He inclined his head imperiously.
“Wings only. After.”
“Unacceptable.”
“Then no.” Cruce in charge of the Fae? Cruce with at least part of the Sinsar Dubh, all the queen’s power, plus the song, assuming we managed to re-create it? What would keep him from wiping us all off the face of the Earth and taking it for himself?
He intuited my thoughts. “We will agree to a Compact, MacKayla. Fae rulers are bound irrevocably by such magic. You will find confirmation of the truth I speak within you. As queen, you possess, undiluted, all the knowledge, myths, and magic of our race.”
“Do I have her memories, too?”
“Memories are not transferred. The Fae already suffer an abundance of them.”
I exhaled a sigh of relief. Though part of me had hoped I had them, another part of me had dreaded feeling split again, divided by memories that were not my own.
“I will agree to remove my race from your world, MacKayla, without harming it, or anything on it, before we go.” He correctly interpreted the look on my face and added a haughty, “Or after, O Suspicious One. Or ever. I will agree to never return and your planet will be forbidden to all Fae for all time. You may have your brehon father draft the details of our Compact and your druids oversee the enforcing of it. MacKayla, by these pledges will I abide,” he intoned with the somber gravity of a vow.
I stared into his eyes, those madness-inducing Unseelie prince eyes, and was startled by the transparency therein. He wasn’t lying. If I agreed to his terms he would do everything he could to save our world, then once I transferred the queen’s power to him, he would take his race away and leave us in peace. Forever.
It wasn’t a bad deal.
In all honesty, after my encounter with the Spyrssidhe that morning, I didn’t want to be queen of the Tuatha De Danann. I still harbored hope that one day I might be “just Mac” again; undoubtedly a new and vastly improved Mac—but one without four feet of hair and the crushing responsibility for an entire race. When would I ever have time to see Barrons or my family and friends? Where would I live? In Faery half the time, a reluctant Persephone dividing her days between Heaven and Hell?
“Who better to rule them than me, MacKayla? There is no stronger, more powerful, ancient, and wise Fae than I. You heard the queen. She, herself, was considering me. We both know you do not wish to be one of us. You bear no favor for my people. I will aid you unstintingly, withholding nothing that is necessary to achieve the health and well-being of your world. Grant me the right to lead my race. It is all I have ever sought, indeed, all I have ever desired. I spoke the truth when I told you, as V’lane, that Cruce’s sole aim was to free my brethren and ensure the future of the Fae. At this moment both our races are in danger of extinction.”
“Actually, that’s not true. The queen may have irrevocably bound the power of the Fae to this planet, and your race will definitely die if the planet does, but humans can go live anywhere. Our existence isn’t dependent on magic buried inside a world. My race can be moved to another one,” I pointed out.
His nostrils flared and he hissed, “If you would leave my people to die after having been entrusted with the True Magic of my race, after having been accepted by it, you are no better than you accuse me of being. Although I have never felt it, I have heard it is a power of great benevolence. I am willing to subject my desires and goals for my people to its scrutiny, and believe it will deem me worthy to lead them. Prove yourself the queen I believe you to be. The queen the True Magic thinks you are.”
He vanished.
I was instantly drenched.
Rolling my eyes, I popped open my umbrella and resumed sloshing through puddles toward Trinity College.
Fade was standing outside the door to the physics lab when I puddled in. Ryodan had dispatched him late last night, he told me, with orders to protect Dancer so long as the music box was in his possession.
Stepping into the lab, I propped my umbrella against the wall, grabbed paper towels off a counter, and dried my face, then hurried to join Dancer where he sat with headphones on, staring at a computer in the rear of the lab.
After exchanging greetings, I removed the music box from my backpack and handed it to him.
Fiddling with the unopened box, turning it this way and that, Dancer told me, “Gottfried Leibniz said that music is the secret exercise of the arithmetic of the soul, unaware of its act of counting.” He looked up at me and beamed. “Don’t you just love that? The relationship between math and music is sublime. I was picking up a lot of distortion from the box last night, so I set up equipment to cancel it out. I want to focus on the notes and chords, which I’ll convert to numbers and play with.”
“How?” I asked curiously. I loved music and had given a lot of thought to what made certain songs appeal to me more than others. I thought of songs as minibooks, with their own beginning, middle, and end and sometimes prefaces that established expectations. All had a story to tell. I responded to pattern repetition, motif that was recurrent, recombinant, and easily subjected to intriguing transformation. Although I adored happy one hit wonders, I could achieve the same buoyancy of mood from a number of classical pieces.
“There are eight notes in any given major scale that can be assigned numbers,” he said. “If you start with middle C as one, D becomes two and E becomes three and so on. You can also assign numbers to chords in the same fashion. As an example, you can do a musical interpretation of pi. A guy named Michael Blake did a fantastic interpretation of pi to thirty-one decimal places at a tempo of one hundred fifty-seven beats per minute, which, interestingly, is 314/2. When it was up on YouTube, I downloaded it because I liked it. Have a listen.” He pulled up the video on his laptop and hit PLAY.