Chains and Memory (13 page)

But with the sidhe given license to walk the world, he had trouble making himself spend his time on anything other than preparing. When Kim was at work, he was out here in the park, in a tree-shrouded corner that mostly hid him from casual view, practicing everything he could that wouldn't draw attention and didn't need a partner. When she left the office, they took the Metro to Eastern Market and practiced more in the basement.

Kim was holding up under the strain far better than he'd initially expected. It was another reminder that he hadn't thought of her as one of the Fiain, not really; he'd still been calculating for her old limitations. She lacked a wilder's depth of training, but she had strong gifts now—stronger than Julian's, in some cases—and more than enough determination to see her through.

Wake up, eat breakfast, come to the park, eat the lunch he brought with him, go to meet Kim. She was pretty much the only thing that broke the constant drill of practice, and Julian had to fight with himself to let it happen. Every time his thoughts strayed to her—and they did, all too often—it felt like a failure of discipline. Other Fiain had told him it would be like this, once he was out of the Center; after a lifetime of someone else setting every rule, now it was his own responsibility to decide where the boundaries lay. Julian had found a balance of sorts at Welton, but now he was reeling again, unsure how much indulgence was wise.

None of those thoughts would help him get anything done today. There were limits to what he could practice alone, without making himself a public safety hazard, but Julian was determined to get the hang of one thing: teleportation.

He still hadn't gotten the trick of it, and that failure was beginning to drive him up the wall. It wasn't even a skill Guardians were required to possess. Some people, even strongly gifted ones, never managed to make it work. But it had its uses; more than one life had been saved by a weapon or ritual component blinking into reach or out of it at a crucial moment. And Neeya could do it, as easily as breathing. She even speculated she could move living creatures that way, though Guan had given her a look that said if she ever tried it without damned good justification, she'd find herself facing a board of inquiry five minutes later.

Julian would settle for being able to move a small, inanimate object, like the rock lying in the grass a short distance from him. He took a deep breath and was about to center himself when the hairs on the back of his neck rose in a way that was all too familiar.

He was on his feet in an instant, shields flaring to life. But the sidhe coming through the bushes wasn't Unseelie; the green eyes told him that much. They claimed that was the one feature they couldn't disguise, even with magic, and so far as anyone could tell, it was true. The individual approaching him now was Seelie, and familiar to him. Falcon.

That was the name he used, at least. All of the sidhe went by use-names, keeping their true names secret from humans, and maybe even from each other. Julian had met Falcon last fall, when the Seelie pulled him into the Otherworld for questioning. From the start, they hadn't gotten along.

Reflex kept his expression neutral, concealing his dislike. Then he wondered why he was bothering. It wasn't as if Falcon didn't know how he felt. Julian shifted his feet to a more casual stance, but didn't drop his shields. “With all your people free to walk the world now, I might have hoped to see someone other than you.”

His antagonism had no visible effect on Falcon. It was entirely possible the sidhe were incapable of feeling hurt by such things. “I might have expected to find you somewhere more . . . interesting than this.”

Julian's shoulders tensed. There was a downside to relaxing his control; it meant the barb got in under his guard, pissing him off, awakening all the resentment and frustration of being left to sit uselessly on the sidelines. He drew in a deep breath, centering himself once more. When he could trust his tone, he asked, “Where's your escort?”

Falcon shrugged, unperturbed. “I do not have one.”

“They're letting you wander around alone? That hardly seems wise. Sooner or later someone is going to start throwing iron nails at you in the street.” Or else worship him as a god. Either one was a pile of tinder, just waiting for a spark.

The sidhe gazed around the arc of trees that shielded Julian's practice spot from view. “I made arrangements to be alone, and I have taken all appropriate care.”

Legitimate arrangements? Or did he mean he'd given his escort the slip? Julian wasn't certain he wanted to know. As much as he would have preferred to be visited by a different sidhe — Flint, perhaps; or better yet, Shard — it was a relief to speak with one of them again. These past months, it had been all too easy to imagine that the Seelie were done with him, now that his usefulness was gone. “Are others of your Court here as well? Shard, perhaps?”

Falcon shook his head. “No. Recent events have wearied her; she is resting.”

What could weary a sidhe? Their gifts outstripped those of the strongest wilder. And Shard was a seer. Divination wasn't usually that draining.

The question was on the tip of his tongue, but Julian stopped himself. Not because Falcon wouldn't answer — though he probably wouldn't. Because there was something strange about this conversation, compared to those they'd had in the past. Falcon's voice was different: he spoke more slowly, and he had a perceptible accent.

He was speaking
English
.

All the sidhe, when he'd dealt with them before, had communicated via a powerful telepathic trick: they spoke their own language, but their minds projected the meaning alongside, so that the recipient heard the result as if it were their own native tongue. It worked best on people with strong telepathic gifts; Julian suspected it wouldn't work on baselines at all. But Falcon was speaking actual English now, with no psychic intervention.

“When the hell did you learn English?”

“I have been studying it since we first made contact,” Falcon said. “Several of us have.”

Julian said flatly, “Samhain was six months ago. You don't become this fluent in six months.”

The sidhe nodded, as if the point were true, but also irrelevant. “Telepathy aids in many things.”

Not in learning languages,
Julian wanted to say. Prior to meeting the sidhe, though, he would have thought it was impossible to create the near-seamless illusion of speaking another tongue. Who was to say they couldn't reach into the mind of another person and lift out the understanding wholesale? Especially since the evidence before him said that was exactly what they had done.

Assuming Falcon was telling the truth. He knew the sidhe could lie; they'd done it before. “How can I trust that? You sound different; for all I know, you might not even be Falcon. You're Seelie, at least — but how do I know that face isn't a glamour?”

