The Black Queen (Book 6) (8 page)

Since the Place of Power had been rediscovered, no snow fell on the mountainside. It fell on the other mountains all the way down to the tree line. He found that strange, but he found many things here strange. He tried to accept them anyway.

He leaned the chair back on two legs, and the top of his head brushed the broad, flat sword blade. There was no magick in these giant swords—if there had been, he would have felt it—but the jewels in the hilt focused and aimed any magick that came through them. He liked to lean against them, though, to draw strength from them. They made him feel the ancient power that he was able to share. The power he was only beginning to be able to control.

Coulter, whose parents were Islander, was born an Enchanter. That was the Fey term. The Islander term varied depending on which region of Blue Isle heard of him. Here, in the Cliffs of Blood, where his birth family was from, he would have been known as
demon spawn
. But his parents had been smart enough to leave, and he had been born on the other side of the Isle. His parents were slaughtered in the first Fey invasion, and a Fey Shape-shifter recognized his magickal abilities, and took him to be raised by the Fey.

Only they didn’t raise him. They neglected him. But he got to observe their magick, and by the time he was five, he knew how to use it—not well, not correctly, but enough to save Gift’s life one horrible night. In doing so, Coulter had Bound the two of them together, mingled their life forces so that if one of them died, the other would too.

That Binding had been a mistake—there was a less risky way to perform the spell, one that didn’t tie their lives together—and it had been the first of many. Coulter hadn’t received real training until Arianna became Black Queen. She sent for the only remaining Fey Enchanter from the Galinas continent, as well as a group of Spell Warders, to train Coulter.

Even then, he wouldn’t go to her. She had wanted him to, and he wouldn’t because he was afraid their emotions would run away with them. He loved her. He had from the moment he met her, and he was afraid if he were at her side, he would hurt her somehow.

So he had forced the Enchanter and Warders to come to him. He let them train him, and now he was using that training in other ways. When he was not up here, guarding the cave, he worked in Constant, teaching Islander children with wild magick how to control and use their powers. Without planning to, he had started a school, and in the last year, parents had sent him students from other parts of Blue Isle, places where Fey and Islanders had intermarried and were creating children with new stronger powers, powers that sometimes frightened Coulter with their intensity.

So now when he came to the mountain, he came here to rest. When he was in his school, he had to be on his guard constantly. The problem with half-Fey, half-Islander children was that they were born with their magick powers fully formed. The Fey didn’t come into their magick until puberty. So the Fey child had already learned about life, about control, before his magick overtook him.

But the interracial children and some of the Islander children had no such buffer. Parents who had no magickal ability or whose magickal ability had been effectively suppressed by the Islander religion didn’t know how to deal with two-year-olds who could create fire simply by snapping their fingers.

Coulter did. He could remember being such a child, and the way the Fey would grab his hands, deflect his spells. He had help now, with these little ones—Domestics who were used to raising children, the Warders who had come to train him, and the Enchanter brought in by Arianna. That Enchanter not nearly as skilled as Coulter was, but helpful nonetheless.

Coulter had a hunch the need for his school would grow, and if he allowed himself to dream, as he sometimes did, sitting in his chair with his head leaning against the sword, he imagined schools like it all over the Isle.

“Anything?”

The voice wasn’t unexpected. Coulter had sensed someone coming up the stairs for some time now, but it hadn’t been anything he concentrated on.

He brought his chair down on all four legs, and stood. The Fey woman at the edge of the carved stone plateau was taller than he was—but then they all were—and she held herself with a soldier’s grace. Her face was narrow, her eyes slanted upward in an angle that matched her sharp cheek bones. She wore her long black hair in a single braid, revealing her pointed ears.

“Leen,” he said in greeting. “It’s quiet as ever up here.”

And then she smiled. It was her smile that had once intrigued him. He had thought it like Arianna’s. He and Leen had tried to be lovers once, several years before, but it ended quickly when they both realized that the only woman he’d ever wanted was a woman he could never ever have.

“Rue the day when it’s no longer quiet,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder as she passed him. She bent down and picked up the chair, moving it away from the swords and the boulders that blocked her sight.

She had very little magick—she was a minor Visionary, good enough to lead an Infantry troop, but not good enough for anything else—and she had come into that magick late. She had been twenty when she had her first Vision. By then, she had already lived through the loss of her family, slaughtered by the Black King as Failures, and the battle against the Black King himself. All her life, she had been a valued member of Gift’s extended family. That was why she was here; because she too could be trusted to guard the cave.

“You think a day like that will come?” he asked.

She carried the chair to the edge of the platform, perilously close to the stairs and the ledge. If she wasn’t careful, she would fall. He picked up the chair, as he always did, and moved it back a few feet.

Ritual. They both enjoyed it. It was like a silent banter between them.

“I’m Fey,” she said. “I’m suspicious of quiet.”

“I rather like it,” he said.

She nodded. “They want you in the school. It seems you had a visitor again today.”

“Matt.”

“Yes.”

Coulter cursed under his breath. Fourteen-year-old Matt was a powerful Enchanter, as powerful—maybe more powerful—than Coulter. But his parents had forbidden him to come to Coulter’s school because the Fey ran it. They taught him using the Book found in the Vault beneath the Place of Power. He was learning the ancient magick without learning the controls that the Fey had modified for their own magick over thousands of years.

Matt wanted that control, and he knew he could get it from Coulter. But Coulter was afraid if the boy were discovered at the school, the boy’s father would retaliate. That confrontation would be horrible.

“Did you tell him I was here?”

“Yes,” she said. “He said he wanted to come back tonight. And bring his brother.”

