by SM Reine
She could only distinguish Wintersong from the rest because he was occasionally willing to hold a conversation with her. That was likely tethered to the madness simmering in his eyes.
Marion’s journals included her thoughts about how Genesis had unhinged many people. She believed that the sidhe had coped better than other factions because they had cohered into a tight community. There were still screw-ups among the sidhe who had entered death and come back from the other side weird.
Wintersong had that kind of darkness in him. Marion was glad to see it for once, because it meant he, of all the sidhe, wasn’t cold toward his new queen.
He was the one she singled out on their path to the gardens.
“How long have you been with the Autumn Court?” Marion asked, pacing Wintersong. The handmaidens were too busy gossiping with Ariane to notice. Her mother easily faded into the gaggle of mean-girl faeries, snapping ice roses off of the bushes and lobbing them at each other.
Wintersong pulled a scarf around his head to keep the lower half of his face warm, but his garnet eyes glowed. “Why’s you want to know?”
“I need to know who is in charge of my life,” Marion said.
The answer made his eyes glow brighter. “I been knocking around with Rage and ‘em all for years. It was meant to be, us together like this.” His eyelids crinkled, and she imagined he was smiling. “The sidhe are God’s chosen people.”
Marion thought she would have known if the gods had picked one race to be better than others. “How do you know?”
“We saw God right before Genesis kicked us in the nuts, and that was when he said he picked us, he did. That’s hows we know.”
There were two male gods. Seth, of course, and Elise’s husband. “Which one did you meet?”
“The boy with them creepy eyes,” Wintersong said.
Marion would have never described Seth as creepy-eyed—or a boy, for that matter. As such, she assumed Wintersong was referring to Elise’s husband. “You’ve been with the court ever since Genesis, then. Have you seen anyone named Benjamin?”
“What’s the last name?” Wintersong asked.
“I don’t know.”
“There been some Benjamins around.” His eyes kept scanning the surroundings, as if he expected an assailant to emerge from the midnight-drenched stairs behind them. “A lobbyist—Benjamin Verbinsky. We used to have a cook named Ben Minaj too. Don’t see that guy no more.”
“Verbinsky?” A lobbyist might have had underworld connections. “I want a meeting with him.”
“Good luck with that one, Your Highness,” Wintersong said. “Benjamin been dead for years.”
So much for that.
Ariane waved to Marion, catching her attention. The handmaidens were returning from their ice battle to swarm her. Marion’s conversation with Wintersong was no longer private.
She muttered a polite thank-you and returned to the embrace of the sidhe girls.
They walked the gardens between the southernmost towers. It was painfully cold, even sheltered by the ice walls, but Ariane showed no sign of being bothered. She chatted brightly about spells she wanted to try from the latest edition of Hume’s Almanac. And when she grew bored of that, she talked about menial celebrity gossip.
The topics were inoffensive compared to Ariane’s earlier overtures, but far less interesting to Marion. The handmaidens were riveted of course. It kept them distracted.
With the incessant drone of her mother’s voice, Marion couldn’t escape the well of her dark thoughts.
Standing beside Konig on the throne.
Standing beside him to hold vigil over his dead mother.
Kneeling within a ring of balefire, begging Seth not to kill himself.
The brush of lips on lips.
Waking up in Arawn’s Sheol tower.
“What do you think?”
Ariane was speaking directly to Marion, who had become adept at answering questions that she wasn’t paying attention to. “You’ll have to elaborate on your question.”
“The meeting with Adàn,” Ariane said. “Do you think you could make it?”
Startled, Marion looked for the handmaidens. They’d been diverted by trying to break the ice on a pond using their stilettos. They weren’t listening.
“A meeting with Adàn. Hmm.” Marion had made a deal with Adàn once and was amicable to the concept of more. But she’d completely been ignoring her mother. She had no clue what that deal would be.
