Lies and Prophecy

by Marie Brennan

  Julian led our circle, of course. He’d taken more shielding courses than the rest of us put together; I didn’t even recognize most of what he did. I tried not resent the fact that I was just there for power, but it was hard.

  How quickly I’d gone from ignoring CM with all my might, to wishing desperately that I knew it all.

  The ritual was over and I was snuffing out candles when a thought occurred to me. I might be uneducated compared to Julian, and I might not have a fraction of his power, and I might not know anything of use—but there was one thing I had done that no one else had.

  “I want to talk to Falcon,” I said.

  All three of them blinked in unison. I fought an urge to laugh. “Now?” Liesel said blankly, sounding utterly confused.

  “Yes. Now.” I glanced at Julian. “I have questions for him.” And I was going to get answers if I had to take the sidhe by his pointy ears and shake him.

  Julian rose immediately. “I suggest we go elsewhere. The Arboretum would probably be best.” Always the bloody Arboretum. I tried not to sigh.

  Liesel and Robert also climbed to their feet. Startled, I said, “You’re coming?”

  Robert snorted, and Liesel looked like she wanted to do the same. “Of course I am. I haven’t even met this guy yet; you think I’d stay behind?”

  So she hadn’t. I’d forgotten that. “I just hope he doesn’t run at the sight of a stranger.”

  ~

  I cupped the carving in my hands and studied it. The other three watched me patiently, their breath clouding in the chill air.

  Falcon said I’d know how to contact him. No, that wasn’t it; he said I had the skill to reach him. Telepathically, no doubt. And, since I wasn’t at all familiar with his aura, this carving would—if my guess was right—be my link to him.

  I glanced up at the others from my seat on a log. “I think I’m going to have to trance to do this. If … if something weird happens … well, you’ll figure something out.” The last time I’d stuck my nose out like this, the Unseelie had nearly snapped it off. I prayed this wouldn’t be a repeat.

  “I’ll follow you,” Julian said.

  Of course he wouldn’t let me go off on my own. The geis probably wouldn’t let him. There was no guarantee the two of us would be any safer than one alone if the Unseelie detected our presence, but having him along wouldn’t hurt.

  “You guys stand guard, then,” I said to Robert and Liesel. They took up stances on either side of us as though they meant it physically as well.

  Julian and I slipped into trance easily, and linked mental hands in a firm grip. Here, the power of his presence was reassuring instead of unsettling; it belonged to this realm. The carving now manifested as a glowing line, much as I had expected. I’d read about similar tools, though never used one. But this one led off in a weird direction—as though my world had only two dimensions, and this was headed into a third. Frowning, I followed it.

  Or tried to.

  I couldn’t find the knack of it. Every time I moved to follow the line, it was like I slid sideways, staying in the flat plane of my own world. Frustration made my trance ripple; I calmed myself and studied it.

  Like this.

  I watched Julian. See? he asked. I studied him carefully before indicating understanding. He was doing it weirdly, but I thought I could imitate it….

  It felt ass-backwards, but it worked. Exhaustingly. Instead of reaching for something naturally, I was having to very carefully twitch just one tiny muscle, letting it lead the way. Damn Julian; it seemed much easier for him.

  Of course it did. With that thought, I realized what we were doing. This line led toward the Otherworld. To follow it, we were having to follow our sidhe blood. Tiny muscle, indeed. Four-tenths of one percent. He got to use a whole twenty-nine percent.

  We slid along the glowing line, leaving behind the comfortable surroundings of our own world. My skin began to tingle, as if the human part of me knew this was not native territory. What would it be like, when our two worlds combined? Would everything feel like this?

  And we reached the boundary, the physical plane of the Otherworld looming ahead.

  In theory we might be able to send our spirits through to manifest visibly there, but I had a suspicion that would be more difficult here than in our world. Probably by orders of magnitude. It wasn’t necessary anyway; we only had to summon our target.

