Did I ever understand that. He and I had a lot more in common than I thought. It hadn’t been a week yet since I murdered a bunch of people to save another bunch, and telling myself they were the bad guys didn’t help. Neither did being under the influence of Milus Dei’s drug—because I’d taken it willingly. I injected myself.
No one would blame me for it, so I had to. Because I wasn’t ever doing that again.
“Oh my God.”
Sadie’s frantic whisper drew my attention. I thought she just felt bad for Uriskel, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was staring past me, her eyes wide and unblinking.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to see whatever it was. But suddenly, I didn’t have a choice—because “it” appeared between me and the fire pit. And it wasn’t alone.
We were surrounded by ghosts.
CHAPTER 19
There were five of them. Semi-transparent women in hooded green robes with long, tangled hair, floating a few feet above the ground. Ancient, wrinkled faces, gleaming white eyes. Their robes shivered and flapped in the still air, as if a phantom wind blew only on them.
“Banshees,” Uriskel grated before I could ask what the hell they were. “Do not engage them.”
The one in front of me floated closer, holding her arms out wide. “Who calls upon Nyantha the wise, daughter of the spirits and guardian of the Trees of Ankou?” Her voice boomed out like a cannon, and the rolling echo of the words lingered in my ears.
I shuddered. Do not engage—yeah, right. They really looked like they were going to engage us, like it or not.
The banshee sighed, lowered her arms and planted a hand on her ghostly hip. “Well?” she said in a normal voice. “It was you lot calling, wasn’t it?”
“Um.” I blinked and glanced at Uriskel, who was busy staring open-mouthed at the banshee. “Yes?” I said.
“Well, ye can bloody well stop now, can’t ye? Oberon’s knees, we’ve been hearing the racket all morning.”
This was not what I expected when I thought banshee. But I’d never actually met one, so maybe this was normal. “So…are you Nyantha?” I said.
The other banshees giggled, but they stopped with a stern look from the apparent leader. “Do I look Sluagh to ye, DeathSpeaker?”
I gave a slight frown. “You know who I am.”
“Course I do. I’m dead, ain’t I?”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
Uriskel stepped forward with a wicked sneer. “What business is it of yours whether we speak with Nyantha, hag?”
“Hag! I’ll have ye—”
One of the other banshees floated over to her, and I realized with a start that her face was smooth and unlined now. She whispered something in the leader’s ear.
The lead banshee groaned. “Hang this bloody tradition,” she muttered, rolling her eyes. “Nyantha the wise, indeed.” She passed a hand down her face, and the old woman became young and breathtaking. Except for the creepy white eyes, and the whole being a ghost thing. “That better, then?” she said.
Uriskel was unmoved. “You still haven’t answered my question. Banshee. Meddling is not in your job description.”
“Typical,” the banshee snorted. “Ye think it’s all wailing and keening, washing bloody clothes at the river, that sort of shite? We get a noble death—what, every few hundred years, if we’re lucky. And we’re not just going to sit around meanwhile waiting for some nob to kick off, are we? Surely ye know this, Prince Uriskel.”
“Enough,” he snarled.
“Not one for labels, are ye?” she said with a smile. “Well, neither are we. So I’ll kindly thank ye to stuff yer assumptions.”
“All right,” he said. “Point taken.”
Sadie touched my arm, and I almost jumped. “What the hell’s going on?” she said under her breath.
“I have no idea.”
The leader managed to look offended. “Ye called for Nyantha,” she said, like she was explaining to a distracted child. “We’ve come to take ye to her.”
“About time,” Uriskel said. “Give us a moment to pack, and—”
“Not you lot.” The banshee’s features looked almost apologetic as she pointed at me. “Only the one who seeks her counsel may enter the realm of the guardian.”
Uriskel folded his arms. “The realm of the guardian. Really.”
“Sorry. I don’t make the rules,” she said.
“And what promise do we have that you’ll bring him back?”
The banshee bobbed up and down a few times. “I suppose ye shouldn’t be left here alone, at any rate,” she said. “All the trampling about ye’ve done since ye got here, psychically speaking, it’s lucky ye didn’t rouse something worse than us.” She looked over her shoulder. “Pohn. Pehn.”