“It’s related to his travels through the Ethereal Levant,” Ariane said gently. Marion’s mumbles hadn’t convinced Ariane that she had her daughter’s attention.
“He said he didn’t need my help traveling through the EL.”
“He doesn’t,” she said. “He wants to help you.”
Marion gathered her cloak around her chin, fingernails stroking the cottony puffs of fur. “With what?”
“You’ll know once you connect with him.”
It sounded suspiciously like more politics. “What in the world have you gotten into this time?”
“Don’t frown like that,” Ariane said. “You’ll get wrinkles prematurely.”
Marion’s fingers flew to the corner of her eyes. She was barely twenty years old. She couldn’t get wrinkles.
“I won’t meet with Adàn in secret,” she said, forcing herself to drop her hands. “More cloak-and-dagger nonsense is the last thing I need at this point.” The next rumor would say that Marion was having an affair with her mother’s boyfriend, and everything would fall apart from there.
The wind blasted harder over the wall, shaking the trees. Marion’s gaze snapped up to the icy branches. They were bare of leaves, but clutched ice balls the size of peaches at the tip of each twig. They sang out when they clashed.
It shouldn’t have been possible for such a strong wind to reach the garden. Not unless someone had broken through the palace’s wards.
Tove screamed. “Look!”
Sidhe scrambled over the garden walls. They were tough little brown creatures with beady eyes and rough-hewn knives, and they came toward Marion by the dozen. “Those are urisk,” she said as she backpedaled, grabbing her mother’s arm.
“Urisk?” Ariane asked.
“Assassins.” That was the only way that Marion had encountered them before. They had been mercenaries hired by Leliel.
Marion had survived, thanks to Seth—but that had been on Earth, where the sidhe had been weaker and less numerous.
They poured over the wall, rappelling down the slick surface and cutting their ropes at the bottom. Once they hit the ground they moved like giant rats, fast and skittering.
“Protect the queen!” Wintersong shouted, drawing his sword. “You—get her mother!”
One of the guards wrapped his arms around Ariane. Both of them vanished.
Another knight moved to seize Marion. Magic sparked through her, and she clenched her fists around bolts of electricity she didn’t remember summoning. “Don’t touch me!”
He took a step back—right into the path of an arrow that had been intended for Marion. It punched through the back of his armor. Sidhe magic flashed.
The garden swirled like it was draining into a sink.
Pain crept into Marion’s senses, and she became aware of blood trickling down her arm. She’d been struck by a second arrow. The wound was bubbling.
Her senses distorted. Marion’s grip on the Middle Worlds slipped.
Sensations crashed in from every side.
She wasn’t in a serene ice garden at the center of her palace, but at the bottom of a deep well, submerged in ice water. The air bubbles that escaped at her shocked exclamation were neon blue. There was no surface to drift towards; they hung around her head, blurring the stone walls.
Where were the Raven Knights? Her handmaidens? The urisk? She could see nothing but chilly darkness.
Water swirled. Gravity sucked her down. Her heart sank faster than the rest of her chilly body.
Her min
d was objecting to the overload of sensations by generating hallucinations. She wasn’t in a well. She was exactly where she’d been moments before, and she was still in danger from urisk that she couldn’t see.
Marion lifted her hands, fingers spread to allow lightning to crackle down her forearms. It cast the bottom of the well in a silvery glow.
She knew how to make lightning.
Abstract runes flowed through her mind like a jumbled alphabet. She could pick some of them out: the one that connected with the sky on Earth, the one that dried the air, the one that drew electricity out of her body’s cells.
She flung her hands toward the darkness.
Lightning shot from her palms, slamming into the sides of the well.
A scream. It was high pitched, as she remembered an urisk’s scream to be.
Marion shot again, and there were more screams.
Fresh lightning bloomed from the tangle of her anger. The lonely well vanished to reveal the garden. Towers reared high above her head. She was surrounded by battle, and Marion was surprised to see that the handmaidens fought the urisk with almost as much skill as the knights.