Falcon's lip curled. “Your suspicion is laudable, changeling, but misplaced.”

This time he spoke as he had before, in his own language, with telepathy carrying the meaning. Julian couldn't rule out the possibility that the sidhe could fake an identity, even mind-to-mind — but the response felt right, down to the slur. Falcon disdained the humanity for having failed to remember enough, and he reserved the worst of his contempt for the Fiain.

Speaking English once more, Falcon said, “But to answer your question: of course this face is a glamour.”

It blindsided Julian, rocking him back on his heels. “What?”

The sidhe shrugged, careless once more. “I chose this appearance. I suppose that to call it a glamour is inaccurate; it is no fleeting thing. But the two are not much dissimilar. Another of my Court could copy it, if they wished — though you would know the difference, if you looked closely.”

“You mean —” Julian's gaze raked over the sidhe, from head to foot. It
wasn't
a glamour; he could see through one of those, if he tried hard enough. “What do you really look like, underneath that?”

“There
is
no ‘underneath,'” Falcon said. “We are not humans. We have no appearance save that which we craft for ourselves. When we returned, we chose to take on characteristics you would recognize as signaling our nature.”

Images flickered through Julian's memory. The U.N. conference, the various sidhe scattered through the crowd. The variety they showed. A few thousand years of myth and folklore, fiction and art, had conditioned Americans to think of the sidhe like something out of Tolkien: tall and slender and pale. But there was plenty of folklore, even in Europe, that described fey creatures as looking quite different.

He stared at Falcon. The glamour — or whatever it was — he couldn't see through it. But Julian's focus changed, as if the sidhe were an optical illusion, and he saw in an entirely new light.

Falcon wasn't a physical body, animated by a spirit, possessing gifts he used in a variety of ways. Everything about him — his face, his voice, even the way he walked — was a creation of . . . no, a
manifestation
of those gifts. Or even further: Falcon
was
his gifts. A self-aware locus of power, which took on physical form the way Julian might put on clothes.

And that was why Falcon said Julian could tell the difference, if some other sidhe tried to copy his appearance. What his eyes received was just a psychic construct. The mind behind it was what he really had to scrutinize.

If they had known this last fall, the Unseelie would never have been able to fool Kim.

It took an effort not to ask his next question in a snarl. “Do the people you're dealing with know this?”

“Of course.”

That must have given the security forces nightmares, no matter how many reassurances they got that the sidhe would remain recognizable from one form to the next.

“But that is not why I came,” Falcon said, with the air of someone shaking off an irrelevant and annoying digression. “We —”

Julian flung up one hand to stop him. A man pushing a stroller was approaching—not aiming for their corner, just passing by, but in a moment he was going to see the two of them, the wilder and the sidhe, and whatever happened next was likely to be bad.

“Have no fear,” Falcon said. “He will see and hear nothing but grass and the wind.”

A glamour. Of the sort Julian was much more accustomed to. “You're maintaining that all on your own?”

“Neither illusion is complex. He expects this corner to be deserted, and so it is easy to persuade him that it is.”

At least it meant Julian didn't have to fear sparking some kind of riot by talking out in the open like this. “All right. Why
are
you here?”

“The Unseelie,” Falcon said, and Julian tensed once more. “We wish your aid against them.”

“You already have it. But I don't know how I can help.”

Falcon sighed. “Your governments insisted on conversing with them. I concede this was inevitable, and we did what we could to prepare them. But the Unseelie have convinced some individuals that they are not the enemy—that they deserve equal freedom to enter your world, and that perhaps there is more benefit to be gained from alliance with their Court than with ours.”

Cold fire burned in Julian's gut. “After everything they did last fall. They say that, and people believe them.”

“They claim their first attack on you was no attack at all, but merely the unfortunate consequence of an attempt to make contact too early.”

Samhain night. The Unseelie had been trying to pull him into the Otherworld, but the realms had been much too distant for it to work. That one, perhaps, could be rationalized. But the others— “And when they tried to turn me to their side? Tortured me after it didn't work? What about when they kidnapped Kim and fed her a drug that could have
killed
her?”

“Regrettable errors,” Falcon said.

If Julian had given in to his fury, he would have detonated the trees around them into splinters. “
Errors?
”

“The point is, your leaders are willing to entertain the possibility of reconciliation—especially if there may be gain in it for them.” Julian wasn't meeting Falcon's eyes, but he felt the weight of the sidhe's attention on him. “We need you to persuade them of the truth.”

His breath blew out, not in a laugh. “If my testimony didn't persuade them, I don't know what will.”

“You told us before that your kind hold authority in matters of magic.”

“
Guardians
hold authority,” Julian said. “And many wilders are Guardians. But I'm not one yet, not officially. And even if I were—we can give orders in a crisis, take steps against people who are causing trouble. We don't rule the world.”

Falcon pursued the point with unwavering determination. “You can advise them. Make it clear that the Unseelie cannot be trusted. You have direct experience of them, as few do. Will they not listen to you? Or to your friend?”

Kim. “The Unseelie attacked her,” Julian said. “Recently. On the Metro—” He sent a quick telepathic image, a condensed explanation of the concept. Falcon nodded. “It would be pretty hard to write that off as an ‘error,' especially when it means they were in violation of the agreement to hold off on contact. But we don't have any proof, and most people think Kim was imagining things. If you can help prove the Unseelie were here, that they went after her—then yes, I think I can make someone listen to me.”

“I will see what I may do,” Falcon said. He didn't sound optimistic, but Julian couldn't tell how much of that was his usual impassive tone and how much was genuine doubt.

His own hopes were not as high as they might be. “Hurry,” Julian said. “I doubt they're done with Kim. And the sooner we can prove the Unseelie are guilty, the more good it will do both of our sides.”

~