Chapter 19

I walk the sun up and back down, and I walk the stars out and the moon high, and then the sky gray and starless once more, and then another dawn.

I feel Aeon behind me. I feel him trying to find something to say and failing.

I can't bring myself to stop. I can't bring myself to break the silence.

The last time I gave in to my feelings for another male, I caused Caspian untold pain. The pleasure and joy of a new mate were burdened by the sorrow of the pain I caused Caspian, who loved me first and forgave me and accepted Caleb.

How can I go through that again? My mates must think I'm dead. The thought cuts me like a knife.

Once more, even knowing it's futile, I struggle with the cuffs, pulling at them, straining, screaming. I spy a sharp rock on the ground and pick it up and smash at the cuffs with it, but I miss and hit my wrists and pain slashes through me and blood wells and drips into the grass at my feet. There's not so much as a mark on the metal.

I collapse to my knees, sobbing. Aeon takes my injured wrist in his hand, closing his large, slender, strong hand around my injury. Blue light glows, flares, and subsides.

When he removes his hand, my injury is gone.

"What the fuck!" I yell, ripping my arm away and lurching to my feet. "You can heal me, but you can't fucking FIX MY GODDAMN MAGIC?"

"I can't fix your magic because there's nothing wrong with it!" he shouts back. "I'm not holding out on you! My magic DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY !"

"Well, you're gonna have to explain because I don't believe you. You can do all sorts of 'minor' glamours that are not at all minor. But this? Somehow this is beyond you." I shake my wrists at him again, a gesture even I'm getting sick of.

He sighs. "Damn it." He pinches the bridge of his nose. "Fine. I am not magically bound to silence, only honor-bond. But for you, I'll accept the tarnish on my honor."

"I…I don't understand what that means."

"I know." He sits cross-legged in the grass and cups his hands, palms down, a few inches above the earth.

Yellow light blazes, and then morphs green, and then fades into blue, and then brightens. A few moments later, he moves his hands, and the weird, soft, hypnotic, soothing blue fire dances and casts long, shifting shadows across the wild rolling hills behind us.

I recognize the beginning of his telelocation glamour and lay down as we did the first time, with the fire between our bodies, midway between hip and shoulder, arm extended. When the fire is burning strong and the magic is washing over us, he lays down as well and takes my hand, after a hesitation.

I'm the one to tangle our hands. "I'm sorry," I whisper. "I know you're helping. I'm not your responsibility, and I'm not your problem. You have no obligation to do a damn thing for me, and I'm being ungrateful. I apologize, Aeon."

"There's nothing to forgive and no reason to apologize, Maeve. I cannot fathom being suddenly cut off from my magic. It is…it is an integral part of who I am as a person, and I cannot imagine being without it. I would go mad. I would not know who I am without it."

"Exactly," I whisper. "I don't know who I am without it, and that scares the hell out of me. Who am I?"

"I do not mock or belittle, Maeve, please believe me. But you're nineteen. Almost twenty, as you said. And at that age, you should be still figuring out who you are. You carry a burden too heavy for anyone, mortal or immortal, at an age when you can barely be expected to know yourself."

"It's too much. And now I'm lost, and without my magic, and my mates probably think I'm dead, and my cause is probably suffering and maybe even falling apart without me, and everything I've done will have been for nothing, and yet here I am worrying about feeling some tingles for you. Being attracted to you is the last thing I should be worried about. But…" I groan a sigh. "It's all so complicated, and if I could just get my magic back, that would be one less thing to worry about, and then maybe I could figure everything else out."

"When I tell you my magic doesn't work that way, it really is true. It doesn't. It never has. The minor glamours and magics I've done are just that, minor. Minor healing, minor conjurations. Telelocation isn't minor, but it does fall under the major category in terms of how my magic does work. But the truth is, there's another reason I can't get Zirae's cuffs off you."

I open my eyes and turn my head to look at him. It's a mistake—above, the stars are spinning as if the Earth is a top that has been set to twirling on a tabletop. The blue glow of magic from the fire is so brilliant and vivid it strains my eyes, so intense it washes through my brain and into my soul. Yet, overlaid beneath and behind the blue glow is the vacant black void of The Dreaming, the sense of nothingness, of chasmic space, endless dark, and hungry shadows. Yet, too, I see the rolling green hills bathed silver by starlight and the waxing moon—now a half-moon. Time is distorting, I think. Just last night—was it last night?—the moon was a waxing crescent.

