“Motto to live by: Never trust a fairy. Did he tell you how the king’s concubine died?”
“He said she hated what the king had become so much that she left him the only way she could. By ending her own life.”
“Did he bother pointing out that everything the king had done, he’d done for her? Did she think of that before she decided to kill herself? Did it ever occur to her that sometimes a willingness to turn dark for someone else might just be a fucking virtue?”
“It doesn’t sound like he went dark for her. It sounds like he was ticked off that she was going to die and willing to do anything to keep her.”
“Perspective, Ms. Lane. Get some.”
The Lord Master had said the same thing. “You think the concubine should have appreciated that her lover turned into an obsessed jackass and overlooked the horrific results of his experiments? Maybe if instead of spending all his time—wasn’t it tens of thousands of years she waited?—trying to make her live forever, he’d just loved her for the mortal lifetime she had, she’d have been happy!”
Barrons looked at me sharply. “The Silvers are a mess now,” he continued abruptly. “There’s nothing predictable about them.”
“Because Cruce cursed them. Who exactly is Cruce?” I kept hearing his name, but that was all. I didn’t even know whether he was Seelie or Unseelie. “And what was the curse?”
“Irrelevant. He’s dead.” Barrons placed the stones in a black leather pouch covered with delicately glistening runes and tied it with a leather drawstring. The moment he sealed the bag, the chiming ceased and the stones fell silent. “But his curse will never die. It corrupted the Silvers irrevocably. What was once an easily navigated network is now a place of complete chaos. Now some Silvers take you to the Hall, but others don’t. Worlds and dimensions fractured and are splintered with IFPs. Some of the main mirrors shattered, others sprang into existence where they were never supposed to be. Many of the two-way Silvers in the Hall are now one-way tickets to wastelands. The looking glasses themselves changed, casting illusory reflections. The Hall of All Days collided with the concubine’s realm, with parts of Faery, and some of it even crashed into the Dreaming.”
“The Dreaming!” I exclaimed. “There’s actually a Fae realm with that name?”
“It doesn’t belong to the Fae. The Dreaming is far older and belongs to no one. It’s where all hopes, fantasies, illusions, and nightmares of sentient beings come to be or go to rest, whichever you prefer to believe. Complicating things further, Cruce’s curse caused tears in the walls of the Unseelie prison, and now the Silvers connect to the prison, as well.”
“Well, then, why haven’t the Unseelie escaped before?”
“Some have. But the Unseelie prison is so enormous that few discovered the rifts in the walls, and the Silvers are so impossible to navigate that only a handful ever managed to find their way into your world. One could stay lost inside the network of the Silvers forever. They’re no longer a realm of the present, but hold the residue of the past. Some say they’re also projections of all the possibles, that they really have become the Hall of All Days that have ever been and ever will be. There are no assurances. The Fae avoid them completely.”
“But not you. And not the LM.”
“There are ways—Druid arts that can seal off portions of the Silvers if used wisely, affording a degree of control over temporary transport within a limited space. Depending on the Silver you have to work with, it is not without … discomfort. The cold in some of them is difficult to bear.”
I knew that. I’d seen him step from it, coated with crystals of iced blood. I’d felt the gust of icy soul-numbing air. “And you killed the woman you carried out of the Silver why?” My voice was spun sugar on a knife’s edge.
“Because I wanted to.” He matched my sugary lightness of tone. “Didn’t expect that, did you, Ms. Lane? Not only an answer but an incrimination, in your book. Come,” he said, and his dark gaze glittered with sudden impatience. “The night won’t last forever.”
“What’s the Unseelie prison like?” I wanted to know if it was the cold place I sometimes went to in my dreams. If so, how could I possibly know of it?
“Multiply the chill in my Silver by infinity.”
“But what does it look like?”
“No sun. No grass. No life. Just cliffs and cliffs of ice. Cold. Darkness. Despair. The air reeks of it. There are three colors there: white, black, and blue. The fabric of the place lacks the necessary chemical compositions for any other colors to exist. Your skin would be as white as bleached bones. Your eyes, dull black. Your lips, blue. Nothing grows. There is only hunger without sustenance. Lust without satisfaction. Pain without end. There are monsters there that have no desire to leave, because they are such monsters.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked as we headed out back to, I assumed, select an incredible car from Barrons’ incredible collection.
“Enough. Tell me, Ms. Lane, if you could go back to the day Alina was leaving for Trinity and stop her, would you?”
“Absolutely,” I said without hesitation.
“Knowing that this would all play out anyway? The Book was already loose. This was going to happen whether or not she came to Dublin. Just a different variation on the same destructive theme. Would you have kept her in Ashford to keep her alive, never learned what you are, and most likely died in complete ignorance at the hands of some Fae?”