She closed her eyes and sighed. She’d failed to secure her race’s future. Had they been doomed from the moment the song was lost? Or had it begun before that, on that fateful day the ancient queen refused to turn the concubine Fae for the king? Had the First Queen not rejected his request, she would never have been killed, the two deadly Sinsar Dubhs would not have come into existence, and Aoibheal wouldn’t now be trapped inside the boudoir of a dead woman, because the mad king was determined to believe she was his long lost love.

Their planet would not be dying, their race poised on the verge of extinction.

Before the First Queen had died, she’d done two things: the first from spite, the second from duty. She’d wasted precious time using the song to sing into existence the walls of the Unseelie prison, as punishment for the king’s defiance.

Then she’d transferred the power of the Fae court, unearthing it from deep within their own fractured world, hurling it across the light-years and galaxies, to be buried within another one. The seat of their power had been moved again to yet more worlds by other queens, but long before Aoibheal took the crown it had been entombed in the planet Earth.

Each and every Fae in existence drew their magic from the roiling cyclone of power at the planet’s core.

Without the song, Aoibheal was forced eons ago to irrevocably bind their power to this planet in order to sustain their race. If the Earth died so, too, would all Fae die, the instant their individual tethers no longer connected to its source.

If only she had the song, she could break the bonds and release the power of her court, to be moved again!

They could leave this world, not care what fate befell it!

She opened her eyes, gaze drawn unwillingly back to the translucent, slender form of the concubine where she rolled with her dark lover on a bed of white ermine and lushly scented flower petals.

The woman was identical to Aoibheal in every way.

But she was not Fae. The concubine was mortal.

Yet…still…Aoibheal felt an inexplicable connection to her. The passion of the residue-lovers had somehow touched her, stirring something in her essence, not quite a memory, but the shadowy images of what seemed a long-forgotten dream. Trapped in this chamber, watching them argue as heatedly as they loved, she’d started to fear she was losing her mind. Their idiotic argument had begun to consume her thoughts. She’d become…interested in their problems. Had wanted to step in and tell them to stop being foolish. Urge the king to let his woman go. Let her live and die as she wanted and love her while he could.

Such thoughts were alien to her!

The Fae queen would never counsel another to cede immortality unless there was no other way to survive.

Yet, she could see…no, she could feel, the concubine’s point of view. The woman didn’t wish to be Fae. Her faith was different than the king’s. She believed life continued after what most perceived as death. Her race had souls, mysterious amorphous things that did not die when the body did, and to become Fae meant her cherished soul would ultimately wither and die. To the concubine, mortal death was nothing more than one door closing and another opening. She had no fear of it. Who was the king to force his woman to choose his faith over hers? Still, he mocked it. Told her death was the end, that she should capitulate her belief in something, for his in nothing. Yet the concubine’s impassioned entreaties, like hers, fell on ears made deaf by ego and arrogance.

Aoibheal pivoted away from the bed. If, as the king claimed, she hadn’t been born Fae but mortal, she would know it. She was not the woman who’d once been his concubine. She was bored, trapped alone, getting distracted by a passion play.

Still…the king claimed she’d been used as a pawn, forced to drink, unsuspecting.

Such had been known to happen, when feuds within her court escalated, until she’d assumed power and locked the cauldron away, along with the Elixir of Life, where only she could access them. She’d carefully conducted each Fae’s forgetting. Protected them from one another.

She’d been trapped in the boudoir long enough to have reflected upon every aspect of the king’s story, and was forced to concede that although his claims were outrageous and absurd, they were nonetheless possible. If someone had forced a cup from the Cauldron of Forgetting upon her much farther back in the past than she even knew she’d existed, then everything he claimed might be true. She’d been accused by her own High Council of granting mortals undeserved lenience, and on rare occasion of even protecting them.

She’d spent her entire reign studying and analyzing possibilities, the better to shape her race’s world, holding none too extreme to entertain.

How then could she deem this one beyond the realm of plausible?

Aoibheal spun to face the towering black Silver that divided the two chambers, light and dark, cozy and cavernous, lovely and frightening. The mysterious portal chilled her. She’d cut her teeth on tales of what lay beyond in the Unseelie King’s eerie realm of eternal midnight and ice. She’d recently been in that realm, until rescued by the O’Connor she’d delicately nudged to be there at her hour of need, but had glimpsed none of it, trapped in her coffin of ice.

She’d not regained consciousness until after the king had taken her from the abbey catacomb, had not foreseen that he would abduct her. She had no idea how she’d been freed from the Unseelie prison, and now her most powerful weapon, the O’Connor sidhe-seer, was possessed by the worst of the Unseelie King—most certainly her enemy.

She knew the legend of the king’s mirror. It was said that only two could pass through the portal and survive. She eyed the enormous, gilt-framed Silver, striving for objectivity, weighing the limited choices she had. It was possible there was a way to escape her prison from the king’s side of the boudoir. The arrogant king was too enamored of his own existence to believe the Queen of the Seelie would risk her own life trying to pass through it.

She smiled bitterly. He didn’t know her.

She would sacrifice everything, confront any unpleasant truth, yield even her immortal life to preserve the future of her race. All that mattered to her was that her people survived. Even if that meant she did not. She was their queen.

If she attempted to cross the threshold and died, what would become of them all? Guilty of the death of yet another queen, might the king finally do something to save their race?

If she tried and survived, it would mean that her entire existence was a lie, that she was far older than she believed she was, and had been born the unthinkable—mortal, human.