Seanan McGuire - An Artificial Night

IAWOKE FACEDOWN in the middle of a marble floor that had been white once, before it was buried under years of mud and gore. My head was throbbing in time to an unseen samba band. I took a brief mental census, confirming that my aching head was still attached to the rest of me before pushing myself upright.

I could feel the blood the Luidaeg used to make my candle even before I realized that my fingers were still wrapped tightly around it. The flame blazed up as soon as I looked at it, growing until it was a foot high and burning brilliant red. That couldn’t be good. Raj was nowhere in sight. That could have meant he’d managed to escape the Hunt, but I didn’t think so. There was probably some ceremony he’d already gone through that I still needed to undergo in my new role as one of Blind Michael’s captive children. There are always ceremonies in Faerie, even in the parts that we’d rather ignore.

The room I was in was probably a ballroom before it became a prison. The walls had been shattered about ten feet up, and the roof was entirely gone. Brambles boiled over the walls on three sides, obscuring all the doors. Tattered tapestries hung between the loops of briar, their patterns worn away by dirt and time. The sky had grown even darker while I was unconscious, but there were still no stars. No stars at all.

Shadows too dark for changeling eyes to pierce pooled at the base of the walls, and I could hear giggling and rustling noises coming from inside them. That wasn’t promising. I’ve learned to never trust the laughing ones; they’re either insane or genuinely glad to see people frightened and in pain, and either way, they’re likely to cause problems.

I stood, trying to ignore the shivering weakness in my knees. The Rider that knocked me out had obviously done it before, because I wasn’t dead—it takes skill to knock someone out from behind without smashing their skull. If I was lucky, the pain would pass before I needed to run. I seemed to be counting on luck an awful lot.

It took a moment to be sure I wasn’t going to fall down. When I was confident my balance would hold I called, “All right, I know you’re there. Now come out where I can see you.” My words almost echoed Acacia’s, and that coaxed a small, wry smile from my lips, even as I wondered whether May knew where to find me. What good is a Fetch if she isn’t there when it’s time to die?

My voice echoed against the walls. As the echoes faded, the children came creeping into the open. At first they came in little groups—two and three at a time, staying tight and close together—but the groups grew larger as they got bolder, until they were approaching in clusters of five and six and even eight. They ranged from toddlers to teenagers on the edge of adulthood, and there were a lot of them, moving too quickly for me to count. I froze, watching them. They were wrong. The children were …

The children were wrong. It was hard to tell their breeds or make my eyes define what I was seeing. Some of them were easy to identify—he was Daoine Sidhe, she was a Bannick, he was a Barrow Wight—but subtly changed, until they looked more like parodies of their races than actual fae. Others were strangely blurred and blended, twisted into strange mockeries of what they should have been. Pointed ears and cat-slit eyes, scales and fur, wings and long, thrashing tails were combined without any visible logic, creating things that were entirely new, and entirely wrong.

There was a Tuatha de Dannan, perfect and unaltered, except for the streaky brown feathers that turned his arms into ragged wings. Behind him was a Centaur with the hindquarters of a small Dragon. He had iridescent green scales in place of fur, and his hooves were more like talons. A Piskie with webbed hands and legs that tapered to fins straddled his back, her snarled hair tied out of her eyes with a strip of dirty linen.

I opened my mouth to test out their bloodlines, and gagged on the impossible mixture that hit the back of my throat. Their blood might remember how they started, if I had the time to taste them out one at a time, but in a group, they were smothering. He hadn’t just changed them on the outside. He’d changed them all the way down to the bone.

Faerie has her citizens and her monsters, and sometimes the two are the same, but it’s by design, not accident or malicious alteration. We are what we were meant to be, and every race has a role to play. The Daoine Sidhe are beautiful and fickle and so tied to blood that our hands are never clean. The Tuatha de Dannan bridge the gaps between our varied lands, gatekeepers and guardians. The night-haunts may be monsters, but they perform a service the rest of us can never repay; they eat our dead and keep us hidden. We do our jobs.

Even the Firstborn, unique as they all are, have a role to play. They give us legends and night terrors; they give us things to aspire to and avoid, and without them, Faerie would lack focus. There would be nothing for the heroes to hunt for or the villains to aspire to become. We need them as much as we need each other. But these children had no purpose anymore. The things they’d become were nothing natural, even on the strange shores of Faerie. It didn’t matter how it had been done, or why; all that mattered was that it was too late to save them. All I could do was hope the children I’d been sent to save weren’t already among them.

“New girl,” said a Urisk with long antennae growing in front of his stubbed and broken horns. He was wrapped in a stained muslin sheet, toga-style, with slits cut for his gauzy locust’s wings. The hair on his goatish legs was sparse and matted.

“New girl,” said the Centaur. The Piskie on his back smiled, baring a mouthful of unnaturally angled fangs.

“New girl,” she said.

The others took up the cry, whispering, “New girl, new girl,” as they crept closer. I stood my ground, fingers clenched white-knuckled around my candle. Luna warned me about Blind Michael’s children, telling me to beware and be wary, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t be afraid of them. I could pity them, and I knew better than to trust them, but I couldn’t fear them.

The Piskie reached out and tweaked a strand of my hair, twisting it between heavily webbed fingers. Her expression was politely fascinated; she was probably somewhere near ten years old. “Human blood,” she said finally, and yanked, hard.

I jerked away, clapping my free hand against my scalp. “Hey! That hurt!”

She ignored me, laughing as she held up the strands of hair she’d stolen. “Rider or ridden?” she demanded. “How strong?”

This seemed to be a great question, and an even better game. The children began to skip in a circle around me, chanting, “Rider or ridden, Rider or ridden,” over and over. They stressed the second syllable of each word, making it a singsong rhythm that clashed with the pounding in my head. I was uncomfortably aware that at least half of them were bigger than I was, and that the ones who weren’t either came paired with larger friends or had some sort of natural weaponry. All I could think of was the Jabberwock, with its claws that catch and teeth that bite. Me, I had my knife and my candle, and that was it.

The flame was burning higher and higher, and it seemed to be doing some good—only the Piskie had touched me. The circle they’d formed around me would draw in close and then spread out again, like the children were trying to stay out of the candlelight. I waited for the circle to close again and then thrust the candle out at arm’s length to test my theory. The nearest of the children shied back, nearly breaking the line.

“How many miles to Babylon?” I asked, half whimsically. The entire circle staggered back, so fast that some of the smaller children fell. The youngest I could see was a tiny Roane with raw-looking gills fluttering in the sides of his neck. He looked like he couldn’t have been more than three years old when he was taken. Oberon only knew how long ago that was; the Roane have been all but extinct for centuries. Oak and ash, how many lives had this man destroyed? Why hadn’t anyone stopped him?