The Black Queen (Book 6) (5 page)

“No.”

He waited.

She swallowed, hard, his mentor no longer. Something in their relationship had changed. Something fundamental.

“I wanted to see,” she said slowly, “if the Throne would hold you. I thought it would. You’re the oldest child of the direct line. It should have held you whether you wanted it to or not.”

“And if it had, you would have stopped my training.”

“A warrior has no place among the Shaman,” she said. “A Black King cannot serve as his own advisor.”

Gift pushed himself off the floor. He was shaking. A gold outline of his body remained in the spot where he had lain. Slowly it returned to red, in all places except the points where his feet still touched.

“It did hold me,” he said. “It grabbed me and it was going to pull me in and I pulled away.”

“That’s not possible,” she said.

“I did.”

“You cannot separate yourself from the Black Throne.”

“I did.” His body still ached from the strain of that, too.

“It wanted you?” she whispered.

“And I said no.”

Her eyes widened. “That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”

“Oh?” He was regaining control of his voice. He made it sound cool. “Was I supposed to disappear into the Throne, and then try to yank command from my sister?’

“She would have Seen. She would have given command to you. It would have worked.”

“This was your Vision?”

“Once,” she said. She raised her head and looked him straight in the eye. “I Saw your sister hand her Throne to a tall Fey with coal black hair. I did not see his face, only hers. But when you came here, I knew you were the younger version of the man I Saw in my Vision.”

He didn’t know how she could know that. He had learned, in his thirty-three years, that Visions were not so easily deciphered. “Have you told anyone else about this Vision?”

“Of course.” It was standard procedure for a Shaman—for any kind of Visionary—to share a Vision with another. Sometimes the other Visionary had a similar Vision, and together they would assemble the truth as if it were a puzzle. “I told the entire village. Others had Seen changes in the Black Throne, but none had Seen you. We decided to wait, to give you training, and to see what it did to you.”

He touched his hair. His still-black hair. “You expected me to turn white.”

“And to age,” she said. “When you did not, we knew you were the one in the Vision. No one else looks like you.”

“From the back, I’m not so sure.”

Her gaze was soft. “We have thought of these things.”

“You’ve thought of Sebastian?” He was referring to the stone being whom he called brother. “He’s my golem. He was created in my image.”

“He does not look like you. I have Seen him. His face is cracked.”

“His face. But from the back, he could be mistaken for me.”

“No,” she said. “He moves differently than you.”

Sebastian did, too. He moved slowly, as if each action took extra thought. Just from his movements, it was possible to tell that Sebastian was not made of flesh and blood.

“And then there’s my sister,” Gift said. “She’s a Shape-Shifter. Have you thought that the person you saw was a Shape-Shifter as well?”

“She was handing the Throne to this person. He had to be of Black Blood. She is the only Shape-Shifter of Black Blood in recorded history.”

Gift sighed. Madot had a point, but it still made him uneasy. His own Visions, the recent ones, haunted him. Why was he seeing his great-grandfather? Rugad had been dead for fifteen years, slaughtered with his troops near the Place of Power on Blue Isle by Gift’s Islander father and the former leader of the Islander religion. They had believed that Rugad, the greatest warrior of all the Fey—the Black King who conquered the most territory in his reign—was an evil, ruthless man who had to be eliminated. Was his appearance in Gift’s Vision a symbol of someone else, someone equally as ruthless, who would wrest the Throne from Arianna? And who would that be? He could think of no one of Black Blood who could do such a thing.

“You do not believe me,” Madot said.

“I do not believe that I was the man in your Vision.” He ran a hand through his hair. He ached everywhere, and he hadn’t been this exhausted in years. What had happened to him here? And did he dare tell the Shaman of it? Or would they see that as yet another sign that he was not worthy of their profession, not capable of their magick?

“You did not See what I Saw.”

He frowned. “I have never Seen myself on the Black Throne.”

“Just because you have not Seen it,” she said, “doesn’t mean it won’t happen.” One of the main tenets of Vision. A Visionary never Saw the entire truth.

“I know,” he said.

“But you Saw something else, something that disturbs you.” She spoke softly, referring to his recent Vision.

He didn’t want to answer her, not yet. He needed to talk to the others, but he would do so before all the Shaman. He had had some of these Visions before, when his great-grandfather had first arrived on Blue Isle. Gift did not think the return of the Visions a coincidence.

“What was that light?” he asked Madot.

She glanced at the Throne and shook her head. “I have never heard of anything like it. But then, no one has rejected the Black Throne before.”

He had put that much together himself. “But what do you think it could be?”

Her face went flat, as if her emotions were so strong that she had to struggle to hide them. “The Throne absorbs magick. Magick often comes in the form of light.”

“You think the Throne was releasing magick?”

“Yes,” she said. Her voice shook. “And I hope I’m wrong.”

TWO

THE ARGUMENTS were old ones. Arianna gripped the arms of the old wooden throne in a vain attempt to maintain her patience. No one had ever explained to her that the main duty of a ruler was to listen to people blather on about things she thought she had already made herself clear on.

The audience room was full. Her Fey guards stood against the wall, arms at their sides. Several other guards were in the hidden listening booths, just in case someone got out of hand. Because she hated this duty so much, she often put it off, and then petitioners piled up. She knew that she would be here for most of the afternoon. There was a line of supplicants outside, most of them in chairs her Domestics had provided—spelled to keep anyone waiting calm.