Coulter swore again. “That’s just what I need.”

“You can’t deny them. They may be more important than all your other students combined.”

“I know,” he said. “But they’re dangerous too.”

She didn’t say any more. She knew how dangerous. And she knew why. “Things are never easy.”

“I never said I wanted them to be.”

“Oh? Didn’t I hear that a moment ago?”

“No,” he said. “I want things quiet, not easy.”

She sat down. “I guess I can accept that.”

He double-checked the chair’s position. Even if he was no longer her lover, he still cared about her. She was a unique woman, one who deserved better than what he had given her. “Who relieves you?”

“Dash, at twilight.”

Dash was one of the few Islander guards. He was young, had great strength, and was one of the best with a sword that Coulter had ever seen. He also had incredible night vision, and could see so well when light was uneven or poor that it was better to have him on the mountainside as things grew dark than a Fey who relied too much on magick and not enough on skill.

“Good,” Coulter said. He was about to leave when the hair on the back of his neck rose. A sensation came out of the northwest. He turned, and saw a golden light threaded with black. It flowed like a river through the sky, but the light had a beginning and an end.

“What is it?” Leen asked.

She couldn’t see something like that; she didn’t have the abilities for it. “I don’t know,” he said.

He frowned. The light had a feeling. It drew and repelled him at the same time. And beneath that feeling was a vibration that echoed through him, making him realize how very small, how very frail he was. Something ancient flowed in that light, something that had great power and great history.

It flew over him and along a trajectory that would take it over the Cliffs of Blood to the Infrin Sea. As the light passed, he got the sense that he knew it, or part of it. He had met it before, in a different form, a familiar form. A hated form? He wasn’t sure. All he knew was that even though he had never seen a light like this, he recognized it as something other than what it was.

“Coulter?” Leen sounded concerned.

He held up a hand. It wasn’t over. He felt a very strong magick behind him. He turned toward the cave, the entrance to the Place of Power. He sensed several beings standing in the cave’s mouth. This was a familiar sensation: he had felt it years ago when Gift’s dead mother Jewel had returned as a Mystery, a ghost-like creature that wasn’t alive but hadn’t ascended into the Powers either. Gift and his father Nicholas had been able to see her, but Coulter hadn’t. He had sensed her as solid person-shaped mass of magick.

He hadn’t sensed her in a long, long time. Not since King Nicholas disappeared down a tunnel inside this very cave.

Coulter walked toward the mouth of the cave. “Jewel?” he asked, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to answer him. But as he got closer, he realized that his first impression had been correct: there were several magickal shapes here. If he concentrated, he could separate them one from another. He counted seven at the edge of the cave door, and ten in a row behind it, and more behind them, more than he could count.

All of the Mysteries? It wasn’t possible, was it? Had they been summoned by the light or were they drawn to it as he was? Or were they watching it for another reason?

He wished he could talk with them. He didn’t entirely understand the Mysteries. They had been people once, all of them murdered, all of them after their death granted by the Powers the ability to affect a minimum of three people: the person they loved the most; the person they hated the most; and a third person of their choice. The Mysteries weren’t always benign. They were often as they had been in life: complex and difficult, with a mixture of good and bad.

“Coulter?” Leen was beginning to sound worried.

He took a step closer to the Mysteries, if indeed that was what he faced. He walked around the two outside swords, past the one that guarded the door to the cave. From his position, he could see the white marble stairs and the strange light that always bathed the place. He could hear the faint burble of the fountain far below. If he didn’t sense the magick, he would have thought he was completely alone.

“Something happened,” he said to them. “Something important. Please help me, if you can. I need to know—”

And then he got a sense of Arianna, as if he were with her, as if he were almost a part of her. She was in great pain, extreme pain, pain so severe it was ripping her from the inside out.

He fell to his knees with the power of it. He wasn’t in pain—he knew it was her pain—but it felled him just the same. “Ari,” he whispered—

And then the feeling was gone as if it had never been. He raised his head toward the sky. The light had passed. It was probably over the sea now on its way to Leut.

Leen had come up behind him. She put her hands on his shoulders as if she wasn’t sure if she should comfort him or help him up.

The presences were gone. A wind blew past him, into the cave, as if proving that nothing blocked its way.

“Are you all right?” Leen asked.

Coulter put a hand on hers. He had no words for what he had just felt. “I’m fine,” he said, “but something has changed.”

“What?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t think things are going to be quiet any more.”

FOUR

BRIDGE FACED THE WINDOW, controlling his temper. The early spring sunlight, usually something that cheered him, now only irritated him. He spread his legs out and clasped his hands behind his back as he often did when contemplating the city below him: Nir, the capitol of Nye, where he had spent all but eighteen years of his miserable life.

How often had he looked out this window at the street vendors hawking their wares, the stone buildings and the cobblestone streets, the brightly colored flags waving in the faint breeze? He hated the flags more than anything else. They still had a nationalistic air that he had tried to breed out of this wretched little country. Blue flags for stores which carried only Nyeian merchandise; yellow, green, red and purple for items made in other countries; and the new addition since Nye had become part of the Fey Empire 40 years ago: the black flag, for items that came from some unidentifiable part of the Fey Empire.

When his grandfather Rugad had left to conquer Blue Isle—and to die there, the arrogant old bastard—Bridge had banned those flags. But the Nyeians found a way to impart the information anyway. Blue ribbon binding fabric or a bit of blue cloth in the front of a display window. The issue of the flags caused so much surreptitious behavior that Bridge actually worried it would lead to a rebellion. Eventually he brought back the flags as a gesture of good will. But he hated them. He saw them as a symbol of his failure as ruler.