All That Burns

by Ryan Graudin

  “Again I endured. I knew my prison wouldn’t last forever. Nothing does, after all. I kept myself alive with runecraft and rage. I knew that once I found a way out, I would have my vengeance on the Fae. I’d get my kingdom back.”

  I think of the cell—its furious runes. Years of agony and revenge chiseled into the very walls of the earth. That same feeling—that same black sick which roiled through the bars, haunted my dreams—stands here in the garden. Morgaine’s voice still gleams as bright as a collector’s prized coin and her face remains a strange beauty.

  But the inside of her . . . her aura. It’s every hurt, every long stretching second of the Labyrinth’s dark, every drop of Arthur’s blood, every needle which ever marked her skin. If Anabelle was all whirlwind and blizzard, then this . . . It’s all blackness. A powerful, soulless void. Swirling and pulling and tugging and wanting to consume. Like those forces in the far reaches of the heavens which have the power to eat the stars whole.

  Morgaine keeps speaking, all calm. “It didn’t take long to persuade the Ad-hene to my side. Not after the Faery queen tricked them in their most desperate moment: turning their home into a prison, binding them into her service. They wanted freedom and vengeance on the Fae as badly as I; they were only too eager to help. But they couldn’t undo the wards Mab placed on my cell.

  “But then Mab was unmade and her wards vanished. I found I could bend my bars. The Ad-hene guided me back into the light and I found a world where the Frithemaeg’s power is crippled by technology. A place where mortals know little of magic. A land ripe for the taking.

  “But the more I studied this new world, the more I realized I could not claim the crown openly,” she goes on, “not without calling an army of Frithemaeg and a horde of angry mortals on my head. But there was quite a crack in this kingdom’s armor: the gap between mortals and Fae. I knew I could pry it wider, fill it with chaos. So I used Julian’s speeches to stir up mortals’ fears; I organized King Richard’s kidnapping to springboard the emergency elections. Tomorrow Julian will become prime minister, and I will have the power to spread technology so far that Fae will be wiped off this island forever.” Her smile flashes teeth and I think of the runes on Mordred’s ebony armor, the tattoo circling Julian Forsythe’s wrist.

  Circles. Back again.

  A new Camelot means a new fall.

  “You won’t get away with this,” I hiss at her. “As soon as Queen Titania realizes what you’re doing—”

  “But that’s the beauty of it,” Morgaine is still all teeth and smile. “She won’t. The Frithemaeg are gone, and even when they were here they did not see me working in the shadows. All they see are the puppets—the show in front of the curtain. And that, Lady Emrys, will go on. Whether you decide to join me or not.”

  “Join you? Never!” I try my best to spit the word, but my mouth is so dry. Parched in fear of this void woman before me.

  “I wouldn’t be so quick to refuse if I were you,” the sorceress says. “You haven’t heard my offer yet.”

  “I’m not so desperate for power.” My throat croaks and rasps, weakness.

  Morgaine’s laughter is like knife blades: iron and clanging through the cold. Her breath curls high, melts into the vast void of night above us. “You say it as if it’s such a terrible thing. To want power. Yet that’s all anyone ever really wants, isn’t it? These men in fancy suits might talk of justice and peace. The women hanging from their arms might speak of love and drink tea from fancy china, but behind it all, they’re just animals struggling to reach the top of the heap. Savages who will do anything to get what they want.

  “Take Eric Black here—an officer who swore a solemn oath to protect the king. All it took was a few of Julian’s speeches, a personal invitation to M.A.F. leadership, and he kidnapped His Majesty straight out of the carriage. To him, a little power was worth a great deal of treason.

  “Or take the Ad-hene. All I had to do was offer them a new set of tunnels they could rule all their own, and they were willing to set me free and lie to the Faery queen.

  “Even you want it.” Morgaine’s smile curls like a velvet Christmas ribbon. “Ever since my escape I’ve been watching you, Emrys Léoflic. At first I did not believe the rumors that you’d become a faagailagh. That a spirit as strong as you would throw all your power away for a man’s sake. But then I saw you on the Winfreds’ yacht. I saw the way you looked at Richard—how you clutched his arm—and I knew the rumors were true. Like Guinevere, you’d given up, become weak.

