The Black Queen (Book 6)
THE FEY SERIES
in order:
Destiny: A Story of The Fey
The Sacrifice: The First Book of The Fey
The Changeling: The Second Book of The Fey
The Rival: The Third Book of The Fey
The Resistance: The Fourth Book of The Fey
Victory: The Fifth Book of The Fey
The Black Queen: The Sixth Book of The Fey
The Black King: The Seventh Book of The Fey
For Loren and Heather Coleman, with love.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks on this one go to Anne Groell for the brainstorming and for taking chances; to Dean Wesley Smith who helped me find some important solutions; and to everyone who asked me what was going to happen next.
THE SIGNAL
ONE
THE ECCRASIAN MOUNTAINS were the tallest mountains Gift had ever seen. Even though he had lived near them for the last five years, he still marveled at their height and their power. Their faintly red rock made him feel as if he were still at home; but their rounded peaks spoke of an age, a timelessness, that he hadn’t seen anywhere else in the world.
He stood outside the Student’s Hut in the Protectors Village, and waited for Madot. Dawn had just touched the tips of the mountains, the sunlight a pale yellow as it rose over the ancient peaks. It would take another hour before the light reached him.
The village was quiet. Many of the Shaman were already busy with their daily tasks. Others, the night guardians, slept. It had taken him almost a year to get used to the rhythms of the Protectors. They gathered much of their food, and the rest was brought to them by the nearby Fey Infantry garrison, a custom that was hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years old. No commerce took place here. Protectors Village served two functions: it housed the Shaman dedicated to guarding the Place of Power, and it gave the young apprentices a school of sorts, a place to train where they would be undisturbed by the real world.
Fifty stone huts huddled on the plateau. They were round and made out of mountain rock. They had no windows and only one door. Some of the huts were built for several inhabitants, like the Student’s Hut. Some were built for one person: a full-fledged Shaman who had to, by rights, live alone.
Gift wasn’t a Shaman yet, and he wouldn’t be for a long time. He had decades of training ahead of him. Madot, his main teacher, believed that he could cut his training short because of the power of his magick, the unprecedented strength of his Vision, but she was only guessing. There had never been an apprentice like Gift in the entire history of the Fey. His magick was unique—his heritage was unique—and because of those things, his future was uncertain.
He rubbed his hands together in the early morning chill. Madot had instructed him to wear only his apprentice’s robes. She was going to take him to the Place of Power, several years before most apprentices were ever taken. It was said that a goat herder found this cave, and took his family inside. When they came out, they were Fey.
Simply entering the cave did not create a Fey. There was magick in a Place of Power that, when tapped, altered everything. That much he knew without being taught. He had discovered a second Place of Power fifteen years before, and had lived in it for several weeks. There he had seen things he still did not comprehend, things that had changed his life forever.
He would not be standing here if he hadn’t lived in that place.
He shifted from one bare foot to the other. His toes were growing cold. The bottoms of his feet had become hard from use. He rarely wore shoes—they were frowned upon by the Shaman—but usually he was moving. He almost never stood still.
Madot saw that as a flaw. She saw many things about him as flaws. He had been raised by adoptive parents who had no idea how to control his Visionary magick, and he had used his talents in ways that the Shaman here frowned upon. That his spells had been successful didn’t matter, nor did the fact that with them, he had saved hundreds of lives. That he had misused the magick was the important thing, the thing they wanted to corral in him.
Wild magick, or so Madot called it. She said his wild magick and his impatience were his greatest faults. Until he had come here, he thought his wild magick his greatest asset. He hadn’t even known he was impatient until he had come to a place where time seemed to have stopped.
There were no regular schedules as there had been when he lived in a Fey military camp, no rhythms as there had been when he lived in the rural areas of his homeland, Blue Isle. Here the Shaman went about their business as if they were being governed from within. He always felt at loose ends. He wanted to stay busy, although sometimes there was nothing to do.
Madot said he had to get used to quiet. He thought that the most difficult thing of all.
He glanced up the mountainside. The Place of Power was a morning’s climb from the Protector’s Village. From here, he could see the silvery shimmer that marked the cave’s entrance. His stomach jumped slightly. He had no idea how different this Place of Power would be from the one he discovered on Blue Isle. On Blue Isle, the Place of Power contained items from the Isle’s main religion, Rocaanism. But Rocaanism wasn’t practiced anywhere on this continent, known as Vion. Here, at the foundation of the Fey Empire, the word “religion” wasn’t used at all.
