For the first time in nearly eighteen years, someone had seen the King. The resulting report lacked concrete details, riddled instead with superlatives and italics and phrases like, “if you felt it, if you were there,” concluding abruptly with a useless sentence: “if only there were words to describe the way the night itself bent around him, how the shadows gave into his touch, how my tongue grew heavy and too big for my mouth, and I had the strangest feeling I was in the presence of a god.”
Maelona snorted. The King was not a god, not exactly. Any Protectorate worth their salt should know gods were a different category entirely. But, if the stories were true, she’d rather come face to face with a god than the King.
If the stories were true. She snapped the report folder shut, placing it back on the table, avoiding the condensation ring her pint had left behind. Maelona swept her gaze through the small pub she sat inside. It was her local haunt, an old place on an old road in Wales. Six or so tables filled the room, all barely more than slabs of wood propped up on some numbers of legs. The light was low and warm against the velvet night outside. A fireplace sputtered soot in the corner. It was a place of relaxation. Merriment, even. Or at least for drowning regular sorrows, like a break-up or a dead pet. The King had no place here.
“Do you really believe it?” Maelona demanded, her tone edged with steel, the words meant only for her brother, who was seated across from her.
“You can feel that he’s real,” her brother replied, not even looking up from Maelona’s copy of the report he eagerly snatched up the second it had hit the table. “The air gets thick when you say his name—his real name. Or his Petition. And besides, there’s too many contemporary accounts, even if it’s been a while. You have to know what you’re looking for and ignore the misdirections, but gods, he’s in the background of nearly every folktale. A shadow at the very edge of the photograph.”
Maelona watched him, irritation prickling her, waiting for his hazel eyes to meet hers. When he finally looked up, there was no trace of mischief.
“I think it’s too convenient, Cormac,” Maelona said with a sigh, propping her chin up on her hand. “I can’t say I haven’t thought that he’s a … I don’t know, Tylwyth Teg boogeyman. Completely made up to keep us all in line and ensure Protectorate families continue offering their kids up to the cause.”
Cormac made a face at her, tucking an errant auburn curl behind his ear.
“And you say I’m the conspiracy weaver,” he teased, raising his pint and taking a long swig.
Maelona sighed again. She did think Cormac was usually the one to veer into tinfoil hat territory—which was a lot coming from a woman raised in a secret organization that fought against the Fey and their magic.
“Seriously—how can we go years without seeing him, yet still think he’s such a dangerous, ever-present threat?” Maelona asked, rolling her eyes. “I mean, we were raised to be afraid of saying his name. His name. Don’t you remember going to see Carey in that production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream a few years ago and wincing every time we heard it? It’s absurd. Nothing like that is actually real. He wouldn’t live up to his own reputation.”
The King’s reputation was immense, enough to make even Maelona’s head spin when she thought about it for too long. He was the lord of the Unseelie Court and the King of the Wild Things and the last of the Tuatha Dé Danann. More than once, Maelona had heard the story of how he was forged in the oldest of magics, said to have been created by two goddesses who tore a wound in the midnight sky and crafted him from the obsidian jewel it bled. Maelona had always passed this story off as folklore, as fanciful parable, because keeping her sanity was more contingent on it not being real than she wanted to admit.
The stories said raindrops fought for the honor of landing upon his shoulders and the earth itself would roil and riot when he asked. Old Protectorate war tales told of the King commanding the ground to simply swallow his enemies whole, which Maelona blamed for her irrational phobia of being buried alive. The King was the last of the Fey courts, of the old ways, the pièce de resistance of the Uprising, and when it came to the Protectorate, the one that got away.
Maelona bit the inside of her lip too hard, ignoring the clammy palms and racing heart that came with too many thoughts of the King. The Protectorate had hunted his Court into extinction, she reminded herself, paving the way for the Age of Man. Humankind was safe in the world the Protectorate had created: a world where no one had the unfair advantage of being born with god-like magic.
The King, Maelona told herself over the drumbeat of her heart, was just a stubborn reminder of what once was, the reason that the middling Fey creatures left alive were still trying to create Courts beneath hills in suburban parks. Once the clearly overblown lore of the King was erased, once the surely less impressive being was found and brought to heel, the world could heave a sigh of relief.
Cormac caught Maelona’s gaze and the discomfort he saw there sent smugness sliding across his expression, slick as a waxed bar top.
