The Black Queen (Book 6) (31 page)

It looked as if he might not make it the rest of the way. Pelô and two other Protectors, a man and a woman, blocked his way.

They all wore the robes that blended in with the mountain, and they all plunked their staves before him, creating a barrier to the rest of his climb. The polished stone platform looked like something he could easily fall off.

The shimmer from the cave, though, felt like a pull, reminding him of his goal.

“You have no place here,” Pelô said.

“Says who?” Gift asked. He pulled himself up another step, careful to keep his hands away from their staves.

“We guard this place,” Pelô said as if Gift were a stranger to him.

“For my family,” Gift said.

“For the Fey,” said another of the Protectors, a woman. She looked like most other Shaman, her white hair exploding around her face, her skin wrinkled and dark. Gift did not recognize her or the third guardian, and that did not surprise him. The Protectors kept to themselves.

“I am Fey,” Gift said.

“Half Fey,” Pelô said.

“Fey,” Gift said. “If you count blood then you should always count blood. Most Fey have the blood of other races running through their veins.”

He climbed another step. Now his torso rose above the platform. If they wanted to push him backwards, he had nothing to hang on to.

Pelô lifted his staff. Obviously he was thinking just that.

Gift smiled. It felt like a cold smile. He didn’t mean anything by it except a showing of teeth. “Push me off,” he said, “and I will fall a very long way. If I hit my head and die, you have not only killed someone, which will make you lose your power, you have also killed the closest heir to the Black Throne. Don’t think my family won’t investigate that.”

“I will make certain you’re only injured,” Pelô said, lifting his staff higher.

“And if you injure me, I’ll make sure my sister pulls all the Shaman from Protectors Village. This place will be ours,” Gift said. “You will have no rights.”

Pelô stopped, holding his staff slightly off the ground. The other Protectors looked at him, worry on their faces.

“If you let me go by with no questions asked,” Gift said, “you can continue your business here as if nothing has changed.”

“To let you by would be to fail in our duty,” Pelô said.

“To let me by, or to let anyone by?” Gift asked.

“You,” the woman whispered. Pelô shot her an angry look. She shrugged. “You have been to the other Place of Power.”

“Your people control it,” the third Protector said. “What will stop you from finding the Triangle?”

“Why you, of course,” Gift said with as much sarcasm as he could muster. The third Protector looked surprised. “Or should I say, the Shaman from the Village.”

“Are they coming for you?” Pelô asked.

Gift shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not going in to find the Triangle. I wouldn’t know how if I wanted to, and I wouldn’t know how to coordinate my efforts with anyone on Blue Isle. I’m going to see my mother.”

“Your mother?” Pelô asked.

“She’s a Mystery. I can’t see her anywhere except a Place of Power.”

Pelô frowned. He had clearly not expected that.

“You may come with me if you want,” Gift said. “All of you can. I swear I won’t touch anything, nor will I remove anything. I’m just going in the mouth until I can see if my mother will show up.”

“You think she will?” Pelô asked.

“You think she will not?” the third Protector asked at the same time.

“I haven’t seen her since my father disappeared,” Gift said. “Except that I got a sense of her just before I touched the Black Throne. I want to know if it was really her I felt, or something else.”

Pelô set his staff down gently. It no longer seemed like a threat. “We could forbid you.”

“You could,” Gift said. “But you can’t enforce. If I chose to use violence to go around you, I can. The only people you prevent from using the cave are those who don’t know the limits of your powers. You might want to think about that in the future when you chose your Protectors.”

Pelô narrowed his eyes, but he stood back. At his cue, the others did as well. Gift took the remaining stairs and stepped onto the platform. As before, he suddenly felt the effects of his exertion. His legs were tired, his hands ached, and he was thirsty.

He reached into the pocket of his robe, and pulled out the half eaten loaf of bread. “I’ll share,” he said, “if you have water.”

The female Protector disappeared behind a rock. The male Protector took some bread, then looked at Pelô as if asking permission. Pelô nodded once, a small movement that seemed grudging.

The woman came back with a stone mug filled with water. Gift lifted it to his mouth, and then said, “This isn’t from the cavern itself, is it?”

“No,” the woman said as if he had shocked her.

Gift held out the mug to her. “You first.”

She took it and drank, something she wouldn’t have done if the water had come from inside the cavern. Then she offered the mug to Gift.

He took it and drank. The water was cool, and slightly brackish, just like the water in the Village below. It tasted fine, though, considering how thirsty he was. He took a bit of bread and gave them the rest. Then he turned to Pelô. “Are you coming with me?”

Pelô nodded.

Gift wasn’t surprised. If he had been doing Pelô’s job, he would have had the same response.

“You two remain here,” Pelô said to his companions. “Make sure he has come alone.”

The woman nodded. The man looked down the stairs, as if he could see the friends that had come with Gift. Gift shook his head slightly. As if he had any friends here. He had people who feared him, and people who feared him less. Plus a handful who believed he was doing something he shouldn’t be doing, and another handful who believed he needed to be the next Black King.

At that thought, he glanced at the stairs leading to the Black Throne. A shudder ran through him. He did not want to go down there again. Instead, he walked past the polished bench.

The mouth of the cave was recessed into the reddish stone. It looked like the mouth to any ordinary cave: nothing marked it as separate, unlike the Place of Power on Blue Isle. There the swords stood as testament to the religion founded after the cave had been discovered. But the Fey had no real religion. They had accepted the magick as magick, not as a gift from God. They had treated it with no reverence at all, and that was reflected in their cave.

The stone platform, though, remained polished all the way to the cave’s mouth. Gift walked toward it slowly, followed by Pelô a half step behind him. At the mouth, Gift again felt the tug of the cave’s magick, a visceral thing, as if the entire area longed for him to be inside it.

