"Zephan has requested the privilege of giving you a tour of the grounds," Jack said, popping into my bedroom in the morning. I sat up dizzily, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes.

"What time is it?" I asked, my voice coming out in a husky croak.

"Time to get up," Jack said, hauling me out of bed. He carried me to my bathroom and put me down on the bath mat. "I'll find you something to wear," he said, closing the door behind him.

"I can do it myself," I called from the bathroom.

"I'll do a better job," Jack called back. "I did this for the king remember." My very own royal dresser. Lucky me. "Besides, I couldn't possibly pick something worse than you would."

"What's that supposed to mean," I said, flinging the bathroom door open. Jack turned to me, with one hand on his hip.

"Did you look in the mirror the other day?" he asked. I frowned. "Trust me, you shouldn't have worn a grey sweater. You looked like you were going to pass out all day."

"I did pass out," I said, "several times. And I vomited once."

"I don't see what that has to do with anything," he pushed me back into the bathroom.

"It has everything to do with it."

"Just have a shower, okay. If you don't like the outfit, you can wear something else."

If I could have thought of an argument against that, I would have said it. As it was, I was forced into the bathroom in silence.

Jack left the pile of clothes on my bed and went to get coffee. He said he'd be back in twenty minutes and he was taking me to Faerie Land regardless of whether or not I was dressed. I smoothed leave in conditioner through my hair and twisted it into a simple braid, letting the end of the plait hang over one shoulder when I was done. It might be more traditional to have a braid hang down your back, but it's a lot harder to do that way. If you drag the hair over your shoulder, you can plait it down the side and actually see what you're doing.

"Laurel?" Someone called from the other side of my door. My twenty minutes were nowhere near up, but it wasn't Jack's voice anyway. It was my mother. I shrugged into my dressing gown, tying the cord around my waist as I went to the door.

"What?" I asked, opening it.

"Can I come in?" she asked.

"Why?"

"I want to talk to you," she said, impatiently, "and if we talk out here your new roommate will think you're crazy." I frowned at her. I didn't really have time to argue, so I kicked the salt out of my doorway and let the circle down. "Thank you," she said, tension seeming to ease out of her body. I thought that was odd, since she didn't technically have a body. I guess it's one of those things that you're left with out of force of habit, like when an ex-smoker raises their hand to their lips, even though they haven't had a cigarette there for years.

"I have to get ready still," I told her.

"Okay," she said, sitting on my bed. Another habit that. It was habit that stopped her falling through the bed, habit that made her wait for me to open a door, habit that made her smile, or frown, or change her posture so it looked like her muscles were knotting up. She stayed on the bed, because she expected to, expected it to feel solid beneath her and so that's how she reacted to it.

That's one of the creepy things about ghosts. The way they stay so human, for so long. It's only the really old ones who seem to forget who and what they are, who lose touch with reality and become unanchored. The floating spirits that don't know how to do or say anything because it's been so long that they've forgotten how. They fade to grey, impressionistic streaks, barely sketches of their former selves.

Another thing that film and television have screwed up. Ghosts don't hang around waiting to finish something, and just because I can see them, hear them, it doesn't mean that I have to go around trying to fix their problems. I don't know why some people stay as ghosts and some spirits vanish. Just because I have the power of death, doesn't mean I have the knowledge.

I picked up the skirt Jack had put on my bed. It was actually one of my favourite skirts but I didn't wear it often because I was paranoid about windy weather. I'd grown up not being able to wear skirts on the island - unless you count a sarong over a pair of swimmers, and frankly, I don't think that's the same thing at all.

He'd paired the skirt with a shirt and vest. The skirt was layered, a gauzy black layer over a complicated mauve pattern. The shirt Jack had put down was a dusky rose that brought out the pink highlights in the mauve pattern on the bottom of the skirt. The vest was plain black, and form fitting. The weird thing was, I thought, sliding the shirt up over my arms and revelling the feeling of silk brushing over my skin, was that I hadn't bought the shirt. The fact that it not only matched something in my cupboard but was a perfect fit made me wonder where Jack had gotten it.

"So, what do you want?" I asked Karlotta, doing the buttons up on the shirt.

"I was listening to you talk with that man," she said, frowning. "The giant one."

"Yeah?"

"He said some strange things..." she said, her voice dropping to a whisper, "things that made me wonder." She looked up at me, expectantly.

"If you were listening in the other night," I said, "then you don't know much less than I do."

"He made it sound like you aren't human," she said quickly, her words tumbling on top of each other in their haste to get out.

"But you've always thought that about me, haven't you?" I said, not even trying to keep the bitterness out of my voice.

"I," she shook her head. She folded her hands in her lap and stared down at them. "What was I supposed to think?"

I shook my head in disbelief. So much for trying to make things up to me. "You can't even look at me." She glanced up but her eyes only made it as far as my ribcage before falling back to look at her hands. I noticed that she had dark, age spots on the back of her hands. That meant she had them when she was alive. The last time I saw my mother, before she died, her hands were perfect.

