“And speaking of Clarissa is to come only at mine,” he said. They were the first words I had heard him speak with honest emotion. The emotion was fury. “And my name is Sebastian.”
“If you’re to rule the world, my love, you’ll have to learn not to let a name have power over you. Yours or your sister’s.”
“That’s somewhat rich, coming from a faerie. I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me your name.”
There was a pause, and my heart nearly stopped beating. If she spoke her true name, knowing I was listening, it would only mean she intended me to die.
“My true name wields power over me whether I like it or not. Were I mortal, I would not invent weakness where none exists.”
Another silence.
“Oh, don’t sulk, my love. My Sebastian. If your sister refuses to rule by your side, I’m sure you can find another consort.”
“She will join me,” Sebastian said. “I just need to disabuse her of this delusion that she’s in love with Jace.”
“You haven’t seen what I’ve seen,” the Queen said. “You haven’t tested them as I have. Their love is true.”
“She’s my sister, my other half. She is too much me to ever love him.”
The Queen laughed again, and I heard desperation in it, and longing, and I understood two things: She was in love with him—and he was in love with his sister. “I worry for you, my Morning Star, when you find out she’s not as much like you as you think.”
“Surely that was an invitation to pain,” Sebastian said, and the Queen giggled, then shrieked with delight, and I curled myself small and tight and tried not to listen to them ravish each other.
I tried not to weep for my Queen, who had given her heart to a demon’s spawn seemingly incapable of love, who had nonetheless found a way to love someone else.
—
I was not executed for what I had witnessed, but I was punished.
“I wish to show you my gratitude,” the Queen told me, once Sebastian had returned to the mortal world. “You healed Sebastian. I would like you to be my handmaid.”
I knelt and bowed my head, for what could I do but accept? “Thank you, my lady.”
“It will be good to have someone with healing skill, because I am with child.”
I was too shocked not to speak. “With his child? Sebastian Morgenstern’s?”
Her eyes glittered. Not sapphires now, but frozen blue ice. “What of it?”
I could neither lie nor speak all the truth. “The baby will be part Shadowhunter,” I said. “It is good for me to know that, for the birth.”
Perhaps she believed that was all that was behind my dismay, perhaps not. Either way, my lady put me under a geas, so I could speak to no one of the pregnancy, or of the true nature of her association with Sebastian. I counted myself fortunate, as there are bloodier ways to silence a tongue.
After that came a strange time, during which I served my lady, and watched her swell with child and with love: not for the child, but for her lover, Sebastian, who now visited only occasionally.
Many of the faeries who served the Queen closely came to love her.
When a being holds your life in their hands, love can be the only way not to go mad with fear or rage.
Love is the lie of choice: You cannot take my power, because I surrender it freely.
And, of course, she was beautiful, and charming, and could be sweet, and even we Fair Folk who should know better sometimes mistake entertainment for affection, and affection for care, and care for love.
I always knew better.
—
For the foolhardy and the foolish, there was the illusion of power, serving so closely to the Queen.
My sister Celithe was neither, or so I had thought.
But after many merciful years of silence between us, she appeared at the Seelie Court, dressed all in a gossamer gown of dragonfly wings.
I wondered how many dragonflies had died to make the dress, even as she appeared at the threshold of my chambers, arms held wide.
“Well met, my long-absent sister.”
“Not so well,” I said, and did not look up from my apothecary table. The herbs I was measuring out needed careful attention; in the wrong dosage they were toxic. And also, I could not stand to look at her.
My once gentle sister, my monster.
“One could almost think you’ve been hiding from me,” she said. “Not very sisterly of you.”
Once upon a time, there was a man I could have loved. A mortal poet, with soft blue eyes and a patch of blond hair that barely covered his shiny skull. Not handsome, my poet, by mortal standards or any other. But with words, he made the world beautiful.
He loved me, and begged me for my heart in return, and perhaps I was tempted.
Perhaps, in my weakest moments, in his arms, listening to his heart beat in time with the stars, I thought, Must love always mean loss, must desire yield to destruction? I thought, What if I opened my heart and invited him in?
Celithe seduced him. She glamoured herself as me, at first, and kissed him, and stripped him bare, and then she released the glamour, and revealed herself.
