The Black Queen (Book 6) Read online

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  THE FEY SERIES

  in order:

  Destiny: A Story of The Fey

  The Sacrifice: The First Book of The Fey

  The Changeling: The Second Book of The Fey

  The Rival: The Third Book of The Fey

  The Resistance: The Fourth Book of The Fey

  Victory: The Fifth Book of The Fey

  The Black Queen: The Sixth Book of The Fey

  The Black King: The Seventh Book of The Fey

  For Loren and Heather Coleman, with love.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks on this one go to Anne Groell for the brainstorming and for taking chances; to Dean Wesley Smith who helped me find some important solutions; and to everyone who asked me what was going to happen next.

  THE SIGNAL

  ONE

  THE ECCRASIAN MOUNTAINS were the tallest mountains Gift had ever seen. Even though he had lived near them for the last five years, he still marveled at their height and their power. Their faintly red rock made him feel as if he were still at home; but their rounded peaks spoke of an age, a timelessness, that he hadn’t seen anywhere else in the world.

  He stood outside the Student’s Hut in the Protectors Village, and waited for Madot. Dawn had just touched the tips of the mountains, the sunlight a pale yellow as it rose over the ancient peaks. It would take another hour before the light reached him.

  The village was quiet. Many of the Shaman were already busy with their daily tasks. Others, the night guardians, slept. It had taken him almost a year to get used to the rhythms of the Protectors. They gathered much of their food, and the rest was brought to them by the nearby Fey Infantry garrison, a custom that was hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years old. No commerce took place here. Protectors Village served two functions: it housed the Shaman dedicated to guarding the Place of Power, and it gave the young apprentices a school of sorts, a place to train where they would be undisturbed by the real world.

  Fifty stone huts huddled on the plateau. They were round and made out of mountain rock. They had no windows and only one door. Some of the huts were built for several inhabitants, like the Student’s Hut. Some were built for one person: a full-fledged Shaman who had to, by rights, live alone.

  Gift wasn’t a Shaman yet, and he wouldn’t be for a long time. He had decades of training ahead of him. Madot, his main teacher, believed that he could cut his training short because of the power of his magick, the unprecedented strength of his Vision, but she was only guessing. There had never been an apprentice like Gift in the entire history of the Fey. His magick was unique—his heritage was unique—and because of those things, his future was uncertain.

  He rubbed his hands together in the early morning chill. Madot had instructed him to wear only his apprentice’s robes. She was going to take him to the Place of Power, several years before most apprentices were ever taken. It was said that a goat herder found this cave, and took his family inside. When they came out, they were Fey.

  Simply entering the cave did not create a Fey. There was magick in a Place of Power that, when tapped, altered everything. That much he knew without being taught. He had discovered a second Place of Power fifteen years before, and had lived in it for several weeks. There he had seen things he still did not comprehend, things that had changed his life forever.

  He would not be standing here if he hadn’t lived in that place.

  He shifted from one bare foot to the other. His toes were growing cold. The bottoms of his feet had become hard from use. He rarely wore shoes—they were frowned upon by the Shaman—but usually he was moving. He almost never stood still.

  Madot saw that as a flaw. She saw many things about him as flaws. He had been raised by adoptive parents who had no idea how to control his Visionary magick, and he had used his talents in ways that the Shaman here frowned upon. That his spells had been successful didn’t matter, nor did the fact that with them, he had saved hundreds of lives. That he had misused the magick was the important thing, the thing they wanted to corral in him.

  Wild magick, or so Madot called it. She said his wild magick and his impatience were his greatest faults. Until he had come here, he thought his wild magick his greatest asset. He hadn’t even known he was impatient until he had come to a place where time seemed to have stopped.

  There were no regular schedules as there had been when he lived in a Fey military camp, no rhythms as there had been when he lived in the rural areas of his homeland, Blue Isle. Here the Shaman went about their business as if they were being governed from within. He always felt at loose ends. He wanted to stay busy, although sometimes there was nothing to do.

  Madot said he had to get used to quiet. He thought that the most difficult thing of all.

  He glanced up the mountainside. The Place of Power was a morning’s climb from the Protector’s Village. From here, he could see the silvery shimmer that marked the cave’s entrance. His stomach jumped slightly. He had no idea how different this Place of Power would be from the one he discovered on Blue Isle. On Blue Isle, the Place of Power contained items from the Isle’s main religion, Rocaanism. But Rocaanism wasn’t practiced anywhere on this continent, known as Vion. Here, at the foundation of the Fey Empire, the word “religion” wasn’t used at all.

  Finally, he saw the door to Madot’s hut open. She stepped outside and sniffed the air, as she always did, as if the faint fragrances on the breeze gave her information that Gift could never get. To him, all the smells were familiar: the dusty sharpness of the mountains themselves; the pungent odor of the ceta plants that grew perennially behind the Student’s Hut; the stench of the manure that he and the other students had spread on the communal garden just the night before. Nothing stood out, and nothing was unexpected. Once he had asked her what she smelled, and she had smiled.

