Ballad (22 page)

“
If
I burn,” Nuala said. She looked down at her plate.

“What?” I demanded.

“Maybe I don’t want to,” she said.

There was silence at the table. Sullivan broke it, gently. “Nuala.” It was the first time he’d actually said her name. “I saw your sister burn, while I was in Faerie. She had to. I know you don’t want to—it’s horrible that you have to—but you’ll die otherwise.”

Nuala didn’t look up from her plate. “Maybe I’d rather that than come back the way I was before.” She balled her napkin up and put it on the table. “I think I have to go the bathroom.” She flashed a fake smile at me. “First time for everything, right?”

She pushed away from the table and disappeared into the deli.

Sullivan sighed and pushed on one of his eyes with two fingers. “This is a bit of bad work, James. Her sister is nowhere near as human as her. She didn’t even seem to feel it when she was burning. Nuala—” He did the same eyes-half-shut gesture he’d done before, the almost cringe. “It’ll be like burning a human alive.”

I got out my worry stone and worried the hell out of it with my fingers. I concentrated on the shape of the circle my thumb made as it swiped the stone.

“You were right, okay? That’s what I’m trying to say,” Sullivan said. “She isn’t like the others. You were still a complete idiot for not running like hell from her, but she
is
different.”

“I’m going with her to see Cernunnos,” I said. Sullivan opened his mouth. “You know you can’t stop me. I know it’s what you would do. Tell me how to make it safer. If there’s anything.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “As your teacher and dorm resident advisor, I’m supposed to be keeping you out of trouble, not getting you into it.”

“It was your idea. Some little part of you must’ve wanted me to go, or you wouldn’t have said it in front of me.”

“Don’t try reverse psychology on me,” Sullivan said. He smashed his fingers into the wrinkle between his eyes. “I would go with you, but I don’t hear him this year. You don’t go to him unless he calls you. That would be … insane. Shit, James. I don’t know. Wear red. Put salt in your pockets. That’s always good advice.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this from a teacher,” I said.

“I can’t believe I’m a teacher telling you this.”

I wrote
red
and
salt
on my hand just as Nuala came out of the deli. Whatever emotion she’d felt before she went in was gone, replaced by a certain fierceness in her eyes.

“Ready to go?” I asked.

James

If Nuala had still been able to read my thoughts, she would’ve killed me. Because I thought, as we waded through the long grass together, that she looked very human, despite her insistence that she couldn’t become one. While we were in town, I’d bought her a sweater and some jeans (both of which she hated since they covered most of her skin—which was the idea) so that she wouldn’t freeze to death while we were traversing the hills this evening.

And it wasn’t like it was a bad thing that she looked human. It made the fact that I was holding her hand and going out to meet the king of the dead a little less scary. And it made the idea that maybe, just maybe, she’d remember me after Halloween and we might have a future beyond making out in the dorm lobby just a little more plausible.

“It’s cold as hell out here,” Nuala snapped.

“It’s almost like I knew what I was talking about when I said you were going to need a sweater,” I told her.

“Shut up,” she said. She was a dull brown silhouette against the staggering pink sky. Some of the trees at the base of the hills had already lost their leaves, and their bare black branches made it look like it was already winter. “You’re scaring away the dead people. Do you hear the thorn king yet, or what?”

I didn’t. I had spent so many nights pretending that I didn’t that I wondered if I still could. It seemed like it was late enough that he should be out here, doing his antlered thing, but the hills were silent. Except for us crashing through the tall grass. During the day, the sound of the grass had seemed minimal, masked by the gusts of wind, but now, with the wind reduced to a silent, icy breeze, our crashing progress sounded like a bunch of elephants. “Big fat nothing so far. Let’s go out further, though, to where I saw him before.”

“Walk more quietly,” Nuala hissed.

“There isn’t a way to walk more quietly. Anyway, you’re talking—that’s louder than us just walking.”

She jerked at my hand. “Nothing in the world can be louder than you walking right now.”