"Close your eyes," Aeon admonishes. "You'll make yourself sick."

I shake my head, trying to sort out the information my eyes are giving me. "It's confusing, but…" I shrug. "It's not so bad."

"Very well."

"What's the reason, Aeon?"

"The reason is that I'm using most of my magic on something else, and the glamour Zirae used to create those cuffs is not minor magic. It will require a lot of power and a lot of skill. And while I have the raw power, I simply do not have the bandwidth available. And truthfully, such a thing is beyond my skill. It's just…" a shrug. "It's just not how my magic works."

"Your library?" I ask. "Is that what's taking up so much of your bandwidth?"

He shakes his head. "No, that's…. that's perhaps thirty percent of my magic. There's a good, oh, fifty-five, perhaps sixty percent used for… something else."

"So everything I've seen you do has been using less than ten percent of your ability?"

"At a rough estimate, yes."

"What's the rest being used for?"

A long silence. I look at him—he's thinking. Weighing. Choosing words, choosing which information to share. Or perhaps just finding the courage to simply say it.

Shadows move, dancing on his face, casting his features into sharp shadow. Overhead, the stars spin, blurring into silvery streaks of light, as if I'm trapped in a long-exposure photograph.

"Two hundred and thirty-eight years ago," he murmurs, almost to himself, "a treaty was signed, establishing a lasting peace between the rulers of the mortal factions and the elders of the immortals. It ended a long, bloody war that cost the lives of tens of thousands of immortals when we could already scarcely tolerate the loss of one immortal."

"Aeon…"

He squeezes my hand and I fall silent. Close my eyes once more and let his words wash over me.

"The war was sweeping. It was, truly, the first world war. Mortals remember it differently, of course." A pause. "And that's where I come in."

"You were part of the Mortals' War?"

"Everyone was," he murmurs. "Mortals remember the French Revolution, the American Revolution…the other conflicts and wars going on elsewhere in the world at the time, but they don't remember that all over the globe, mortals were rising up against immortals. Slaughtering us. Hating us. Drawing us into war. Using any excuse—like that pathetic little faction of extremist godhoodists who started things in the Colonies."

I snort. 'the Colonies', Aeon? Your age is showing. No one has called the US 'the Colonies' since the seventeen hundreds, I think." I frown. "Also, godhoodists? Never heard that one."

"The immortals who claimed to believe we immortals were meant to rule over the mortals because of our divine nature, our godhood. It was a handful of egotists, narcissists, and hedonists who used that as an excuse to take what they wanted. The immortal elders and the mortal leaders all knew the godhoodists weren't a major movement, but the mortal politicians used it as an excuse for warmongering."

"Sounds like what mortal politicians are still doing."

"Yes, well, it's one of the things the mortals are obnoxiously consistent about." He sounds remarkably sour on the topic.

"Where do you come in?" I ask.

A sigh. "I'm working up to that. It's difficult to talk about for reasons you'll come to understand." A long, long pause; I can almost hear the earth spinning, almost feel the warm tingling rush of magic on my skin. "I was there when the treaty was signed. I was masquerading as a fae elder at the time. I'd been all over the world, telelocating to the utmost of my abilities—and what I saw was suffering. Immortals being hunted by mobs and faced with the choice to either use their abilities and slaughter them, reinforcing the mortals' fears, or let themselves be killed. I watched wars break out, watched it spread over the whole world, bit by bit, over months and then years. For six years, I wandered the earth, watching us slaughter each other. Watching mortals grow more and more fearful of us as they drove us to worse and worse violence. And we were not innocent. We committed atrocities, same as they did. But the mortals could afford to lose their children to war. They could replace their numbers in a generation or two—and then some. We could not. Even then, before the Treaty, our numbers had been declining for centuries. The war had to end. It had to."

"I've heard some of this, but I didn't realize it was global."

"Few do, even among immortals. See, what isn't widely known, even among immortals, is that the glamour that changed the mortal world's knowledge of immortal existence also affected immortals to a degree. The glamour was designed and implemented in such a way that certain amounts of memory loss were inevitable for everyone involved—except the person who cast the glamour."

My stomach sinks. "I was told it was a group of six fae. They died casting it or something like that. That's what Alistair told me."

"Alistair Taylor?" He asks.

"Yes. He's my mate and the leader of the coven into which I mated."

"I knew him. I worked with him during several campaigns in the Colonies. An excellent soldier." A musing hum. "He'd not know me now, though. I was masked to look like a fae."

