The Shattered Dark (8 page)

After he leaves with Jacia, I have to assure myself a dozen times that he’s going
to be okay and that I
will
see him again. Then I start looking for Naito. Surprisingly, he’s difficult to find.
A human with lightning-covered skin kind of sticks out in this world, but I check
his room, do a quick walk-through of the sculpture garden, and search a few other
locations where he’s likely to be, all without any success. I finally start asking
the English-speaking fae—we decided it’s best that the high nobles don’t know I’ve
learned their language—if they’ve seen him. After half a dozen negative responses,
someone tells me Naito’s in the royal archives. I clarify that with the fae more than
once, though, thinking he must have misunderstood me. Humans aren’t allowed in the
archives. At least, they weren’t under Atroth’s reign. Eventually, though, I head
in that direction because I don’t know where else to look.

“McKenzie.” Kavok smiles when he opens the door. I can’t help but smile in return.
I’ve always liked the archivist. He’s dedicated to his job. So dedicated he didn’t
leave the palace when Lena gave the Court fae the opportunity, and when I worked for
the king, he was one of the few fae who was always willing to talk to me. That’s mainly
because he’s so curious about humans. Whenever he had the chance, he questioned me
about my life and my world, and sometimes, he told me a few things about his.

“Hi, Kavok,” I say, looking into archives behind him. Drawers line the walls of the
large room. The symbols on them are illuminated by hanging orbs, which are lit with
magic. The combination of blue and white lightning inside them creates a steady, slightly
tinted glow that doesn’t damage documents like the sun or lights from my world would.
But that’s not the only thing that preserves the records in here. Kavok can, to a
certain extent, control the weather. It’s a useful magic, one that’s in high demand.
Farmers employ fae who can tweak the weather if there’s a drought, and the former
king used to use them to darken the sky when he thought it would give the Court fae
the advantage during an
attack. Kavok, though, uses his ability to regulate the temperature of the archives.
He keeps humidity out, too, and from what I’ve heard, some documents in here look
like they were created yesterday even though they’re centuries old.

“It’s good to see you,” he says. Then, his face brightens even more. “I found an earlier
reference.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about, but he turns to the desk that’s just to the
left of the door. At least, I think there’s a desk under the mountains of papers,
thick, leather-bound tomes, and haphazard stacks of anchor-stones. An entire alcove
in here is set aside for storing the latter. Locations both here and on Earth are
kept in drawers in case the king needed fae to fissure somewhere they’d never been
before.

After a minute of shuffling through the piles, Kavok looks up.

“Come in,” he says.

Carefully, I step over the threshold. I feel the atmosphere change when I do. It’s
dryer and cooler than the corridor. “I thought humans weren’t allowed in here?”

He shrugs. “New ruler, new rules. Ah, yes. Sixteen hundred ninety-one years ago—our
years, not yours. That’s the earliest mention I’ve come across. It corresponds with…”

He begins describing some kind of agricultural process, but I’m only half listening
because I’m trying to figure out what reference he’s referring to. I haven’t spoken
to him in months. He might have an impeccable memory, but I don’t. I can’t even remember
the topic of our last conver—

Oh.

“You found a reference to a shadow-reader?” I ask.

“Yes!” He looks up from the huge book in front of him and grins. “It’s 350 years earlier
than Faem thought.”

Faem, I think, was the previous archivist. The silver in Kavok’s eyes practically
sparkles. His giddiness makes him seem even younger than he already looks. If he was
human, I’d guess him to be in his midtwenties, so that means he’s probably pushing
fifty, still a relatively young age for a fae. His hair is blond, just a few shades
darker than Aren’s—most likely because he locks himself in here all day, every day—and
it’s just long enough to be frazzled.

In short, he’s the geekiest fae I know. I keep expecting him to push wire-framed glasses
up on his nose.

“What does it say about the shadow-reader?” I ask, interrupting his lecture on agricultural
practices.

“Oh, yes.” He clears his throat. “It doesn’t say this is the first shadow-reader,
and I can’t validate the text’s authority, but it appears that there is little difference
between his abilities and yours. The shadows only told him where a fae exited the
In-Between, not where he entered it, and he, too, had to draw what he saw and name
the nearest city or region out loud. But then, we come to a small discrepancy.”