“Except for your strident voice, dear,” I countered. “Like a harpy, its shr–
oof
.”

I stopped walking so fast that Nuala’s hand twisted out of mine and she stumbled.

“What?” Nuala rubbed the skin on her hand and returned to my side.

“Sorry,” I said, without feeling. I looked down. “I ran into something.”

At my feet was a pile of something. A pile of someone. It was sprawled in a sort of strung-out way that I didn’t think a living someone could manage. For one-fourth of a breath, my brain thought:
Dee
. But then I realized it was a guy. In a tunic jacket, leggings, and leather bootie-things. Either a very lost reenactor or someone who’d been messing around with fairies.

Nuala gave the shoulder an experimental shove with her foot, and the body slumped wetly onto its back.

“Oh, vomit,” I said, to keep from actually throwing up.

Nuala gave a little sigh. “Eleanor’s consort. He was at the dance last night.”

“Who do you think killed him?”

She touched the hilt still sticking out of his heart with her toe. “This is a bone dagger. It was Them. I’ve seen Eleanor carry these around all the time. He told me he was going to be a king when I first met him. King of corpses, maybe.”

I was sort of shocked-horrified-fascinated. I’d never seen a really properly dead body before, aside from on TV, and this was a pretty gruesome example for my first time. I wondered if we ought to report it to the police or something. I mean, it seemed pretty careless of the faeries, to just stab someone and leave them lying around.

“What did you do to get yourself killed, human?” Nuala asked the body.

I looked at her. It seemed like an awfully compassionate thing for her to say. And then I realized that the thorn king’s song was in my head and I had no idea how long it had been there.

“Nuala, the song. He’s—”

She grabbed my arm and jerked me round. “There!”

And there he was, massive antlers echoing the shape of the naked branches behind him. He was striding past us, several yards away already. Somehow I’d never thought that I’d have to chase him. I’d thought something that terrifying would be the sort of thing you ran
from
.

Nuala and I both started after him, but we weren’t getting any closer. In fact, the gap between us was growing, an immense sea of red-gold grass. And then I realized he had begun to run, the slow, graceful lope of a massive animal. The antlers rocked to and fro with each loping stride.

I broke into a run too, and I heard Nuala’s footfalls land faster and harder. The antlered king left a beaten path in the grass that sprang back up almost before we could get to it. The cold air tore the hell out of my throat and I was about to give it up when I saw that a long, black cloak fluttered out behind him.

I threw myself into the pursuit like my life depended on it. I stretched out as far as I could, and my fingers caught the fabric, coarse and cold as death in my grip. With my other hand, I reached out for Nuala. I felt her fingers seize mine a second before the thorn king began to drag us.

I didn’t know if I was running or flying. The grass was flattening faster and faster below us, and the sun vanished below the hills behind us. The air froze solid in my mouth and nose, escaping only in frosted gusts in the darkness. Above us, the stars came out, millions and millions, more stars than I’d ever seen before, and I heard Nuala gasp with delight or fear. Maybe both.

And still we ran. Comets raced above us and the wind buffeted below us and the hills went on forever. The night grew deeper and darker, and suddenly, between the hills, there was a huge black river. And we were going straight for it.

My brain screamed
let go
.

Or maybe it was Nuala.

I don’t know why I hung onto the shroud that flowed from the king’s shoulders. Death glittered below me, black and filled with stars like the sky above us. Something I’d never seen before. Maybe glimpsed around the edges, a dark promise of the end. But never plunged into face-first, eyes open.

Someone was laughing, right as our bodies met the surface of the river.

Nuala

Never so sad as seeing your smile

Never so false as you being true

Never so dead as seeing you alive

Never so alone as when I’m with you
.

—
from
Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

It was dark.

No, it wasn’t dark. It was
nothing
. James’ hand was supposed to be in my hand, but I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t feel the sweater hanging on my shoulders or the breath coming from my mouth. Or my mouth.

