The Black Queen (Book 6) (15 page)

He took a deep breath before opening the kitchen door. Another Fey, a girl he had never seen before, instantly covered her plate with her hands. She was his age, and her features were rounder than most Fey.

Was she part Islander?

“Who’re you?” she asked. Her voice was soft, with the slight twang of Jahn in it.

“Nobody,” he said. “Finish your meal.”

Color flooded her cheeks, and that was when he realized her skin was as pale as his was. She had Fey features, but they had been tempered by her Islander heritage.

Slowly she uncovered her plate. Bits of sausage littered it along with a large hunk of cheese. He couldn’t believe she would eat that much. She was very thin.

“You want some?” she asked in a tone that led him to believe she really didn’t want to share.

“No,” he said. “I was just leaving. Is that strange Fey outside?”

“Scavenger?” She nodded. “He usually is at night.”

Alex felt his mouth grow dry. He really didn’t want to see the little man again.

She seemed to sense his unease. The edges of her lips quirked in a half smile. “You want me to go with you?”

“No,” he said.

“You running away?”

He supposed that was accurate. He was running from here, but not away. He didn’t live here. This wasn’t home. It wasn’t like he was doing something wrong.

Was it?

Matt thought it was. That look in his brother’s eyes had been one of hurt, not anger. Matt had brought Alex to this forbidden place so that he could get help, and Alex had refused. Couldn’t Matt see that the way Islanders behaved was the only thing that made them different from the Fey? To learn how to behave from the Fey was wrong, and always had been.

He’d try to explain that to his brother later, but he had a hunch it would make no difference. Matt had made his choice long ago, and if Alex had known this was it, he wouldn’t have lied for Matt. He would have told his mother exactly where Matt was.

Although her tears had confused him. Her tears and her willingness to send him here after discovering his hallucinations, his Vision, as Coulter called it. Maybe Matt had been right. Maybe Alex had needed to be here. Now he had learned what he needed to know: that such Visions were normal and that he had to learn how to live with them, how to use them. They were flashes of the future, and they could be changed.

The one that bothered him the most wasn’t the one of himself surrounded by Fey. It was the one of Matt, cackling, his eyes empty, his mind gone.

Alex shuddered.

“All right,” the girl said, returning to her food. “Don’t answer me.”

He had forgotten what the question was. He made himself smile at her as he slipped past her. “Sorry,” he said.

This time, she shrugged, and didn’t look at him. Her back was so thin he could see the outline of her shoulder blades and the ridges of her spine. Didn’t they feed their students here? Was that why she was sneaking food? He’d have to warn Matt about that as well.

Alex pushed open the door, and felt a blast of cold night air. The door scraped against a wooden chair and it slid across the stone threshold. The little man appeared out of nowhere, grabbed the chair, and grinned at Alex.

“So,” the man said, pushing the door closed. “Couldn’t stay, could you?”

Alex was determined to move past him. This time, the man wouldn’t make him angry, no matter what he said.

“Where’s your brother?”

“Inside.” Alex shoved his hands inside his coat pockets and bowed his head, hurrying across the yard. The little man kept up with him.

“Afraid of me?” he asked.

Alex didn’t answer.

“Or are you afraid of yourself?”

Alex tightened his hands into fists.

“Just like your father, aren’t you? Willing to deny everything you are because you can’t face yourself.”

Alex whirled. “My father is a good man.”

“Your father has never been a good man,” the Fey said. “But he has always been an interesting and complex one. I’ve seen him lately. It’s sad what he’s become.”

“You don’t understand it.”

“I’m afraid I do.” The little man was speaking softly now. “It’s the one reason I’m happy I have no magick. I value my mind too much.”

Tears touched Alex’s eyes for the second time that night. He didn’t like this place. He didn’t like these people. He wanted them all to leave him alone.

Blindly, he turned and ran away from the school. But he didn’t head home. Instead, he ran toward the center of town.

Most of the lights were out now, except for the torches that burned streetside. Those were a Fey custom, now adopted by Islanders, so that the streets were visible at night. Someone said it cut down on crime, but Alex’s father said there had been no crime until the Fey arrived.

The houses were dark. Alex’s footfalls on the dirt roads and his own ragged breathing were the only sounds he heard. The little Fey man hadn’t followed him.

Alex was alone.

When he reached the plaza and its built-in stone booths, he stopped running. He had a stitch in his side, and he was tired on a level he didn’t entirely understand.

He walked the rest of the way to the old meeting house, not seeing a soul, wondering if his mother had already been here to fetch his father. Alex suspected she hadn’t. More and more, it seemed, she left his father on his own. It was as if she were disgusted with him, or frightened of him, or unable to deal with what he had become.

Alex pushed open the meeting house door. The familiar musty smell overtook him. Old furniture was piled against the walls, and the candle, usually left by the door, was gone. It probably hadn’t been there for a while. A lot of people had died in and near the Meeting House during the Battles for Constant in the last war, and no one wanted to come into this place any longer.

No one except his father.

Alex felt around, dust rising as he did so, his hands getting filthy as he searched for more candles and a flint. If Matt were with him, he would create one of those tiny flames on the tips of his fingers that lit everything so they could find a candle. But he had left Matt at that school.

It was the first real purposeful separation of their lives.

Finally Alex’s fingers felt soft wax. He grabbed the candle, felt some flint beside it, and, after a few tries, managed to light it.