“Discrepancy?” I move closer to his desk, but he closes the text and rises.

“Not with your abilities,” he says. “With ours. According to the author, only a few
fae were able to fissure to the locations the shadow-reader mapped and named.”

Now,
that’s
interesting.

“Is it something fae learned to do over time?” I ask.

“It’s implied that the fae who could follow the maps had more…er, more contact with
humans.” Kavok doesn’t meet my eyes.

“Sex?”

He lifts a shoulder, says almost apologetically, “It’s implied.”

Everyone
who has the ability to fissure can make it to the locations I sketch, and since most
of those fae would rather not touch a human at all, sex definitely doesn’t have anything
to do with it.

“That’s all I’ve discovered,” Kavok says. “I found the reference a few weeks ago,
but you were…Well, you were…”

“Things were different then,” I say, hiding a smile. It’s almost cute, how easily
flustered he is. “I’m looking for Naito.”

He seems grateful for the change of subject. “Of course. He’s there.”

He points to an alcove that splits off from the main room.

After he takes a seat at his desk, I walk toward the alcove he indicated, and there,
sitting at a table heaped with papers, books, and a few boxes, sits Naito.

He doesn’t notice me. He’s staring at whatever is in front
of him. His left hand is clenched in his black hair, helping to hold his head up,
and his forehead is creased. He’s wearing the same jeans and white T-shirt I saw him
in a few days ago, and his shoulders are rounded and slumped. Oddly, though, he looks
better than he did before. I can’t quite put my finger on why. Maybe it’s the lack
of anger in his expression. Maybe it’s the amount of concentration, of focus, in the
way his eyes move back and forth, reading, I presume. Or maybe it’s just the fact
that he’s not demanding someone fissure him back to Earth so he can murder his father.

“Hey,” I say when I reach his table.

“Hey,” he responds without looking up. I wait a moment then, when he still doesn’t
glance away from what he’s reading, I pull out the chair across from him and sit.

My gaze sweeps across the table.

“You can read this?” Everything is written in a jumble of symbols and marks. I can
speak Fae fairly well now, but even if I had years to study, I don’t think I’d ever
be able to make sense of their written language.

“Kelia is teaching me,” Naito says.

I bite my lower lip, unable to ignore the fact that he’s still talking about her in
the present tense. “Naito—”

“I understand enough to get by,” he says. His tone is firm, now, and his eyes have
hardened.

Everyone’s been tiptoeing around Naito these past two weeks. I don’t want to make
him hurt any more than he already does, but I think it’s time someone convinces him
that he’ll never see Kelia again. She’s well and truly gone.

I ignore the way my throat burns when I swallow, then say, “Kelia would want—”

“To be with me,” he interrupts again. There’s steel in his voice. It’s as if he’s
daring me to claim otherwise. Before I can do just that, he turns the book in front
of him around so that it’s right side up for me.

“Banek’tan,”
he says, pointing to a jumble of tiny lines.

The word sounds familiar—I’m pretty sure it’s a type of magic—but I say, “I can’t
read that.”

He raises his eyes to meet mine. “It means ‘one who retrieves the departed.’ A
banek’tan
can bring Kelia back.”

Really?

I stare down at the book as an almost giddy feeling takes over me. A
banek’tan
could undo so much. With one’s help, Naito and Kelia can be together again. They
can have their happy ending, and we could bring back the innocent fae who were caught
up in this war: the merchants who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, the families
who were burned inside their homes in Brykeld, the swordsmen on both sides of the
war who were only following orders.

We could bring back the fae I inadvertently killed in Belecha.

We could resurrect Sethan.

But just as quickly as those hopes appear, they vanish. What the hell am I thinking?
If that magic existed, Lena would have already tried to bring her brother back from
the ether. And someone would have tried to bring back the king.

I close my eyes as a rush of pity flows through me. It’s tinged with pain, and it
takes everything in me to keep it locked down tight. I swallow, trying to loosen a
tight and raw throat, then, carefully, I ask, “Is that an extinct magic?”

