14
The darkness of the tunnels outside the Unseelie Court was broken by only a single, faint lamp of flickering blue light, like a gas flame turned down low. Rayce lay in a heap underneath its glow, still unconscious from the discipline he had taken under Iarlath's whip. He had been dumped there unceremoniously at the King's order, and Caelus found him soon after receiving a message to fetch back the Lord of the Hunt from his master's doorstep.
The Faerie crouched down and reached out to gently touch Rayce's shoulder. There was no response, so he squeezed lightly.
Rayce hissed with pain and vanished, reappearing behind Caelus and driving him down hard into the stone of the tunnel floor with one knee in the small of the Hunter's back. The stripes across his back burned like fire, and several must have broken open their scabs because he felt fresh heat stain the cloak that lay across his wounds. The blood of the Hunt allowed him to heal faster than others, but not that fast.
"My Lord!" Caelus croaked in fear. Rayce recovered immediately and felt a flash of guilt for his reaction as he released his hold on the other man.
The Hunter pushed himself up, seemingly unfazed by his treatment. He cleared his throat. "My Lord, the Hunt has grown restless in your absence. Many have slipped away."
Rayce closed his eyes, weary. It never ends. "Take me back to them," he said quietly.
Caelus nodded and rose, offering a hand to help Rayce up, but the Shadowhunter ignored it and stood slowly as more scabs let go. He grimaced at the crackling sensation down his back and sucked in a breath through his teeth.
"I'm sorry I cannot ease your pain, my Lord. My gift does not run toward healing," the Faerie apologized.
Rayce briefly lingered on what he knew of Caelus' gift from Gwyn's memories. The Unseelie King had sired many talented sons, it would seem; some, perhaps, too talented. However, if his gift could run toward herding stray Hunters back into the fold, that would be wonderfully useful at the present. Rayce had often heard Zeke use the expression 'about as easy as herding cats' before, but he was tempted to amend that to 'Hunters' instead. They seemed to constantly push their boundaries with him.
Inside his cloak, he could feel the outline of Gwyn's horn resting against his side. It didn't matter how far they went; he would be able to bring them back, but he wanted to know who was missing first.
Wordlessly, he followed Caelus back through the Unseelie domain toward where he had left the others. I should have ordered them to stay, he berated himself. I have get better at controlling them. The memory of his own forced submission to the Unseelie King's will was still fresh in his mind, though, and he was filled with revulsion at the thought of dominating the Hunters like that. What would it take to make him bend them to his will? Even leaving Fiorinor stranded on a moor until he was recalled made Rayce uncomfortable.
Ahead, a light grew brighter and brighter until they turned a corner and found a small Faerie fire burning in a wider section of tunnel. Baelerithon's shadow stretched behind him as he stood patiently with his arms folded across his chest. Rayce felt his guard snap up warily as he saw his brother waiting alone.
Bael's glittering black and amber eyes locked on to Rayce and Caelus as they rounded the bend, appraising every movement in a moment and filing away the information in his calculating mind. As they approached, Bael raised a slim, blue hand in a dismissive gesture. "Leave us, Caelus."
Accustomed to obedience, the Faerie ducked his head and slipped past Bael to rejoin the others. Baelerithon had been born to command, and it was second nature to him now. Rayce worried at how quickly the Hunter had complied; that was how the others should have responded to his commands, not Bael's.
A mocking smile lifted Bael's lips. "Oh dear, brother. It looks as though you've let your temper get away from you." How does he know?
Refusing to be baited, Rayce tried to brush past the older Faerie and follow Caelus back to the others, but Bael blocked his way. It would be simple to shift past him, but Rayce paused for a moment to think. Better to know his brother's mind than wonder what he might have learned by staying. He stepped back and waited.
"Poor Shadowhunter," Bael taunted. "No stele to heal your wounds?" He looked down at his hands and spread his fingers. "You know there's another way."
Rayce was tired, so tired, making it easy to look bored by his brother's play. Hadn't Bael been the one to teach him to reveal nothing? An old memory floated across his mind, one of his own, for a change. 'It is far more difficult for your enemies to gain a hold on you if you provide nothing with which they might grapple.'
"What game are you playing now, Bael?"
The former crown prince laughed. "There's only one game that matters, little brother. If you even need to ask, you only reveal yourself as much farther behind than you should be."
I should have just said nothing. Rayce gestured to the stumps of Bael's once-magnificent wings. "The first round cost you heavily – how much more are you willing to gamble?"
Bael smiled darkly. "Who said that was the first round?" He stepped aside to let Rayce through and bowed disparagingly. "Your move, my Lord. You need only ask for my help when you're ready."
