Queene of Light

by Jennifer Armintrout

  Garret turned his head, just a few degrees. His neck was stiff from bowing. “Thank you. Bring her to the throne room.”

  Careful to say “the throne room,” not “my throne room.” He would play this out as cautiously as he possibly could, until the coronation. Only after he’d reluctantly accepted the job of King of the Lightworld would he let his guard slip.

  He rose from his knees, muscles protesting after being immobile for so long. All afternoon, after the healers had discovered their songs would do nothing to bring the Queene back, after her maids had tearfully robed the withered black husk of her one last time, Garret had knelt beside his sister’s bier, forehead resting on his clasped hands, back shaking with dry sobs every now and again to display his grief to the courtiers and commoners who streamed through the great hall to pay their respects.

  Their respects. If they had known Mabb, they would not have respected her. Her moods that could change like the wind, her refusal to believe logic and rational truths when presented to her, her vain insistence that she would someday bring the Fae to the surface when all of her efforts were directed only to fancy gowns and lavish parties, these were not things that commanded respect.

  Once, she might have been worthy of their adulation. But that time was long ago.

  The throne room was another of the cavernous spaces hollowed out by the Humans above in a time when the Earth belonged to them, but Mabb had taken special care to bring some dignity to it. One of the few things in her reign that could be called “dignified,” in Garret’s opinion. In the early days, when it had seemed they might mend their ties with the world above and their tradesmen were still allowed to travel freely between the worlds, Mabb had chosen to outfit this room with walls of polished amethyst tiles and a slick, polished quartz floor. She’d loved those two stones most of all, for their gentle energy and the image of status they projected. She’d believed that to surround herself with amethyst was to proclaim an affinity with the mineral’s psychic energy. “No one will lie to me if they believe I shall see directly through it,” she’d crowed to him once, and he’d wanted to divulge right then exactly how many lies he’d gotten past her. But maybe that had been the trick of it.

  The throne was also quartz, a huge, raw chunk of it, chipped and fashioned and polished enough to be comfortable, but with clusters jabbing from the sides and arms like warning spines to any that would approach closely. It had crossed from the Astral with them, and Mabb had not cast it off when she’d created her underground Palace. There was a crack in the back, where it had been damaged by the Human leader who’d called himself Madaku Jah during the Human uprising. That a Human had infiltrated their Upworld Palace and nearly taken the Queene’s life had been the decisive blow in that fight.

  Garret posed himself on the throne, his posture strong, but his expression that of a weary and broken man. “How sad the Royal Consort looks,” they were bound to say. “Yet how determined and powerful.”

  He quashed a smile that came to his lips a second before the doors opened.

  Two guards led Ayla, each holding the end of a rope that looped around her body. Garret would not have known it was her unless he’d been told, as she wore a strange Human garment that obscured her wings and a hood over her head. Behind them followed a jeering throng made up of courtiers and commoners. One of the guards tugged his end of the rope, and Ayla stumbled to her knees. The crowd hurrahed, and Garret felt an unexpected stab of sympathy for her.

  “Guard! Stand down!” He stood and pointed at the other soldier. “Untie her. Remove that ridiculous hood!”

  A murmur went through the assembly. They would either revile him or pity him. He believed it would be the latter.

  The soldier untied Ayla, leaving the hood for last. When he removed it, she was still almost unrecognizable. Her nose was smashed and bloody, her eyes swollen to purple mounds. Dried blood stained her mouth, and her head lolled from side to side on her neck as she tried to keep her footing.

  The gasp that came from the crowd confirmed Garret’s guess. They pitied him, that his mate would have fallen so low, and that he was subjected to the horror.

  Mabb’s—his—council stood in expectation at the side of the room, distancing themselves from this spectacle. One of them, a short, round little Pixie whose name Garret always forgot, cleared his throat and stepped forward. “As acting monarch, it is your job to sentence her as you see fit. If what you have said is true, if she allowed a Darkworlder to infiltrate our borders and coupled with him willingly, if she killed your sister the Queene, you must accuse her of these things and punish her.”

