Child of Darkness-L-D-2 (30 page)

Cedric took a long time in replying, and what he gave her was not an answer. “Perhaps we did that long before your birth.”

“You did not.” The pain in her leg was too great, and she rose into the air to give herself some relief. “There are tapestries all over the Palace that depict Faeries with their wings unbound. All except Mabb.” A bit of hope sprang into her heart. “Was Mabb…did she have some relation to—”

“She did not know Malachi,” Cedric said gruffly. “Mabb was deformed by aberrant Human blood. She hid her wings out of shame. Your mother hid yours, by making all of us hide, in order to protect you.”

“Protect me?” She flapped her wings, more conscious of them now that they were speaking of them out loud, to catch up to Cedric’s suddenly quickened pace. “From what? Everyone at Court knows what he is.”

“But they do not all know what you are.” Cedric stopped, obviously exasperated, and faced her. “Your conception was the only thing keeping your mother on the throne. The Court accepted her because they believed that she bore King Garret’s child. You are not Garret’s child, and that much is obvious, so she did what she had to do.”

“That is not protecting me.” Cerridwen flew a few feet ahead of him, her mood suddenly irreverent. Perhaps because they were so close to home, and therefore, safety, although they both knew that was not true. “She was looking out for her own interests. I cannot say that I blame her. She has spoken before of her life in the Assassins’ Guild, and it is not one I would have wished to return to, either.”

“Are you truly that stupid?” Cedric’s vitriol took her by surprise. He stalked toward her, grim eyes frightening to behold. “If the Court knew that you were not truly of royal blood, you would have no claim to the throne in the event of her death. And what would have happened to you, then? She did not act out of selfishness or greed. She did what she had to because it was the only way to protect you, to give you a life at all.”

Cerridwen could not respond. She had, for just a moment, become her old self again; spoiled, self-centered, dismissive of everyone who did not provide her something she wished for in return. No, she had been dismissive of them, as well.

Cedric stalked past her. “He did what he had to, as well.”

It had not occurred to her yet that it might have caused Malachi pain to hide the truth of her birth. Perhaps it hadn’t with the way she had treated him. Perhaps he’d been glad to not claim her.

The thought froze her in place, and hot tears sprang to her eyes. Cedric was farther away now; he barked out a command to keep up. She swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, but she did not want to follow him until her emotions were once again under her control. He stopped, turned, and angrily called, “I think you wish to be caught by the Waterhorses! I have a mind to let them take you!”

That was the last weight of sadness that could be dropped on her before she crumpled, and a sob tore from her throat despite her best efforts to keep it back. She sank to her knees, tears flowing freely from eyes that burned with soot and fatigue. She expected Cedric to leave her. Or, at least, to angrily haul her to her feet and demand that she pull herself together. But he did neither of those things. He set Malachi down and limped toward her, though she knew that it pained him to erase the progress of even a few steps.

“Cerridwen,” he began, and there was tenderness in his voice, below the terrified urgency. “I did not mean to upset you. I am tired, as you are, and my temper got the best of me. I am not sorry for the things I said, because they are important for you to know. But I am sorry that I told you now, when you have so much else to worry about.”

She nodded, wiped her eyes, but the tears would not stop. “I have upset myself,” she managed, choking on her sobs. “I have behaved deplorably to everyone who has ever tried to help me, and I have thrown you all to the Waterhorses. I do deserve to stay here and let them find me.”

“Self-pity will not help you now,” he said, laying a hand on her shoulder, the way she imagined he would comfort a soldier. “Please, get up. We must warn your mother. We must warn everyone we encounter. If you wish to make things right, this would be a good enough place to start.”

That, she could not argue with. She climbed to her feet, opened her wings to stabilize herself so that she did not have to step onto her injured leg. She had never used her wings so much, and they ached almost as badly, but she did not wish to ruin what little healing Cedric had accomplished with his energy.

She waited for him as he lifted Malachi onto his back. And though she did not wish to know the answer if it was not the one she hoped for, she asked, “Does he still live?”

Cedric nodded, but did not look at her. “He will not survive much longer.”

