The Dark Throne (76 page)

My hand again found the hilt of the Caedbranr, and when my skin touched the Sword, the shadows suddenly parted before my eyes. The Sword leapt eagerly beneath my touch, its power whirling up to meet mine, crashing like an ocean wave in my chest. I looked up at Malravenar sitting upon his Dark Throne and drew the Sword from its sheath. When I released my hold on the Caedbranr’s power, the blazing blade sent a shock wave of blinding light into the darkest reaches of the cavern.

Malravenar stood langorously, his hands caressing the skulls set into the dark glittering stone of his throne. Though the power of the Sword cut through the shadows, my vision still blurred when I tried to focus on him. He was taller than Luca, broad and muscular; or he might have been shorter than me, slim as a boy. One instant he wore gleaming dark armor, made of the same shimmering dark substance as his throne; and the next he was dressed in a simple white shirt and dark pants, walking barefoot down the many steps of the dais. My head began to ache, but I gritted my teeth.

Malravenar stopped part of the way down the long straight stairs to his throne. He spread his arms, his face flickering first handsome and boyish, and then stately and aged. “I welcome you to the Dark Keep.” His voice was smooth and mellifluous, a sinuous darkness lurking beneath the beauty. He smiled, a sight terrifying and dazzling and savage all at once. “My honored guests, how I have longed for this day.”

The shadows coalesced around us again, beat back by the radiance of the Sword and the Queens, but behind us I heard our warriors gasping, fighting to draw breath.

“You have brought fine brave warriors with you into the heart of my domain.” Malravenar smiled again, and my eyes watered. I fought the urge to drop my blades and cover my ears to block out that silky, slithering voice. “Yet as much as I have enjoyed our games of war, you had only but to ask, beautiful maidens, and I would have opened my gates to you.”

“Opened your gates in exchange for our blood,” said Vell. Her voice sounded harsh and ugly after the perfect beauty of Malravenar’s words, like the croaking of a crow after a nightengale’s song.

“A small token of your allegiance,” acknowledged Malravenar with a graceful nod, descending the steps again. The shadows swirled around him like fog. I thought dreamily that he looked sleek as a panther prowling toward his prey…elegant and dark. “And after opening my gates to you, I will open another Gate.”

We stared up at him, transfixed—all of us, the Queens and me, as our warriors struggled for breath behind us. In a haze I thought that it would be easier if they would lie down quietly—what use was there in fighting this magnificent Dark being?

The Caedbranr flared, and its power
bit
me, or slapped me, I wasn’t sure which, hard enough to make me stumble to one side. I almost fell, but I dropped my plain blade with a crash and put out a hand, and there was a warm tawny body beneath my palm. The sudden movement sent a sharp lance of pain across my back. I dragged in a ragged gasp and straightened, my left hand still wrapped in Kianryk’s pelt. It
hurt
not to give in to the glamour about Malravenar: every breath felt like I drew in a mouthful of icy water, thick and stinging; my eyes ached and I tasted blood on my tongue. But I anchored myself with the feel of the great wolf beneath my hand, the blaze of the Sword, and the pain radiating hotly across my back.

“We have come to destroy you,” I rasped, my lips dry and cracked from the aching cold. I heard one of the queens stir behind me. With a monumental effort, I raised my chin and forced one of my legs forward. Kianryk moved with me, his great head bowed as though he walked into a mighty wind.

Malravenar looked at me and laughed, the sound shaking the distant vault overhead. I screamed as his voice sent daggers of pain lancing through my head, but I couldn’t hear myself over the great thunder of his laughter. A few of our company went to their knees and then fell, and didn’t move. My war-markings blazed so intensely that curls of smoke rose from my shirtsleeve, and the pendant at my throat seemed to melt into my skin. The Caedbranr strained forward, toward Malravenar, dragging three more steps from my frozen feet. A slim figure breezed past me, passing so quickly that I thought I’d imagined it, a shadow; something stung my arm, and then Malravenar stood at the bottom of the steps. The rolling echoes of his laughter faded. My hands ached and a single thought floated through my dumbstruck mind:
We were wrong to think we could match his strength.

At that thought, the Sword dug a tendril of power into the cut on the back of my neck.
Force him to focus on you
, the ancient weapon commanded.