  The future, boy, she had said. Just the future.

  It also took him a while to get used to being called “boy.” He was thirty-three years old, a full adult in most places. To many Shaman, though, a thirty-three year old was still in his childhood. Most full Shaman didn’t begin their solitary practices until they were 90 or older.

  The Shaman were the longest lived of the Fey, and it was a good thing, because so few had the ability to become Shaman. Of those who did, even fewer chose the work. It was arduous and its rewards were few. He still thought of the Shaman who helped raise him—a woman he thought of as his father’s Shaman, even though his father hadn’t been Fey—and of the sacrifices she had made so that her Vision, her dream for the future could come true. She had died for that dream. Apprentices did not become Shaman until they were ready to make that supreme sacrifice. It was the one area that Gift was confident he would pass. He had sacrificed so much over the years that sacrificing his life seemed a very small thing indeed.

  Madot was watching him. Her eyes were dark against her wizened skin. Her white hair surrounded her face like a nimbus. The hair was the unifying feature of all the Shaman, the hair and the desiccated look of the body, the skin. It was as if, in training their Vision to See and Foresee, they had lost something vital, something that nourished them from within.

  Gift had none of that look. He favored his Fey mother in most things, but it was obvious that Gift was not fully Fey. His father had been the King of Blue Isle, and the people there were short, blond haired and blue eyed, with skin so fair that it turned red in the sun. Gift’s Fey heritage showed in his height, his hair, and his faintly pointed ears, but his Islander heritage diluted his skin to a golden brown, made his cheeks round instead of angular, and gave his eyes a vivid blueness that usual
ly startled any Fey meeting him for the first time.

  Madot found Gift’s appearance cause for concern. He had been having Visions since he was a child, and he had first used his Visionary powers when he was three. Thirty years of such extreme magick should have taken a toll on his skin, his hair, his face, but it had not. And that worried her. Once she had mumbled that perhaps he hadn’t tapped his full power yet, and once she had said that perhaps his magick was something Other, something so different that the rules no longer applied.

  “You are being impatient,” she said as she approached him, her dark robes flowing around her. Her voice was high and warm. He would have called it youthful if he had heard it without seeing her. Yet she was among the oldest of the Shaman in the village, and one of the most powerful.

  He smiled at her accusation. She was correct. He was impatient.

  “I was trying to wait,” he said.

  “Trying forces you to be impatient. You must not try. You must simply be.”

  He shook his head slightly. “You’ve been telling me that for five years.”

  “And for five years you have not understood me.”

  “Then perhaps the problem is with the messenger, not the recipient.”

  She smiled at him, and her eyes twinkled. The expression filled her tiny face with wrinkles and made her look like a wizened infant. “That’s the argument of the impatient.”

  He shrugged. “Well, we’ve already established that.”

  She laughed, then put a hand on his arm. “Are you ready for a climb?”

  “I have been for years.”

  “No,” she said, the smile suddenly gone. “You have not. You have wanted to go for years. But you have not been ready.”

  “And you think I am now?”

  “I didn’t say that either.”

  He waited. Word games were part of a Shaman’s business. It was canon here that information given too easily was wasted on its hearer.

  “You want to ask me,” she said, looking up at him.

  “I do. But I’m trying to be patient.”

  “That ‘try’ word again.” She sighed. “Ask anyway.”

  “Why are you taking me up there today?”

  She looked away from him. “‘The hand that holds the scepter shall hold it no more, and the man behind the throne shall reveal himself in all his glory.’ Have you heard that before?”

  “No,” he said, startled. He thought he had heard all the prophecies about the Black Throne.

  “Four had visits from the Powers last night. Those were the words given.” Four meant four of the Shaman, probably those guarding the Place of Power. The Powers were the spirits of the Fey dead who, from the planes beyond, guided the living. At least, that was how they were once explained to him. The Shaman believed that the Powers were more than that, and that their abilities were indescribable to mere mortals.

  Madot was watching him closely.

  He shook his head slightly. “I don’t see the connection.”

  “Shamanistic Visions are always about the Black Throne.”

  “I know that,” he said. “But I thought the Visions could foretell any future point from now to a thousand years from now.”

  “This wasn’t a strict Vision. No one Saw events. All they heard were words. They believe it to be a Warning.”

  A shiver ran down Gift’s back. But he kept his mind focused on the conversation. He didn’t want to speculate, not yet. If he had learned anything from his teachers, it had been that speculation could dilute a message.

  “I still don’t understand why that made you decide I’m ready for my first visit to the Place of Power.”

  “It is not your readiness we are dealing with,” she said, and he knew that the “we” in that sentence did not refer to him, but to the full Shaman in the village.

  “Then what is it?” he asked.

  “Your presence.”

  “You may ask me to leave?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Her grip tightened on his arm, and she led him around the Student’s Hut to one of the many paths that led to the steps carved into the mountainside.