  “Kill the—” Ayla gasped and coughed, clutching at her bruised neck before righting herself and stating, in a much quieter tone, one that every ear in the throne room strained to hear, “I did not kill the Queene.”

  “Lies!” a shrill voice rang out over the collection of similar denouncements. But Ayla stood in her place, resolved. She could play the game, perhaps as well as he could.

  “Ayla.” He let his voice break a little on her name, struggled to keep himself together for the crowd. What a play this had turned out to be! “Ayla, you have been charged with assassinating the Queene of the Faery Quarter. You have also been charged with helping a creature of the Darkworld enter our borders, and with…” He walked slowly off the dais, toward her, his expression fixed and sad. “And with lying with a creature from the Darkworld willingly.”

  Another outraged burst from the crowd. Garret could not force himself to listen to it, too intent was he on Ayla and the hatred in her eyes. Hatred! After what he’d offered her, what she’d thrown stubbornly aside!

  He held up a hand to silence the hall. “These accusations are grave. And they are, indeed, too much for me to contemplate now in the wake of my—of all of our—loss. And I cannot pass a judgment upon you without serious consideration. Therefore, it is my decision that you should be held prisoner until such a time as this matter can be fully investigated and your sentence can be delivered in as unbiased a manner as I may be able to accomplish, under the circumstances.”

  Another roar of disapproval, and he shouted to be heard above them all. “Please, I ask that you place yourself in my position!” This muted them, almost instantly. “My beloved sister has been…brutally destroyed. My mate has been found, fugitive from the Lightworld. Please, let me grieve my sister before I am to condemn the one soul—” he leveled his gaze on her then, made sure she could feel the import of his words “—whom I have loved above myself.”

  She spat at him.

  That sealed her fate, he reflected with pleasure as the guards trussed her once more and shoved her from the hall, through the snatching, tearing throng. If she had wept, that would have ended her, as well. But the defiance, oh, how they would loathe her for that.

  When all of them had gone and the large, stone doors closed behind them, Garret sat down once more upon his throne and smiled to himself.

  The cells of the Faery Quarter dungeon were badly lit by torches and smoky because of them. The beds were rags tossed on the floor, the food nothing but stale bread and cups of water. In short, it was but a small step down from what Ayla had lived in her entire life. It was not so horrible as others might have thought it, and so she was afforded plenty of time to think, rather than wallow in misery at lost comforts.

  They thought she had killed the Queene. In hindsight, perhaps that was what Mabb had wished all along. She’d had her leave, unescorted, unseen, by that secret passage, had she not? She’d threatened to ruin her. She’d suspected Ayla of wanting her dead.

  But no, what benefit would it be to Mabb to frame Ayla for her own murder, when at the end of it all she would still just be dead?

  That left Ayla only one other option, and as much as she hated him—and now she really, truly hated him—she could not resolve to believe it.

  She’d thought no one could stand to profit from Mabb’s death. How naive. Of course, there had been two who could profit, and handsomely. The
first being herself, for she would be Queene and supreme ruler of the Faery Quarter and, in all reasonable things, of the Lightworld. The second being Garret, for when Ayla was Queene, he would be her consort, second highest.

  She knew she did not kill Mabb, so it had to be Garret.

  How to prove it, though? Who would believe that Garret, who was making such a show of his grief that he should have grown up in a troop of players, not in the Palace, would have killed his beloved sister? But a lowly half-Human who’d wormed her way into the Lightworld, scratched out a pitiful existence before being offered a world of luxury and privilege beyond her dreams? How easy it would be to believe she had become suddenly, clumsily greedy for more. Easier still to imagine her seducing her mentor, beguiling him until he brought her inches from the throne. It was then that she had sank her poisoned dagger into her Queene’s heart, then that she had dared reach for the crown.