Finally, he saw the door to Madot’s hut open. She stepped outside and sniffed the air, as she always did, as if the faint fragrances on the breeze gave her information that Gift could never get. To him, all the smells were familiar: the dusty sharpness of the mountains themselves; the pungent odor of the ceta plants that grew perennially behind the Student’s Hut; the stench of the manure that he and the other students had spread on the communal garden just the night before. Nothing stood out, and nothing was unexpected. Once he had asked her what she smelled, and she had smiled.
The future, boy
, she had said.
Just the future.
It also took him a while to get used to being called “boy.” He was thirty-three years old, a full adult in most places. To many Shaman, though, a thirty-three year old was still in his childhood. Most full Shaman didn’t begin their solitary practices until they were 90 or older.
The Shaman were the longest lived of the Fey, and it was a good thing, because so few had the ability to become Shaman. Of those who did, even fewer chose the work. It was arduous and its rewards were few. He still thought of the Shaman who helped raise him—a woman he thought of as his father’s Shaman, even though his father hadn’t been Fey—and of the sacrifices she had made so that her Vision, her dream for the future could come true. She had died for that dream. Apprentices did not become Shaman until they were ready to make that supreme sacrifice. It was the one area that Gift was confident he would pass. He had sacrificed so much over the years that sacrificing his life seemed a very small thing indeed.
Madot was watching him. Her eyes were dark against her wizened skin. Her white hair surrounded her face like a nimbus. The hair was the unifying feature of all the Shaman, the hair and the desiccated look of the body, the skin. It was as if, in training their Vision to See and Foresee, they had lost something vital, something that nourished them from within.
Gift had none of that look. He favored his Fey mother in most things, but it was obvious that Gift was not fully Fey. His father had been the King of Blue Isle, and the people there were short, blond haired and blue eyed, with skin so fair that it turned red in the sun. Gift’s Fey heritage showed in his height, his hair, and his faintly pointed ears, but his Islander heritage diluted his skin to a golden brown, made his cheeks round instead of angular, and gave his eyes a vivid blueness that usually startled any Fey meeting him for the first time.
Madot found Gift’s appearance cause for concern. He had been having Visions since he was a child, and he had first used his Visionary powers when he was three. Thirty years of such extreme magick should have taken a toll on his skin, his hair, his face, but it had not. And that worried her. Once she had mumbled that perhaps he hadn’t tapped his full power yet, and once she had said that perhaps his magick was something Other, something so different that the rules no longer applied.
“You are being impatient,” she said as she approached him, her dark robes flowing around her. Her voice was high and warm. He would have called it youthful if he had heard it without seeing her. Yet she was among the oldest of the Shaman in the village, and one of the most powerful.
He smiled at her accusation. She was correct. He was impatient.
“I was trying to wait,” he said.
“Trying forces you to be impatient. You must not try. You must simply be.”
He shook his head slightly. “You’ve been telling me that for five years.”
“And for five years you have not understood me.”
“Then perhaps the problem is with the messenger, not the recipient.”
She smiled at him, and her eyes twinkled. The expression filled her tiny face with wrinkles and made her look like a wizened infant. “That’s the argument of the impatient.”
He shrugged. “Well, we’ve already established that.”
She laughed, then put a hand on his arm. “Are you ready for a climb?”
“I have been for years.”
“No,” she said, the smile suddenly gone. “You have not. You have wanted to go for years. But you have not been ready.”
“And you think I am now?”
“I didn’t say that either.”
He waited. Word games were part of a Shaman’s business. It was canon here that information given too easily was wasted on its hearer.
“You want to ask me,” she said, looking up at him.
“I do. But I’m trying to be patient.”
“That ‘try’ word again.” She sighed. “Ask anyway.”
“Why are you taking me up there today?”
She looked away from him. “‘The hand that holds the scepter shall hold it no more, and the man behind the throne shall reveal himself in all his glory.’ Have you heard that before?”
“No,” he said, startled. He thought he had heard all the prophecies about the Black Throne.
“Four had visits from the Powers last night. Those were the words given.” Four meant four of the Shaman, probably those guarding the Place of Power. The Powers were the spirits of the Fey dead who, from the planes beyond, guided the living. At least, that was how they were once explained to him. The Shaman believed that the Powers were more than that, and that their abilities were indescribable to mere mortals.
Madot was watching him closely.
He shook his head slightly. “I don’t see the connection.”
“Shamanistic Visions are always about the Black Throne.”
“I know that,” he said. “But I thought the Visions could foretell any future point from now to a thousand years from now.”