“Say his name, then,” Cormac shot back, staring her down across the table. “Since he wouldn’t live up to his own reputation, anyway. Petition the King.”
“Here?” Maelona asked. With a raw and heavy sigh, she gestured to the quiet pub and their superior seated at the bar, poring over the same report. “You want me to say his Petition?”
The idea rattled her, speaking the very words that the Fey who swore fealty to the King’s once-mighty Unseelie Court would have uttered to summon their liege. She’d do it, full of liquid courage and wanting to prove her younger brother wrong. But she wouldn’t enjoy it. It’s not like the King would heed a Protectorate woman’s call. But he would hear it, if he existed. His gaze could turn to her.
“If you don’t think he’s real, it won’t matter,” Cormac replied, beaming at her impishly, his eyes crinkling with joy in having unnerved her.
“Gwenci is ten feet away from us,” she hissed, her words laden with frustration. “Keep your voice down. Imagine if he overheard.”
“Adds to the fun, doesn’t it?” Cormac asked, arching a brow. “Petition the King. When nothing happens, we can both sleep a little easier, aye?”
“Fine,” Maelona said, drawing up, telling herself nothing would happen, though she kept her voice low. She tasted blood in her mouth. “‘I greet you, King, as I walk within your shadow and your stead. The darkness I walk is your dominion and—’”
Quite suddenly, Maelona’s skin was too tight and the air was too thick; like trying to pull a jumper over a button-up, the layers all so obvious and wrong and harsh. Twisted. Inside-out.
Gwenci turned sharply and stared in their direction, his brow furrowed. The shadows outside the small window seemed to swirl strangely, like a thousand mouths opened all at once. The light above their table flickered with a crackling sound, as if frost had wrapped its fingers around the bare bulb. Cormac jumped, pressing his face against the window.
The world held its breath in the tiny pub for a long moment, silence stretched taut as a drum, the darkness waiting just outside the doors.
And then nothing happened. Well, not quite—Maelona suddenly noticed she was warm again, though she had never actually sensed being cold, and the light in the pub seemed brighter. Cormac peeled his face off the window and gaped at her, eyes wide.
“Sometimes that happens,” Gwenci called from the bar, sounding more vaguely annoyed than anything else. “Try not to believe the report when you read it.” He turned back around, nursing his whisky, clearly unaware the King’s petition had been partially spoken.
“Hell,” Cormac said. “Try not to believe it? He’s that powerful?”
“If he’s that powerful, why are we alive? Why isn’t he, I don’t know, Emperor of the World?” Maelona demanded.
Cormac considered.
“Maybe he doesn’t want that. Maybe he doesn’t want any of the things we think he does,” her brother said, his voice soft and becoming more conspiratorial with each word. “Maybe he just wants to keep outliving us. Maybe long after humankind is gone, he’ll rebuild his Court from the ashes of our world and nothing we did will have mattered at all.”
Maelona did not like to think about it that way because it made her teeth hurt, and she told him so. When the pub’s landline rang and it was a call for her, requesting she be part of the team that followed up on the new sighting in Prague, she tried as hard as possible not to look scared as she relayed the news to Cormac. He made her promise to tell him everything, his grip on her wrist too tight.
The next morning, when she packed her bag, her hands shook so badly she almost couldn’t close the zipper.
***
Maelona didn’t feel anything in the rain-sodden streets of Prague like Cormac said she would. If the King had been there, surely a Protectorate family as old as the Overhills would sense it, right?
And yet all Maelona sensed was that her socks were wet and she was freezing. She didn’t realize it could rain so much in Prague and her handler hadn’t warned her that she would be walking through tiny, twisting streets—not to mention all the little fucking stairs.
“I haven’t seen anything, Gwenci,” Maelona said as she stepped under the awning, a respite from the rain. The tall, lanky man waited for her there, dressed in a suit of murky, indeterminate color, his jaw grinding as always.
“Keep canvassing,” he commanded.
“Do you really believe the report?” she wanted to know.
Gwenci looked at her then, his eyes like stone.
“If there is even a chance the King is here, we must hunt down every possibility and drag it into the light to be examined.”
“Damn,” Maelona said, stamping her cold feet against the damp cobblestones. “Look, I’m going to stand here and have a cigarette, and then I’ve got one last location.”