Two of the other banshees floated over.
“My sisters’ll stay with ye, until we’ve come back with yer friend,” she said. “Will that do ye?”
“Fine,” Uriskel grumbled.
Pohn and Pehn looked at each other, and then smiled teasingly at him. He rolled his eyes and turned away.
Well. This could get awkward.
“Are you all sisters?” I said, hoping to steer things in a different direction.
“All banshees are sisters, in a manner of speaking,” the lead banshee said. “I’m Pan, by the bye. That’s Pyn, and she’s…” She waved a hand at the one who’d whispered in her ear. “Alice,” she sighed dramatically.
Alice giggled and vanished abruptly, only to reappear at Pan’s side, waggling her fingers at me.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “I’m Gideon, and this is Sadie. I guess you know Uriskel.”
“Right, then,” Pan said. “Now we’re all introduced, so let’s go.”
Sadie frowned and looked at me. “Are you sure about this?”
“No. But I promise I’ll be back.”
She nodded. “Hurry.”
I definitely intended to try.
CHAPTER 20
It wasn’t long before I lost all sense of direction in the unchanging forest.
Pyn floated in the lead, her hands pressed together solemly in front of her. Pan stayed to my left, and Alice was apparently supposed to flank me on the right. But she kept vanishing in silky clouds of multi-colored smoke, or sinking slowly into the ground with an expression of mock horror, or air-swimming circles around the group.
She disappeared again, and then popped into view right in front of me. Upside down.
“Alice!” Pan hissed. “Can’t ye stop fidgeting for five minutes?”
With a high-pitched giggle, Alice flipped in midair and landed on my right. She made a show of craning forward to look at Pyn, and then copied her sister’s choir-girl posture and tried to look serious. But the corners of her mouth kept twitching.
I gave it two minutes. Three at the most.
Pan shook her head. “Ye’ll have to forgive Alice,” she said. “She’s not been dead long, and the novelty hasn’t worn off yet.”
“Oh. Right.” I guessed it was good to know there was novelty in being dead. But there was something else bothering me, and I’d finally figured out what it was. “Can I ask you something…Pan?” I said.
“Aye. As if I could stop ye, DeathSpeaker.”
“Yeah, it’s about that.” I wasn’t quite sure how to ask it. “You’re dead, right?”
“Told ye that already, didn’t I?”
“You did mention it. So…why aren’t you afraid of me?”
“Should I be?” she said.
“Er, no. But all the other dead people have been, so far.” I frowned. “And you keep answering my questions with questions. I didn’t think you could do that.”
“Well, I’d answer with answers, if ye’d ask me something that has an answer.”
“Okay,” I said. “Now I’m really confused.”
She laughed, but there was nothing mocking in it. “Ye’ve no idea what it means to be the DeathSpeaker, do ye?” she said. “Just as green as our Alice, here
.”
Alice joined in with a giggle.
“You’re right. I’m clueless,” I said. “That’s why I want to talk to Nyantha. I heard she knew the DeathSpeaker before me, and I was hoping she could help me figure all this stuff out.”
“Oh, for the love of Titania. Ye’ll swell her dear old head right up, and she’ll be intolerably full of herself for weeks.” Pan flashed a fond smile. “To answer the question, I don’t fear ye because I’m already on the living side of the barrier—and I’ve no secrets to keep. Ye’ll not understand that quite yet. But ye will, soon.”
Oh, good. I could hardly wait.
The realm of the guardian was a treehouse.
In defense of its mystical-sounding name, though, it was a hell of a treehouse. The structure spanned a group of three trees, with hanging wooden bridges connecting buildings so high up, they looked like ornate birdhouses. A light mist swirled the air above the mini-compound, glinting blue in the blazing moonlight.
The banshees led me up a spiral staircase that seemed to be carved into one of the trees—the one supporting the largest house. When we reached the top, Pyn and Alice disappeared.
“Where’d they go?” I said.
