Lies and Prophecy (29 page)

“Forget about that; it's not why I called you here. What are their limits?”

Something flickered in his eyes, that I couldn't read clearly. But his posture was a little less arrogant, and that was a victory. If Falcon respected firmness, then I'd give him firmness, until he choked on it.

With poisonous precision, he said, “Because the burden of them cannot be shared, they are limited to what a single individual can maintain. Thus they are small in scope. It is extraordinarily difficult to convince all senses at once; thus they are focused on deceiving only a few. And no sidhe can disguise his eyes—not even to change their color and convince you he is of the other Court.”

So their limits were closer to ours than I'd feared. But what did eye color have to do with it? I glanced at Julian. His jaw tensed, and he said, “All Seelie have green eyes. The eyes of the Unseelie are gold.”

It would have been nice if one of them thought to mention that sooner. I wasn't about to yell at Julian, though, and I had better things to press Falcon about. “Okay, next question. How is it that I understand you?”

Now he looked blank. “I beg your pardon?”

“How am I understanding you? I'm not going to believe that after who knows how many thousands of years of separation, the sidhe just happen to be fluent in modern English. How are you communicating?” It was as close as I could come to asking if they'd been spying on us prior to Samhain. I doubted Falcon would ever answer that.

“Ah. I understand.” Falcon seemed amused again, damn him. “I am not speaking English at all.”

I looked at him closely. He sounded perfectly intelligible. But once I paid attention, I realized he was telling the truth. My mind heard English, but that wasn't what my ears were picking up, and that wasn't what his lips were forming. It was done so skillfully, better than any dubbing, that I hadn't noticed until he pointed it out.

“How are you
doing
that?” I whispered, fascinated by the trick.

He shrugged. “Your mind chooses words to suit the thoughts it receives.”

Telepathy. At such a highly refined level I could barely begin to comprehend it. Most telepathic communication was like slightly quicker speech, and was language-dependent. A closer link could pass language boundaries by relying on images and emotions, but then it was nonverbal. I marveled at the beauty of this. With it, no interpreter would ever be needed. Every language would be understood.

Provided the people on both ends were gifted. “So a person with no sidhe blood wouldn't be able to understand you,” I said.

“That explains my difficulty, I suppose,” Robert said with a painful laugh. “He doesn't sound entirely fluent to me. Damn my lack of telepathic skill.” The uncertain light made his expression hard to read, but he felt more than a little bitter.

I turn back to Falcon. “So you understand me….”

“By the thoughts and images you project.”

Those “thoughts and images” had to be damn faint, as we all shielded against leaking anything strong. “If I put up tighter shields, would we be able to communicate?”

“I would expect not.” Falcon continued talking, but it became incomprehensible as I sealed myself off as tightly as I could. For the first time, I truly
heard
his words, in the sharp, alien language of the sidhe. “Gods, that's weird.”

He shook his head, and I lowered the shields. “You didn't understand what I just said, did you?”

“No. I was almost able to extrapolate from the others, since they understand you, but it was too indistinct.”

So we could, if we wanted, converse amongst ourselves without the sidhe understanding. Not for long, though; staying that thoroughly locked off was tiring. But ungifted baselines might be unintelligible to the sidhe. It was possible to pry into their minds, but that took a more concentrated effort, since they didn't leak anything. They were, in a way, safer than bloods—until somebody started flinging around the telekinetic effects, or ceremonial magic.

I made myself focus. We needed information that would protect
all
of us, blood and baseline alike. That was what I came here for, to bludgeon Falcon into being of actual use. It didn't matter how many skirmishes we won against the Unseelie, if we didn't have something to base a broader strategy on. “How about travel? How did you get here?”

“My people sent me.”

“I know that. What I want to know is
how
—the mechanics of it. You didn't just wiggle your nose, I'm sure.”