Rayce eyed him, suspicious of a hidden blade, but he ran out of time to wonder about it as a beautiful, clear note reverberated loudly through the tunnels around them. The bell-like echo was laced with an earthy scent that took Rayce back to his childhood. He felt himself begin to fade, and looked down through his hands in astonishment as the summons of the Seelie Court caught him in its grasp.
Just before he vanished completely, Rayce heard Bael's voice call out over the harmonious note, "Give my regards to our sister!"
Rayce breathed in the air of the Seelie Court and tried to feel a hint of nostalgia, a pang of homesickness, but nothing came. This wasn't his home any more. Sera.
Around him, the familiar tunnels remained empty; no other Hunters had been swept up by the summons. He felt the same tug in his chest as he had in the Unseelie Court, and he followed it to see what his sister was up to. When his path bent away from the throne room and led instead to the Queen's apartments, he understood immediately that this was intended to be a private audience.
The cloak's bond chafed as he was pulled this way and that by an invisible collar. First the Eternal Forest, then the rulers of the Courts. He had never stopped to consider that each would take the time to break in their new hound. Gwyn had chosen this fate, and he had worn the leash lightly through the centuries. Not so for Rayce.
Two Faerie knights stood on guard outside of his sister's new rooms and looked confused when they saw him coming, but one opened the door hastily as he glowered at the pair.
Inside, his sister turned from winding a small music box on a side table and gasped when she saw him. He was still bare-chested under the cloak, but it wasn't his clothing that had startled her. His beautiful smile had been replaced by a scowl, and his once-sparkling green eyes were filled with distrust, tainted by the darkness of the Hunt. He drew up just short of her and neglected to bow, giving her a haughty look instead.
"What do you want?"
The Seelie Queen's hand shot out and a stinging crack broke the quiet of her apartments as she struck his face unexpectedly. "You should be ashamed of yourself," she scolded. "I raised you better than that."
Stunned, Rayce's lips parted in disbelief, and he felt a spike of guilt cut through him, but it wasn't enough to overshadow his simmering anger at what had been done to him by the Unseelie King. He flipped one side of the cloak back and twisted so that his sister could see the bloody lashes across his back. "Do you want to punish me as well, sister?"
He shrugged the mantle back into place as she unconsciously covered her mouth with one hand. The glimmer of a tear shone in her eye but did not fall as she stared at him. "Rayce..."
"My Lady sent for me, and so have I come with all the speed of the wind. What service may I render you?" Gwyn's words spilled easily, mechanically, from Rayce's lips.
Uncertainty filled the Queen's eyes as she registered the dramatic change that had claimed her brother in so short a time. She felt like she didn't know him anymore.
"You wear the cloak, Rayce, and it comes with responsibility. The Eternal Forest starves, and the earth's magic flows only weakly. The Forest-"
"Yes, yes, the Forest, the Forest!" Rayce burst out, throwing his arms up in frustration. "Let it starve for all I care! Do you have any idea why it was drained so suddenly? Do you know what the Unseelie did to Alicante?"
"I know," she answered steadily.
His eyes flashed dangerously and she felt fear race through her blood as he loomed over her menacingly. "Did you know what they were planning beforehand?"
She looked up at him and held his gaze with her own. "No. I swear to you, brother. I did not know what the Unseelie King was engineering."
Rayce huffed and backed away, pacing restlessly like a caged animal. "Then tell me why I should care. Tell me why I need to close the eyes of the dead and bear them away from their families to vanish into deep Faerie forever. Tell me why I have to keep doing this until I'm killed for this cloak." Agitated, he ran his right hand back though his shock of white hair and the lights flashed off a ring that she didn't recognize.
The Queen took a deep breath. "You need to care because the ley magic is the life's blood of more than one thing, Rayce. Yes, it was used to destroy the city of glass. But it was also used to create the Rift, to fuel the ley line network that our people use to travel safely without crossing into the Mortal world." She paused and made sure that he was listening. "It also feeds the wards of the world."
"The wards..." Rayce trailed off.
"Yes," she said firmly. "But it's the Rift that is in danger now. It can barely sustain itself, and Sol's strongest spellcasters are doing everything they can to stabilize it. To do that, they need to have something to work with, and you aren't giving it to them."
He shook his head. "The Rift means nothing to me now."
"Would it mean more to you if you knew that your Sera was there right now?" The Queen's eyes were filled with challenge.
Rayce stopped and looked at his sister. "Why would Sera be in the Rift? And how would she even get there?"
Inwardly, the Seelie Queen nodded to herself. "She came here asking to be allowed entry, and Sol escorted her there himself." Rayce's eyes widened. His sister couldn't lie, and she was speaking plainly. "She's searching for a way to reclaim you for the Hunt."
