But they chose not to comment on it. Though they would never admit it, they were impressed a half-sídhe had managed to successfully cast a spell of such magnitude.
Impressed, and perhaps unnerved. All three had grown more tense since I last looked their way. I took that to mean they didn’t know what to think of me anymore.
After the darkness of the forest swallowed the last echoes of my message, an uneasy silence fell. Not across our group, but across the entire forest. The bird calls had abruptly stopped. The footsteps had come to a halt.
Nothing walked. Nothing talked. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.
Everything had heard what I had to say, and now everything waited to see if the Morrígan would reply.
We all stood at the crossroads, unmoving, unspeaking, for almost five whole minutes.
Naturally, it was Odette’s patience that ran out first. “Doesn’t seem like she’s coming,” she said. “Should we try option two?”
Not one whole second after
she said that, an ear-splitting screech blasted through the trees to our right. We all slapped our hands over our ears, grimacing from the pain, and spun to discover what manner of creature had decided to attack us.
Only to realize in abject horror that the sound wasn’t the furious bellow of a living creature at all. It was the screech of a rapidly approaching tornado.
A brutal wind struck us before anyone could react, ripping us off our feet and slinging us through the air, horses and all. The last thing I remembered before the lights went out as my head smacked the thick branch of a tree was the barely discernible silhouette of a woman floating stationary in the center of the raging winds.
Part II
Burns Brightest
Chapter Eight
Six and a Half Hours Till Dusk
I woke to the sound of running water.
My body lay tangled in a web of thick thorny vines that had crawled their way up the trunk of an enormous tree. Suspended beneath a branch over fifty feet from the ground, I got a bird’s-eye view of my immediate surroundings. Brownish-green forest floor stretched as far as I could see, the subdued colors broken only by clusters of dense, leafy bushes with half-bloomed flowers and a small, clear stream.
There was no hint of a beaten path stamped through this area, and the gloom cast down by the heavy canopy formed a near and dark horizon past which my half-sídhe sight could not penetrate. I had absolutely no idea where I was in reference to the crossroads, and no clue how I was going to regroup with the rest of my allies.
We were probably all separated, I thought as I carefully shifted around in the net of vines to avoid the bite of thorns. That attack didn’t come from some random creature irate at being woken from a nap. That was the Morrígan herself.
I would have considered the tornado response to be an emphatic
“fuck off,” if I didn’t believe the Morrígan would have outright killed me if she hadn’t been interested in discussing the queens’
offer. Instead, I thought splitting up the group might have been the precursor to some kind of test.
Ancient beings of power were all about tests and challenges, I knew from my extensive study of Tír na nÓg’s history. They didn’t like to capitulate to the requests of those they saw as inferior, so they set up elaborate obstacles for people who dared to impose such things upon them.
If a person overcame a challenge, thus proving their mettle, the powerful being in question would use the achievement as proof that the person was at least worthy enough to be heard.
Rubbing the back of my aching, blood-crusted head—that was at least my third concussion this week—I extricated myself from the thorny vines and clambered up onto the branch. Perched firmly on a bed of soft moss, I examined myself for new injuries.
The stitches that the healer at Fort Drochrath had used on my iron wound had held, barely. But both the entry and exit holes were sore, as my torso had twisted this way and that as I flew through the forest inside a tornado.
Fresh bruises were forming across my back, arms, and legs. A few of my fingers were dislocated—I snapped them back into place,
hissing through my teeth at the sharp ache—and at least three of my ribs were cracked. Again. Two of my teeth also felt loose, and the taste of blood coated my tongue and throat.
All in all though, I was less injured than I would’ve been if the tornado had been a natural phenomenon. The Morrígan had spared me from critical injuries. She wanted me rattled and hurting, wanted me to know she could squish me like a bug anytime she pleased, before I pressed on with my attempt to meet with her.
I reexamined the general area, searching for any clues as to what I was supposed to do to please her. But nothing presented itself.
This area of the forest was oddly quiet and completely devoid of wildlife.
I’m not going to get anything done by sitting here, I reminded myself, checking the cracked screen of my phone. There’s not much time left on the clock.
Pushing off the edge of the branch, I dropped to the ground, cushioning my landing with an air spell. From the base of the tree, I followed the stream to what I thought was west, based on the direction that the weak beams of sunlight were cutting through the canopy. With every step I took, I searched up and down and all around for details that looked out of place, things that might have been manipulated in dangerous ways.
But the trees looked like regular trees, no tripwires or magic nets suspended from their branches. The ground was unbroken, no spike-filled pits partially hidden beneath loose leaves. The air tasted and smelled fresh, with that hint of organic decay present in all forests, and I didn’t develop any symptoms that suggested an airborne toxin was present.