I reached my hand up for my lips, to prove to myself that they were there, and there wasn’t anything. No lips. No hand. Just swallowing darkness—because of course, I had no body, so I had no eyes to see anything.

There was no time.

Nothing stretched out in front of me and behind me, without beginning or end.

I had stopped existing.

I started to scream, but without any mouth or vocal chords or anyone to hear, did it matter?

Then I had an arm, because someone was grabbing it. And ears, because I heard James say, “Nuala! Why can’t she hear me?”

Something gritty was being rubbed on my skin, pressed into my hand, traced on my mouth. Salt, like the potato chips.

“Welcome to your death,” said another voice, and this one was low, earthy, organic, thundering from under our feet or inside me.

My eyes flew open. I was suddenly aware of the ordinary magic of them; the way the lids fit over my eyeballs, the curve of the upper and lower lashes touching as I blinked, the effortless way my gaze slid over to James beside me. There was still nothingness around us, but James was here in it with me, his red sweatshirt glowing like a sunset.

I gripped onto the hand he offered me, gritty salt pressed between our palms. What I could glimpse of his arms was covered with goose bumps.

“You see your death,” the voice continued, and I realized it was the massive antlered king, appearing in the nothingness before me. “And she sees hers. What do you see, James Antioch Morgan?”

Beside me, James turned his head this way and that, as if there were more to see than nothingness. “It’s a garden. All the flowers are white and green. Everything’s white and green. There’s music. I think—I think it’s coming from the ground. Or maybe from the flowers.”

“What do you see,
Amhrán-Liath-na-Méine
?” Cernunnos asked me, voice even deeper than before.

I flinched. “How do you know my name?”

“I know the names of all creatures that come through my realm,” the thorn king said. “But yours I know because I gave it to you, daughter.”

James’ hand gripped mine tighter, or maybe I gripped his tighter. I snapped, “I am no one’s daughter.” But maybe I was. I would’ve said I was no one’s sister, earlier.

“What do you see,
Amhrán-Liath-na-Méine
?” the thorn king asked again.

“Trees,” I lied. “Big trees.”

Cernunnos stepped closer to us, a dark mass in dark nothing, visible because he was something and the nothing was not.

“What do you see,
Amhrán-Liath-na-Méine
?” he asked, a third time.

I couldn’t see his face. He was too tall for me to see it, and that scared me almost as much as my answer. “Nothing,” I whispered. And I knew that was what I would get when I died, because I had no soul.

The void swallowed my word until I doubted whether I’d said it.

“Nothing has its pleasures,” Cernunnos said finally. His antlers stretched above him into the blackness. Blackness so black that I longed for stars. “You have no consequences. You have life eternal. You have unbridled hedonism at your feet, if it sings to you. Nothing is a small price to pay for such a life, when you lay your head down on the cold ground at the end.”

James’ fingers tightened and released around mine. He was trying to tell me something. Cernunnos inclined his head toward me. He, too, was trying to tell me something, to get me to say something, but I didn’t understand what. I wasn’t used to words being so important.

“Yes,” I said finally. “And I have a host of faeries to mock me. And a pile of bodies behind me, all used up to give me life. And what do I do with it? Use my life to suck life out of
more
bodies. Until I wear out, and I burn, and I do it all over again.” I sounded ungrateful. But I
felt
ungrateful.

Cernunnos folded his hands, which were not beast-like at all, in front of him. They were lined and sturdy and ghostly white. “It is I that has given you this existence, daughter. It is my poisoned blood in yours that drives you to the bonfire every ten and six years. My blood that means you have but half a life, and must pilfer the rest from those with souls, trading their breath for your inspiration. I thought only that you would find pleasure in years of self-indulgence, dancing, and adoration. I did not mean this life to cause you pain, though I see that it has.”

“My sister,” I said, and bitterness sharpened my voice despite myself. “Does she find pleasure in such a life?”

“She did,” Cernunnos said. “She is dead, now.” He made an odd gesture toward James, holding his palm up toward him, and James jerked as if he saw something displayed in the lines of the thorn king’s hand.