  It was sensational and impossible, and that was the thing that lent it the most credence. That was why Garret had chosen her from the start, mentored her, then mated himself to her, when he could have had any other, more desirable Faery in the Court. No other Faery would have become so easy a target for suspicion. He must have planned it for months.

  Footsteps echoed through the rough-hewn stone corridor outside her door, and she cocked her head to listen. Her bread and water had already been brought to her, and her jailer’s epithets and taunts had run out hours before. Had Garret changed his mind? Would she be put to death now?

  The lock on the door twisted. When it opened, the dim light hurt Ayla’s eyes, and she shielded them.

  “Get on your feet! It’s your Guild Master who’s come!” A boot connected with her side, already sore and bruised from previous beatings, and she could do no more than lay where she was and cry out.

  “That is unnecessary.” Cedric’s voice was even, calm. Perhaps he had come to kill her. She’d heard of an Assassin being executed before by the Guild Master.

  “I did not kill the Queene!” she cried, climbing to her knees despite her pain. She opened her eyes as much as they would and groped in the darkness for something to get her balance on. Her hands found Cedric’s tunic, and she half climbed him, ashamed at her own feebleness.

  The Guild Master’s large, warm hands closed over her own, gentle even now that she was a prisoner. “Leave us,” he commanded the guard, and when the door had shut again, he lifted her to her feet. “Ayla, Gods, what have you let them do to you?”

  She could not have fought back. He must have known that. And so, she did not explain. Nor did he expect her to, she surmised, when he continued, “Please, I must know…what they are saying is false, is it not?”

  She nodded, wetted her lips. She had to speak slowly, as her throat was hoarse and sore from the rope they’d choked her with. “I did not kill the Queene. She took me to her chamber, it was true. But I did not kill her.”

  “No one saw you leave. No one saw anyone but Garret go to her, and when he left, you still had not.” He was not condemning her, but gently probing for the answer that would prove to him, beyond all certainty, that she told the truth.

  There had long been rumors of the Guild Master’s relationship to the Queene. If there was truth to them, Ayla was about to discover it now. “You know, as well as I, that the Queene has her ways of disguising that which she does not wish to be seen.”

  He nodded once, his expression strained in the dim blue light of his antennae. “If you wish to save yourself, then you need to tell me, now, plainly, what your meaning is.”

  “The secret passage.” She blurted it too quickly. It felt as though it were something to hang on to, to save her. But she’d said it, and she said it again. “Mabb made me leave by the secret passage. She did not want me to…disturb her guests.”

  Cedric turned away, his back rigid, then he pounded both of his fists against the cell wall. “Mabb, you silly, vain fool!”

  “You know I could not have killed her,” Ayla was quick to continue. “You know that I have always endeavored to serve my Queene. And you know that I would never betray the Lightworld—” She stopped herself there. It was not in her nature to lie.

  He faced her again, a calm mask in place. “What of this talk of a Darkling? They say you snuck him into the Lightworld and lay with him in Garret’s bed. Is that true?”

  “I did not help him cross our borders. He did that of his own volition. And I did no more in Garret’s bed than what Garret himself saw. That is, the creature touched me, he kissed me and then he left, frightened off by Garret’s return.” Her face burned at the memory. “I confess I did wrong by not killing the creature when I first happened upon him in the Darkworld, but that, and only that, is the extent of the vows I have broken.”

  “It is a serious vow.” A sad smile touched the corners of his mouth, and his antennae twitched. “But less serious than what you are already accused of.”

  He helped her to sit down on the filthy pile that served as her bed, then walked toward the door. “Rest. I will see that justice is done in this situation. It falls to you now to heal and to wait.”

  When he closed the door behind him, Ayla rose to check the lock. But he had not come on a mission to free her.

  Heal and wait. But there was something else, too: she was to trust him, as he was the only Faery who seemed to be on her side in this.

  When Malachi woke, he found he could not sit up. When he opened his eyes, it took a moment to realize that he was up. His arms stretched above his head, bound together in an iron clasp, fettered to a chain pulled through a giant loop. His legs were similarly shackled, but attached to the stone wall that scraped his wings with any movement.