I thought about explaining what the professor had told me. Telling her that she was the reason I was what I was. I could just imagine the look of horror on her face, how much that would hurt her. And I wanted to hurt her, I genuinely did. It wasn't just about revenge, getting her back for rejecting me as a child. It was deeper than that. I'd spent my entire life hurting because of her rejection and it turned out that the part of me she was rejecting was actually a piece of her. I guess I wanted her to have to look that knowledge in the face. I wanted her to deal with the truth. Yeah, part of that was about revenge, pain for pain, but mostly, I think, it was about justice.

I actually opened my mouth to tell her before I realized that it wasn't how I wanted things to be with my mother. I'd spent my entire life wondering how things would have been, how they could have been under different circumstances. Now, I had the knowledge, the power, to change those circumstances, and it wasn't what I wanted. I didn't want my mother's love because she thought it was her fault. I didn't even want her guilt. I remembered being so angry at her that I didn't even want her love, but I knew then that that was a lie. Who, in any world, truly does not want to be loved? I've never met anyone who I could say that about.

"You don't have to do this," I said, at last. "I know that I'm not the daughter you wanted." I picked the vest up and slid it up over my shoulders. And then I said something that I never would have imagined myself saying. Even knowing what I did about the metaphysical heritage of my abilities, I told her, "It's not your fault." Then I told her what I've always wanted to tell her, what I used to lie awake thinking, hoping that she'd somehow feel the thought floating through the ether, that she'd spontaneously understand and take me home. I used to think that if she knew, if she could just understand, then she'd be able to love me. It was only when I'd given up hope, when even my mother's ghost couldn't meet my eyes, that I found the courage to say it out loud.

"But it's not my fault either," I said, doing the buttons up on my vest. "No one gets to choose what their born with, or what they're born without. Some kids are born deaf, some have blue eyes, I raise the dead." I shrugged.

"So, you're saying it's like a birth defect? Like being blind?"

"No," I shook my head, "it's more like having x-ray vision," I paused, surprised to hear the tenderness in my own voice, "in a world where everyone else is blind."

Jack only gave me enough time to stuff a piece of toast into my mouth before he whisked me off to Faerie Land. I wasn't even given the opportunity to wash the crumbs away with a cup of tea. Apparently we were on a tight schedule.

Zephan didn't seem like the type who could handle being made to wait. As far as I was concerned, that was more reason than any to take my time. Jack disagreed. Maybe he just wasn't a breakfast eater.

I don't know if it was out of politeness, or shame at having left the party early, but Zephan didn't mention the cemetery to me. Instead, he simply gave me a tour of the Great Court. I suppose, under different circumstances, I might have been glad of the opportunity. It isn't every day that a member of the royal family gives you a tour of anything. I should have been impressed by being shown where the bathroom was, if a royal hand was pointing the way. At least, that's the impression I was getting.

Zephan was nice enough, polite, charming. He made me laugh a few times, but I don't remember what at. What I do remember is being trailed by a group of the Fae, at a distance. They whispered behind us, like a cloud of moths, and Zephan was the light they followed.

"Do they always follow you?" I couldn't help asking.

"Who?" Zephan asked, looking genuinely confused. I pointed at the group behind us. "Do they bother you?" he asked.

I shrugged. "I'm not used to the attention."

"Leave us," Zephan called, in a commanding tone. He smiled down at me when the group turned away. Some of them looked disappointed enough that I almost felt guilty. Almost.

Zephan led me through to a great art gallery type hallway. The paintings and statues were beautiful but I couldn't focus on them. I stopped to stare at a statue, not because I actually wanted to look at it, but because I wanted an excuse to ignore what Zephan was saying.

I was starting to get really worried about raising the king. If he was anything like his daughter, and I had no reason to suppose otherwise, then I probably wouldn't even get the chance to ask him to choose between his grandchildren. And if I did manage to ask him to choose a new king, it was looking ever more likely that he would choose himself. Either way, I was dead.

I wondered if I could make a double circle. One to protect the world from my powers, and one to protect me. I grimaced at the idea. If I could separate myself from my powers, I wouldn't be in this situation, in the first place. I'd be living a normal life. No ghosts, no zombies, no Fae.

"Do you like this?" Zephan asked, standing next to the statue. I forced myself to look at it properly, instead of focusing exclusively on my problems. I felt my cheeks grow warm as I stared at it.

"It's very..." I glanced over the nude carving of the man beside me, "life-like."

"Do you think so?" Zephan frowned at the statue of himself. I wondered if he'd actually posed for the artist, or if they'd used a stand-in model for the body. I tried to keep my eyes from wondering between the statue's legs. I failed.

A large leaf was balanced over the area. The artist had carved the delicate veins in the leaf and it looked as though a strong breeze would blow it away. A sharply drawn vein stuck out on the statues thigh. There was a small bead about a quarter of the way down the vein that looked like it was about to jump through the length of the vein, as though the artist had caught it mid pulse.

