Lies in the Dark

by Robert J. Crane

  “General Roseus!” someone shouted, fluttering down from above the crowd. It was a soldier in full armor, silver blood glazing his armor in a few spots. “They are coming at us from the upper flank, trying to get around it. Colonel Halware requires your assistance immediately to hold, sir.”

  Roseus sighed, then looked at me, Orianna and Lockwood all in turn. “This is the trouble with being so very important to your kingdom—someone always needs you.” He nodded at the soldier. “I will be along directly.” He glanced back at us. “Such misfortune, to not be able to see your ends with my own eyes. But I’ll look forward to examining your lifeless eyes when the battle is won and I return.” He sketched a rough salute at Lockwood. “I can’t thank you enough. If not for your honor and nobility and utterly foolish idealism, why … I might still be stuck under you, rather than climbing to the heights of general.” He smiled. “And if not for you, Iron Bearer, and your spy friend? Why, my star might not be rising in the court. I might be forever stuck in the lower ranks rather than ascending to my proper place. I can’t thank you enough.” He waved. “But, alas … the headsman’s axe will have to convey my regards. Do take care to make it as painless as possible, my good man. Unless they force you to do otherwise, in which case … swing badly. I won’t mind.”

  And with a last nod at the executioner, he was gone in a flutter of wings, taking his soldiers with him.

  Chapter 36

  “Well, this is a fine kettle of fish, as they say on Earth,” Lockwood said as the three of us stood on the executioner’s platform, looking at the leering fae in the black mask who watched us with his axe slung over his shoulder. I couldn’t imagine a much scarier looking guy this side of a vampire with blood running down his face, honestly—he was frighteningly large, and the axe had a curve to it that suggested it was pretty good at taking the heads off people.

  “What’s a fish?” Orianna asked, nose curling at the bridge.

  “What’s a kettle?” the executioner asked, slinging his axe back down to catch it with his other hand just below the neck. “Never mind. Who wants to go first?”

  I looked at the heavy block sitting in the middle of the platform. It looked nice and clean, metallic, like an anvil. No discolorations to suggest use, but I had a feeling they’d have a glamour over it. You know, to keep those waiting in line a little calm. I stole a look around; there weren’t any soldiers immediately nearby.

  The executioner was suddenly up in my face, breathing a sweet, surprisingly floral breath right into my eyes. “Don’t even think about it. You won’t make it a step.”

  “Can’t blame a girl for trying,” I said, looking him in his pale-silver eyes. Gulp.

  “I think you just volunteered to be first,” he said, taking hold of my manacles and steering me toward the block.

  “That is a pretty loose definition of volunteering,” I said, putting a little effort into slowing our forward momentum. I twisted my head around to look at him. “I mean, by that definition, I volunteered Bobby Anders in eighth grade, just because I was looking at the wart on the side of his nose. Which I totally felt bad about, but—”

  A shock of brightness caused me to lurch back, the flicker taking over again like a fork of lightning landing in front of my face. I gasped, arching my back and causing my fresh stab wound there to scream at me from the movement. I staggered and fell, hitting sideways and accidentally rolling to my back like a coin that landed on its side.

  The world around me took a turn for the much worse; the tent that had been above earlier shredded, hanging limply in rags from poles. It looked like the fae had just sliced their way through when the war began, leaving me with a clear view to a stormy sky racked with lightning. I looked sideways and there were dead trees as far as I could see, chopped down, the fires of war spanning out in the opposite direction of the troops. Screams came from the front, and I started to look that way—

  But the executioner swam into my view first. And he … did not look at all as I remembered him before the flicker.

  Gone was the black-masked specter with the evil grin. In his place was a thin fae with drooping wings to match his face. The corners of his mouth turned down, even as he peered at me, and his eyes held a deep sadness of the sort you only see in people who have suffered something terrible.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, and even his voice was different. It sounded …

  Quiet. Genuine. And as I blinked at him, he recoiled slightly, puffing up. “I mean … get up,” he said, and here he sounded a touch harsher.

  “I … I see you now,” I said, a little chill running down my scalp, down my spine.