“So, we must get him to a healer, then?” The hope in her voice sounded very naive. Cedric shook his head. “Let’s just keep moving.”

Malachi would die, then. She could no longer fool herself into believing it would not be so. She’d killed him, with her stupidity.

She had killed her father.

“Does he still live?”

What a question to hear about one’s self. He waited for the answer, because he truly did not know it, himself.

“He will not survive much longer.” So, he was not dead yet. It seemed strange, then, that the pain had left him. Or, at least, that it did not matter to him anymore. He tried to find the pain in the floating pink void his mind presently occupied, and there it was, still far away, throbbing and angry and insistent, but he did not pay attention to it.

“So, we must get him to a healer, then?”

Even he knew that he was too far gone for that. He did not know why he was still alive, wondered if dying took this long for every creature. It was not an unpleasant process, but it was disconcerting.

He knew, for example, that he did not move under his own power. But he did not know how he moved. He did not know why they had brought him along. He knew they were going to the Palace, but did not know why. He did hope that he would hear Ayla’s voice, though he hoped it would not pain her too much to see him so injured.

That was foolish. Of course it would pain her. She worried over him more than any immortal creature should worry over a mortal. Should worry over anything. Her life had been difficult, and it should not have been, not when the creatures who’d been created on the Astral had spent their days frolicking and causing mischief and waging pointless wars against each other…

The voices that broke through the void came to him again. A female, and a male. He knew them! Cerridwen, his daughter, and Cedric, his friend. They were still with him, though he was of no help to them in their flight. What did they flee from? He could not recall.

“Why are his wings that way?” It was Cerridwen. She knew now, then, who and what he was to her. That was a tragedy, for she was not supposed to know. And how sad that she found out now.

Cedric answered her question, though Malachi should have been the one to do so. Words. He wished he could rally some strength to open his eyes and see, to make his mouth form words, but all that was left to him was to listen.

“He was a Death Angel. A creature of the Darkworld that was never meant to know mortals. He served the One God of the Humans. Your mother accidentally made him mortal…I am not sure how.”

The touch that had made him mortal flashed through his mind. The white-hot of Ayla’s skin under his hand, the feeling of, well, not losing immortality, because he could no longer truly remember what it had felt like to be immortal. But the feeling of suddenly…feeling.

“Whatever happened to him, a Human found him, a Bio-mech. There are not so many of those these days as there were then, but you may have seen them on the Strip. They are Humans who fashion new pieces of themselves with metal and gears and other parts. And he did the same to Malachi, to repair whatever injury he had.”

Oh, that had been Keller. Malachi wondered why he could remember the dead with such clarity, but could not recall the faces of those at Court. A part of dying, perhaps.

“I never knew.” Sadness, an emotion that seemed so bizarre to him now that he inhabited a place where emotions seemed to not touch him, colored Cerridwen’s words. “I never knew that he was my father. If I had—”

If she had, she would not have treated him as though he disgusted her. If she had, she would not have avoided him, maligned him. But she had not known, and so he could not blame her for the way she had acted toward him. He wished she would not blame herself. But that would come in time, he guessed. She would grieve, and she would regret, and then she would move on. It was the way of mortal emotion, and she was more than half-mortal, though cut from strange, immortal cloth.

Far away, in the void, he heard the rustling of their wings, and he chased them away again.

The tunnels near the Palace doors, usually crammed with Faeries selling things, begging for food or goods, an audience with the Queene, an apprenticeship with one of the Guilds, were eerily empty. Cedric could not recall a time, even in the first days that Mabb had worked to establish her Court after the Fae had been banished to the Underground, that this area was not loud and chaotic.

“Where is everyone?” Cerridwen whispered, unsettled by the emptiness, as well.

“Fled.” It was his only explanation. “Some had already left by the time we marched on the Darkworld.”

“Fled to where?” There was a note of panic in her voice. “To the Trolls? To the Dragons? I heard there are Pixies who live in another part of the Lightworld, but I do not know where that is.”

“They have gone to the Upworld, to find Queene Danae’s Court.” He shook his head. “There is too much to explain, and not enough time, not now. Open the doors, we must get inside.”

