AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Well, how very unsurprising,” he growled. “I thought the two of them seemed awfully fucking close.”
“Why is the Pool showing us this?” I demanded, my cheeks still hot with embarrassment. “I can’t believe it! I mean, it’s so…so humiliating!”
“Not for you, little bird,” he assured me. “You knew the two of them were scum long before you saw this. And as for why the Pool showed us…” He shrugged, his broad shoulders rolling. “Who knows? As I said, it won’t always answer questions or show what you want. And sometimes it shows you things you definitely don’t want to see. Hey—stop it,” he added, talking to the Pool, which abruptly went dark.
I was relieved that the carnal scene between my cousins had ended, but I couldn’t explain the strange feelings in my own body that seeing them do that together had caused. On one hand it was revolting—they were brother and sister! But on the other hand, the way they had been moving together, taking pleasure in each other…
I wondered how the act would be with Liath and how long he would wait before he took me. But he seemed to have already pushed the lurid scene out of his mind, for he only shook his head.
“Come on,” he said, lifting me again and setting off into the forest. “Before you can find Quill’s killer and vanquish him, you have to find your magic. And before you can do that, you first have to understand the different types of magic…and why the magic you’ve been seeing all your life is false.”
13
“There’s nothing false about Seelie magic,” I argued, as Liath carried me through the forest. “I once saw my cousin, Asfaloth, turn a male inside out using it. All his organs were on the outside of his body.” I shivered in revulsion at the awful memory. “You can’t fake that kind of power.”
“Yes, but you can steal it—and that’s what Seelie Magic is—it’s stolen,” Liath told me. He wasn’t even breathing hard though he’d been carrying me through the thick snow for quite some time.
“Stolen how? Stolen from who?” I asked, frowning.
“From nature mostly—from the bounty around them. And by extension, from the Unseelie Court,” he explained. “Every time a Seelie Fae does a bit of magic, the power has to come from somewhere—the place it comes from is the forest around them. Which is also the forest around us.”
“But I already knew that,” I protested. “I mean, the part about the power being drawn from nature.”
“No, you don’t understand,” Liath argued. “What do you think happens when a Seelie maiden does a working to fix the clasp on her favorite locket that got broken?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “She reaches out and pulls the power from the natural world around her?”
“Yes, and somewhere a flower wilts or a tiny creature—a toad or a frog or an insect—dies,” Liath told me. “There are consequences when you draw power—the life power—from a living creature or plant. The consequences are death. And the more power you draw, the bigger the death. In Asfaloth’s case, turning a male inside out probably killed an entire tree somewhere in the forest.”
“But…I’ve never seen any flowers wilt or anything die when someone did magic and I’ve been watching magic done around me all my life!” I protested.
“You haven’t seen the Unseelie Court before, though—have you?” he countered. “The reason we live in eternal Winter is because we bear the brunt of the Seelie Court’s constant drain of power. It withers our plants and keeps our Realm plunged into the season of death.”
“I…didn’t know.” I shook my head. “But what about the plants inside the palace?”
“Protected by wardings,” he said succinctly. “My mother, Mab, used to say that the greenery inside the Winter Palace was the only thing that kept her sane,” he added.
“I’m so sorry,” I murmured. “I had no idea that the Summer Court was, uh, sucking all the power out of the Winter Court.”
“It’s the reason we’ve been at war all these years,” Liath growled. “The Great Divide which separates us allows the Summer Court to steal from the Winter Court without consequences. And the Seelie Fae don’t care—they just want an easy source of power they don’t have to pay for.”
“The way you pay in blood,” I whispered. A new thought came to me—a rather awful thought. “Are you going to teach me to, er, find my magic by cutting me?” I asked, my voice coming out tight and high.
“What?” Liath gave me a convincingly horrified look. “Of course not, little bird! Besides, blood and pain isn’t the only way to pay for magic—you can pay for it with pleasure too. The greater the pleasure, the greater the magic you can generate and the more you can do with it.”
“Is that why your magic feels so good to me?” I asked, feeling my cheeks get hot. “I mean, when you…you know, touch me with it?”