"You mask yourself even among other immortals?" I ask.

"Yes. Just as immortals mask themselves among mortals to avoid questions and conflict, so too do I among immortals for the same reason."

"So, the glamour that erased knowledge of immortals was cast by one person? God, the amount of power that must have required. Who could be capable of such a thing?"

I know the answer.

I open my eyes, turn my head, and look at him. His eyes glow azure, casting almost as much light as the fire. He regards me steadily and evenly, his emotions carefully hidden.

"Aeon—what? No." I hold his eyes. " No ."

He smiles weakly. "Yes. It's my glamour."

I shake my head. "Bullshit."

He laughs, but the laughter doesn't reach his eyes. "Truth."

"Why? Why would you do that?"

A ragged sigh. "I didn't see much alternative at the time. The war was showing no sign of stopping. Immortals were dying. One immortal could take on a dozen, or two dozen, or even three dozen at a time, and in previous wars, swords and spears and bows and even trebuchets and the occasional firearm wouldn't change the outcome, even outnumbered. It was armies of men armed with muskets and cannons that changed the calculus of warfare. Coordinating shields with offense was proving difficult, and even the best shields will fail sooner rather than later under sustained fire. And mortals are far from stupid—they learned very quickly that if you concentrate fire on a specific location, the shield will fail that much faster." He sighs, long and bitter. "And there was also resistance among the elders to allow certain tactics and strategies that would have allowed us to…well…kill far more of the mortals at once than we were currently using. Sort of a magic version of nuclear warfare."

"Angelfire," I murmur.

"That's one. It's very inaccurate and doesn't just kill people, it kills everything , including the ground, the earth itself—nothing will grow or live where Angelfire has burned." Sadness and sorrow weigh down his voice. "There were others that were discussed. Violent, destructive magics. Things that, once unleashed, cannot be undone. And the elders, whether right or wrong, chose not to go down that path. It would have won us the war, but at what cost? It would have decimated mortals. Erased entire cities. Wiped tribes and families and whole villages off the map. It would have made us the villains in a very real sense, and it would have made us gods, as the godhoodists wished—by merit of having killed off the vast majority of mortals, leaving the rest essentially slaves.

"It was that, or sign the treaty."

"Like a…what's the phrase…Pyrrhic victory?" I ask.

A shrug. "Not exactly. A Pyrrhic victory is where one side technically wins the battle but in doing so loses so many of its soldiers that it barely counts as a win. What the immortal elders faced was a far worse dilemma: win but become evil, or lose and face the consequences. It's the same choice immortals have faced throughout history when confronted with an angry mob of mortals who hate you and want to kill you simply for who and what you are: prove them right in being afraid of you, or suffer."

"I never understood it in that context before."

"Because very few have the context," Aeon says.

"So, how did you end up being chosen to cast the glamour?"

"The peace talks were falling apart. The mortals insisted on a reproductive restriction meant to stop mortal women from dying in childbirth. Understandably, the immortal elders balked at this. Neither side could agree, and it was looking more and more like the war would just continue. And if it did, we would just die out. We'd end up going extinct as a species. And not eventually, but in a matter of years, not decades or centuries or millennia." He halts, sighs. "I revealed myself, my true nature, to the elders. I implored them not to accept that condition—we had to be able to reproduce. And there was an obvious alternative: mate with each other…across tribal lines."

"I'm guessing that suggestion went over like a lead balloon."

"Exactly. Flat-out refusal. I explained the cycle, how immortals have faced this dilemma already—and the only conclusion that anyone could come to is that marriage across tribal lines is the only way." Pause, a groaning sigh. "They wouldn't even consider it. It would be the end of immortals, they feared. We'd just mingle and water down the bloodlines. Not so, I told them. Bloodlines change, powers change, traits and features and abilities change, but immortal-kind lives on."

"They're a bunch of stubborn old farts," I say. "Stuck in their ways, addicted to power, and afraid of irrelevancy."

"So, they're human."

I laugh. "A fair and true point, sir."

"It was a mortal politician who suggested the glamour. Jefferson? Franklin? No, no. Someone obscure, at least according to your mortal histories. I can't remember—the name is in there somewhere but it's not worth the effort to retrieve it. It was a passing comment, almost a joke. Something like, ‘Too bad you can't just make us all forget you ever existed.'"

"How would that help? Being invisible to the mortals…what does that do? It's just putting your hands over your eyes so you can't see the problem—the problem hasn't gone away just because you can't see it."