Hidden bodyguards as well as spies. Konig was thoughtful for a controlling bastard.
None of Marion’s guards could reach her because she was encircled by a dozen of the urisk and their wiry forms were plated with armor her lightning couldn’t touch. Someone had enchanted them against mage craft.
Clawed hands dug into Marion’s limbs. They tore at her furs, opening gashes through which the cold could bite.
She kicked them away. “Wintersong!”
The white-haired sidhe’s gaze shot across the garden. He was fighting urisk against the wall. “Hold on!”
He ripped through them, sword swinging.
The remaining four Raven Knights linked arms. Light flashed so bright that it consumed the garden. When the light faded, Konig stood within that ring, the silken ribbons of his royal coat fluttering around him.
His eyes fell on Marion, while he was safe within the protective sphere of knight magic.
They’d summoned him from the Autumn Court.
Marion saw her husband for only an instant before an urisk’s hand jerked her ankle. She tumbled to the icy ground.
They lifted her.
“Help me!” Marion cried. The urisk were dragging her toward the garden wall. They wouldn’t even need to cut her open, make her bleed. The cold would kill her in minutes.
Wintersong appeared, sword swinging. He only managed to make one drop before Konig spoke.
“Stop it,” said the king.
The knight froze. Sweat beaded his forehead.
He couldn’t move when he was ordered not to. Wintersong stood outside the ring of clawing urisk as they hauled her to that wall.
Anger and despair mingled within Marion. “Konig!”
“Tell them to stop, princess,” Konig said. “You’re Queen of the Winter Court. You’re running it on your own. Your word is law, and the world will bend to your will—won’t it? Because you’re fine without me.” Throwing the words back in her face managed to hurt twice as much as the attacks.
“Stop it! Stop!” An urisk tangled its fingers into her hair and dragged her to the wall. Her neck ached. It was going to rip her head off trying to get her out of the garden.
“Make Niflheimr save you!” Konig roared, radiating with his father’s rage.
Hot, angry tears shot to Marion’s eyes. “I can’t!”
That was what Konig had been waiting for.
The king’s human form vanished. He was starlight, the wind, the icy hand of winter.
He was Niflheimr.
Konig closed around them all. Marion couldn’t breathe within her husband’s form. He overwhelmed her and smothered her lungs and claimed everything that she’d thought belonged to her.
He made her small.
One by one, Konig plucked the urisk away. His reach appeared in a dozen different ways. Sometimes it was a tree branch reaching down to snap a neck, sometimes it was a spear of ice thrusting from the ground to impale an unsuspecting body.
Konig snapped back into his human form standing over her, a hand extended toward Marion on the ground. He was as towering as Niflheimr.
His crown had changed, just as the Middle Worlds had been changing to accept his rule. It used to be a gold band across his forehead. Now tiny daggers thrust from the edges. One had cut his skin, and liquid emerald trickled from his temple to his jaw.
“You owe me everything,” Konig said, waiting for her to take his hand.
Marion took one long, slow breath, and then clasped his hand, allowing him to pick her up.
When she got on her feet again, her fear vanished. She was calm in her anger. Marion was sore, but alive. The urisk had done no real damage.
Marion spoke words that felt like they’d been birthed straight from her tongue, unconnected to her heart. “Thank you, Konig.” She made herself lean against him, and Konig wrapped his arm around her waist to support her, as a husband should.
“You can really thank me by coming to dinner,” he said.
And she said, “I will.”
7
Marion didn’t sleep that night. She took the leather folder from her desk and pored over it in the darkness, using only a single tiny witchlight for visibility.
The pages were instructions to make a gris-gris. The Old Marion had thought such a gris-gris was so important that memories of it had piggybacked into her mind through Onoskelis.
So she would make a gris-gris.
She lifted a hand. “Help me.”