Break his hold on the Queens!
cried Gwyneth and the Bearers in the back of my mind.
He has your blood, and his servant goes to take theirs!

And so I let go of Kianryk, and I stepped forward again. I raised the Sword, and I said hoarsely, “You are not so powerful, when a mere mortal girl still stands before you.” My throat felt like it was on fire, but I smiled mockingly, feeling my lips crack. My limbs ached as I spread my arms in sardonic imitation of his earlier gesture. “I have said I come to destroy you, and yet here I am.”

Malravenar stood before me, an arm’s length away, no longer flickering between one guise and the next. He was about my own height, his features fine and delicate, a long straight nose and full lips that would not have been out of place on a beautiful woman’s face. The whites of his eyes were very white, his pupils very black, and the irises a red ring around them, dark as dried blood. His skin was the bluish gray of the dead, his lips tinged blue like those of a drowned corpse. He smelled sharply of hot metal—the scent reminded me of something that I couldn’t quite grasp.

The Sword blazed, but he stepped past it as I stared, frozen once again, and he reached up with one long-fingered hand to touch my face. I tried to scream but his eyes engulfed me, and the feel of his hand burning against my cheek faded. He reached into me and scooped out my spirit with his other hand, delicately; my Walker-form tried to writhe away, but he held me firm.

“This hurts less if you stop struggling,” he said in a voice that could have even been gentle, and now his words were only for me. I couldn’t have called them silent, because his voice enveloped me, but vaguely I sensed Vell and Titania and Mab stirring, then beginning to move even as my awareness of them faded. The great vaulted room dropped away. Malravenar and I stood opposite each other in an ordinary room, a fire flickering in the hearth. I realized with a jolt that the room wasn’t ordinary—every object within it, the table and two chairs, the cups on the table, the floor and walls, they were all composed of the same dark matter as the Dark Throne.

The Sword was no longer in my hand. Gwyneth’s pendant no longer pulsed at my throat. I faced Malravenar in a room of his own making, stripped of my weapons. I swallowed and turned to face him.

“Shall we sit?” he asked courteously.

“Bite me,” I snapped, crossing my arms.

Malravenar tilted his head and smiled. “I had forgotten the amusing tendency of mortals to show bravado in the face of an unwinnable enterprise.” His face darkened. “I could make you sit, if it pleased me.”

“If it
pleased
you,” I repeated mockingly, finding it easier to think when I was hurling epithets. “I doubt anything
pleases
you, you overbearing asshole.”

“Sit, and stop being rude,” Malravenar said mildly. I blinked. I was sitting in the chair before the fire, my legs crossed demurely, a cup of tea held delicately in my hand. Malravenar sat in the other chair, stirring his own tea with a gleaming little spoon. A thrill of fear coursed through me. “This is a much quieter place to discuss important matters.”

In my Walker-form, I didn’t have my heartbeat thundering in my ears, or the comforting sound of my own breath. I felt my own
taebramh
faintly, like the twinkle of a faraway star. There was only the hollow snap and crackle of the sparkling dark flames.

“Now,” said the Dark Lord, as if we were merely discussing the weather over a friendly cup of tea. “Tell me, Lady Bearer, do you truly wish to die?” When he pronounced my title, he made it sound as though he was humoring a child, a gently forbearing tone that both kindled a little spark of anger and deepened the fear rushing through my chest. The hand that held my teacup shook slightly. Malravenar continued without waiting for an answer. “I suppose that is a rhetorical question. I have not met many who wish to die, though your dark-haired knight reeks of his own self-loathing and is as close to it as I’ve seen.” He sipped at his cup contemplatively. I glanced down into the cup I still held dumbly in my hand—I couldn’t seem to put it down—and saw that it held not tea, but an inky liquid that gleamed with an oily darkness. It could have been blood, or it could have been shadow itself.

“If I must die, then I will,” I said. My hand shook so badly that the liquid in the cup sloshed over the side and onto my leg. Malravenar tsk-ed softly and took the cup from my hand, setting it on the table again. Here his skin was not the color of death, just incredibly pale—like Mab or any of her Unseelie knights. The spilled liquid spread in a warm dark stain over my thigh.