“No, I did not.” I let him think it over. For once he didn't seem like he was trying to avoid the question, just searching for the words to answer it. Or not words—given what he'd just told me—but an answer I could comprehend. “We … reached through. I do not know how else to explain it. We reached through, and found your world, and temporarily made a hole. Then I was here.”

“And to go back?”

“The same, except it is easier. I contact them, to let them know I am ready. They make the hole. I go back through.”

“You don't make it yourself?”

“It is too difficult for one alone, and even to help would tire me. We think it safer to have it done by those who can remain in our world and rest.”

So theoretically we could trap a sidhe here, if we could block him from contacting his people. I wasn't planning to try it on Falcon—not unless he really pissed me off—but it could be useful against the Unseelie. And there was at least the possibility that we could make a portal of our own, if we had to.

“But it will get easier as time goes on,” I said.

Falcon nodded. “Yes. Gradually, until the solstice, when it will but require intent and energy. One alone will be capable, then.”

“And it's easiest here, at least for now.”

“Yes.”

“So why Welton?”

“Are you asking why it was chosen in the first place?”

“Yes.”

Falcon leaned his head back, considering his answer again. “I cannot say for certain why the Unseelie chose this place. All our kind are restricted to this area at the moment because this is the point of contact, the one place that has a link to our world. The farther we move from it, the more … uncomfortable it becomes.”

“But you can guess why they chose it.”

He lowered his chin. I controlled my reaction as his reflecting gaze settled on me. “This is … a good place. For us. It is closer to our world than most. There are others like it, but not all of them also have the concentration of those you call gifted that this does.” Julian shifted next to me.

Closer to the Otherworld. There was a cave, deep in the Arboretum, that had been sacred to the Ojibwe before they were driven off the land. The tribe had made an almighty protest when the university was built here—but the powers that be, determined to put the campus on a strong magical locus, had pushed it through anyway. Throw in a high number of bloods, and suddenly you had a place that was as close to home as the sidhe were likely to find in our world. “But there are other places—not many, but a few—with similar locations and many bloods. Why this one?”

Falcon indicated ignorance with another faint shrug. “Who can say. Chance, it would seem; they had to choose a place, and this was it.”

Chance. Fate rolled the dice, and we won—or lost. I wondered if anyone in those other places had gotten the same signs I had, the Tower and Hagalaz. Warnings of the Otherworld's approach.

“Are you finished?” the sidhe asked, at his very driest.

“I'm not,” Julian said even as I nodded. Falcon looked to him with a raised eyebrow. Sidhe body language might not be like ours—in the end, they simply weren't human—but the way his shoulders settled back read like disdain to me. He truly did have it in for Julian. I, not being a wilder, was apparently less to blame.

For a moment I thought Falcon would just leave, but he let Julian ask his question. “How did the Unseelie find Kim?”

The moonlight limned Falcon's graceful hands as he lifted them in a careless shrug. “I can only assume they followed from you.” A cloud scudded across the moon, and when it cleared, the shadow where Falcon had stood was empty.

~

“
Damn
it!” I swore, jumping half a foot. “I wish he wouldn't just vanish like that.”

Julian was still staring at the place where the sidhe had been. Half to himself, he said, “But you got real information out of him. Interesting.”

Robert linked his hands over the top of his head and exhaled loudly. He began questioning Julian; I went to Liesel, who was standing with her arms wrapped tightly around her body. “You okay?”

She shook her head—it was more like a whole-body shudder. “No. I thought—I thought it would be like meeting Julian, only more.”

But it really, really wasn't. “Maybe some of the other sidhe aren't so creepy. Maybe it's just him.”

Liesel tried to fold in on herself, even smaller. Her voice went very quiet, until I could barely hear her below Robert. “The summer before I came to Welton … I volunteered at a psychiatric hospital. There was a sociopath there, a man who just didn't see other people as human. He was flat, cold, as if nothing ever touched his heart—as if he didn't have a heart to
touch.
And Falcon reminds me of him.”