She hated canvassing. She had to slide into places like she belonged there, ask a bunch of vague questions that annoyed everyone, and use magic for super boring reasons, like concealing her Welsh accent, comprehending whatever languages she heard and making everyone forget she had been there in the first place. Leave it to humans to make magic subject to all the same bullshit bureaucracy as everything else. Maelona knew for a fact that magic was real. The blood that ran in her veins was as old as the Welsh hills and the organization she had been born into was older still— yet she spent half her days filing paperwork.
The goddamn cigarette wouldn’t light and she almost thought the rain had gotten to the pack, but then she saw the faint glow of magic around Gwenci’s hands.
“Damn you,” she snapped, throwing the cigarette back into the pack.
“Just finish your list,” Gwenci grumbled. He cast his gaze out into the alleyway they occupied, the cobblestone street twisting away from them at a hard angle, the ancient buildings towering so high above it felt like they were in a canyon.
“I hate this place,” Gwenci said, grinding the words between stained teeth. “Steeped in the old ways.”
Maelona just shrugged and ducked back into the torrential rain that closed around her like a curtain. The last location was well out of the touristy areas of the city, which she wouldn’t have minded seeing. But only bars and nightclubs and 24-hour places were likely to be open at the time of the occurrence, though she wasn’t sure it would matter. This whole thing felt like a desperate grab. Like they were reaching their hands into the night itself and expecting to pull something out.
Maelona shouldered the thick door and entered the bar. It was not unlike the pubs she was used to—low ceiling with exposed rafters, scuffed floors, a dark, chipped counter at one end. There were a few patrons. No one glanced at her until she reached the bar and sat down, and even then, only the bartender shot a look in her direction before continuing a conversation.
A drink would’ve been nice, this being her last stop and all. Maelona glanced around, taking in the u-shaped bar with peeling leather stools on either side. There only seemed to be one person sitting across the way, and they were uninteresting and difficult to make out in the low light. There was, however, something about this bar that set her just a bit on edge. It grated against her sensibilities, like it was hiding something about itself from her, but when she looked around with a sharper eye, all her magic attuned, she saw nothing.
She drummed her fingers against her thigh, growing impatient for the bartender. Maelona fell into daydreaming about what she would do when she got back to the hotel: the hot bath she’d take, what she would order for dinner, how well she’d sleep with the soft duvet.
The approaching bartender broke her reverie. She was about to ask for a drink, a good way to get the conversation going, but before she could even open her mouth, the bartender slid a frosted coupe glass in front of her. The liquid within was a pale and slippery gray, something nearly luminescent about it, a ghost light that came from nowhere in particular. Shadows seemed to dance in its depths, surely some trick of liquid density. A single purple violet, its edges seemingly dipped in black ink, floated on the surface.
Maelona looked at the drink and then at the bartender and for a long moment, she was too confused to say anything at all.
“From the gentleman over there,” the bartender told her, his tone cool, jerking his chin in the direction of a patron across the bar.
Maelona raised her eyes to look and saw a man seated across the way. He had one elbow on the bar, his chin propped on a capable hand, the way one might watch the clouds in a park. But instead, he was watching her. His skin was ivory, the hair a dark sweep across the forehead. His eyes were an ocean—the only way to describe them, Maelona thought. Like an ocean in a storm. He was devastatingly attractive in a feral, dangerous sort of way, and she found herself hoping he had an identical twin sister who was too shy to send her own drinks.
There was something familiar about him, something she could not quite place about the cut jaw and the point of the strong shoulders and the powerful hands and the too-sharp cheekbones. For a moment, her gaze snapped to his aura—an improbable shade of ink-black, wide as the moon, capable of eclipsing all the light in the room. Maelona felt that falling into that blackness and disappearing forever would be as easy as blinking.
But then the strangeness of it all dissipated, wiped away like condensation off a mirror, and she just shrugged and took a sip of the drink. It was heavily botanical, lush dark florals landing on her palate, ending with a bittersweet note she could not name.
“This is good,” Maelona said to the bartender. “What’s in it?”
“It’s a house special,” the barkeep replied. “It’s called the King’s Cup.”
And so, the thrall broke.
Maelona shot to her feet, moving like an arrow in the direction of the man who had been across the bar just moments ago, but she saw before even reaching the space he had occupied that there was nothing except shadow and empty space.