A vine loosed itself from the tangle against her wall, creeping to her fingertips. She plucked it from among its brethren. It was a sturdy fiber that wove into a bracelet well, though she had to strip the delicate leaves from its stalk.
Marion sank into crafting the bracelet. When she was immersed in carving tiny runes into the vine, she wasn’t thinking about urisk. She wasn’t thinking of the way Konig had taunted her. And she especially wasn’t thinking about how quickly she’d gone running into his arms for safety.
Her stomach churned at the memory of thanking Konig for her rescue.
She was safe with him, in a way. As long as they stayed in the Middle Worlds, Konig was as good as a god, and nothing could hurt Marion unless he allowed it. And that was the problem, wasn’t it?
A wet circle appeared on the cover of the leather folder. Marion blinked, and a second circle joined it. They were dripping from the tip of her nose.
She touched a finger to the wetness, and magic jolted from the runes.
“Hello,” Marion said.
It felt like someone responded by saying, Hello.
It was an echo of the witch she used to be speaking through time via magic.
She shoved the half-finished gris-gris and the leather folder into her desk again.
When the witching hour fell and even the wildest winds silenced, she slipped from her office and peeked into the hallway. Three sidhe stood outside. A fourth was surely on the balcony.
She shut the door again.
The handmaidens were asleep in the servants’ quarters with the door open. Two had passed out in one bed together. Another was sleeping on the floor. They’d hear Marion if she wasn’t quiet.
She went to the pantry, found an empty plastic bottle. The majority of its contents had been long since consumed, but a few drips and drops remained on the inside of the water bottle.
Those droplets had come from a river in Sheol called Mnemosyne. Seth hoped that it would be enough to restore the memories she’d lost in the Canope, but there’d been nothing to restore at the time.
Marion’s memories existed somewhere in the universe, trapped between pages of a book. Onoskelis had opened the cover a crack.
She shook the bottle upside down, unscrewed the cap, and licked it empty with her tongue. Then Marion shut her eyes, and she let her mind drift back to a time when she hadn’t been quite so alone.
/> After a few weeks, Marion had already forgotten so much about Seth Wilder. Even though she remembered that he smelled like well-worn leather, it was a fact dedicated to rote memory. She couldn’t summon the sensory experience without the presence of his body. She knew he had a scar on his lip but couldn’t remember what, say, his left ear had looked like.
These were the things that simply disappeared with time. Seth was aging out of Marion’s mind.
Konig remained as immediate as ever.
Marion missed feeling safe.
The effects of the water sank into her, and memory far more vivid than dull fact swelled within her skin.
She was sitting on a couch in Seth’s old living room. He had been stabbed by a sidhe sword while defending her from assassins. Marion had feared for his life, though Seth had remained calm through the process of stitching the injury.
The memory slipped sideways into another, sitting at a bar next to Seth. Amusement warmed his brown eyes. He thought it was funny how Marion had so carefully wiped clam chowder off the side of the bowl, then folded her napkin so her fingers wouldn’t get damp.
The bartender had gotten Marion a Long Island Iced Tea when she fluffed her hair and batted her eyelashes at him, ensuring that she didn’t get carded even though she was obviously under twenty-one. Those gestures worked on all men except Seth. He’d always been immune, and stable as the earth beneath her feet.
And then the quiet hours driving to Port Angeles in Seth’s truck. When he had been only a few inches away for so long, and Marion had pretended to read her book, and Seth had pretended to watch the road, and they had both pretended not to look at each other.
Little moments, inconsequential things that she’d let slip past her.
If she’d known how much she’d want to bring those moments back, she might not have rushed through them so mindlessly the first time around.
A couple drops from Mnemosyne weren’t enough to summon more. When her mind cleared, she was still alone in the Winter Court. Marion didn’t remember more than she used to. The empty hole within her mind was still empty.
But there was light in her bedroom that she knew hadn’t existed before she’d sunk into the mire of her memories.