Beneath the blanket of residual magic that covered the whole of the forest, I also failed to sense any new wards waiting to be tripped. There were a few old ones here and there, their power mostly sapped by time, and all but a few were easy to evade, the rest easy to dispel.
Either this section of the forest saw little traffic, or the Morrígan had cleared it of anything that might interfere with her test.
For twenty minutes, I followed the zigzagging stream. Around trees wider than office buildings. Down shallow hills speckled with blue flowers and mossy stones. Until the water dipped out of sight beneath a pile of rotten logs that had intentionally been set across the length of the stream.
At first, I thought the structure was some kind of dam. But a peek around the side revealed that the stream slipped underneath the logs and continued unimpeded. I stared at the arrangement for a minute, trying to work out what it could be, before I shrugged—
it might have been the work of any one of thousands of woodland creatures—and made to walk on past it.
Just as I stepped around the edge of the structure, a small furry head poked out of a hole in one of the logs. I froze as the creature’s beady black eyes looked me up and down. It wasn’t afraid of me, but it didn’t seem happy to see me either. And no wonder why. I had trespassed onto its property.
The creature was a fear dearg.
Just south of one foot tall, with pudgy bellies, flexible spines, and several brown furry accouterments that resembled the features of common rats, fear dearg were simple creatures that lived in damp wooded areas or city sewer systems. They weren’t exactly intelligent, but they were a little more sentient than most Earth animals. They built and used tools, had their own basic language, and formed organized community structures with leaders and social hierarchies.
Fear dearg were sometimes hired to perform simple but tedious tasks in urban environments—like cleaning chimneys and other cramped places—in exchange for food. In the wild, they tended to live in colonies around rivers, streams, or swamps, and spent their days foraging for food instead.
They possessed no significant magic energy, and the worst they could inflict on the average fae was a flurry of minor cuts with their tiny claws and stubby teeth. But the fear dearg did possess one ability that had historically given them a bad rap: for reasons unknown, they had a tendency to psychically project images of themselves into nightmares.
A half-dozen more furry heads popped up from the nest of rotten logs, and my sore gut tied itself into a knot.
This isn’t real. This is a dream.
I scrutinized my surroundings yet again, now uncomfortably aware that they were nothing but a façade. I had no concept of where my body actually was in the forest, no idea whether I was in a relatively safe place…or if I was lying amid a horde of ravenous predators that were currently duking it out to decide who got to take a bite out of me first.
I also didn’t know if I’d been physically moving during my walk through the dream forest, or if I’d been sitting still.
Sleepwalking was not on my list of skills, as far as I was aware.
But if this was some sort of spell-induced dreaming experience, then it might very well have pushed my sleeping body beyond its routine behaviors.
This was the test. It had to be.<
br />
The Morrígan had deliberately knocked me out by bashing my head against a tree and then spelled me into a lucid dream. But the threat to my life wasn’t going to be in the dream; the worst you could do to someone in a dream world was psychologically torture them.
That would serve no purpose to the Morrígan unless I had valuable information I wasn’t willing to share. Which I didn’t. Rather, the threat to my life would be in the waking world, something I currently couldn’t perceive at all.
I could be standing an inch from the edge of a cliff right now and not even know it.
“Shit,” I spit, startling the projections of the fear dearg back into their dream logs. “I have to wake myself up before something the size of a truck eats me for dinner.”
But how?
Pinching myself wasn’t going to counter the magic of a godlike being, and I wasn’t well versed in mind magic, so I couldn’t construct a workable counterspell.
Hell, I couldn’t even sense the magic that had enveloped my brain, much less analyze and deconstruct it. The spellwork was too perfect. It had completely overridden my sensory perception.
How do I break out of a spell if I can’t attack its construction?
I wondered. Generally, the only alternative is to push one of its parameters past its limit. But what are the parameters of a spell that induces a lucid dream state in the target?
I thought hard on that question for several minutes, and came to the conclusion that if the spell was meant to thoroughly simulate reality, I needed to do something that violated the boundaries of the simulation. Something that wouldn’t be possible if I was awake. If the spell wasn’t robust enough to compensate for such a violation, then it would destabilize.
The first step to achieving that outcome was to figure out what sort of violation to attempt.
That wasn’t as easy as it sounded. A projection of a forest landscape was relatively simple to produce and manipulate.
I wouldn’t be able to walk to the edge; it could go on forever. I wouldn’t be able to burn it down; a sudden rainstorm could drown any fire. I wouldn’t be able to fly over it or dig a tunnel underneath it; something could knock me out of the sky, and a deposit of metal or stone could block my way down.
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