It was strange to see Cerridwen fly to the doors and try to open them herself. Usually, two guards stood watch there, and would have opened the way for them. Cerridwen pulled on the rusted handles, but the doors did not move.

“Do they lock?” She tugged, stumbled back onto her injured leg and hissed in pain. Rubbing her ankle, she looked up at him. “I think they are locked.”

“Halt!” a voice called out, and Cedric turned, saw a spear thrust out in the darkness, brandished by a guard who appeared too frightened to recognize his own kind as they stood before him.

“Lower your weapon,” Cedric ordered, and added, when the guard did not obey, “by order of the Queene. I am charged with protecting the Royal Heir, and you are threatening her.”

The point of the spear lowered a fraction, but it had never been aimed at Cerridwen. “The Queene is not here,” the guard said, and the length of the weapon trembled as he trembled. Cedric took a step forward. “Where has she gone? We have urgent news that she must hear.”

The guard jerked his head in the direction he had come from. “Sanctuary. Everyone in the Quarter is in Sanctuary. There was a runner that came, and he told us—”

In the tunnel behind them, a shriek.

Cerridwen gasped and clutched Cedric’s arm, as though he could bear her weight as well as Malachi’s. “They’re coming!”

“They are still a ways off,” Cedric reassured her. Hopefully, it reassured the guard as well, for he looked just as likely to faint dead away. “But we must hurry. Can you carry the Royal Consort?”

The guard seemed to notice Malachi for the first time, and he blanched further. “Is he dead?”

“Not dead. We need to take him to Sanctuary.” In truth, there was no need to take him farther; by the time the Waterhorses reached him, he would be dead already. But they had brought him this far; to abandon him to those fiends while he still lived, only to hasten their flight, seemed wrong.

The guard took Malachi’s body from Cedric, draped it over his shoulders in the same way Cedric had carried him. Though relieved of his burden, a new one settled on him, the strange notion that he had done all he could for his friend, and he would not be able to do anymore. This guard would carry him the rest of the journey; for Cedric, Malachi’s life was over here. Behind them, the cries of the Waterhorses grew in number, grew more insistent, and the Fae hurried away, on soft footsteps at first, then, as they put distance between them, pounding harder at the ground for more speed, more haste. Even Cerridwen ran, though she panted and cried out with each step.

“This way!” he called to the guard, as the frightened creature missed a turn altogether. He slid and stumbled, and for a moment it appeared he would drop Malachi. But he regained his footing, and all three of them saw the green of Sanctuary welcoming them.

Though there was room enough in Sanctuary for three times the number of Faeries that assembled there, they all huddled close together on the grass, not daring to go into the trees, content to stay safe in their number.

Ayla could not blame them. For an hour or more she had watched as the guards uncovered their escape route to the Upworld, and now all eyes on the ground eyed the hole warily, waiting, she presumed, for the guards to leave it unattended.

They would not, though, not without her signal. She trusted that, at least. If they had to flee the Underground, they would do so together, so that none was lost in the journey to the boat. Flidais still glared at her, lying on the ground, her gag bound tighter. But when she’d had the chance, she’d told Ayla all she knew about the Upworld escape that Bauchan had planned. No doubt she believed this assistance would help her, because she believed that Ayla would take her along, and the glory would be all hers when she arrived at Queene Danae’s Court. There would be no going to the Court of another Queene. Not for Flidais, and not for Ayla. She looked to the guards at the hole over Sanctuary, saw they had their expectant gazes trained on her, and she looked away.

“Mother!”

The voice cut through the air like an arrow aimed for her heart, and she turned to the entrance to see Cerridwen, wings unbound, hair matted to her face, clothes bathed in blood and grime, flying toward her. She was more beautiful to Ayla now than she had been the moment she’d been born. With a sobbing cry, Ayla ran to meet her.

“I am sorry! I am so sorry!” Cerridwen cried as she came into Ayla’s arms, and they embraced as though every harsh word between them had been forgotten, as though no betrayal had ever taken place. Ayla’s arms ached with the reminder that they had been empty for too long, now that she finally held her child again.