It was amazing to her how small this chamber felt when it was filled with people. It was actually one of the longest rooms in the palace, and had the same width as some of the larger suites. But the ancient spears lining the walls seemed to make it smaller, as did all those guards—not to mention the fact that there were no windows to open. She had spent too many years Shifting from one animal or bird form to another. The outdoors was, in some ways, more comfortable to her than an interior room with no fresh air, and filled with torches that couldn’t quite make it light enough.

The chamber was too hot and smelled of nervous sweat—the petitioners, not her own. She wasn’t nervous about anything. She was just hoping she could make it through the afternoon without losing her temper, providing more stories for the gossip mill. The Islanders loved her, the very first Queen of Blue Isle, or so she heard. They called her colorful, and gave her a lot of leeway because she was a war hero, and because she had Fey blood. Her mercurial moods had become something the placid Islanders were willing to forgive because she had tainted blood.

The bastards. The Fey didn’t see her as mercurial. Which probably proved the Islanders’ point.

That mercurial label was probably the reason she hated these sessions most of all. In her other role as Black Queen of the Fey Empire, she did not need to hold such formal audiences. Sometimes she thought of combining the roles, but she had tried that once, about twelve years ago, and all it managed to do was upset the Islanders and confuse the Fey.

So she was stuck with days like this. A day full of spring sunshine, and she had to spend it inside, listening to people who had placed all their hopes on this single meeting.

The pair in front of her were prosperous men from the city’s seafaring merchants society. They were Islander, but they wore Fey cloaks over their linen shirts and tight pants. Their boots had been made in Nye. She wondered if they dressed that way to prove how cosmopolitan they were, or to show her how important trade with other continents was.

The oldest one, a man with so many lines on his face that she knew she would have to count them if he went on much longer, was arguing that Blue Isle needed to resume its trade with Fillé, the country on the Leut continent with the most accessible ports. Every quarter since Arianna had become Queen of Blue Isle, some of the older Islanders came before her, asking her to resume trade with Fillé. And every quarter, she turned them down.

Leut was not part of the Fey Empire. It was supposed to have been the next stop on her great-grandfather’s long series of conquests. But the Fey Empire stretched over half the world already. It had enough wealth to sustain itself forever, and to keep its people happy and well-fed. Arianna, who had been raised Islander, not Fey, did not see the point of continuing the conquest when there was nothing to be gained but more land. Her main focus as Black Queen had been to retrain the Fey, to get them to think about building instead of destroying.

It was an uphill battle, and she didn’t need distractions like trade with a non-Fey country to remind the Fey that they used to conquer people instead of set up diplomatic relations.

Of course, she couldn’t explain that to the merchant who was droning on and on and on. She had never explained that. This was one instance where she relied on her mercurial reputation. When he was through with his presentation, and when his elderly friend was through with his, she would wave a hand and say in a particularly dismissive tone, “Petition denied.”

They would be disappointed, of course, and because she never gave a reason for denying this particular petition, they would try again—or other merchants would—next quarter. In keeping her reasons to herself, she doomed herself to a long afternoon four times a year.

As the first merchant finished, something caught her eye. She looked up. A broad flat light, laced with black, flowed into the room. It was wide, like a river.

She blinked, and felt the light pass through her. No one else seemed to notice. She blinked again, and the light was gone. She almost turned to see if it flowed through the wall behind her, but she didn’t. She wasn’t even sure she had seen it, not really. Maybe she had imagined it. Surely someone else would have noticed.

The second merchant stepped forward. He opened his mouth and she wished she could close her eyes. Her head was beginning to ache. Lights, headaches. She really hated this part of her work.

“Highness,” he said. “If we open trade with Fillé, we not only have the Fey Empire, but an entire new…”

She wasn’t listening any more. She felt not quite dizzy, but not quite solid either. Lightheaded. Black dots swam before her eyes. Inside her mind, something moved.

“…products we have no use for throughout the Empire. Our productivity is up. We have space to grow new crops, items that will…”

Moved, raised up, awoke. She wanted to put a hand to her head, but did not.

“…revenue for Blue Isle. Even though we are an unconquered part of the Fey Empire.…”

Which was so important to the Islanders, she thought. And perhaps in some ways it was. She willed herself to focus on his words.

“…could use trade of our own. We are not asking for the Empire’s blessing. Just yours, as Queen of Blue Isle.”

Pain exploded behind her eyes. She gasped and bent over. For a moment, she saw only blackness. It was as if she had crawled inside her own mind.

The pain ran through her head, down the back of her neck, and into her spine. She couldn’t move if she wanted to. It felt as if something were being forcibly separated from the inside of her skull.

“Highness?”

The voice was soft. She made herself focus on it, willed herself to think despite the pain. With great effort, she sat upright. The two Islanders stood before her, their pale skin and blond hair in sharp contrast to the Fey darkness filling the room.

The wooden throne felt sturdy beneath her, the only sturdy thing about her at the moment.

“Highness?” one of the Islanders said again.

She should know who he was. She should know who all of them were. But she didn’t. It was as if they were at the same time familiar and unfamiliar. She had never felt like this before.

“Highness?” The other Islander took a step toward her.

Highness
. Using titles was an Islander tradition. It felt wrong. She was Fey. Fey did not use titles. She almost opened her mouth to say that, but she couldn’t think as to why she would. She was Queen of Blue Isle and Black Queen of the Fey. The Islanders could call her “Highness” if they wanted to. It was correct.

She put a hand to her forehead. “I must postpone this meeting,” she said. She didn’t even know what the meeting was about, not at the moment. And she should. She should.