"It would help if they'd listened to me. What I suggested was that immortals go back to living among the mortals, hidden and masked. I hated even suggesting it, but it was better than our whole race dying out. Don't agree to reproductive restrictions, I said. I'll cast the glamour, and we'll be forgotten by mortals forever. It'll buy us time, at the very least. Mortals have short memories, except when they don't. In a couple hundred years, we can re-negotiate the treaty."

I frown, thinking. "Is that a possibility?"

"Well, sure. I think it would require a summit, like NATO or G20, where the few world leaders who do know the secret of our existence negotiate with the immortal leadership. Or, it would have been. But you disbanded the Tribunal, killed Zirae, the de facto leader, and then our existence went public anyway, causing a rift—the glamour is trying to erase their memories, but technology makes it impossible. It's part of what is driving the conflict, actually. They are confused and afraid of the dichotomy in their brains. They feel lied to, and that makes them angry, and on top of that, there's suddenly a whole new race of beings that live longer and have actual magic. It's a shock. And it's made worse by interactions of magic and technological dissemination of information that even magic can't keep up with."

"So…you cast the glamour anyway?"

He shakes his head. "No. They lied to me. They didn't want me on the council—I'm not a fae, or a shifter, or a vampire. I'm a relic of a bygone age—Zirae's words. They'll summon me when they make a decision. I told them I would not cast the glamour if they didn't make a provision for the future of our people. They're not my people, they told me. Very well, but my offer stands, as do my conditions."

"How could they have forced you? How could they have lied to you? Can't you tell?"

"I'm not infallible. And magic works on me, too. You see, my magic works best on large-scale effects. Global weather patterns. Conjurations that affect a large area. It's very, very difficult for me to focus on something so minuscule as healing or summoning fire. It's…" he trails off, thinking. "It's a matter of perspective, but my perspective, in this case, is not something I can easily change. I see from twenty thousand feet—I see the landmasses, the continents, the mountain ranges. I do not see the towns, the people, the cars. Does that make sense?"

"Sort of."

"So, yes, I could cast a lie detection glamour—but doing so is as hard for me as it would be for you to attempt the memory-phage glamour I cast. They lied to me and manipulated me. Zirae, the cunning old fox he is, knew somehow that we—my people—have the oath effect. Zirae manipulated me into promising to cast the glamour, and I, occasionally a fool, did not include the caveat of reproductive rights. You see, the elders were so afraid of the peace talks failing and the war continuing that they were willing to sacrifice our future for our present. Live now, die later. But they're not mortals—it wasn't a problem for a later generation. I think they assumed they'd be able to get out of it. To work around the issue—or solve the reproductive issue scientifically." Aeon sounds more human than ever—angry, embarrassed, frustrated. "By the time I realized how thoroughly Zirae had played me, I was locked in by my oath—I had to cast the glamour."

"God, Aeon."

"Do not pity me. It was hubris at play. I assumed because I was so much older and more powerful than the likes of Zirae, whom I'd known as a babe in swaddling clothes and then a snot-nosed brat tramping around the palace bullying everyone and then as an arrogant, hot-tempered young buck terrorizing everyone with his newfound powers. He outmaneuvered me. Got me to agree to cast the damned spell and lied to me about the contents of the treaty. They signed away reproductive rights. There wasn't a damn thing I could do." I hear pain in his voice—deep and bitter. "It is the worst failure of my life."

"Aeon…"

I open my eyes again; the stars are no longer spinning but seem to be…folding. Merging? The four quadrants of the heavens are moving inward toward each other, and where they meet, directly overhead at a point directly above the flickering blue fire, the stars seem to blur and distort into a single point of muted and filtered light.

His eyes glow blinding blue, and the void sings to my soul, and hills ripple in a long wind.

"You wanted to help," I whisper.

"Yes. And instead, I made things worse. Our people are dying out, still—or, perhaps not my people. I don't know anymore."

"Why not undo the glamour?"

"I almost have many times over the years. But…I couldn't bring myself to do so. The chaos that would ensue from the whole world, suddenly and apropos of nothing, remembering the existence of immortals?" A harsh bark of laughter. "No. That would not help. So, the glamour stays."

"But you could undo it."

"Of course." He goes silent. "It would be a relief."

"A relief?" I ask. "How so?"

"Well, it's just a memory-phage, Maeve. A very, very , very big one, with specific parameters. Forget immortals, past, present, and ongoing. Do not forget anything else. But anything to do with the existence of mortals is forgotten, and a convenient lie is slotted into place."

