Queen of Air and Darkness
Page 38

“Kieran,” Diego said sharply. “You are a prince of Faerie. Be a prince of Faerie.”
Kieran gave him a wild, dark look. His breath was ragged. Divya glanced at Diego as if to say what are you doing? just as Kieran reached up to seize a branch of the tree.
He closed his black and silver eyes. His face was a pale mask. His jaw tightened even as the leaves on the tree began to rustle, as if in a high wind. It was as if the tree were calling out.
“What’s happening?” whispered Divya.
Light crackled up and down the tree—not lightning, but pure bright sparks. It circled Kieran as if he were outlined in gold paint. His hair had turned an odd gold-green, something Diego had never seen before.
“Kieran—” Diego started.
Kieran threw his hands up. His eyes were still closed; words poured from his mouth, a language Diego had never heard. He wished Cristina were here. Cristina could translate. Kieran was shouting; Diego thought he heard the word “Windspear” repeated.
Windspear? thought Diego. Isn’t that—?
“There are people coming!” Divya cried. She ran to the door of the library, slammed it closed, and locked it, but she was shaking her head. “There are way too many of them. Diego—”
The glass ceiling exploded. Both Diego and Divya gasped.
A white horse crashed through the ceiling. A flying white horse, proud and beautiful. Glass sprayed and Diego dived under a nearby table, dragging Divya with him. Kieran opened his eyes; he reached up in welcome as Windspear sliced through the air, swift as an arrow, light as thistledown.
“By the Angel,” Divya whispered. “God, I used to love ponies when I was little.”
Kieran vaulted himself up onto Windspear’s back. His hair had gone back to its more normal blue-black, but he was still crackling with energy. His hands threw sparks as he moved. He reached out toward Diego, who scrambled out from under the table, Divya beside him, their boots crunching on shattered glass.
“Come with me,” Kieran called. The room was full of wind and cold, the smell of the Carpathians and lake water. Above them, the broken window opened out onto a sky full of stars. “You will not be safe here.”
But Divya shook her head. Crushing down the longing to escape that rose inside him, Diego did the same. “We will stay and fight,” he called. “We are Shadowhunters. We cannot all flee and leave only the worst of us to seize power. We must resist.”
Kieran hesitated, just as the library door burst open. Gladstone and a dozen Cohort members swarmed in, their eyes widening.
“Stop him!” Gladstone shouted, throwing an arm out toward Kieran. “Manuel—Anush—”
“Kieran, go!” Diego roared, and Kieran seized Windspear’s mane; they exploded into the air before Manuel could do more than take a step forward. Diego thought he saw Kieran look back at him once before Windspear cleared the ceiling and they shimmered into a white streak across the sky.
Diego heard someone step up behind him. Across the room, Divya was looking at him. There were tears in her eyes. Behind her, her cousin Anush was cuffing her hands.
“You’re going to be so sorry you did this,” Manuel said, his delighted whisper rasping in Diego’s ear. “So very sorry, Rocio Rosales.”
And then there was only darkness.
* * *
Emma was taken up behind Nene on her gray palfrey, while Julian rode behind Fergus, so there was no chance to talk. Frustration churned in Emma as they rode along under the green trees, the golden spears of light that drove down through the gaps in the trees turning to a deeper bronze as the day wore on.
She wanted to talk to Julian, wanted to make a plan for what they were going to do when they reached the Seelie Court. What would they say to the Queen? How would they get out again? What did they want from her?
But part of her was also too angry to talk to Julian—how dare he keep a massive part of their plan from her? Let her walk blind into Faerie, believing they had one mission when apparently they had another? And a smaller, colder part of her said: The only reason he wouldn’t tell you was if he knew you’d refuse to go along with his plan. Whatever the plan was, Emma wasn’t going to like it.
And down even deeper, where she barely had the words for what she felt, she knew that if it weren’t for the spell, Julian would never have done this, because she had never been one of the people Julian manipulated and lied to. She was family, inside the protected circle, and because of that she had forgiven the lies, the plans, because they hadn’t been directed at her. They’d been directed at the enemies of the family. The Julian who had to lie and manipulate was a persona created by a frightened child to protect the people he loved. But what if the spell had made the persona real? What if that was who Julian was now?
They had left the forest behind and were in a place of green fields that showed no sign of habitation. Just waving green grass for miles, starred with patches of blue and purple flowers, and dim violet mountains in the distance. A hill rose up in front of them like a green tidal wave, and Emma chanced a glance at Julian as the front of the hill rose like a portcullis, revealing a massive marble entryway.
Things in Faerie rarely looked the same twice, Emma knew; the last time they’d entered the Seelie Court through a hill, they’d found themselves in a narrow corridor. Now they rode under an elegant bronze gate boasting scrollwork of prancing horses. Nene and Fergus dismounted, and it was only after Emma had slid to the marble floor that she saw that both horses’ reins had been taken up by diminutive fluttering faeries with outspread wings of blue and red and gold.
The horses clopped off, led by the buzzing pixies. “I could use one of those to do my hair in the morning,” said Emma to Nene, who gave her an unreadable smile. It was unnerving how much Nene looked like Mark—the same curling white-blond hair and narrow bones.
Fergus narrowed his eyes. “My son is married to a diminutive pixie,” he said. “Please do not ask any intrusive questions about it.”
Julian raised his eyebrows but said nothing. He and Emma fell into step beside each other as they followed Nene and Fergus from the marble-clad room into an earth-packed corridor that twisted into the hill.
“I guess everything went according to your plan, didn’t it,” Emma said coldly, not looking at Julian. She could feel him beside her, though, the familiar warmth and shape of him. Her parabatai, who she would have known deafened and blindfolded. “If you’re lying about having the Black Volume, it’s going to go badly for both of us.”
“I’m not lying,” he said. “There was a copy shop near the London Institute. You’ll see.”
“We weren’t supposed to leave the Institute, Julian—”
“This was the best option,” said Julian. “You may be too sentimental to see it clearly, but this gets us closest to what we want.”
“How does it do that?” Emma hissed. “What’s the point of coming to the Seelie Queen? We can’t trust her, any more than we can trust Horace or Annabel.”
Julian’s eyes glittered like the precious stones set into the walls of the long tunnel. They gleamed in stripes of jasper and quartz. The ground underfoot had become polished tile, a milky green-white. “Not trusting the Queen is part of my plan.”
Emma wanted to kick a wall. “You shouldn’t have a plan that includes the Queen at all, don’t you get it? We’re all dealing with the Cold Peace because of her treachery.”
“Such anti-faerie sentiments,” Julian said, ducking under a gray curtain of lace. “I’m surprised at you.”
Emma stalked after him. “It’s nothing to do with faeries in general. But the Queen is a no-holds-barred bit—why hello, Your Majesty!”
Oh crap. It seemed that the gray curtain they’d passed through was the entrance to the Queen’s Court. The Queen herself was seated in the middle of the room, on her throne, regarding Emma coldly.
The chamber looked as it had before, as if a fire had swept through the room years ago and no one had truly cleaned up the damage. The floor was blackened, cracked marble. The Queen’s throne was tarnished bronze, the back of it rising high above her head in a fan-shaped scroll. The walls were gouged here and there, as if a massive beast had dug out clots of marble with its claws.