  “But then I saw you jump. I saw the look in your eyes when you dove after that Kelpie and I knew you still had strength inside. Potential for greatness. A power I could use. So I decided to test you.”

  My mind is racing, webbing through stories of Camelot and shadows and what lies beneath. If Julian is playing the role of Mordred and I am so like Guinevere . . . then the parallels must keep stretching. “You tested me with Kieran. You were using him, just like you used Lancelot.” I think of all those silver words, all those moments the Ad-hene touched me and my insides prickled with magic and mysterious want. Smaller at first, up, up, up until that desperate, last-ditch kiss. When I broke away and it all vanished. “He was dosing me with a love spell, trying to seduce me. . . .”

  “When Alistair informed me that he’d sent one of his own to aid you, the opportunity was too good to resist. But seduction was only a part of it.” Her scarlet smile wreathes into a smirk. “The Ad-hene are excellent guides and I needed him to guide you to the edge. Force you to choose, so I could see where your true desires lie.”

  “And where is that?” I grit my teeth.

  “In the realm of the impossible. You want a life you cannot have, Emrys Léoflic. It wasn’t Kieran who was tempting you. Not really. What tortures you, what tears your heart, is the magic you lost. That need Richard can never fill, no matter how much you love him. Richard or power. That’s always the question in the back of your mind, isn’t it?”

  I feel like her eyes have sliced me open, peeled back layers of muscle and bone, rooted out all the ugly truths.

  “I made my choice,” I tell her, remind myself. Richard. The life I want more.

  “What if you don’t have to choose?” Morgaine walks closer, heels grinding down the garden path. The scent off her pale skin is honey and coal dust: the bitterest of sweet. It fills my nostrils as she steps close, leans in. “I can give you both.”

  Her nearness is dizzying. My eyes swim, and it looks almost as if the runes—all the spells she etched into her arms over the years—are flowing as they reach for me. Her fingers wrap around my wrist, cold as bands of iron as she pries me free from Eric’s grip. She stretches my arm out, yanks up my sleeve.

  “Serve me. Take my runes into your flesh and I’ll allow your king to live. I’ll teach you runecraft, return all the power your heart has ached for.” Her words glide through the night air, smooth as a serpent’s belly. I stare down at my arm, try to imagine what Morgaine’s marks would look like, snaking up its pure peach skin.

  She must need my permission to slide the ink into my veins. She wouldn’t be asking otherwise.

  “I wouldn’t ask much,” she says softly. “You’ll keep an eye on your king, of course. Make sure he does not interfere with my plans. I’ll only call upon your powers when I need you.”

  “You want me to control Richard. . . . You want us to be your puppets.” Like Mordred and Julian. Like Blæc and the Ad-hene. I wonder what she offered them. What lives they couldn’t refuse.

  “You’d be taking a great burden off his shoulders. Without the pressures of leading, Richard would have all the time in the world for you. It’s what you both want. Isn’t it?”

  I think of the cabin on the shores of the loch. Its empty rooms waiting to be filled: with blankets and laughter and Richard’s fingers dancing through my hair, over my skin. Over my inked, mottled skin . . .

  Morgaine’s fingers grip tighter. Pain creeps up my wrist, shatters the thought of Richard’s fa
ce.

  “And if I don’t?” I ask, though I already know the answer.

  She drops my arm. Her lips purse. “I’m afraid you’re too much of a threat. If you refuse my offer, then tonight when midnight strikes the Palace of Westminster will collapse into flames. King Richard’s body will be found underneath the rubble and yours with it. But not to worry, your deaths would be quite productive. The Fae will be blamed for his assassination and the M.A.F. will sweep tomorrow’s elections, making my dear husband the new prime minister. I’ll find another royal puppet to fill the throne and the show will go on. Either way I win. Either way I gain control of my kingdom.”

  I look down at my arm. It’s covered in goose bumps, white as marble. The skin where Morgaine’s fingers were is red. Stinging.

