Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1)(185)

“So he killed them,” Emma said. “For a spell.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “Did it at least work?”

“It didn’t,” said Kieran. “It failed, and so he left their bodies in the ocean, knowing that the murders would be taken to be Sebastian’s work.”

“Iarlath told you all this?” There was suspicion on Mark’s face.

“I followed Iarlath to the Unseelie Court and listened to what he said there.” Kieran tried to meet Mark’s gaze. Mark looked away. “The rest is what I demanded he tell me at knifepoint. Malcolm was to misdirect and confuse you so that you would not realize what he was doing—he used Johnny Rook for some of that. He wanted you to engage yourself in an investigation that would prove fruitless. Mark’s presence here would deter you from asking the Clave or the Silent Brothers to help you, thus protecting Malcolm’s work with the Followers, his attempts to raise his old love from the dead. When Malcolm had done what he needed to do, he would take a Blackthorn, for the death of a Blackthorn would be the last key to the enchantment.”

“But Iarlath hasn’t got the power to authorize a faerie convoy to do something on this scale,” said Mark. “He’s just a courtier, not someone who can order Gwyn around. Who gave the permission for this to happen?”

Kieran shook his dark head. “I don’t know. Iarlath did not say. It could have been the King, my father, or it could have been Gwyn—”

“Gwyn would not do that,” said Mark. “Gwyn has honor, and he is not cruel.”

“What about Malcolm?” Livvy demanded. “I thought he had honor. I thought he was our friend! He loves Tavvy—he’s played with him for hours, brought him toys. He couldn’t kill him. He couldn’t.”

“He’s responsible for the killing of a dozen people, Livvy,” said Julian. “Maybe more.”

“People are more than one thing,” said Mark, and his eyes brushed over Kieran as he spoke. “Warlocks too.”

Emma stood with her hands still on the seraph blades. Julian could feel what she felt, as he always had, as if his own heart mirrored hers—the hot curl of anger rising over a choking sense of despair and loss. More than anything he wanted to reach out to her, but he didn’t trust himself to do it in front of everyone else.

They’d be able to see right through him the moment he touched her, see his real feelings. And there was no way he could risk that now, not when his heart was being eaten alive with fear over his little brother, fear he couldn’t show in case it demoralized the rest of his siblings.

“Everyone is more than one thing,” said Kieran. “We are more than single actions we undertake, whether they be good or evil.” His eyes gleamed, silver and black, as he looked at Mark. Even in this room full of Shadowhunter things, the wildness of the Hunt and Faerie clung to Kieran like the scent of rain or leaves. It was the wildness that Julian sometimes sensed in Mark, that had faded since he’d come back to them, but showed itself still in brief flares like gunfire seen from a distance. For a moment they seemed to him two feral things, incongruous in their surroundings.

“The poem that was written on the bodies,” Cristina said. “The one that mentioned the black book. The story said it was given to Malcolm in the Unseelie Court.”

“So goes the faerie story as well,” said Kieran. “At first Malcolm was told that his love had become an Iron Sister. Later he found out that she had been murdered by her family. Walled up alive in a tomb. The knowledge drove him to seek out the King of the Unseelie Court and ask him if there was a way to raise the dead. The King gave him that rhyme. It was instructions—it is only that it took him almost a century to learn how to follow them, and to find the black book.”

“That’s why the library was destroyed in the attack,” said Emma. “So no one would notice the book was missing, if they ever looked for it. So many books were lost.”

“But why did Iarlath tell Malcolm that the Followers could kill faeries as well as humans?” said Emma. “If he was really in league with Malcolm—”

“That was something Iarlath wanted. He has many enemies in the Seelie Court. It was an expedient way for him to rid himself of some of them—Malcolm had his Followers slay them, and the murders could not be traced back to Iarlath. For a faerie to kill another of the gentry, that is a dark crime indeed.”

“Where is Annabel’s body?” asked Livvy. “Wouldn’t she be buried in Cornwall? Wouldn’t she have been walled up there—in a ‘tomb by the sounding sea’?”

“Convergences are places out of space and time,” said Kieran. “The convergence itself is neither here nor in Cornwall nor in any real space. It is a between place, like Faerie itself.”

“It can probably be entered through Cornwall as well—that would be why those plants grow outside the entrance,” said Mark.

“And what is the connection to the poem ‘Annabel Lee’?” asked Ty. “The name Annabel, the similarities of the stories—it seems more than coincidence.”

The dark-haired faerie prince only shook his head. “I only know what Iarlath told me, and what is part of faerie lore. I did not even know the name Annabel or the mundane poem.”

Mark whirled on Kieran. “Where is Iarlath now?”