He gaped. I can't believe you're really doing this, Sera, but I love you for trying. I'll love you forever for trying.
Arynessa closed the distance between them while he stood thunderstruck, and she reached out to gently stroke his reddened cheek. "I'm truly sorry for your sacrifice," she said softly. "It's not what I ever would have wanted for you." Her amethyst-coloured eyes were filled with sadness.
Out of the corner of his eye, Rayce caught a flash of scarlet on one of the low couches arranged around the sitting room as Sebastian leaned back and draped his arms along the cushions. "Ask her," he prompted.
Rayce hesitated, remembering what his father had said in the Eternal Forest. He didn't say anything, Rayce thought angrily. He's dead. He's not real. But there had been a name... it had seemed vaguely familiar. He stalled.
"What did you want for me?" he asked his sister, his face softening with curiosity. "Why did you take me?"
Rayce had come to see in his adult life that his sister had given up a lot to be kept shuttered away from Court life for the better part of twenty years. Once he had been free to roam his mother's domain, he had heard many things, and he had grown increasingly curious about why she had sacrificed so much of her position in the Court to raise a half-blood prince like him. His heart lurched as he remembered reading in Seraphine's living room.
"Coward," Sebastian sneered.
"Rayce, I..." his sister began, but Rayce immediately cut her off, tired of his father.
"What did you do to Arthur Blackthorn?"
Surprise flickered across her face, and then... guilt? "Where did you hear that name?"
"Answer the question," he shot back.
"I wonder if you already know how entwined the answers to both of your questions are," she replied mysteriously. "But I will tell you. I want you to trust me again, brother."
Doubt filled Rayce. His father had made it seem as though whatever the answer was would reveal his sister's darker side; why did she think it would be something to make him trust her?
The Queen crossed the room and took a seat on the couch where Sebastian had been lounging. The scarlet-clad Shadowhunter had vanished between one moment and the next, and Rayce had a hard time believing that he had even been there. Why does he come and go like this? What wakes him? Am I doing this?
She beckoned for him to join her, and he sat down hesitantly, uneasy occupying the same space his father had. His sister took his right hand in her own gently and lightly traced the Voyance rune on the back of his hand.
"Many years ago, a Nephilim boy came to the realm of Faerie with his brother. They were very young - still students at the Shadowhunter Academy. They had never seen the lands of the Fey before, and were awestruck by the wonder they found here. In a twist of fate, they came across my twin sister, the Lady Nerissa. The elder brother was immediately enchanted by her and swore himself to her at once, vowing never to leave her side. The other Shadowhunter refused to leave his brother, and so remained in our realm.
"The elder brother was called Andrew; the younger was named Arthur." The Queen turned over Rayce's hand and absently trailed her fingertips along the inside of his forearm, following the slightly raised veins there as her memories carried her backwards through the years.
"Nerissa fell in love with her Shadowhunter boy," she said softly. "And how could she not? The blood of angels is a heady thing, Rayce, and to be loved by one of the Nephilim is as close to the love of Heaven as one may get." Her eyes slipped out of focus. "I wanted it, too."
Her nails pressed into his forearm as her lip curled up in remembered anger. "But he wouldn't love me back," she breathed. "Arthur."
Rayce watched as she regained control and her face smoothed over once more. She looked down and loosened her grip, now tracing the tiny dents she had made in his arm.
"I was so angry; I went to mother. She promised to teach me how to break him, and all I could think about was being close to her, to finally be the one she cared about." The Seelie Queen shook her head and avoided her brother's eyes.
"Years, Rayce. I did it for years. He was broken in less than one, but I kept torturing him anyway. Can you remember how you felt on the day of your Marking ceremony? The day our mother gifted you with the white gauntlets that would mark you as a prince of the Courts?" She waited for him to nod, and then closed her eyes. "That feeling, Rayce. Knowing that she was proud of you. I was practically drunk on it in the beginning. I wanted to be her.
"I kept Arthur Blackthorn chained like an animal, made him howl like an animal, watched him cower like an animal." She set her brother's hand down gently and reached up to brush away a tear from her eye. "But I was the real animal, Rayce. I started to hate myself, to hate what I was becoming, even as mother watched approvingly."
The Queen shivered and laced her fingers back into his for the strength to continue her confession. "The things I learned from her... I was scared, Rayce. Scared of how easy it was to watch impassively as a man howled until he choked on the blood from his own throat ripped raw from screaming. When mother's interest waned, I only tried harder, inspired to new depths of depravity to try to win her back.