  His thin brow furrowed heavily. “I … what?”

  “I see you,” I said, staring at him. “You’re not … not what they want you to be. Underneath it all, I mean. You’re not what they’re trying to make you be.”

  His eyebrows arched, and he straightened just a little. “I—I don’t know what you mean.”

  “What have they done to you?” I asked, peering at him. “You didn’t want this job, did you?”

  He looked torn between a terrible response, but it passed, and he swallowed visibly. “No,” he whispered. “I hate it. I wanted to be … anything else.”

  “I am so sorry,” I said softly, with utter sincerity. “What’s your name?”

  “Tanner,” he said, eyelids fluttering. “My name is Tanner.”

  “Tanner,” I said, catching stray, bewildered looks from Lockwood and Orianna, hovering behind Tanner, “I want to end this war. I want to stop it. Do you understand?”

  He looked away. “I … I’m supposed to—”

  “I know what you’re supposed to do,” I said, and he looked back at me, his eyes full. “And I know you don't want to. I don’t blame you. Having to pretend to be somebody you’re not …” I swallowed heavily. “Well, let’s just say I understand it, and … it sucks.”

  Tanner blinked. “Sucks … what?”

  “Like a pig?” Orianna asked. “A suckling pig?”

  “You’ve got pigs but no fish?” I asked. “Really?” I turned back to Tanner. “Never mind. It’s a terrible feeling. That’s what I meant. It’s a terrible feeling, having to hide who you are. Pretend to be somebody you’re not. To do something that … wrenches your very soul.” I swallowed again, trying to keep down emotion. “Did you want this war?”

  Tanner shuffled his foot, and put the haft of the axe down against the platform, keeping the blade up. In a very small voice he said, “No.”

  “I want to end it,” I said. “And I think I can end it—we can, anyway. But not if you do what you’re planning to do with … that.” I nodded at the axe.

  “You don’t understand,” he said, blinking, a glittering light flashing in his eyes as little diamond-like tears spilled out. “This is what I have to do.”

  “No, you don’t,” I said, getting to my feet but no move toward him. “It’s what you think you have to do. But every time you execute someone … you feel a little less like yourself.” It was like me, every time I told a lie. I could almost see the girl I was, before all the compulsive lies. She was lost, somewhere way, way back along the path. “You keep telling yourself that if you just keep going, it’ll get better. But it won’t. You’ll feel more and more lost as time goes by. And one day, you’ll look in the mirror … and you won’t even recognize yourself.”

  Tanner stared at me. “How … how did you know?” he whispered.

  “I’ve been there,” I said, looking him in the eyes. “Tell them we escaped, if they ask. You’ve done a good job for long enough. Tortured your own soul trying to be what they want you to be. You don’t have to do it anymore. Not if you don’t want to.”

  Tanner smacked his lips together and flexed his fingers once, then twice.

  Then he let go of the axe, and it dropped, ringing out as it hit the platform. He looked up at me, tears still in his eyes. “Go,” he said, and turned away, as though to keep from looking at us.

 
“Come on,” I said, snagging hold of Lockwood’s manacles as I walked toward the far end of the platform. Neither he nor Orianna said anything, and all that I could hear other than our footsteps were the sobs of Tanner as he stood there, contemplating where things had gone terribly, terribly wrong in his life.

  Chapter 37

  “That … was really quite something, Cassandra,” Lockwood said as we hurried across the churned up field, a flicker showing me the horror that had been done here by an encamped army. They must have been here for days before we showed up, just waiting for the right time to invade Winter.

  Well, now they had it. The battle was raging in the distance; I could hear it in both the “real” world and when there was a flicker showing me the one beneath. That meant either way … it was close.

  “I had a little bit of a revelation back there,” I said, hurrying along. I paused a second, stretching up. The flicker disappeared, and sunny skies shone down on me from overhead. But they felt cold now, lacking any of the warmth this beautiful glamour had cast when I’d first gotten here.

  “Do tell,” Orianna said, fluttering a few steps behind me.

  “See, nobody here is exactly what they seem to be,” I said. “Like you said, Orianna—it’s all lies, all the way down.”