“Oh, they’re just following the rules. Realm of the guardian, only one may enter, et cetera and so forth.” Pan smiled crookedly and gestured at the arched wooden door in front of us. “Ye’ll have to open that,” she said. “What with my being incorporeal.”
“Got it.” I grabbed the tarnished brass doorknob, turned it, and pushed the door open.
Inside was a living room with a green carpet, wooden walls, and off-white furniture. At least, that’s what my brain saw at first. I gradually realized that the walls were living branches, the floor was a carpet of moss—and the furniture was made out of bones.
Okay. That was a little unsettling.
“Nyantha,” Pan called as she drifted past me into the center of the room. “Ye’ve a visitor here. Isn’t that exciting?”
There was a throat-clearing sound from a shadowed doorway on the other side of the room.
Pan slumped and let out a long-suffering sigh. “Presenting Nyantha the wise, daughter of the spirits and guardian of the Trees-of-Ankou-come-seeker-of-knowledge-and-speak-your-questions-forthwith.”
Another deliberate cough.
“Really, Nyantha,” she muttered, extending her arms wide. She threw her head back, and light poured from her white eyes, filling the room with blinding light.
When it faded, Pan was gone, and someone else stood in her place.
Nyantha was surprisingly tall. Long, straight white hair fell to her waist, and her eyes were the purple of a twilight sky. Not a single line, crease or wrinkle marked her elegant face, but she still seemed ancient, timeless. She wore a simple black, shimmering gown and silver rings on every finger, and on every toe of her bare feet.
She smiled. “You know my grand-niece. What a delight,” she said. “How is Shade?”
“I think she’s fine, ma’am,” I stammered, trying to remember if I’d actually said that.
“Such lovely manners.” The Sluagh seemed to drift when she walked. Her feet barely whispered on the moss beneath them. “Welcome, DeathSpeaker. How can I help you?”
I had no idea where to start. I wanted to know about the barrier Pan had mentioned, and why it hurt when I spoke to the dead. Why sometimes I had to physically touch the corpse to contact them, and other times they just started talking to me. Why I couldn’t do it for very long, and what made me pass out when I did. Whether there was anything else I could do besides force dead people to speak.
“I see.” Nyantha smiled again. “You’d like to know everything.”
I got over the surprise pretty fast. “Right. You’re psychic,” I said. Couldn’t help wondering if it worked the same as Shade’s abilities, if she’d only hear what I wanted her to. Or if she could read anything she wanted in my head.
Nyantha raised an eyebrow. “I can read anything,” she said. “But I’ll try to stay away from your dark secrets, Gideon Black.”
This time I was a bit unnerved. “I’d appreciate that.”
“I know.” She winked and held a hand out. “Shall we, then?”
“Okay,” I said hesitantly.
I took her hand, and the world went away in a dizzying swoop of weightlessness.
And then we were in a cemetery.
CHAPTER 21
“It’s quite simple, really. You merely decide to be somewhere else.”
“How did you do that?” I blurted, before my mind processed that she’d already answered the question I hadn’t asked. “Um, right. Simple.” It didn’t sound simple to me. I decided I wanted to be somewhere else all the time, but I’d never suddenly found myself there. Of course, anywhere but being shot at by bad guys wasn’t a very specific destination.
Daoin had done something like that. Once, and probably by accident.
“You are the child of Lord Daoin?” Nyantha said. “How is he…oh. Oh, my.”
“Yeah. That.” I must’ve thought about Daoin and Taeral, and Reun, and why we’d come here unprepared and desperate instead of the way Taeral planned. Sadie had told me to hurry, but I didn’t need the prompt. I knew the longer this took, the more they’d suffer. And maybe we were too late. Despite Uriskel’s assurances, I couldn’t help thinking that if the Unseelie Court wanted them dead—they would be.
Nyantha smiled sadly. “They live yet,” she said. “Moirehna has no intention of destroying them. She seeks revenge, for a heart she believes broken.”
I stared at her. It wasn’t easy getting used to this psychic stuff.