  Julian indicated to me that I should make the call.

  Falcon.

  It reverberated along the line and passed out of sight.

  Falcon. Come to us; we must talk.

  Assent. He would come, and reasonably soon. I could pick up no more than that—no surprise, nothing.

  Let’s go.

  At Julian’s suggestion, we began to back away. Returning was far easier than going out, with my mortal blood pulling me rapidly toward its home. I understood better now what Falcon meant about our world not being comfortable for him. What would it feel like if I entered the Otherworld physically?

  Back in our bodies, Julian and I opened our eyes. Robert and Liesel relaxed with twin sighs of relief. Glancing at my watch, I saw that the journey had taken remarkably little time.

  “Did it work?” Liesel asked.

  “Yeah, he’s coming. Soon.” Julian and I rose to our feet, stiff with cold, and we all waited, wary, looking in seventeen directions at once. To pass the time, I tried to explain to the other two what the journey had been like, but I saw from their expressions that words did a poor job of describing it. They would have to feel it themselves.

  “Not I, my lady,” Robert said with a stiff laugh when I suggested bringing him along the next time. “I fear such tricks are best left to those with more telepathic ability than I.”

  “What do you want?”

  Liesel made a strangled noise and whipped around. I’d forgotten to tell her that Falcon had a habit of appearing without warning.

  The waxing moon was intermittently covered by clouds tonight, so Falcon seemed to fade in and out of the shadows. His green eyes glowed unnervingly, like a cat’s, reflecting what little light there was. Liesel was close enough to me that I could feel the tension in her body. I sympathized. I remembered what my first encounter with Falcon had felt like.

  A lot like it did now.

  But I refused to let his strangeness put me off-balance. I’d taught myself to cope with Julian, back when I first met him; I would do the same now.

  “Impatient, are you?” I stepped forward to catch his eye. “I’ll get to it, then. What are the limitations of glamours?”

  Falcon’s eyes traveled the length of my body appraisingly. From a human it might have been lascivious, but from him it was just a flat evaluation. “You look well. We had word of your adventures last night.”

  “Forget about that; it’s not why I called you here. What are their limits?”

  Something flickered in his eyes, that I couldn’t read clearly. But his posture was a little less arrogant, and that was a victory. If Falcon respected firmness, then I’d give him firmness, until he choked on it.

  With poisonous precision, he said, “Because the burden of them cannot be shared, they are limited to what a single individual can maintain. Thus they are small in scope. It is extraordinarily difficult to convince all senses at once; thus they are focused on deceiving only a few. And no sidhe can disguise his eyes—not even to change their color and convince you he is of the other Court.”

  So their limits were closer to ours than I’d feared. But what did eye color have to do with it? I glanced at Julian. His jaw tensed, and he said, “All Seelie have green eyes. The eyes of the Unseelie are gold.”

  It would have been nice if one of them thought to mention that sooner. I wasn’t about to yell at Julian, though, and I had better things to press Falcon about. “Okay, next question. How is it that I understand you?”

  Now he looked blank. “I beg your pardon?”

  “How am I understanding you? I’m not going to b
elieve that after who knows how many thousands of years of separation, the sidhe just happen to be fluent in modern English. How are you communicating?” It was as close as I could come to asking if they’d been spying on us prior to Samhain. I doubted Falcon would ever answer that.

  “Ah. I understand.” Falcon seemed amused again, damn him. “I am not speaking English at all.”

  I looked at him closely. He sounded perfectly intelligible. But once I paid attention, I realized he was telling the truth. My mind heard English, but that wasn’t what my ears were picking up, and that wasn’t what his lips were forming. It was done so skillfully, better than any dubbing, that I hadn’t noticed until he pointed it out.

  “How are you doing that?” I whispered, fascinated by the trick.

  He shrugged. “Your mind chooses words to suit the thoughts it receives.”