I understood her shudder, now. Of course Falcon didn't see us as human—or rather, as sidhe. We might carry a small bit of their legacy, and I supposed by the usual biological definition that made us variants of the same species … but we were not the same. And from his perspective, I imagined, we were not just different but
lesser.

Falcon called Julian a changeling. If that was the translation my mind chose, then whatever word he was using was
meant
to be a slur.

My roommate looked up at me suddenly, almost desperately. “Power isn't the only difference between us and them, Kim. Don't make the mistake of believing they think or feel like we do. Even the Seelie.”

I nodded soberly. We headed back toward the dorms with Robert making his best attempts at jokes along the way, but Liesel's words stayed with me.

I was being dragged backward into a lake, fighting a scream as I saw the sun recede, keeping silent only because I knew that to scream was to lose air and to lose air was to die. But soon I would have to breathe….

Persistent beeping finally broke through and brought me awake with a convulsive jerk. I lay in bed, one hand on my throat, breathing deeply to remind myself that it was just a dream.

How long had my alarm been going off?

I rolled over and swore. It was nearly noon, and I'd slept through Ring Structure. If you could call it sleeping.

Sitting up, I rubbed my eyes and struggled to banish the remnants of my terror. What a wretched night. I, in my arrogance, had decided to try for a precognitive dream, and what had I gotten for my pains? Nightmares. Each more horrifyingly real than the last. And none of them answering my questions.

Nothing about the Unseelie, nothing about how we poor mortals could keep their collars from around our necks. Instead the warnings from my father and Michele, along with the reversal of the Knight of Cups, had combined to gift me with one nightmare after another. At any other time, I would dismiss them as being brought on by stress, with no precognitive element. But these days I couldn't be that careless.

Shivering, I rose swiftly and scrounged about for clean clothing. There wasn't much; I'd been neglecting laundry lately. Would the Unseelie come after me in the laundry room?

“Gods,” I swore, and pressed one hand to my head.

The dreams only indicated danger. Not death, not injury. There was no sign at all that I wouldn't come out okay. I couldn't even say for sure what the reversed Knight meant; it might not mean I was going to break down, at least not in the way I thought.

What was it Shard had said? The one Julian loved would be lost. Ignoring the inevitable blush, I tried once more to analyze that. My mother had seen me going into the woods, oblivious to my path. Well, the Unseelie could lead me astray; a glamour would account for me not seeing the trees. And then if everyone else tried to come after me, that would match Michele's dream. Although I didn't know what the mist was. And this was assuming I could interpret the dreams literally—which I couldn't.

And somehow I doubted Shard would have predicted something as minor as me getting lost in the Arboretum.

My little outline also failed to account for my own dreams. I sighed and sat down heavily on the edge of my bed, sweater in my hands. What had I dreamed, anyway? A lot of them seemed to involve choking in one way or another. Maybe I'd be deprived of oxygen and lose my higher brain functions. That could qualify as “lost.”

Several of the dreams were washed in a faint tinge of gold, or featured the color at one point. As if I couldn't guess the danger came from the Unseelie. One time I'd looked at everything around me and not recognized any of it, though shortly before it had all been perfectly familiar. If that foretold danger, maybe my guess about brain damage wasn't so far off. Maybe the Unseelie would take away my memory. Except that
still
didn't fit with everything else. No pattern I could think up matched up with all the details.

Temporarily abandoning the exercise as useless, I applied myself to getting dressed. I should have enough time to get breakfast—or lunch, or whatever—before going to Banishing.

Facing the door took willpower.

Liesel must have left for her nine o'clock psych class on time, or she'd have woken me. How had she managed to leave, alone? All I could think was that within the room, I was safe, protected behind shields that could withstand a serious amount of damage. Outside, I'd be on my own, with the Unseelie lurking gods knew where. How could Liesel face that?

She hadn't fought them yet. She'd been there at the second summoning, but that was different, less … personalized. The attack in Talman had been aimed at
me.
They knew where I was, and what I was doing.