  If I take her ink into my skin, I’ll never be mine. No matter how much power I gain. I’ll never be Richard’s. No matter how many precious hours I spend wrapped up in his arms.

  I’ll be hers.

  Sucked so entirely into the black of her soul. Swallowed with the stars.

  I would become that. Emptiness collapsing into emptiness. Hate crumbling into hate. Round and round it goes. A widening gyre.

  Down.

  Down.

  Down.

  Down.

  A down which never ends.

  This time I cannot jump to save Richard’s life. I cannot do what it takes to protect him. But it’s not because I’m weak.

  I think of her aura again . . . so empty, so hungry. Never filled. I knew that feeling once. I brushed the edge of it that summer night when I was sprawled across the stones of fortress ruins. When I knew that meeting Richard had changed everything. That the edges of my soul were jagged with a hole only he could fill.

  I think of this and look back at Morgaine. “Have you ever loved anyone?”

  The beauty of the sorceress’s face spoils as if her rune of youth has already expired. But it’s only disgust wrinkling her brow, twisting her lips into a snarl.

  Such a hard, impenetrable soul. Spun into so much darkness. Crystallized into a cocoon of death. A coffin nailed tight. I can only feel sorry for her.

  “If you had, you’d know your offer is useless,” I say.

  If she hears the pity in my voice, she doesn’t show it. “And so you choose to throw your life away. Again. How disappointing.”

  Morgaine snaps her fingers and the garden’s dark shifts. The gaps between the hedges fill with faces. The sharp, fault-line features of sixteen Ad-hene loom in the torchlight.

  Alistair steps in front of the rest. He doesn’t look at me at all. His lazy lids are focused solely on the sorceress. “Yes?”

  “The Ad-hene’s bargain has been fulfilled,” she says. “The tunnels I’ve marked are yours to loop as soon as you escort Emrys underground.”

  “Thank you, Lady le Fay.”

  “Now go. I have some memories to modify.” Morgaine reaches out for Eric’s frozen face. Her nails sink deep into his cheek, carve out skin like a carrot peeler. She stares at me, smiling as her nails run all the way down to his jaw. “Though after the tray incident I don’t think it will take much to convince him you did this, in your desperate attempt to escape.”

  The scratches must be deep because Eric’s blood washes down Morgaine’s fingers. Staining that white skin, mixing into the rune ink.

  I look away, down the row of stoic faces and see Kieran, lurking in the far fringe of the hedges. Finally, finally, his stare is not on me. It’s not on anything. It’s adrift, floating through the night in front of him, glossing over the Orangery’s windows.

  I want him to look at me. I want to gut him through, the way Anabelle did.

  But he doesn’t care. He never truly understood. There was never a word out of his mouth which wasn’t a twisting lie, a means to an end, a key to his prison.

  He’s stone, like all the others.

  Twenty-Five

  I expect the earth to yawn open under the Ad-hene’s feet, to swallow us whole as they haul me up from the gravel and start walking.

  Alistair leads the way out of the garden in that slow, swaying way of his. The world is still frozen with Morgaine’s spell as the Ad-hene file along the asphalt of the pitch-dark streets. All of the electric streetlamps are dead, glass bulging and dull like a bovine’s eye. It seems the power outage has reached far past Kensington’s walls. The city is all darkness except for the stunned headlamps of cars, the Ad-hene’s scarred arms.

  “Foshil!” Alistair calls out from the middle of the street. There’s a grating sound and a manhole cover slides across the road, spinning like an Olympian’s discarded disc. Along its metallic edges I spy a scratch of runes—the very same combination I glimpsed on the service door.

  “Get her under, swiftly.” He points to the gape in the earth. With the extra shine of his arms I can see the hints of a ladder. “The spell is due to lift at any moment.”

  One by one the Ad-hene leap into the service hole. They toss me down like a bushel of fruit. The air down here is warm, heavy with awful smells. Scents which make my tongue curl and my throat close. London’s filth.

  “This is to be your new labyrinth?” I look around at the cramped concrete walls, the murky sludge swallowing my captors’ ankles. “You betrayed your oath to the Faery queen for sewers?”

