Dugan nodded. “Your castle has enough of Faerie that the planebender can reach it.”
Well, that was an unintended side effect. I’d have to find out if his magics could be warded against. I didn’t want the shadow court members showing up whenever they pleased.
Dugan stalked forward and stepped through the hole to the shadow court where my wall should have been. I followed close behind, opening my senses to examine the door—which was really more like a tear in space from one place to another—as I stepped through it. I could feel the change in layers of reality as I moved from my castle to Faerie proper, but I couldn’t begin to guess how the planebender moved Faerie to touch in places it normally didn’t. Of course, he was a planebender and I was a planeweaver, so while our skills might have been of the same family, they were quite different.
Once Falin stepped through the doorway, the planebender grabbed the tear in space with both hands and tugged it back together. With my shields open, I could almost see the strands of reality repairing themselves. Then the seam was gone, as if the door had never existed. And now I have no easy way out of the shadow court. I didn’t like it, but I’d agreed to come and see the king, so I would.
The room we’d stepped into appeared to be a long hallway. The shadows seethed and writhed along the walls, and I made a point of staying squarely in the center of the hall as we walked. We didn’t have to go far. Dugan turned to a patch of shadows and they moved aside to reveal a dark gold doorframe.
Dugan stepped through it, and I moved to follow but something caught my sleeve, holding me back. I glanced down to see the planebender, his hand tentatively wrapped in the knit of my sweater.
“You can help him, right?” His voice was young and worried, but something about it was incredibly familiar, as if I’d heard it before, long ago.
I had the urge to kneel down and reassure him that everything would be okay, but he wasn’t actually that short, so it would come off wrong. Also, while he sounded prepubescent, he was almost certainly a changeling, so he could be far older than me. I didn’t want to insult him.
“I’ll see what I can do,” was all I ended up saying. Which felt like not nearly enough, but I wasn’t going to bind myself with a promise I couldn’t keep.
With that, I walked through the door and into what could only be the king’s bedchambers. A female fae sat on the large four-poster bed, her body cradled protectively forward, her large leathery wings stretched so that most of the bed was shielded from sight. She looked up as we entered. Her face was other, but beautiful, and her red eyes were glassy, her long eyelashes clumped from tears.
“Serri, this is Alexis,” Dugan said as he approached the side of the bed. “I brought her to look at Nandin.”
She stared at me, assessing. Ever so slowly, her wings retracted, the leathery membranes lifting to reveal the Shadow King tucked neatly in the bed, his head and shoulders on her lap. He appeared to be sleeping, but not peacefully. His face was pale around the dark purple lines of fouled magic, sweat beaded on his skin, his brows were furrowed, and his eyes darted behind his lids as if he was caught in a dream he couldn’t escape.
“You are a healer?” Her voice was high and harsh, the worry in it almost a tangible thing.
“Not exactly.”
Her red eyes shot to Dugan, the look questioning and slightly hostile.
“She’s purged basmoarte before.”
I frowned at Dugan. I hadn’t agreed to more than look at the king yet. Serri wore no circlet and she hadn’t been presented at the king’s side at the solstice, so she wasn’t an official consort, but she clearly cared about him. I didn’t want to offer her false hope.
“If I can do this, do you have a receptacle?” I asked, looking around. While the space in the room felt large, most of it was lost in shadow, as if the bed were adrift in a sea of living darkness.
“Trees are not exactly plentiful here,” Dugan said, frowning. He clearly hadn’t thought about where I would put the basmoarte, but if I was able to purge the king, the fouled magic would