"How do you fabricate the lies?"

"Oh, that's the beautiful part of a memory-phage," he says. "You don't. The subject's unconscious mind does."

"So the relief would be…what?"

"A memory-phage isn't a set-it-and-forget-it glamour, like a ward or a conjuring. It's more like a shield—you have to focus on maintaining it."

I frown at him. "You're saying you've been constantly, intentionally, and consciously maintaining a memory-phage glamour over the whole mortal population of the globe for 238 years?"

"Yes."

"So just…let it go, Aeon. The world is ready. We're outed."

"It's not that simple."

"No?"

"No." He points up at the sky. "It would be sort of like that. A bifurcation. Memory would return—everything. All the knowledge that was erased would return, all the history. The books would all be wrong. There would be… confusion isn't even the word. Minds could splinter, Maeve. The chaos you're talking about? It would get so much worse because there's history that in some ways might be better left forgotten."

"History is never best left forgotten, Aeon," I snap. "Never. We can't let ourselves forget, or we won't learn. We can't forget 9/11, Vietnam, the Civil War, The Trail of Tears, the Japanese internment camps, Auschwitz. We can't forget any of that, so we don't repeat it. And we can't forget that we did kill who knows how many mortal women so we could have babies. For thousands of years, we did that because we were too scared and selfish to do the right fucking thing. God, not even the right thing—the only logical, possible thing for our self-preservation."

He's quiet for a long time. "Yes. You're right. But the fact remains that if I undo the memory-phage, chaos will ensue—and according to you, the world is already in a state of chaos."

"Exactly. It's already chaos. Governments are already toppling. The face of human civilization is already irrevocably altered and will only go through more upheaval before we find any kind of equilibrium. What better time than now?" I turn my head to look at him. The glow of his eyes is so fierce it's disconcerting. "Things are already bad, Aeon. Mortals are already angry and feel lied to—they don't care about the Mortals' War—to them, shit, to me, it's something that happened a quarter of a millennium ago. Having the true history suddenly and literally magically appear in everyone's heads all at once…yeah, that'll be a shock. But we have to rewrite the history books anyway."

"I don't know what will happen," Aeon says. "Not for sure. It's never been done before."

"Do all memory-phages have to be maintained like that?"

"No. Normally, you have to time it—so many seconds for so many minutes of memory erased, or something like that. But this is a vastly different thing than causing a couple of dozen mortals to forget that they saw a shifter turn into a wolf in the middle of Walmart. It's not even similar to making a few hundred mortals forget they saw a fight between immortals. It's the whole world. All mortals. All memory. Written, verbal, public, private, past, present, and future."

"What is it like?"

He hums. "Sort of…sort of like holding a glass of water in your hand. But the glass is full to the brim, you can't spill it, and you can't ever put it down. So you have to learn to sleep, walk, talk, eat, and do everything with it in your hand. You can't ever use that hand. Your focus is always split."

"Sounds miserable."

"It hasn't been fun. But I've long known that an end was coming, one way or another. I'm no seer. But I just…feel it. Perhaps the Fates, whichever of them was my lover, told me something. Perhaps I didn't forget it entirely. I don't know. But I knew I wouldn't have to hold it forever. And in the scope of eternity—gods and blood, in the scope of my life so far, two hundred and forty years is an eyeblink. Barely two percent. It's nothing."

"But it has drained you to almost nothing for two hundred and forty years."

"Perhaps. But I couldn't just unleash the truth simply because I was tired of maintaining the glamour. I was bound by my oath to cast it and honor-bound by my agreement with the council of elders, what you call the Tribunal, to keep silent about it. I gave my word to them. But, you disbanded them and ended their authority over immortals, which I have taken to mean my promise to remain silent is ended." A laugh. "A liberal interpretation of honor, to be sure."

"They lied to you and tricked you! You don't owe them anything."

"Honor is for you, not others. You do not keep your word to impress other people with your integrity—you keep your word so you can live with yourself." His eyes meet mine, and the glow is less intense, and the whirling spinning folding of the stars slows, and the echoing hollow void of The Dreaming subsides into mere shadow, and the rolling green hills seem to dissolve into the gray light of dawn. "I did not maintain the glamour because I promised to. I maintained it because it was the right thing to do."

"But it's not, anymore. It was —you did do the right thing. But now things have changed."

He nods. "Things have changed, yes." He searches me. "I will release the glamour. But not until we get those cuffs off you."