  She nodded. “That’s the Seelie for you.” Lockwood shot her a glare, and she shrugged. “I don’t make them lie, all right? They’re your people.”

  “Everybody lies at some point,” I said. “But what people lie about tells you a lot about them.” Like a teenage girl lying about stupid stuff? That tells you she’s petty, small, and self-involved.

  And that was a stinging revelation to come to, let me tell you.

  “A society so obsessed with appearances that they have to lie about them in every way, though?” I caught a glimpse of my ultimate target, far up ahead on the dais of the royals. “That is a person—or a people—who are deeply insecure about … well, everything, probably.”

  Lockwood was limping along behind me, bleeding from the dozen shallow stab wounds the guards had inflicted on him during the march to the executioner. “And what would you know about this, Cassandra?”

  I flashed him a smile. “Lockwood, I’m a teenager. I understand insecurity. Trust me.”

  “That’s funny,” Orianna said, “because you’re confidently leading us into absolute insanity. Or am I wrong about the direction you’re taking us?”

  “You’re not wrong about either,” I said under my breath. The field was clear ahead, the army having moved on to engage with the Winter forces. No one was even looking in this direction, not even the Summer Queen’s guards. Of which there were only a handful. Probably because the queen seemed capable of defending herself, sending a blast of green magic forth, hurtling toward the front, all her attention focused on the battle.

  Which was good, because I was aiming to make this a surprise.

  “I would caution you here, Cassandra,” Lockwood said as we drew to within a few hundred feet of the dais. We had yet to be seen, the guards watching forward for attacks, the occasional large bolt of magic swirling in from the front lines like some kind of artillery. “The reception you are going to receive once you get the attention of the queen and her guards is bound to be … frosty.”

  “Oh, hilarious, because she’s the Summer Queen,” Orianna said, a little snippily. “I would have gone with ‘fiery.’”

  “You will only have one chance at this,” Lockwood said. “So I would caution you, whatever you do—get it right.” He gave me a fatherly, reassuring squeeze of the shoulder.

  “Okay,” I said, and the world flickered around me. The queen flickered too, turning from a lovely, golden-haired creature into a dark-haired, angry crone with a furious scowl and a much less … shapely figure than in the glamour. Seriously, she was at least three bra sizes smaller.

  The glamour snapped back into place, and it hurt a little to go from seeing her as an angry middle-aged lady with all the requisite wrinkles and iron-grey hair … to this vision of beauty.

  But it gave me an idea.

  “Hey, Queen Ignes!” I shouted. “Does anyone know that you’re totally a bottle blond? Like, magical bottle blond? Or is it just me?”

  It felt like the entire battle halted at that exact moment. Every guard left around the queen pivoted, turning their attention to me and, by extension, Orianna and Lockwood.

  “Well,” Lockwood said, and there was a hint of restrained terror underneath his dry delivery, “that certainly seems to have … gotten some attention.”

  “Yeah,” Orianna said, and she sounded even more strained than he. “So … what now?”

  That was a great question. And as I stared at the Queen of Summer, the answer escaped me for a moment, and her entire army turned its attention on us.

  Chapter 38

  It was pretty clear that the Seelie queen was pissed, bright flames sprouting from her shoulders as she seethed. I could feel the heat, even at this distance, and she flamed brighter, fire burning out of her like some 80’s shoulder pads I’d seen in pictures of my mom when she was younger. The flames crackled, and the warmth felt like I’d stepped outside to Florida sunshine, sweat beading on my forehead as I stared at the Queen of Summer.

  “Uh oh,” I said, thinking maybe, just maybe, I’d taken my insult a little too far—

  “Fiend!” A guard leapt at me, and a timely flicker was the only thing that warned me he was not twenty feet away, as I had expected, but in fact less than five as reality bent around me, and I dodged in the way Mill had taught me.

  Lockwood leapt forth and turned aside his spear thrust, catching it in the crook of his elbow and dealing a palm-fist to the fae’s nose that drew silver blood and rattled his armor. He strained, sweeping the spear out of the man’s grasp and knocking his feet from beneath him.