  When had things gone so wrong? At the Strip, when Keller had tried to talk to the Faery soldiers who detained them.

  Foolish Keller. Malachi shut his eyes, almost cried out at the thought of his friend. The screams, the blood. If only he’d done as Malachi had told him, if only he’d run back to the safety of the Darkworld.

  Malachi had been paralyzed with horror and grief for the Human. It had been easy for the Faeries to capture him.

  A metal brazier of glittering coals stood in the room, not far from him. A set of iron bars lay across it, glowing menacing red. They would torture him, he had no doubt. For what purpose he could not say, but a Death Angel knew the look of torture.

  A Faery came in. This one was not a soldier. He wore silk robes, no helmet. He had a haughty expression on his face, and this was what Malachi recognized.

  The Faery closed the door of the cell behind him and came close to Malachi, so close that he wished his hands were free. With a smug grin, the Faery pronounced the mortal words carefully. “Do you have any idea who I am?”

  “Garret,” Malachi answered, just as slowly, delighting in the change that came over the Faery.

  Shaking with rage, the little creature struck him. The blow stung, but only for a moment. It would not leave a mark. Knowing that he sealed his own fate, Malachi laughed.

  “You will not think it funny when I kill her,” Garret spat, turning away from him. “You will not think it humorous when she watches you die!”

  Malachi strained at his bindings, but the chains held fast. “No! You will not kill her!”

  “And you will stop me?” Garret forced his hands into a pair of stiff gloves and lifted one of the brands from the coals. He looked it over a moment, as if he could examine the heat. Then, without further preamble, he forced the spike into Malachi’s side.

  The pain was unlike anything Malachi had ever thought to imagine. His flesh split under the point of the brand, then fused to it. When Garret ripped the instrument free, he pulled flesh with it, and hot, wet jets of stinging blood splashed from Malachi’s wound.

  Garret dropped the brand back onto the brazier. The scent of cooked flesh rose into the air. “When I have finished with you, she will not recognize you. And you will be far from capable of saving her.”

  Eighteen

 
; T he door to her cell opened, but the hall beyond was not the dingy hall of the prison. It was a corridor of clean, gray stones leading straight from her door. She rose on trembling legs and walked, not daring to believe her own freedom, out. At the other end of the corridor, light streamed in. Beautiful sunlight such as Ayla had only seen through the grates above Sanctuary, and sand so blinding white that she had to cover her eyes.

  Beyond that sand, water. Open sea, just a bit more blue than the sky, but ever more violent and mysterious, tossing into and over itself as it argued its way toward shore.

  At the edge of the water was a woman. Tall and fair, her golden hair nearly the same shade as the sand, her skin the white of the foam crests on the waves. She wore a white garment that blew with her hair in the wind. She turned her face and her full, pregnant body into the breezes the ocean gave her, arms open. When Ayla stepped from the cave, she turned and beckoned her closer.

  “Where am I?” Ayla asked, coming to stand beside the woman much closer and quicker than she’d anticipated.

  The woman opened her arms to the winds again, her face pink from the sand and spray. “It is the sea.”

  Ayla had heard of the sea before, seen it in tapestries. That this woman assumed she did not know made her feel foolish and angry. “I know it is the sea! Why am I here?”

  “Because this is where all things must begin. And end.” The woman closed her eyes and laughed. Somewhere, a gull cried. Or a…

  “Malachi is in pain.” Distress nagged at her. “I must go to him.”

  “He has his own end and beginning.” The woman nodded to her with a knowing smile. “But you knew that.”

  “You speak in riddles, as always.” But wasn’t that a riddle, that Ayla had just spoken? “Leave me, Mother. I do not wish to hear that I am about to end.”

  “How do you know that you will end?” The wind stopped now, the sea calmed. The woman turned to her. She took one of Ayla’s hands in her own and lifted it, guided it to Ayla’s stomach. “How do you know that you are not here for a beginning?”