His hands were shaking. This cave felt different from the one at home. This one felt older, more powerful, and not as benign. Perhaps that was because the other Place of Power had, in some ways, been his. It had also been untouched for centuries. This one had Shaman coming to it all the time.

As he grew closer to the mouth, he heard water burbling. It sounded louder than the fountain in Blue Isle’s Place of Power. He glanced at Pelô, who tilted his head slightly when his gaze met Gift’s. It was a mocking look, a look which challenged, although Gift wasn’t exactly sure what the challenge was.

The cavern looked dark from the outside. Gift took a step through the mouth, and felt warmth. A warm dry breeze that smelled faintly of cinnamon, and beneath it, crisp, fresh water.

The floor here glowed red, a deep red so dark it was almost black. The color was halfway between the red on the floor of Blue Isle’s Place of Power, and the black stone his father had shown him. Gift shuddered. Was that how the Throne turned black? So much power spilled that it had fallen into the floor, the walls, the very ground itself, and from that ground rose the Throne?

He didn’t want to speculate. Instead he looked.

The walls here were red, a light red, adding to the glow. The ceiling was still white. All of the stone was polished and shone in the unnatural light.

There was nothing on the walls. No swords, no globes, no tapestries. The walls were sheer, as if time had polished them smooth.

But there were stairs in the center of the cavern. A long flight of stairs, as dark a red as the floor. Gift stepped inside, felt the warmth envelop him like an old friend. The sound of burbling water grew louder. He peered over the stairs, expecting to see a table and a fountain, just as there was in Blue Isle.

Instead, he saw a stream that cascaded down a far wall, and bubbled through the large polished stone at the bottom of the stairs, then disappeared into a hole beneath the stairs themselves. The water looked powerful, almost angry, a violent mixture of froth and movement.

He backed away. Pelô was watching him. Gift felt the hair rise on his arms, the back of his neck. He turned.

“It is not as you expect?” Pelô asked.

Gift wasn’t going to answer. He wasn’t going to give Pelô the satisfaction. “The tunnels leading off the stream, have all of them been explored?”

“Some,” Pelô said. “And some of the explorers never returned.”

Gift nodded. He knew how those tunnels felt, if they were anything like the ones in the Place of Power at home. He’d gone into one without his father’s permission. There was a sensation of time slowing, and the feeling that, if he took any branch, he would end up somewhere else. He had gotten a sense of this place in one of Blue Isle’s tunnels, and the sense of another place too. He supposed here, he would sense Blue Isle’s Place of Power and that third, as yet undiscovered place. But he could not go there. That took the help of another, just as he had said.

He took a deep breath. He didn’t come in here to see the cave. He came here to see if his mother would appear to him again. “Give me some room,” he said.

Pelô bowed slightly, another mocking gesture. “As you wish.” He retreated to the cave’s mouth and stood there like a sentry, holding his staff as if it were a spear.

Gift walked to the stairs and sat on the top step. The stone here felt unnaturally smooth, and too warm. The redness seemed to swirl inside it, coming up against him and then moving away like water. It almost seemed to him as if the redness wanted to touch him and, in touching him, was satisfied and left.

“Mother?” he whispered. “If that was you I saw by the Black Throne, please talk to me.”

His whisper echoed faintly down the stairs and toward the water where it seemed to bounce along the top of the froth. He could almost see his words.

Why should she appear to him? Why would she? She had disappeared with his father, her one true love, into one of the tunnels off the Place of Power in Blue Isle. She didn’t need Gift any more. She had fulfilled her purpose.

Or had she? Her enemy still lived. Matthias, the one she hated the most, was, the last Gift heard, still alive in Constant, attempted to restart the religion of Rocaanism.

“Mother?” he whispered again.

He felt a hand on his back. He turned, about to tell Pelô to back away, when he saw himself looking into a familiar face.

Arianna’s face, only more Fey, harsher and wiser at the same time.

His mother.

Jewel.

She held out her arms and he slid into them, letting her hug him. He hadn’t seen her in a long time and he thought he had lost this need for her, a feeling that had grown in him at the other Place of Power, when he had seen her almost every day.

Over her shoulder, he saw Pelô frown. Gift’s movement must have looked strange. Only three people could see Gift’s mother. To everyone else, she was invisible, something they couldn’t even hear or sense. Pelô knew this, of course, but he probably hadn’t seen it before. Most Fey hadn’t.

Slowly Gift pulled back and studied her. She looked the same. She could choose how she wanted to look and she always chose how she looked on the day she first saw his father. She had been a young woman, a teenager, her long black hair in a braid down her back, an old-fashioned Fey leather jerkin covering dark breeches. Once she had seemed impossibly old to him. Now she looked like a child with an old woman’s eyes.

“You didn’t hear my Warning,” she said.

“In the Throne room?” he asked.

She nodded.

“I saw you for a moment, and that was it.”

She closed her eyes and bowed her head. Her hair turned silver along its roots, and then went back to black. “I was afraid of that,” she said. “It’s my fault. I should have Warned you before you came here. But I lost track of time.”

She raised her head, her eyes open, and put her finger beneath his chin. “So much time has passed.”

“Yes,” he said.

“You haven’t married.”

“No.”

“You haven’t even loved.”

He flinched. “No.”

“Arianna has no children.” His mother shook her head. “You must, Gift. You must or Bridge’s children will inherit. They will lose all that we have won.”

“Is that what you wanted to Warn me about?” he asked.

“It’s too late now.” Her words were soft. “What I wanted to stop you from doing you have already done. A Warning now is wasted.”