exist. Or not. She wasn’t sure.
Tonight she took sanctuary in this place for a different reason altogether. Not because she blended with the stark nothingness, but because she pulsed with so many different emotions, fears, and desires she could barely contain them all.
Cliodnah appeared in front of her. Kylah would have gasped, had she a voice to produce the sound. She’d only ever laid eyes on the Banshee Queen in her own world. There, the Fae was frigid and resplendent in arctic silver-white, often turning the moisture in the air around her into glimmering crystals of frost, no matter the season.
Here in this plane, she was a being of so much color, that if Kylah had been in possession of her eyes, she didn’t believe they would have contained or comprehended the spectrum. The flawless symmetry of her features was unnatural in its exactness and lent her beauty an unfinished quality which she hid behind layers of glimmering color and riotous translucent robes. She didn’t walk so much as glide through the nether until she filled the same space that contained Kylah.
Behind the Queen, a smaller, more delicate Fae hovered unobtrusively. She often had accompanied Cliodnah to their meetings and Kylah had the impression she was some kind of attendant or Faerie lady-in-waiting. Her robes were more substantial than the one’s draping the Queen’s seductive body, and the spectrum was limited to indescribable, uncommon shades of blue.
“Your Majesty.” Kylah didn’t so much speak as reverberate with the intention to do so. “I’ve never seen you here before. How lovely you are.”
“Banshee.” Cliodhah’s voice was at once atypical and familiar. The infinitely slow, methodically annunciated immortal lack of inflection was at once chilling and strangely melodic. “I’ve come to discuss our pact.”
Fear speared through Kylah. “I understood I had three months more, my lady.”
Pupils twice the size of a human’s slid to pin her with a disdainful glare. “My consort, Ly Erg, tells me you are oft in the company of the Druid of Cape Wrath.”
Kylah was suddenly glad she didn’t require breathing for survival. “Yes, majesty.” She decided not to elaborate.
“I believe you have captivated him,” The Queen remarked with an infinitesimal level of amusement.
“The Druid?”
“Ly Erg.” The Queen’s lip lifted in the terrifying ghost of a smile, but didn’t leave Kylah a chance to contemplate the horror of her announcement. “For a hundred years, the Druid has hidden himself in the earth somewhere, away from our notice. Only recently have we felt his powers stir. This, we think, is largely your doing.”
Did she mean the royal “we”, or that Kylah had garnered the notice of the entirety of the Fae? The possibilities frightened her beyond her wits.
Cliodnah waved her hand, disturbing the swirling grey until it congealed with a foreign sound like vines snapping in a heavy storm. There appeared in front of them a vision of Daroch crouched naked and bathing in the grotto. The lower half of his body remained concealed by the dark water, but his tattooed torso was burnished blue and gold by a fire he’d kept dark while Kylah had been with him.
He’d done that in deference to her, she realized. Regardless of his many verbal dismissals, he’d never once lit a flame in her presence, knowing she feared them.
Perhaps he cared, in his own way.
Kylah, the Queen, and her lovely blue attendant silently played voyeur to Daroch’s private bath. He scrubbed his slick body and long hair with a sort of spongy, colored salt that bubbled and then dissolved in the water. When his skin glowed raw, he took a wicked-looking dirk and gripped the string of shells that hung close to his right eye. Kylah felt like wincing as he took three preparatory breaths before shearing it off.
“What is this?” she whispered.
“’Tis how the ancient Druids prepared for war,” Cliodnah didn’t look away from him and Kylah noted the uncloaked lust dripping from her voice. She resented it. She wanted to hide Daroch from the Queen’s view. He didn’t want to be watched, this she understood absolutely. “He left the Faerie realm promising retribution for his bondage. I fear he has finally found the means to turn his threat into reality.”
“It was you,” Kylah gaped, horrified. “You kept him prisoner in Faerie.”
The Queen made a foreign gesture that would have been the human equivalent of a shrug. “Look at him. He’s a paragon of masculinity. One of the most perfectly crafted human beings I’ve seen in millennia. As a youth, he was