  Telepathy. At such a highly refined level I could barely begin to comprehend it. Most telepathic communication was like slightly quicker speech, and was language-dependent. A closer link could pass language boundaries by relying on images and emotions, but then it was nonverbal. I marveled at the beauty of this. With it, no interpreter would ever be needed. Every language would be understood.

  Provided the people on both ends were gifted. “So a person with no sidhe blood wouldn’t be able to understand you,” I said.

  “That explains my difficulty, I suppose,” Robert said with a painful laugh. “He doesn’t sound entirely fluent to me. Damn my lack of telepathic skill.” The uncertain light made his expression hard to read, but he felt more than a little bitter.

  I turn back to Falcon. “So you understand me….”

  “By the thoughts and images you project.”

  Those “thoughts and images” had to be damn faint, as we all shielded against leaking anything strong. “If I put up tighter shields, would we be able to communicate?”

  “I would expect not.” Falcon continued talking, but it became incomprehensible as I sealed myself off as tightly as I could. For the first time, I truly heard his words, in the sharp, alien language of the sidhe. “Gods, that’s weird.”

  He shook his head, and I lowered the shields. “You didn’t understand what I just said, did you?”

  “No. I was almost able to extrapolate from the others, since they understand you, but it was too indistinct.”

  So we could, if we wanted, converse amongst ourselves without the sidhe understanding. Not for long, though; staying that thoroughly locked off was tiring. But ungifted baselines might be unintelligible to the sidhe. It was possible to pry into their minds, but that took a more concentrated effort, since they didn’t leak anything. They were, in a way, safer than bloods—until somebody started flinging around the telekinetic effects, or ceremonial magic.

  I made myself focus. We needed information that would protect all of us, blood and baseline alike. That was what I came here for, to bludgeon Falcon into being of actual use. It didn’t matter how many skirmishes we won against the Unseelie, if we didn’t have something to base a broader strategy on. “How about travel? How did you get here?”

  “My people sent me.”

  “I know that. What I want to know is how—the mechanics of it. You didn’t just wiggle your nose, I’m sure.”

  “No, I did not.” I let him think it over. For once he didn’t seem like he was trying to avoid the question, just searching for the words to answer it. Or not words—given what he’d just told me—but an answer I could comprehend. “We … reached through. I do not know how else to explain it. We reached through, and found your world, and temporarily made a hole. Then I was here.”

  “And to go back?”

  “The same, except it is easier. I contact them, to let them know I am ready. They make the hole. I go back through.”

  “You don’t make it yourself?”

  “It is too difficult for one alone, and even to help would tire me. We think it safer to have it done by those who can remain in our world and rest.”

  So theoretically we could trap a sidhe here, if we could block him from contacting his people. I wasn’t planning to try it on Falcon—not unless he really pissed me off—but it could be useful against the Unseelie. And there was at least the possibility that we could make a portal of our own, if we had to.

  “But it will get easier as time goes on,” I said.

  Falcon nodded. “Yes. Gradually, until the solstice, when it will but require intent and energy. One alone will be capable, then.”

  “And it’s easiest here, at least for now.”

  “Yes.”

  “So why Welton?”

  “Are you asking why it was chosen in the first place?”

  “Yes.”

  Falcon leaned his head back, considering his answer again. “I cannot say for certain why the Unseelie chose this place. All our kind are restricted to this area at the moment because this is the point of contact, the one place that has a link to our world. The farther we move from it, the more … uncomfortable it becomes.”

  “But you can guess why they chose it.”

  He lowered his chin. I controlled my reaction as his reflecting gaze settled on me. “This is … a good place. For us. It is closer to our world than most. There are others like it, but not all of them also have the concentration of those you call gifted that this does.” Julian shifted next to me.

  Closer to the Otherworld. There was a cave, deep in the Arboretum, that had been sacred to the Ojibwe before they were driven off the land. The tribe had made an almighty protest when the university was built here—but the powers that be, determined to put the campus on a strong magical locus, had pushed it through anyway. Throw in a high number of bloods, and suddenly you had a place that was as close to home as the sidhe were likely to find in our world. “But there are other places—not many, but a few—with similar locations and many bloods. Why this one?”

