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I didn’t know what to do. I hated to press. I had to. “Is what? Still alive, maybe?”
Hands pressed to her face, she made a strangled sound. “He’s never forgiven me. Never. How could he?” She dropped her hands and glared at Rogue through tear-filled eyes. “They can’t understand and we can never explain.”
“No,” Rogue replied quietly, stroking my back. “This is true.”
She hiccupped and nodded, vindicated in this, at least.
We were going in circles, accomplishing nothing more than dredging up pain. Her emotional turmoil leaked out of her in waves, flavoring the air with the bitterness of regret and broken dreams. I pressed my fingertips to my temples, trying to think past it. The gesture jogged my memory.
“Lady Blackbird, would you let me listen in on your thoughts?”
Her emotions shut down, a steel security door slamming down on an invaded museum vault.
“Just a memory of Fergus’s last visit. I can eavesdrop on what he said, glean something from that. Something, maybe, that you can’t tell me.”
She exchanged looks with Starling, then sat stiffly on a chair, still clutching her glass of untasted whiskey. “Fine.”
I hesitated. “Are you sure?”
She pinned me with her bright robin eyes, reminding me that, for all that she seemed softer, more maternal and human than the other fae, she was alien to me. I might taste her thoughts and emotions, but she would forever be fundamentallyotherto me.
Just like Rogue.
“Lady Sorceress—do not toy with me. I’m perfectly aware you could scrape out and empty my mind as easily as I clear the ashes from a fireplace. I would only grieve myself resisting you.”
I bit my lip against the urge to argue with her. I doubted I could do such a thing, even if my own moral code let me. And yet, in a world where I needed every advantage I could muster, being overestimated had become one of my most valuable commodities. I didn’t need her to think I was a nice person.
Straightening my spine, I moved from under Rogue’s touch and approached her, offering my open hands. Blackbird closed her eyes and I laid my fingertips on her temples, as I had done to Rogue so long ago, in those first chaotic days. He’d thought to convince me of his good intentions. Now, no longer an untrained bumbler, I understood a great deal more of what he had and had not let me see in his mind.
Starling perched nearby, anxious worry darkening the blond in her hair. Though I’d done the magic to change the color, I’d tied it to her self-image, to help it stick when we were apart. It tended to lose its luster when she lost that certainty.
“I won’t hurt her, Starling. Don’t hover.”
“I’ll hover if I want to,” she retorted, but moved out of my line of sight. Rogue murmured something to her, but then they fell silent.
I concentrated on dipping into Blackbird’s mind, wondering briefly how her brain was structured, if the sulci and lobes were like mine or wholly different. It might be similar to Rogue’s auricle—same basic design, but with elaborations. Her cortical layers might spiral and wind with more intricate folds. It didn’t matter. This wasn’t about the physical structure, but the ebb and flow of the electrical gestalt. The metaphorical mind generated from the activity of millions of neurons. Rogue had explained it once as a lake, where thoughts swim at shallower or deeper levels. Marquise and Scourge, with their twisted, cruel aggression, had taught me to see a mind as a labyrinth, guarded by various doors and gatekeepers who could be circumvented or destroyed.
Since I left their keeping, I hadn’t used the skills much, but I found my own approach forming, shaped by what I knew of the structure and function beneath. The brain was a kind of maze, wrapped in layers over itself. In the cortical regions, near the top and front, higher processing blazed along, synthesizing all the sensory information gathered by the peripheral systems and reported up through the various way stations and combined with memory, both short- and long-term, to create a constantly evolving understanding of the world.
I brushed past all that, the chattering creation and reformation of this moment and the ones that just occurred. What I wanted was deeper, stored in long-term memory, some of it consciously accessible, but the meat of it, the juicy bits I needed most, locked away, whether by her own wishes or some compulsion.
Trying not to invade her privacy more than I had to, I searched the vaults of her memory, scanning back through time, looking for images of the apple orchard. The trees hung ripe with fruit now, so I skimmed for impressions of them in blossom and, before that, bare limbs devoid of leaves, preceded by harvest.
Then I looked for pain. And love.
They radiated out, ribbons tied into a knot, attaching to newer memories and older ones. One dark and shredded connection reached back and I knew where it would lead—to a place she hadn’t given me permission to see.
Instead, I delved into this knot, letting the scenes from her husband’s visit play for me like a movie. Only this one would be an IMAX in 360 degrees, with full sensory surround. I witnessed not just their conversations, but how she felt and the flashes of other memories that came and went with kaleidoscopic bursts of light and color.
More, I gleaned hints of what she hadn’t fully realized at the time. Clues from him that she subconsciously understood but didn’t consciously consider. It was truly amazing what we observed and understood but refused to contemplate.
Having what I needed, I started to withdraw, but that blackened cord leading to the deeper past beckoned me. Would I find a scene like the one in the courtyard of the Inn of Seven Moons? I didn’t have permission to look, but this might be a vital clue. And an unparalleled opportunity to witness for myself what really occurred.
I followed the thread of it, coiling through dark and dismal emotions, clusters of ideas, like cancerous complexes growing off it. I imagined my own PTSD might appear this way, the wires short-circuited to kick in certain thoughts, prescribed reactions. Perhaps I could perform a kind of mental surgery on myself, to remove the scar tissue and speed healing.
The cord grew thicker as I closed in on the origin memory. Slimier too, coated with a repellant substance, necrotic and infected. I tried to delve in, but it shifted away, both dodging and sucking at me, a mire of quicksand. Even Blackbird herself could not reach into this. It shimmered, not with magic like mine or Rogue’s, but with the mind-to-mind manipulation Lady Healer had once tried to explain to me. The kind that she’d said was not magic, not subject to the same laws and principles.
More like what I used now. And possibly, what connected all their minds together, flowers drawn into a bouquet tied with one noxious thread. One that trailed out into the universe and that ended, I was sure, with Titania.