“The girl in my dream,” James said. “The one who was stabbed with the iron. I thought it was Nuala—I thought it was her future.”

“Like me, you see future and past both.” The antlered king turned his head, looking into nothing as if something was calling to him. “She was not meant to die this year. I will have my revenge, even from where I stand.”

He was fearsome when he said it; I heard nothing but the undeniable truth of his words and felt a shard of pity for whoever had killed my sister.

In the silence between our voices, the nothing pulled at me, threatening to rob me of my body again. I shivered, thinking of the sister I’d never known. She was nothing now—like she’d never existed. Which meant everyone who’d given her life had died for nothing. I realized suddenly, in this darkness, that even if I
felt
human now, I wasn’t. I knew, with a sudden, urgent clarity, that I was still a faerie, just slowly stripped of my powers by eating human food. This was still how it would end for me, this staggering emptiness.

“I don’t want to be nothing,” I pleaded, suddenly. I wasn’t sure if I was talking to James or Cernunnos.

“What do you want then,
Amhrán-Liath-na-Méine
?” And when Cernunnos asked it this time, I saw what he had been waiting for me to say before. The words were right there in my mouth, waiting to be said. But before I said them, memories flashed in my head. Lying in water, utterly invisible, completely safe. Flying through the air on the thoughts of humans, light and free. The wave of a hand toward a movie screen, calling up any movie I wanted to watch. The devastating sweetness of the melody I’d inspired in James. The safety of eternal youth. All of the faerie pleasures that were mine.

“I want to be human,” I said.

Cernunnos held his arms out on either side of him, and light trickled down from his fingers, green and white, bleeding into the nothing. The color grew and rose around us until we stood in a twilight garden, the half-light tinted green as it filtered down between massive leaves the size of my body. Heavy white blossoms shaped like trumpets hung on the plants closest to us, and pale white lilies tipped their throats up toward the sky beyond them. They looked hungry to me.

“You can choose,” Cernunnos said. “When you burn, you can choose to be born human. I made such an offer to your sister, but she scoffed. I looked into the future, and I saw that you would do the same.”

“I wouldn’t,” I demanded. “What you saw was wrong.”

The antlered king walked slowly toward James. James’ chin was lifted, unafraid. I was terrified of the fascination in James’ expression. There was an unspoken choice James could make too. “This was before the piper. Piper, know that humans who wish to leave my realm do not.”

James didn’t flinch. He held up his left hand, the one I wasn’t holding, so that Cernunnos could see the writing on it; a bit that hadn’t been washed off or newly added. It said
bonfire
. “But I will. Won’t I?”

He sounded a little disappointed.

Cernunnos looked at James, and I didn’t like the nature of the expression; appraising and hungry.

James continued, “You and I know it. Because I
will
be there on Halloween with her. I know you don’t feel like I do, like a human, but I know you care for Nuala. You can’t want her to be there alone.”

The antlers turned slightly. “You don’t fear me, piper. And you do not care whether you leave this place. And that is why you will.”

James turned his face away from both of us. With both his thoughts and expressions hidden from me, he seemed very far away. His hand in my hand was cold and still. I had forgotten, over the last few days, that he had been chasing death when I met him.

Cernunnos came close to me then, the tips of his antlers brushing away fragile-looking green tendrils of leaves overhead, and I felt young and powerless in his shadow. “Daughter, do you understand what I am telling you?”

I nodded, just barely.

“Wear black, daughter, to your bonfire. You and the piper both. Cover your bodies with black garments so that my hungry dead will not see you.” Cernunnos took James’ shoulder in one of his ordinary-looking hands, and James jerked as if he’d forgotten we were there.

“James Antioch Morgan,” the king of the dead said, and when he sang out James’ name, it sounded like music. “You will be called to make a choice. Make the right one.”

James’ eyes glittered in the darkness. “Which is the right one?”

“The one that hurts,” Cernunnos said.