“There are few times when anyone
must
die,” said Malravenar. His eyes were still the color of dried blood, I noticed. “And I would find it distasteful to kill you.” He reached out and tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear. “In a way, you remind me of my own daughter. Willful, and sometimes disobedient.” He looked at me consideringly. “And your own father is dead.”

“You could never replace my father,” I said between clenched teeth.

“Oh, but I could,” he replied, and the air shimmered. Suddenly I wasn’t sitting in a darkly glimmering room but in the kitchen of my childhood home, and sitting across the table from me was my father. A strange and painful recognition surged through me, so intense that I had to blink away tears.

“This isn’t real,” I gritted out, clenching my jaw.

Malravenar, wearing my father’s face, smiled gently at me. Smiled my father’s smile, the one that didn’t show any teeth, the one that he only used when he spoke to Liam or me. I’d almost forgotten that smile, because photos hadn’t captured it; it lived in the recesses of my childhood memories, slightly foggy, the recollection fading with time.

“Oh, but it could be real,” my father said, the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes crinkling. He reached out and took one of my hands in his own.

“Your hands aren’t as big as I remember,” I murmured, staring down at my father’s hands clasped about mine on the well-used, scarred surface of our kitchen table.

“Because you’ve grown up, Bug,” he replied.

My breath caught in my chest. My throat ached. “Dad, I miss you so much.” Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes as I withdrew my hand from his and pushed my chair back from the kitchen table. I swallowed hard. “But you’re dead, and this isn’t real.”

My father leaned back in his chair. “Who’s to say what’s real and what isn’t?” He stood and put his hands on my shoulder. I felt the warm weight of his palms through my shirt. “Look at you, all grown up. Taller than your mother now, I think.”

I jerked back. “Stop. Just…stop.”

“Why?” Dad shook his head. “Why don’t you want to stay here with us, Tess?”

When he said “us,” my mother walked into the kitchen, holding Lila’s leash in one hand and her tennis shoes in the other. The golden retriever trotted happily after her, tail wagging furiously in anticipation of a walk. My mother looked up and flashed us a smile—the kind of smile that I hadn’t seen on her face since my dad died. Genuine. Happy.

“Because you’re not real,” I repeated, but the kitchen table felt incredibly solid when I put my hand down to steady myself.

“We are real if you want us,” my dad said warmly. “Just say the word.”

I took a deep breath, even though my Walker-form didn’t need to breathe. My hands tingled. “What word is that?”

My dad stepped closer, so close that I could smell the mingled scents of Old Spice aftershave and sawdust from his workshop. My eyes stung again. “Just stop fighting, Tess. Just stop fighting, and stay here with us.”

Stop fighting
. I instinctively recoiled, even as the ache in my chest intensified. How many times had I dreamed about something this simple…and this impossible? I couldn’t count the times I imagined that I’d come in the door after a day of school and my dad would be at the kitchen table, drinking black coffee from a cracked mug and reading the newspaper. A strange fog blanketed my mind, but I shook my head all the same. “I can’t. I don’t…I can’t remember exactly why. But I know there’s people who need me, and I can’t let them down.”

“Let them take care of themselves,” my dad said gently.

I blinked. And then I smiled slowly. “That’s how I know you’re not real.”

The figure wearing my father’s face stood tall and impossibly straight, watching me with suddenly cold eyes.

“Where do you think Liam and I learned that we were supposed to take care of each other, and other people?” I shook my head. “You’re not my dad, and this isn’t real.” I pushed away from the table, and walked quickly through the house, ignoring Lila’s happy bark as she frolicked around my legs and my mom’s querying voice. I wrenched open the front door, stepped outside…

…And walked back into the darkly glimmering room, Malravenar still seated before the fire. I placed my hands on the back of my empty chair, knowing that he could probably force me to sit again but daring him to do it.

“You are so needlessly stubborn,” he said, staring into the fire. He placed his cup on the table and stood, facing me again. “Just remember that their blood is on your hands.”

The room faded, and we floated now near the vaulted upper reaches of the cavernous dark throne room, looking down at a roiling mass of Dark creatures, frothing around a handful of shining figures. I struggled to dive back down into my body, but Malravenar only chuckled.