  Falcon indicated ignorance with another faint shrug. “Who can say. Chance, it would seem; they had to choose a place, and this was it.”

  Chance. Fate rolled the dice, and we won—or lost. I wondered if anyone in those other places had gotten the same signs I had, the Tower and Hagalaz. Warnings of the Otherworld’s approach.

  “Are you finished?” the sidhe asked, at his very driest.

  “I’m not,” Julian said even as I nodded. Falcon looked to him with a raised eyebrow. Sidhe body language might not be like ours—in the end, they simply weren’t human—but the way his shoulders settled back read like disdain to me. He truly did have it in for Julian. I, not being a wilder, was apparently less to blame.

  For a moment I thought Falcon would just leave, but he let Julian ask his question. “How did the Unseelie find Kim?”

  The moonlight limned Falcon’s graceful hands as he lifted them in a careless shrug. “I can only assume they followed from you.” A cloud scudded across the moon, and when it cleared, the shadow where Falcon had stood was empty.

  ~

  “Damn it!” I swore, jumping half a foot. “I wish he wouldn’t just vanish like that.”

  Julian was still staring at the place where the sidhe had been. Half to himself, he said, “But you got real information out of him. Interesting.”

  Robert linked his hands over the top of his head and exhaled loudly. He began questioning Julian; I went to Liesel, who was standing with her arms wrapped tightly around her body. “You okay?”

  She shook her head—it was more like a whole-body shudder. “No. I thought—I thought it would be like meeting Julian, only more.”

  But it really, really wasn’t. “Maybe some of the other sidhe aren’t so creepy. Maybe it’s just him.”

  Liesel tried to fold in on herself, even smaller. Her voice went very quiet, until I could barely hear her below Robert. “The summer before I came to Welton … I volunteered at a psychiatric hospital. There was a sociopath there, a man who just didn’t see other people as human. He was flat, cold, as if nothing ever touched his heart—as if he didn’t have a
heart to touch. And Falcon reminds me of him.”

  I understood her shudder, now. Of course Falcon didn’t see us as human—or rather, as sidhe. We might carry a small bit of their legacy, and I supposed by the usual biological definition that made us variants of the same species … but we were not the same. And from his perspective, I imagined, we were not just different but lesser.

  Falcon called Julian a changeling. If that was the translation my mind chose, then whatever word he was using was meant to be a slur.

  My roommate looked up at me suddenly, almost desperately. “Power isn’t the only difference between us and them, Kim. Don’t make the mistake of believing they think or feel like we do. Even the Seelie.”

  I nodded soberly. We headed back toward the dorms with Robert making his best attempts at jokes along the way, but Liesel’s words stayed with me.

  Chapter Eleven

  I was being dragged backward into a lake, fighting a scream as I saw the sun recede, keeping silent only because I knew that to scream was to lose air and to lose air was to die. But soon I would have to breathe….

  Persistent beeping finally broke through and brought me awake with a convulsive jerk. I lay in bed, one hand on my throat, breathing deeply to remind myself that it was just a dream.

  How long had my alarm been going off?

  I rolled over and swore. It was nearly noon, and I’d slept through Ring Structure. If you could call it sleeping.

  Sitting up, I rubbed my eyes and struggled to banish the remnants of my terror. What a wretched night. I, in my arrogance, had decided to try for a precognitive dream, and what had I gotten for my pains? Nightmares. Each more horrifyingly real than the last. And none of them answering my questions.

  Nothing about the Unseelie, nothing about how we poor mortals could keep their collars from around our necks. Instead the warnings from my father and Michele, along with the reversal of the Knight of Cups, had combined to gift me with one nightmare after another. At any other time, I would dismiss them as being brought on by stress, with no precognitive element. But these days I couldn’t be that careless.