Nothing. There was nothing. No raven feathers or warnings scrawled on vellum or a calling card inscribed only with blood. Maelona demanded the bartender tell her who sent the drink, but he only looked at her like she was insane and told her that she had ordered it “her goddamn self.”
She left and relayed the happening to Gwenci, of course, but even after the Protectorate spent twelve hours scouring the area and practically camping out at the bar, they found nothing. Numerous, invasive physical and magical exams of Maelona showed nothing. Just shadows and empty space.
“He’s fucking with you,” Cormac told Maelona on the phone when she returned to her hotel room. “He’s fucking with all of us.”
Maelona rubbed her forehead, sitting down on the edge of the rumpled bed. An empty crisp packet crinkled under her leg.
“I swear I saw him, Cormac,” she said. “I swear he was right there. He was right fucking there.”
“I suppose this means he’s real,” Cormac said after a long pause.
Maelona swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry, her throat aching.
“It could have been anyone. It could have been just the right series of odd, unrelated events.”
“You don’t believe that,” Cormac scoffed. His dog barked in the background, tinny through the long-distance call.
“I don’t know what I believe,” Maelona replied firmly, digging one hand into the crisp packet, scrounging for crumbs. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
“How did it feel, Maelona?” her brother asked, his voice breathy. “How did it feel to be in the presence of the King?”
Maelona frowned, not liking when Cormac got this way, all hot-blooded and strange. But she didn’t want to hang up just yet because that meant being alone, so she attempted to humor him. Maelona closed her eyes and put herself back at that bar, back on that stool, one hand curling around the frosted coupe glass.
Maelona felt the blackness roar in from every angle, a thousand crows’ wings blotting out the sky. She smelled woodsmoke and rain and damp stone. She felt wild and strange, a wolf dancing beneath the full moon. Shadows swelled in her, billowing like heavy cloth on the wind, pushing aside her organs to make room for their black infinity. If she were a more fanciful person, Maelona would’ve sworn that she felt time turn itself inside out, a snake eating its own tail, scales colored the pale and slippery gray of an ocean in a storm.
Nausea—or something akin to it—bloomed in her stomach, violent and raw. She lurched forward, headed for the bathroom or maybe a trash can, but her legs folded beneath her weight and she found herself on her hands and knees, slick with a sudden sweat. She dry-heaved and then retched, one hand automatically leaping to cover her mouth.
When the sickness subsided, Maelona rocked back on her heels, lowering her hand from her mouth to inspect the dampness there. Cradled in her palm, fresh as could be, was a pale violet, its scalloped petals tipped delicately in black ink.
White-hot fear skittered across Maelona’s skin as she flung the flower across the room, scrambling backwards, only to slam into the bedframe. She watched, disbelief blossoming in her chest, as the ink slunk from the petals and onto the plush carpet. Darkness rippled out like a silk scarf, the shadowy ink forming a door: arched at the top, bottomless as a shard sliced out of the night sky. Jaw set, Maelona called to her magic, throwing everything she had at the door’s gaping maw.
The ink and her magic and the door and her heartbeat all seemed to hold entirely still for a long, stretched moment. Then several dark tendrils shot out from the growing gloom, reaching to encircle her wrists and ankles. Maelona shouted, digging her heels in, but the silken cords of shadow dragged her toward the door’s mouth all the same.
Distantly, she heard her brother saying her name over and over again through the dropped telephone just steps away, louder and louder, like it was a prayer or a hymn or sigil that could hold back the dark. But this darkness, this ancient, exquisite darkness, knew nothing of prayer.
Maelona managed to sink her fingernails into the carpet, grappling desperately for purchase, and for a second, she hung poised at the door’s lip. The velvet shadows swam and contracted, a black woolen cloak on the wind, scuffed midnight-hued armor on a desolate battlefield, an obsidian throne on a dark dais. And then, emerging from the shadow-spun gloom behind the throne, was a man. No, not a man—worse, so much worse, composed of sharp angles and lithe, feral grace. She watched him as he raised—as if to toast her at a dinner party—a frosted coupe glass.
Just before Maelona tumbled over the edge and into the waiting void, she wondered if it were too late to complete his Petition, to utter the final seven syllables:
“And to you I surrender.”
Victoria Mier (she/they) is a queer, disabled writer, independent bookstore owner, and suspected changeling. Her work can also be found in The Raven Review, Fifth Wheel Press, SORTES and Vulnerary Magazine. Learn more at victoriamier.com.
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