"Nerissa was ashamed of me. Some nights, she and her Shadowhunter boy would hear Arthur's screams, and she would fill Andrew's ears with sweet half-truths to hide my wickedness. When he finally learned what was happening to Arthur, she wove a false story into their memories to try to mask what had been done, but I had done my work all too well. I doubt that Arthur's mind could ever have fully recovered from the horrors he suffered in Faerie. When my sister freed him, I was secretly relieved."
Rayce stayed silent. Sebastian had hinted that Arynessa's past would shatter her image in Rayce's mind, and it certainly had. He couldn't understand why she was telling him.
"Nerissa and Andrew had brought two children into our world together, and they were all that remained of the brothers who had so foolishly strayed into the realm of Faerie. My sister tried to love them, but they were only a part of him. She wanted all of him or none of him."
The Seelie Queen looked up at the ceiling of her apartments, surrounded in the splendour of rule that she had coveted for decades, and she tried not to cry.
"I offered to take those children as my own, to try to start over and make amends for all the suffering I had caused. My sister, my twin, the person I was closest to in this world, pulled away from me in revulsion, Rayce. She swore that I would never lay a finger on her children, and she sent them away to the world Above to be raised by their father, far away from me."
At last, the tears fell, splashing down to stain the white silk of her dress. "My sister died hating me," she whispered. "She gave up living because there was nothing left to live for, not even me."
She reached up to scrub away the tears, but was surprised when Rayce beat her to it, gently running his thumb across her cheekbone. His face was the one she remembered again, the one that had laughed and played in the boughs she had grown with Bael's help in the great room of their home, the same face that had grinned as Zeke had tried to hide his bottle of brandy from her and she had pretended not to notice.
A smile came to her lips unbidden. "Years later, you were born, and mother had neither the time nor the inclination to raise what might prove to be a bad investment. She offered you to any of her daughters, but I was the only one willing to take the chance. I knew I was consigning myself to near-exile until you were grown, but I also knew that this was my chance.
"I had grown up a lot in the intervening two decades, but mother was uncertain of me at first; worried, perhaps, that I would ruin her experiment before she could see if it had been a success. She set Bael to give you your lessons in Court etiquette, ostensibly, though I could have done the same, but also to keep an eye on me, I think. I was trying to be better, Rayce, I wanted to be better."
The Queen wrapped her hands back around his and squeezed. "And you made me better. You saved me from what I might have become." She shook her head wistfully. "You can't imagine what it's like, the love of the Nephilim. It's not like anything else in this world. You gave it so freely when you were a child, and then it was me who was hopelessly ensnared. When Zeke joined us, you set yourself between him and my legs, absolutely determined that you would defend me to your last breath. My heart..." she trailed off. "That was a turning point for me, Rayce. I found Sol a few years later, and I was different. I could love and be loved."
Rayce inhaled deeply. He had never heard her speak so openly before. He found it refreshing.
His sister leaned over and tilted her head sideways to rest on his shoulder, her lilac-hued hair spilling over his chest and lightly tickling his bare skin. "If you believe nothing else, brother, believe that I loved you."
Rayce stirred. "Loved?"
"Love," she corrected smoothly.
Distrust crept back into his mind like a weed, and he felt its roots twist back into heart. He rose from the couch and backed away, watching her.
The Seelie Queen stood, reflections of light glittering off the crown on her head, and his sister vanished back under the mask of a ruler once more.
"Take my advice brother: Do what you must to survive until it's your turn to be saved." She lifted a finger in warning. "But make certain that there's still a part of you that's worth saving."
A burst of radio static crackled in Rayce's mind and he heard panicked voices yelling for help over the roar and crackle of fire. More shouts and cries filled the background, and he sank to his knees, clutching at his head as the Eternal Forest made its desires known. It was in the mood for the most delectable of treats; the blood of fallen heroes, steeped in terror and allowed to marinate in pain before death. The Forest would not be denied.
The Queen of the Seelie Court looked down at her brother's suffering with pity in her eyes, and she reached down to lift his chin, granting a temporary relief from the onslaught.
"Do what you must to survive," she repeated. "And remember that she's out there counting on you to still be you if she breaks the cloak's hold."
Rayce squeezed his eyes shut. Sera.
He staggered back to his feet and lurched away from his sister, wrenching open the door to her apartments and brushing past the guards outside. His head pounded in time with his steps as he left the heart of the Seelie Court behind. When he judged that he had gone far enough, he fumbled inside the cloak for a moment to withdraw the scuffed and battered horn from within.
Hands shaking, he lifted it to his lips and blew.
**Author's note: Chapter 14 became gloriously long as I added the next section, so I had to split it into 14 and 15. Enjoy the ride!