  “Thanks,” I said as Lockwood kicked him, sending him flying sideways through the air. I blinked in surprise at the force of the blow, and I snapped back into the glamour as the guard shot away from us as though launched from a cannon. “Uh … wow. This place just does not like physics, does it?”

  “Magic and science are ever at odds with each other,” Lockwood said, tucking the haft of his stolen spear under his arm and assuming a defensive stance between me and the queen. He held up a hand that crackled magic, and some of Ignes’s remaining guards stepped forward, forming a defensive half-moon between us and her.

  “Wait,” I said, “I didn’t mean to start a fight.”

  “When you insult a woman’s hair color, how can you expect anything else?” Orianna asked under her breath.

  “You have stepped into a war, Iron Bearer,” the queen said, and she seemed to swell in size, becoming a taller, more frightening figure, golden hair blowing all around her as if caught by a fan mounted beneath her feet. “Are you so naïve as to fail to recognize what happens in war?”

  “The only thing I fail to do here,” I said, “is see any truth. Not from you, not from your soldiers, and definitely not from the men feeding you lies and pushing this fight.”

  The queen’s eyes burned. “Coming from one with as a poisonous a tongue as yours, that means … nearly nothing.” She raised a hand, snapping her fingers. “Dispatch them.”

  The guards swarmed at us, and Lockwood immediately caught three of them, engaging with his spear, moving blurry fast in spite of his injuries. Silver blood dripped and splashed, and within seconds it was not just his I was seeing. He struck quick and true, and the guards he crossed blades with did not seem well-prepared to deal with him.

  “Okay, this is bad,” Orianna said, fluttering her wings without any actual lift taking place. She held up her hands, taking a step back and putting a hand on my arm to drag me back with her. “Gentlemen … there’s no need to get rough. We’re unarmed, we’re—”

  One of the guards reached for her, putting aside his spear just long enough to swipe forward at Orianna’s exposed arm. As he did so she grabbed him by the wrist and pull
ed him, yanking him off balance. As he came down she raised a knee and caught him in the jaw. He let out a grunt of pain and she grabbed his spear, twisting it out of his grasp in the same way Mill had taught me—pull toward the thumb, where the grip was weakest.

  That done, she brought it around and dinged him on the helmet, knocking it off. Then she raised up the butt of the spear and clubbed him in the back of the head before bringing the tip around at the remaining guard.

  “I don’t know what your plan is here,” she said, keeping her eyes completely fixed on him, “or if you even really have one. But you better do something fast, because I’m not sure I can take this guard one on one, and Lockwood seems … a little busy at present.” She nodded her head at the queen without taking her eyes off her foe. “Also, I think Ignes might have some words for you. Magic words, ones that will disintegrate your body and soul.”

  “I should never have left New York,” I said. “I should never have told my first lie. I—oh, to hell with it.” I gathered up the shredded remains of the train of my dress, looking at the bare remnants of what had been so pretty only a day or so ago. “All right, Queen Ignes—I think we need to have a conversation.” And I started toward the dais, where she waited, blazing at me and little else.

  “I am a Queen of Faerie,” Ignes said, growing even taller, a giant to my Lilliputian self. “What needs to be said between us two? What could possibly be spoken but lies from you and righteous fury from me?”

  A flicker showed me something horrifying, just for a second. Ignes was pouring green energy forward at me, magic blasting at little old me, burning toward me like green, verdant flames—

  And something was stopping it just a couple feet from my face. A barrier of blue that bled off her spell magic, swirling and raging like a river rapid.

  “I don’t need to say anything to you, really.” I took a step up onto the dais. “I don’t know anything about Faerie except you people use an awful lot of magic. And you seem to be about to kill each other in great numbers. Which is not wonderful. But I do know someone who has something to say to you … someone not like me. See, I am a liar. Been doing so for as long as I can remember. Deception has been like a second skin to me, really. My parents don’t even trust me anymore.” I shook my head. “So … I don’t think you should believe a word that comes out of my mouth, because … why would you? You don’t even know me. But …”