Page 122 of Better in Black
“You haven’t seen what I’ve seen,” the Queen said. “You haven’t tested them as I have. Their love is true.”
“She’s my sister, my other half. She is too much me to ever lovehim.”
The Queen laughed again, and I heard desperation in it, and longing, and I understood two things: She was in love with him—and he was in love with his sister. “I worry for you, my Morning Star, when you find out she’s not as much like you as you think.”
“Surelythatwas an invitation to pain,” Sebastian said, and the Queen giggled, then shrieked with delight, and I curled myself small and tight and tried not to listen to them ravish each other.
I tried not to weep for my Queen, who had given her heart to a demon’s spawn seemingly incapable of love, who had nonetheless found a way to love someone else.
—
I was not executed for what I had witnessed, but I was punished.
“I wish to show you my gratitude,” the Queen told me, once Sebastian had returned to the mortal world. “You healed Sebastian. I would like you to be my handmaid.”
I knelt and bowed my head, for what could I do but accept? “Thank you, my lady.”
“It will be good to have someone with healing skill, because I am with child.”
I was too shocked not to speak. “With his child? Sebastian Morgenstern’s?”
Her eyes glittered. Not sapphires now, but frozen blue ice. “What of it?”
I could neither lie nor speak all the truth. “The baby will be part Shadowhunter,” I said. “It is good for me to know that, for the birth.”
Perhaps she believed that was all that was behind my dismay, perhaps not. Either way, my lady put me under a geas, so I could speak to no one of the pregnancy, or of the true nature of her association with Sebastian. I counted myself fortunate, as there are bloodier ways to silence a tongue.
After that came a strange time, during which I served my lady, and watched her swell with child and with love: not for the child, but for her lover, Sebastian, who now visited only occasionally.
Many of the faeries who served the Queen closely came to love her. When a being holds your life in their hands, love can be the only way not to go mad with fear or rage. Love is the lie of choice: You cannot take my power, because I surrender it freely. And, of course, she was beautiful, and charming, and could be sweet, and even we Fair Folk who should know better sometimes mistake entertainment for affection, and affection for care, and care for love.
I always knew better.
—
For the foolhardy and the foolish, there was the illusion of power, serving so closely to the Queen.
My sister Celithe was neither, or so I had thought. But after many merciful years of silence between us, she appeared at theSeelie Court, dressed all in a gossamer gown of dragonfly wings. I wondered how many dragonflies had died to make the dress, even as she appeared at the threshold of my chambers, arms held wide.
“Well met, my long-absent sister.”
“Not so well,” I said, and did not look up from my apothecary table. The herbs I was measuring out needed careful attention; in the wrong dosage they were toxic. And also, I could not stand to look at her.
My once gentle sister, my monster.
“One could almost think you’ve been hiding from me,” she said. “Not very sisterly of you.”
Once upon a time, there was a man I could have loved. A mortal poet, with soft blue eyes and a patch of blond hair that barely covered his shiny skull. Not handsome, my poet, by mortal standards or any other. But with words, he made the world beautiful.
He loved me, and begged me for my heart in return, and perhaps I was tempted.
Perhaps, in my weakest moments, in his arms, listening to his heart beat in time with the stars, I thought,Must love always mean loss, must desire yield to destruction?I thought,What if I opened my heart and invited him in?
Celithe seduced him. She glamoured herself as me, at first, and kissed him, and stripped him bare, and then she released the glamour, and revealed herself. Celithe the cruel, Celithe the mad, Celithe the beautiful, with an ethereal grace that lies beyond me, and awe broke over the poet’s sweet face, and he took her in his arms, and he said her wish was his command, and she bade him to join her at a revel, and she drugged him, and she laughed as he danced himself to death.
And I know this, because she made me watch.
This was her gift to me, Celithe said. Someday she was sure I would return the favor.