“The Unseelie Queen,” she said as I opened my mouth to ask who’s Moirehna. “And yes, I’ll try to wait until you ask a question.”
Damn. I hadn’t even thought that far ahead. The question didn’t form in my mind until after she’d answered—and I had to force myself not to say it out loud anyway.
“Thanks,” I said. At least that was in the right place.
It’d take a few minutes for my head to stop spinning, from trying to follow a conversation that somehow happened before I had it. So I leaned on a nearby gravestone to catch my breath and look around.
Grass covered the grounds here, like the marshlands—but it was glossy black. A low-lying blue mist, like the stuff above Nyantha’s treehouse, drifted around and between the thick, inky stalks, occasionally splashing against a stone and billowing up the surface until it poured down the other side like ghostly water.
The grave markers themselves weren’t uniform, and there were few that resembled traditional headstones. Some were obelisks, like the one I’d leaned against. Others were cairns, or boulders, or rough stone sculptures. They were marked with runes instead of names, and they didn’t seem to be arranged in any particular pattern. No rows or columns or grids.
Or so I thought, until I spotted the tower of black stones in the center of the place and realized the graves formed a widening spiral from there.
“Okay,” I finally said, hoping to start a normal conversation this time. “Shade says you knew the guy who was the DeathSpeaker before me, right?”
Nyantha nodded. “I did. Poor, mad Kelwyyn,” she said.
“Er. Mad Kelwyyn?”
“Yes, he was. Eventually.” She sighed and folded her hands together. “He’d learned to kill with a word, you see. One word that could rip the very soul from you and destroy it forever—a feat only the DeathSpeaker can accomplish. He’d used it just once, to stop a power-hungry sorcerer with designs to enslave all of Arcadia. But the High Fae decided that Kelwyyn himself was too powerful…and so, to keep him in line, they murdered his daughter.”
“Jesus Christ.” Somehow I didn’t see pissing off someone more powerful than you as being an effective way to stop them.
“Indeed, it was not,” Nyantha said, and I ignored the fact that I hadn’t said that out loud. “His grief drove him to slaughter anyone who came near him. The more he killed, th
e harder they tried to destroy him. But they could not touch him. Their final attempt, thirty of the oldest and strongest nobles armed with lethal weapons and spells, lasted less than half a day against him.”
“Wait. I thought they killed him,” I said. “He’s still alive?”
“Perhaps…but no one will ever know for certain. In the end he removed himself, the only way he could.” She looked off to the distance. “The Fae are not capable of taking their own lives,” she said. “And so, Kelwyyn walked into the Mists.”
Uriskel had mentioned those, too. “What are the Mists?”
“Agents of change,” she said. “The Mists…take things, and sometimes leave other things in their place.”
I frowned. “What kind of things?”
“Cottages, fields, ponds. Forests and villages. Once, an entire realm. Those sorts of things—sometimes along with the living creatures they contain.” She looked at me, and added, “No one knows what happens inside them, because nothing alive has ever returned from the Mists.”
“Great.” So being the DeathSpeaker meant I’d eventually go crazy, kill a bunch of people, and wander off to vanish into who-knows-what forever.
“Not necessarily,” Nyantha said. “All right, then, DeathSpeaker. Let me show you how to speak to the dead properly.”
That was definitely going to be my next question.
The marker she led me to was a cairn of stones, carefully placed to form a flat-topped pyramid about four feet high. There was a large, flat stone with carved runes embedded in the top of the cairn.
She didn’t mention who was buried there.
“The barrier between the land of the living and the world of the dead exists all around us.” Nyantha took a seat on a stone bench alongside the grave. “You’ve the ability to reach through that barrier, and pull souls through to the living side.”
“Is that what I’m doing?” I said, vaguely horrified.
“Yes, but the souls take no harm in visiting this side. Many do so voluntarily. My banshees, for example,” she said. “The remains of the dead serve as a kind of touchstone, an anchor to the living realm. In a sense, they are always connected to their remains, no matter where they roam. That is why you can reach them when you’re near a body.”
Realm of Mirrors (The DeathSpeaker Codex Book 3) Page 10
