Grave Visions (Alex Craft, #4)(22)
As the one and only fae bar in Nekros, the Bloom had a reputation as a tourist trap. A handful of unglamoured fae were contractually required to frequent the main bar so they could be seen by the mortals. It was good PR and mortals catching sight of fae reinforced the belief Faerie magic required. That said, there were never more than three or four fae at the bar at any given time, the menu was overpriced and limited, and aside from the opportunity to stare at unglamoured fae, the bar itself was rather mundane.
The VIP room was different. Hidden through a door humans couldn’t perceive unless they knew to look for it, the VIP area was a pocket of Faerie. The fae who worked the mortal side of the bar were doing just that, working. They were required to be seen, so they put themselves on display. Most of the fae on the VIP side were there to relax. They let down their glamour because it felt good to be unconfined, and a single glance around the room revealed shapes both beautiful and monstrous of every shape, size, color, and element. The food was served in magnificent feasts unlike anything I’d tasted elsewhere. Granted, it was Faerie food and if you tried to smuggle any of it out, the food transformed into toadstools that quickly rotted away. And the bar itself? Well, despite the fact I’d been in the bar at least once a week for the last few months, entering still took my breath away.
The furniture was deceptively simple; all wood but without nail or seam as if each piece had been carved from a single trunk. The room was much larger than what should have been possible for the building to contain. Not that the confines of the rest of the building mattered. The roof was missing, the sky of Faerie stretching above the bar. The sun was up now, high in the sky above, but the branches of the giant tree growing in the very center of the room shaded the bar, making it comfortable.
The tree itself was possibly one of the most magical things in the room, as well as one of the more dangerous. The amaranthine tree, which gave the Eternal Bloom its name, held flowers of every sort and shape on its many branches, but as I’d learned on my first trip to the Bloom, studying the flowers could lead the unwary to be hopelessly entranced. And that was hardly the only danger in the bar. It was a magnificent place, but a potentially deadly one.
I sighed as we passed through the threshold. The relief I felt wasn’t quite as profound as when I’d stepped into the pocket of Faerie at my father’s mansion, likely because that pocket had been created by my magic pulling chunks of reality into Faerie, whereas the Bloom was a space where Faerie and reality both bled over and mingled, but it was still an intense change. Falin spared me a momentary frown, and then led me past the fae scattered among the tables. They fell quiet as he approached. Most of the fae in the bar were independents and Falin was not only an agent of the winter court, but the queen’s knight. Her assassin. Her bloody hands. He wasn’t popular, not even among his fellow court fae.
By the time we reached the trunk of the amaranthine tree, the bar was silent aside from a distant thread of music. I ignored the sound—it might have been coming from the endless dance. The dancers jumped and twirled and writhed in the corner of the bar, but I knew better than to get too close. Once you joined the dance, you had to dance until the music ended. The previous dance had lasted over half a millennium—until I’d cut the fiddler’s strings on my first visit here—and I had no desire to get caught up in the “merriment.” Besides, even if I was better on this side of the door, I was still exhausted.
Falin paused. His gaze skittered over my face but I couldn’t read his expression. He could have been memorizing my face because he thought this was the last time he’d see me, or simply judging if I’d make a dash for it rather than follow him into Faerie. Either way, it wasn’t reassuring.
He didn’t ask again if I was ready. Which was best, as I wasn’t but didn’t want to admit as much. I’d been to the outlying pockets of Faerie like the Bloom and the one in my father’s house numerous times, but Faerie proper? I’d been there only a few times and two out of three hadn’t gone particularly well for me. Seeing the queen also wasn’t at the top of my list of fun—or safe—things to do.
Falin held out a hand. I stared at his gloved palm for a moment. I could turn and try to run, but that would be rather pointless. I could shrug off his gesture and walk into Faerie all on my own, but doors tended to be strange in Faerie. While I might walk through only a moment after him, it was possible for us to arrive on the other side of the door hours apart. Contact guaranteed we’d arrive together. So, after a moment of hesitation, I placed my own gloved hand in his.
Then we walked around the tree, and though I couldn’t see the door, between one step and the next the world slid out of focus. The bar vanished, as did the dappled sunlight, the thin strands of music, and the tree itself. In its place was a pillar of intricately carved ice. The floor and walls were also ice, though there was no chill to the air nor was the surface slick. Above us stretched an inky black sky, broken with pinpoints of glistening white specks though I wasn’t sure if they were distant stars or falling snow that vanished long before it could reach our heads.
Entering the Bloom had made me feel slightly better, but entering Faerie proper felt like I shed a hundred pounds of exhaustion that had been attempting to drown me, and my vision cleared, the magic that damaged my eyes ineffectual here. I almost smiled as I looked around. Almost. Even the sudden physical relief wasn’t enough to stem my general anxiety of being in the winter court.