  “Our oath?” Alistair lands in front of me, a burst of fallen light and brown droplets. His eyes meet mine for the first time: black and vicious and old, old, old under those paper-thin lids. “There was never an oath, faagailagh. Oaths are made out of good faith and fealty. What Mab did was pillage. She found the Ad-hene torn apart, ruined by years and years of war. She promised to rebuild our home, make us whole again, if we bound ourselves to her. But she desecrated the Labyrinth—made it a place of pain and despairing dark. We became her prisoners, trapped in the tunnels which were once ours. But Mab is dead. Her wards have fallen and we are now free. We are betraying nothing.”

  “Dooin!” He barks his spell and somewhere far above us the manhole cover slides back into place. Schnick.

  The sound jars me more than it should. It seems far more real—far more final—than anything else about this night. I hear it and wonder if I’ll feel the sun’s rays on my face again. If anyone will ever know the truth about how the earth swallowed me like a magician’s trapdoor . . .

  Click.

  The final piece of the puzzle falls into place.

  Richard never left the city. Trafalgar Square swallowed him and his kidnappers like quicksand. That’s why no one saw him being taken. There was nothing to see. Just the spin of a manhole—lost in all the chaos of Blæc’s bloodbath.

  Richard is here, underground.

  For the first time in a long time my chest jars with a feeling which isn’t doom or burning or loss. I’m slung like a spring lamb over this Ad-hene’s broad shoulders, probably being taken to my slaughter. I have no reason to hope, but that doesn’t make my heart thrill any less.

  I’m going to see Richard again.

  The Ad-hene move as one. They flow—cobra swift—through tunnels, through hatches, through halls, down stairs, down holes, over pipes, over tracks. Through layers and centuries of cramped humanity. The one who carries me runs without jarring. A stale wind rakes my hair, plasters its black strands into my face. I only glimpse flashes of London’s vast underbelly through it, images skating along the silver rays of the Ad-hene’s scars. Tiled walls, a Roman-era well, a tribe of brown rats, a brick archway from Victorian times, train tracks so long out of use they’re coated with moss.

  And runes. Everywhere runes.

  They’re scrawled in odd places: on the rungs of ladders, the backsides of iron hatches, above arches like mistletoe. Always the same string of symbols. The same spell from the manhole cover and the service door.

  After what seems an eternity, the river of Ad-hene slows, becomes a trickle. I’m slung to the ground, facing Alistair again, and behind him, a steel door. The paint on it is peeling, old and negl
ected.

  “She’s using you,” I say over Alistair’s shoulder as he opens the door. “Look at what you’re doing. Opening cell doors, guiding prisoners. Just like before. Morgaine has made this place a prison! Just like Mab.”

  More dark yawns past the open door. Alistair turns. “This is no prison, faagailagh. It is your tomb.”

  “Do you think Morgaine is just going to hand you these tunnels?” I think of the vastness of London’s underground network, how it reaches up into every building, delves deep into every secret. How many things move unnoticed by the world above.

  “She already has. Now that Kieran has fulfilled our bargain, I can loop this labyrinth with my own magic,” Alistair informs me. “Even Lady le Fay will not be able navigate these tunnels without us.”

  “But her runes are everywhere,” I say.

  “Morgaine marked out our tunnels before we arrived. They’re blocking spells to cleanse our territory of common mortals. Just as you thought.” Kieran speaks from behind me. And I remember how eager he was to keep me from going back to study the runes on the service door. I’d been so close to the truth.

  “Now go.” Alistair—the oldest Ad-hene of all, father of labyrinths—sweeps his arm into the dark. “Die the death you chose.”

  I look over the chorus of faces, lit and somber like mourners at a candle vigil. My eyes catch Kieran’s. Finally. Finally! His face doesn’t flinch. His eyes don’t shine. I stare and stare. I want to haunt him. But his expression remains like all the others. Blank. He is only one of sixteen pale bodies, surrounding me like a half-moon, pressing in, leaving no room to run. I have no way to go but forward.