  His entire body was tense. What he had thought a reward for progress in his studies was turning out to be something else altogether. A test of some sort. A decision, perhaps already made, to treat him differently than the other students or to make him leave.

  He didn’t want to leave. He was born a Visionary, the most powerful Visionary in the history of the Fey, and a Visionary had two choices: he could lead or he could become a Shaman. Gift had had a taste of leadership. He had seen the compromises it caused, the responsibility it held for other people’s lives. He had seen how Visionary Leadership could be corrupted, and how such a Leader could often rely on no one but himself.

  Visionary Leadership also required a harshness, a warrior’s nature, a willingness to sacrifice one life for the good of all others. Gift had watched his grandfather, his great-grandfather, his father, and now his sister make such decisions. He wanted no part of it.

  The life of the Shaman appealed to him. Never did a Shaman take a life. If he did, he would lose his powers. The Shaman’s nature was at its heart peaceful. Madot had once said that put Shaman at odds with all the rest of the Fey.

  At the time, Gift hadn’t cared. His sister Arianna, in her role as Black Queen of the Fey, had been attempting to alter the nature of the Fey. She wasn’t full Fey any more than he was, and she had been raised an Islander. For fifteen years, she had held the Fey Empire together using diplomacy and tact. Before that the Fey Empire had been a conquering empire, and its hereditary ruler was often the best warrior among the Fey. Arianna had a warrior’s spirit, but she lacked the conqueror’s drive. She believed the Empire would become stronger by consolidating its holdings, and using its resources to grow richer, not to expand. So far, it had been working. In fact, it had been working so well that Gift felt he could leave her side and immerse himself in his apprenticeship.

  Was that what the Warning was about? If Arianna died now, childless, Gift would inherit her throne. The Black Throne only went to those of Black Blood. The Black Blood passed through his mother, Jewel. Gift was the eldest. Arianna only held the throne because he had given it to her, willingly. It had been something he felt she was more suited to than he.

  He knew better than to ask Madot any more about the Warning. She would answer him in her own time. She led him to the stairs.

  They were ancient and well tended, carved out of the mountainside. Their surface was smooth and shiny, but not slick. Every morning and every evening, one of the Protectors swept the stairs. Once a week, another Protector washed them. If the stone cracked or wore too thin, the Shaman told one of the Infantry when the food deliveries came, and within the week, Domestics who specialized in stone masonry arrived to fix the problem. The Domestics also spelled the stairs so that no one could slip on them or fall down them. The spells were as ancient as the stone, and in all the centuries that the Protectors had guarded the Place of Power, no one had been injured climbing to or from the cave.

  As he climbed beside Madot, Gift wondered if the Domestics also spelled the stairs to make the trip easier. His legs felt lighter, as if the muscles in his thighs had to do no work at all. He almost felt as if he could sprint up the mountainside, but he restrained himself. The climb was a long one, and he knew that running would only exhaust himself later.

  So he savoured the trip. The ancient staircase was carved deep into the rocks, and as he moved, he could see the veins of red running beneath the surface, like blood beneath the skin. Partway up, he traced a finger along one of the veins: it was warmer than he expected. Madot watched his movement, and smiled.

  She said little and that was not like her. Usually she used every moment to teach him. There were seven apprentices in Protectors Village right now, and most were taught by all the Shaman. But Gift had Madot as his main teacher because the Shaman had been divided about his presence from the beginning. Some had been frightened of hi
m. He was the first Shamanic candidate of Black Blood ever, and many did not believe that he was here to become a Shaman, but rather to learn how to dismantle them.

  He understood the belief. It showed that the Shaman understood the kind of cunning that had ruled his grandfather and great-grandfather’s lives. If Gift had been like them—and he wasn’t in any way that he knew of—he would have found some way to infiltrate the Shaman, especially now.

  A ruthless ruler would want to destroy the Shaman, and the Place they guarded. Ever since the second Place of Power had been discovered, the Shaman had been worried. Fey legend said this: There are three Points of Power. Link through them, and the Triangle of Might will reform the world.

  For centuries, the Fey had debated what that prophecy meant. Did “reform the world” mean that everything would be destroyed? Or did it mean that the world would become strictly a Fey place, a place where all diversity was destroyed? Most agreed, though, that discovering the Triangle would benefit the Fey, as discovering the cave had benefitted the goat herder and his family by giving them powers undreamed of before. Controlling the Triangle, most believed, would make the Fey gods.

  Shaman believed that once the second Place of Power had been discovered, the third would be easy to find. A Shaman would stand within the first Place of Power, another Shaman would stand in the second, and together they would triangulate the power, and learn where the third was located.

  But discovery of the Triangle frightened everyone. Gift had set up, at his sister’s request, guards for the second Place of Power. Those guards did not allow a Shaman into it. The Black Family, at least Gift and Arianna’s branch of it, did not want anyone to have access to the Triangle. Gift and Arianna could have attempted to triangulate the power and learn where the third Place of Power was. So far, they had chosen not to. Arianna believed, and Gift agreed, that there was no need unleash more magick upon the world.