Celithe the cruel, Celithe the mad, Celithe the beautiful, with an ethereal grace that lies beyond me, and awe broke over the poet’s sweet face, and he took her in his arms, and he said her wish was his command, and she bade him to join her at a revel, and she drugged him, and she laughed as he danced himself to death.
And I know this, because she made me watch.
This was her gift to me, Celithe said. Someday she was sure I would return the favor.
I had not seen her since.
“You owe me, my sister,” she said. “And now you have something I want.”
I turned to look at her then. Celithe had raven-black hair that fell like a curtain of spider silk across her face.
She peered at me through it, blinking wide doe eyes.
The picture of innocence. Maybe Celithe had never been gentle, I sometimes thought.
Maybe she’d only fooled her sisters as she’d fooled her lovers; maybe the monster had been there all along.
“It’s not usually your way to ask permission before taking from me what you want,” I said.
Celithe smiled. “I thought surely you’d forgotten our little dancing doll. He can’t have meant that much to you, Nene. He was mortal.” She said it as you’d say the word rotted or foul.
I gritted my teeth. “What do you want, Celithe?”
“I want you to intercede on my behalf with the Queen. Have her appoint me as another handmaid.”
As if I had the power to do such a thing. The thought was ludicrous. The Queen barely allowed me to advise her on matters of healing; she certainly did not confide in me, or seek my counsel. But I wasn’t about to admit that to Celithe. Even the illusion of power is better than none at all.
“Why should I help you?” I asked. “You’ve already killed my lover, which leaves you with nothing left to threaten me with.”
“Nothing?” Celithe tapped a graceful finger to her ruby lips, a pantomime of contemplation. “What of the children of Nerissa? Miach and Alessa?”
“What of them?”
“They live, though their names are different now. Mark. And Helen.”
“I know,” I said.
“Ah, but they live as mortals. They have not been raised to fear Faerie, or to suspect danger from that quarter. It would be so easy to trick them to their deaths—”
“You imagine that is a threat?” I said, though my hands were shaking. “I do not know them.”
“Oh, Nene. Still our adorable little fool, after all these years; as if you have to know those children to care about them. You have always cared too much about everyone. And now you will do what I wish, and we both know it.”
“And what is it you wish?” The Queen, appearing as if from nowhere in the doorway, spoke quietly. I tried to hide my surprise; she rarely visited my chamber. She was dressed all in blue and billowing green, a full gown that hid her pregnancy.
Celithe curtsied, and showed no fear in her face, but her hands, laced behind her back, were trembling. She had recognized the Queen’s voice as the voice used by true power, that need not threaten. Its word is will. “Only to serve you, my lady.”
The Queen clapped her hands together in a show of delight. “Wonderful. Your reputation is well known, and I have the perfect job for you. The Lighthouse on the Green Isle is in need of a keeper.”
Believe me when I say, rarely in my long life have I experienced such a jolt of amusement. To think of Celithe marooned on the Green Isle, with no one to torment but the occasional kelpie who washed up on her desolate shore? Delightful.
Celithe looked green. “I am not certain that position suits my particular skills, my lady.”
The Queen continued as if she had not spoken. “I shall appoint you as keeper for ten years. After that time, we will reconsider.”
“I…would prefer not to,” Celithe said, and surely even she understood she was on unsteady ground.
“Yet it is my will.” The Queen raised an eyebrow. “You said you wanted to serve me? This is how you will serve.”
Celithe opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
The Queen offered her a dainty wave. “You may go now.”
And I watched my sister, defeated, slink away to her fate. The Queen turned to me, expectant—perhaps wondering if I would offer complaint or gratitude.
I did neither. I bowed my head. “Do you have need of me, my lady?”
“Of course, Nene. Or I would not have come to you.”
It was the first time she had addressed me by name. She told me she’d been having trouble sleeping. The baby was restless in her womb. I offered to prepare her a sleeping draught, but she shook her head.
“Come sit by me and tell me a story. I wish for some pretty words to ease me into a dream.”
And that night, and many nights after, I sat by the Queen’s bed. I told her the story of my sisters, and how I had lost them, one by one. Each night a tale of love and death.
That first night, I began with Celithe.
—