Naito’s gaze doesn’t waver. It’s almost as if he’s waiting for the pity or skepticism
to reach my face, but after a handful of heartbeats, some of the tension leaves his
shoulders. “These documents are filled with references to
banek’tan
. And some of them are recent. This one”—he grabs a loose parchment from one of his
stacks—“is only twenty years old. A false-blood’s bond-mate was killed. She came back.”

I bite the inside of my cheek and watch as he picks up another paper.

“Same thing with this one,” he says. “It’s a little older, but there were dozens of
witnesses. A fae died in the silver mines of Adaris. His bond-mate was able to bring
him back. I’ve found twelve stories like these from the past century. Twelve. There
has to be some truth to them.”

There’s so much hope in his voice, I almost want to let him believe this. Would it
be so wrong to? This is the best he’s looked in weeks. He has a reason to live, but
these…these stories are just that. Stories. They’re rumors. Dreams.
I want to believe them, too, but I’ve learned the hard way that life isn’t a fairy
tale. People don’t come back from the dead.

No. I was wrong before when I thought it was too soon for him to go back to work.
He needs the distraction. He doesn’t need to sit around researching dreams that can’t
come true. It isn’t healthy.

“What happened to them?” I ask.

His brows lower. “What do you mean?”

“These fae who came back from the ether. Where are they now?”

He blinks, then stares down at the pages in front of him. “I’m not sure.”

I wait a moment, letting him think things through. “Naito, the
banek’tan
don’t exist.”

He looks up again, his expression hardening. “Neither did the
ther’othi
.”

And one point goes to Naito. Fae aren’t supposed to be able to walk the In-Between,
but Micid could. He was a cruel, sick fae who worked for the previous king and his
lord general, Radath. Instead of going through the In-Between, the freezing space
fae pass through when they fissure, he waded in, taking me with him into a dimension
within a world. We were invisible to everyone, but could still move and interact with
the world. I suppose I can see why Naito is clinging to this hope, but it’s so, so
thin. If a fae was ever brought back from the ether, there would be more evidence
than what’s hinted at in these documents.

I draw in a breath, let it out slowly, then go for a not-so-subtle subject change.
“Lena’s having a hard time keeping the palace secure.”

“Hmm,” Naito murmurs, leaning back in his chair and pulling a book closer. “She needs
more fae to guard the
Sidhe Tol
.”

“The
Sidhe Tol
aren’t the problem,” I say. They’re not entirely the problem. A
Sidhe Tol
is a very rare and very special type of gate that allows a fae to fissure into an
area protected by silver. We know the locations of three of them, but rumor has it
there are more. No one’s been able to find them,
and until two weeks ago, no one but the king and a few trusted advisors knew where
they were.
I
wasn’t supposed to know where they were, but Kyol fissured me through one once. I
gave the rebels its location, and then, they learned where the other two were as well.
They used the
Sidhe Tol
to take the palace. Now, we have to guard them to make sure the former Court fae
don’t do the same thing to us.

“The remnants are launching organized attacks from within the silver walls,” I tell
Naito. “They have illusionists and all of the humans who used to work for the Court.
Lena needs—”

“Not all of them,” Naito interrupts. “They don’t have you. I hear they don’t have
that Shane guy, either.”

So he
is
aware of some of the things that are going on around the palace. That’s good. It
means he isn’t completely lost in his research here. “Lena needs your help.”

“I’m busy.”

“Naito.”

“I said I’m busy.” His glare comes off as a warning not to press the issue further.

Too bad. I have to.

“And how much time do you think you’ll have for your research if we lose the palace?”
I demand. “Do you think the remnants will just let you hang out here?”

His bottom lip twitches.

“You need to join the rotation,” I say. “With you and Shane, there are six of us working
for Lena. We can keep all the entrances watched.”

Naito’s gaze grows distant, focusing somewhere behind me. “It won’t make a difference.
We can’t keep watch indefinitely. Lena needs to take out the remnants’ leader. She
needs to go on the offensive.”