The mess in this place always looked worse in the dark, almost as if he could see the remains of the people who had died here in the year before he was born. He had heard the stories, how the Fey had become birds and rats and had attacked everyone, but he had never actually seen anything like it. Still, from the time he was a small boy, sudden sharp movements by small creatures terrified him. The stories had lodged deep within him and he knew, no matter what his brother said, that the Fey couldn’t be trusted.

Shadows moved across the wall as the candle flickered. Alex swallowed, wondering if he should have come here at all. But he didn’t want to go home. He didn’t want to see his mother right now and have her ask questions, and he didn’t want to see Matt. Matt would yell at him. Matt would try to change him. And there was no way that Matt could.

Alex had never realized how very different they were until tonight. They looked so much alike and they had been together almost every moment of their lives. When they were little, they even had their own language. Their mother had thought it cute, but their father was the one who had put a stop to it, insisting that they speak so that everyone could understand them.

Their father had been right, of course. In those days, he always was.

Alex crossed the dirty floor to the hidden door. He pressed the mechanism that opened it, heard the click, felt the rush of cooler air rise from below.

There were no lights. Maybe his mother had been here.

“Father?” he yelled. He waited a moment, and heard nothing but the echo of his own voice.

He sighed and a bit of his breath hit the candle’s flame. It guttered but did not go out. His heart started pounding. The last thing he wanted to do was go down those stairs and suddenly find himself in darkness.

Hot wax dripped on the back of his hand. This wouldn’t work. He turned and searched until he found the remains of a torch. He used the candle to light it, then blew the candle out.

The wax had dried on the back of his hand. He wiped it against his pants, then went to the door again.

Taking a deep breath, he walked down the stairs, feeling them creak under his weight. They hadn’t had care for years. He could remember coming down these stairs when he was little and thinking them wondrous, with their clean wood surface, their firmness despite their age. He, his brother, and his parents could stand on a step and it wouldn’t make a sound of protest.

Things had changed. He knew that. But he still had hope that the answers to his new problem lay here, and not with the school. That even if his father couldn’t assist him, the Words could. The Words and the trappings of the old religion. After all, that had been all that the first Alexander had had.

The stairs went down a long way ending in a wide corridor. It was built of the mountain stone, and filled with cobwebs and rotting wood. The smell of decay was strong here, and seemed to grow stronger every time he came down.

The stones were uneven and held in place with generations of mortar. Some had flaked off, and he could see the older material beneath. He had tried to touch it once, to see if the older material was the same as the newer, but his father had yelled at him as if he had touched something forbidden.

“Father?” Alex yelled again.

This time his voice sounded disembodied. There was no echo; there never had been in this portion of the corridor. It went on for a long way, and he sighed, realizing that he would have to go all the way to the Vault.

As he walked, the air got colder and damper, and bits of water glistened on some of the stone. It took a long time before he got to the section of the corridor that meant he was getting close to the Vault itself.

The floor had changed color. Earlier, it had been the gray of mountain stone after it had been cut away from the mountain. Now it was red like the mountains, like the mountain stone before it was cut away.

He was inside the Cliffs of Blood.

That thought always made him slightly uncomfortable. He envisioned the mountains rising to their incomparable height above him, and he always felt very small and fragile. In comparison to the natural beauty around him, he was nothing.

He had said that to his father once, and his father had laughed. A real laugh, not the cackle he so often used now.
Boy
, his father had said.
The beauty wouldn’t exist without our eyes to appreciate it
.

His mother had laughed too, and called his father self-centered. His father had put his arm around her, and said, as he so often used to, that she was the best thing in his life.

Alex used to be jealous of that. Why weren’t his sons the best thing? But now he missed it. Now he missed the father who gave them advice and sometimes played with them and instructed them. The father who loved their mother best of all and made no pretense at hiding it. Alex hadn’t seen that man for a long, long time.

Maybe Coulter was right. Maybe Alex’s father could no longer help him. But his father had always said,
If you can’t find answers from the people around you, return to the Words.

Alex was doing that, and returning to his father as well.

The corridor had stopped tilting downward and here he felt it, as he always did, stronger than usual. The pull of the mountain. He had felt it since he was an infant. His mother used to tell the story of Alex, reaching toward the sky. Once Alex asked about it and his mother said she hadn’t known what he was reaching for. But his father had. He had looked at his mother with a grave expression, and said,
Alex feels the Roca’s Cave.

His mother never told the story again.

The first time his father brought him down here, he held Alex’s arm tightly. His mother held Matt. At this point in the corridor, both boys had felt the urge to run forward, to climb from the inside, to use the tunnels to take them to that mysterious place up the mountain, but their parents had held them fast.
See?
his father had said.
This is why I haven’t brought you here before. I will only bring you if you resist that temptation. For up there is death
.

It was later that Alex heard how his father had nearly died there twice, fighting spirits that lived in the mountains, and that was where he had gotten the permanent bruise at the base of his neck. His father was horribly scarred from battles fought against the Fey. The worst scar ran along his face, puckering as he grew older, and knocking his features out of alignment.

Alex almost called for his father again, but did not. His father hadn’t answered before. He probably wouldn’t answer now.

If he was even here.

Alex’s heart was pounding. The torch’s heat was growing too much for his hand. The torch obviously had been discarded because it had grown too short. But it was all he had. He switched it to the other hand, and placed the hot hand on the nearest stone.