“And I don’t want an Unseelie army to rule.”
“Army? Dani, my bonny will o’ the wisp, what are you talking about? I was telling you about the Hoar Frost King. Are you coming or not? It’s a fine night to be alive. We’ve a monster to catch.” He winks at me. “And tonight it’s not me.”
Dude. Sometimes that’s all you can say.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“I walk up on high and I step to the edge to see my world below”
A good leader knows her world.
I know nothing of my world.
Well, that’s not entirely true.
I know that 152 paces beyond where I stand looking out of Rowena’s dressing room window there is a serene arbor of shaped topiary with a tiled pavilion, stone benches, and a reflecting pool that centuries-dead Grand Mistress Deborah Siobhan O’Connor built for meditation in times of turmoil. Far enough from the abbey to grant privacy, near enough to be used often, the silvery pool was long ago usurped by fat frogs on lily pads, and on a gentle summer night, in my old room three floors above Rowena’s and two to the south, they charmed me to sleep with their lazy baritone ah-uuups for many years.
I know also that there are 437 rooms in the abbey, in common-knowledge use. I know of an additional twenty-three on the main floor alone, with more on the other three, and undoubtedly countless more of which I know nothing at all. The rambling fortress is a hive of concealed passageways and hidden panels, stones and floorboards and fireplaces that move, if you’ve the secret to their operation. Then there is the Underneath. That is how I have always seen the abbey: the Upstairs proper where sunshine glitters on windowpanes and we bake and clean and are normal women, and the Underneath where a dark city twists and turns, with passageways and catacombs and vaults, and the sweet Lord only knows what all. There, those of us in the Haven become something else sometimes, something ancient in our blood.
I know that a quarter of a mile behind the abbey is a barn with 282 stalls where cows and horses and pigs were once penned. I know a brisk walk beyond it is a dairy that housed forty-odd milk cows, with a chilled larder where we made butter and cream. I know that there are seventeen rows of five beds making eighty-five tiered vegetable garden beds behind the dairy that once grew enough to sustain the abbey’s thousands of occupants plus more to sell in the village for a tidy sum.
All these things I know belonged to a different world.
The world I live in is no longer a world I know.
It is four-thirty in the morning. I pull my wrapper more closely around me and stare out the window at gnarled oaks casting long shadows, and moonbeams crisscrossing the lawn through latticed branches. My comforting view of the familiar shaped topiary is blocked by one of those dangerous aberrations of physics Mac calls Interdimensional Fairy Potholes; IFPs for short, an expedient abbreviation. This one has the funnel shape of a crystalline tornado and shines milky-lilac, its dull, faceted exterior reflecting the moonlight. In the light of day those pellucid facets are difficult to distinguish from the surrounding countryside, compounded by their extreme variations in shape, texture, and size. I have seen IFPs larger than our back field and smaller than my hand. This one is taller than a four-story building and as wide.
When first she told me her name for them, I laughed. That was back when my family had recently been killed and I was drunk on freedom. For the first time in my life, when everyone around me felt anxious about the many new monsters on the loose, I felt gloriously, deliriously safe. My monsters were gone. They’d been trying to pry me from the abbey again, my mother evidencing a triumphant gleam in her eye at Sunday-supper-last, and I was certain she and Father had finally struck upon something Rowena wanted badly enough to give me up. For years, the diminutive Grand Mistress had commanded my blind devotion merely for standing bulwark between them and me.
IFPs are no longer a laughing matter. They never were. This one was discovered a week ago, heading straight for our abbey. We wasted days tracking its progress, trying to devise ways to divert it. Nothing worked. It is not as if an IFP can be blown off course with a giant fan. I am the leader of this enclave, yet I’m unable to do something so simple as protect it from being swallowed up by a fractured piece of Faery! The IFP is not even a sentient enemy. It is merely an accident of circumstance.
Then there are the sentient enemies I have to worry about. The thinking, coveting ones whose Upstairs never matches their Underneath, who are no doubt even now talking about the repository of endless knowledge and power the world now knows we have locked beneath our fortress, guarded by a snortingly inept 289 women ranging in age from seven all the way up to Tanty Anna, at one hundred and two.
These are my charges. Trusted to my care.
I see no end for them that does not involve their hapless slaughter!
I need more sidhe-seers. I need to strengthen our numbers.
Last night I gathered my girls around the IFP when it was a mere mile from the abbey. We’d plotted its course with ninety-nine percent certainty: it would enter our home. The only questions were how much of the south chapel next to Rowena’s chambers would it instantly engulf, and would it raze every square inch of our abbey or leave the occasional pile of rubble, perhaps a glowing, red-hot wall standing here and there?
Given its rate of locomotion, it would take nearly an hour for it to complete its passage from end to end. We were able to plot the time and trajectory of its destruction so accurately because it had already left hundreds of miles of fine, sooty ash in its wake. Dirt fields were emblazoned with deep ruts of scorched earth. Large buildings were reduced to small mountains of postapocalyptic embers.