Karen Moning - Shadowfever

I wonder how long the concubine was here. I wonder how much of this house is her creation.

I taste forever in this place, but, unlike in the Hall of All Days, forever here is exquisite, gentle. The House promises a blissful eternity. It does not terrify or cow. The House is time as it was meant to be: endless, serene.

Here—a room of thousands of gowns! I dash through row after row, my arms spread wide, my hands fanning the fabulous fabrics. I love these gowns!

I pluck one from its hanger and spin around, dancing with it. Faint strains of music drift upon the air and I lose track of time.

Here’s a curio cabinet housing items I cannot name but nonetheless recognize. I pocket a few of the smaller trinkets. I open a music box and listen to a song that makes me feel I am drifting in space, enormous and free, more right in my skin than I’ve ever been, poised on the brink of all possibles. I forget everything for a time, lost in joy that is larger than the mansion itself.

In room after room, I find something familiar, something that makes me happy.

I see the first of many beds. As in my dreams, there are so many that I lose count after a time.

I wander sumptuous room after room, see bed after bed. Some of the rooms have nothing but beds.

I begin to feel … uneasy. I don’t like looking at these beds.

The beds disturb me.

I turn my head away, because they make me feel things I don’t want to feel.

Need. Desire. Alone .

Empty beds .

Don’t want to be alone anymore. So tired of being alone. Tired of waiting .

After a time, I stop looking in the rooms.

I was wrong when I thought it might not be possible to feel negative things inside the White Mansion.

Grief wells up inside me.

I’ve lived so long. Lost so many things.

I force myself to focus. I remind myself that I’m supposed to be looking for something. A mirror.

I love that mirror .

I shake my head. No, I don’t. I just need it. I don’t have any emotions about it!

It brings me such pleasure! It brings us together .

White marble, Darroc said. I need to find white-marble floors. Not crimson, not bronze, not pink, and especially not black.

I envision the mirror as he described it: ten feet tall, five feet wide.

Gilt-framed, like the ones at 1247 LaRuhe.

The mirror is a part of the vast Unseelie Hallow that is the network of Silvers. I can sense Hallows. I can sense all Fae OOPs—Objects of Power. It is perhaps my greatest advantage.

I reach out with my sidhe -seer senses, expand and search.

I sense nothing. It didn’t work in the Hall of All Days, either. Impossible, I suppose, to sense a Silver while inside the Silvers.

My feet turn me, and I begin walking in a new direction with complete confidence. I’m suddenly certain I have seen the mirror I need many times and I know exactly where it is.

I’ll find the way out long before Darroc does. And although I will not leave without him—I have much use for him—it will please me to best him.

I hurry down a mint corridor, turn without hesitation onto an iridescent path, and rush down a pale-blue hall. A corridor of silver turns to blush wine.

The mirror is ahead. It draws me. I can’t wait to get to it.

I’m focused, so focused that the crimson hallway barely makes a dent in my awareness.

I’m focused—so focused on my goal that, by the time I realize what I’ve done, it’s too late.

I don’t know what makes me look down, but something does.

I freeze.

I’m at a crossroads, the intersection of two halls.

I can go east, west, north, or south—if such directions exist in the House—but whichever way I choose, the floor is the same color.

Black.

I stand uncertainly, berating myself for screwing up again , when suddenly a hand slips into mine.

It is warm, familiar. And much too real.

I close my eyes. I’ve been played with in Faery before. Who am I to be tortured with now? What is my punishment to be? Which ghost will nip at me now with needles for teeth?

Alina?

Barrons?

Both?

I fist my other hand so nothing can hold it.

I know better than to think if I keep my eyes closed my ghost will go away. It doesn’t work that way. When your private demons decide to mess with you, they demand their pound of flesh. It’s best to pay it and get it over with.

Then I can focus on finding my way off the black floor. I brace myself for how bad it’s going to be. I speculate that if golden floors in the Hall of ALL Days were bad, black floors in the White Mansion will be … forgive the pun … beyond the pale.

Fingers twine with mine. I know the hand as well as my own.

Sighing, I open my eyes.

I jerk away and scramble back frantically, boots slipping on the shiny black surface. I sprawl flat on my back with such a jolt that I bite my tongue.

I begin to hyperventilate. Does she see me? Does she know me? Is she there? Am I?

She laughs, a silvery sound, and it makes my heart hurt. I remember laughing like that once. Happy, so happy.

I don’t even try to get up. I just lay there and watch her. I’m bewildered. I’m hypnotized. I’m carved in two by a sense of duality I cannot reconcile.

Not Alina. Not Barrons.

At the juncture of east, west, north, and south, she stands.

Her.

The sad, beautiful woman who haunts my dreams.

She is so dazzling it makes me want to weep.

But she’s not sad.

She’s so happy that I could hate her.

She glows radiantly, she smiles, and it curves lips of such soft, divine perfection that mine part instinctively to receive her kiss.

Is this her—the Unseelie King’s concubine? No wonder he was obsessed!

When she begins to glide away down one of the corridors—the blackest of the four, the one that absorbs the light cast by candles in sconces—I push myself up.

Moth to a flame, I follow.

According to V’lane, the concubine was mortal. In fact, her mortality was the first domino in a long, convoluted line that toppled out of control and led to this moment.

Nearly a million years ago, the Seelie King asked the original Seelie Queen—since her death, many queens have risen, only to be ousted by another who achieved greater power and support—to turn his concubine Fae, to make her immortal so he could keep her forever. When the queen refused, the king built his concubine the White Mansion inside the Silvers. He secreted his beloved away from the vindictive queen, where she could live without aging until he was able to perfect the Song of Making and turn her Fae himself.

If only the queen had granted his one simple request! But the leader of the True Race was controlling, jealous, and small.

Unfortunately, the king’s efforts to duplicate the Song of Making—the mystical stuff of creation, a power and right that the queen of their matriarchal race selfishly hoarded—created the Unseelie, imperfect half-lives that he couldn’t bear to kill. They lived. They were his sons and daughters.

He created a new realm, the Court of Shadows, where his children could play while he continued his work, his labor of love.

But the day came when he was betrayed by one of his own children and found out by the Seelie Queen.

They clashed in a battle to end all battles. Seelie struck down their darker brethren, who sought only the right to exist.

The dominoes fell, one after another: the death of the Seelie Queen at the hands of the king; the suicide of the concubine; the act of “atonement” in which the Seelie King created the deadly Sinsar Dubh .

He rechristened himself the Un seelie King—never again would he be associated with the petty viciousness of the Seelie; henceforth he would be Unseelie, literally meaning not of the Seelie. He no longer called his home the Court of Shadows, in which he hid to perform his labor of love. It became simply Unseelie court.