"It's very detailed," I said, dragging my eyes away.

"The wonders of modern magic," Zephan said, turning further down the hall. I glanced around, wondering if there was a twin statue of Kieran. Most of the portraits and statues were of Zephan, but there wasn't a single bust devoted to Kieran's form. Strange.

Zephan was all open and light, were Kieran was closed and dark. I would have found it much more challenging to sketch the complicated emotions behind Kieran's dark eyes, and I would have taken joy in the challenge. Zephan on the other hand, while beautiful, posed no such challenge. But maybe the Fae didn't like their art to be challenging. The amount of detail in their art made me think there was another explanation. Lazy artists do not capture the throbbing of a vein, no matter where it is on the body.

I didn't ask Zephan why there weren't any pictures of Kieran. Mostly, I think I was afraid that there were pictures, afraid that Zephan would take me to them. Looking at a nude statue of Zephan was awkward enough. I didn't want to think about how I'd react to seeing Kieran naked.

"This," Zephan said, gesturing around yet another great hallway, "is the Hall of the Dead."

"The hall of the dead?" I asked, looking around. There were portraits all down the sides of the hall, with small pedestals beneath the portraits. Each pedestal held a delicately painted porcelain vases.

"This is where we keep the ashes of our kings," he said.

"You don't bury them?" I asked. I looked back at the nearest pedestal. It didn't hold a vase, I realized, it was an urn.

Zephan shook his head.

"The royal family has always been cremated," he said.

"Except for Eolande," I pointed out.

"Except for her," Zephan conceded the point. "But that's because she was disowned."

"Really?" I asked. "I didn't know that." The hall felt very still and silent around us. Experimentally, I stretched a line of power to the nearest urn, like running your hand through water. I felt nothing. The ashes stayed still and lifeless beneath the touch of my power.

"That's why I have more right to the throne," Zephan said. "As far as I can tell, Kieran's line of inheritance was cut off. He's just being childish, trying to claim the throne like this."

"Oh," I said, quietly. Zephan kept talking about his right to the throne but, frankly, I'd stopped listening. The king was nothing but cold ash, now. There was no body for me to animate, no memory for me to work with. I couldn't raise the king. I looked up at Zephan, about to tell him that I wouldn't be able to help Kieran, when a chill breeze blew down the length of the hall. Goosebumps prickled on my arms and the I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

I shivered.

"Are you cold?" Zephan asked. I nodded. "It is getting a bit late," he said. "We're having a ball tonight. I want you to come with me."

"Okay," I said. I suppose, when you're royalty, you don't always remember to make things like that into questions.

"I've organized a room for you," he said, turning back the way we'd come, "I'll pick you up in," he paused, staring into the distance where a human would have checked their watch, "three hours."

My own special guest room in the middle of the Great Court. I should have felt like a fairy princess, instead I felt like I was being used. Kept. Like a pet for the sake of entertainment.

Once Zephan had left, I tried the door. It was locked. Great. All the hope that I had that Zephan was actually a nice guy died when the handle refused to turn. I sat down on the bed, and sighed. My only remaining hope was that Jack would come and find me. I was the damsel in distress, waiting for my prince to rescue me. Except that the prince was the one who'd locked me up and I was waiting for a valet.

I lay back on the bed, slightly disturbed by the softness of the mattress. I'd felt more support floating on water. I wriggled on the bed, wondering if it actually was made of water. It didn't slosh.

I stood up and started walking around the room. Exploring it, like an animal in a cage. A gilded cage, of course, with wallpaper that looked like it was literally made of beaten gold, but a cage nonetheless. I ran my hand over the wall, feeling the tiny imperfections in the cold metal.

I thought I remembered an old faerie myth about metal. I frowned at the wall, trying to remember. Was it metal in general? Steel? Iron? Was it a myth based on fact, or was it like the stories about zombies? And did it matter, since I wasn't wearing any of my jewellery?

A horrible thought suddenly occurred to me. Jack had chosen my outfit. Had he intentionally robbed me of any help, knowingly forcing me into imprisonment. Was Jack on Zephan's side, instead of Kieran's? And if he was backing Zephan politically, did Kieran know about it, or was he totally in the dark?

I found myself absently toying with the medallion Jack had given me. Given that the very walls were covered in gold here, I figured that the gold chain on the medallion wouldn't be particularly helpful in any way.

I continued my exploration of the room. Though I'd given up hope of finding anything to help me, I thought I might find something to pass the time. I had to trust that Zephan would come back for me, in the three hours he'd allowed. I had to trust in that, because I had nothing else, that was helpful, to trust in.

Opening what I had presumed to be a cupboard door, I found the entrance to an enormous and extravagant bathroom. The bath itself was almost more like a pool, vastly wide, apparently deep, and already filled with water. I slipped my shoe off and dipped a toe into the water. Steam danced from the surface, rising up in graceful spirals. I glanced around the room, seeing a toweling robe draped over a rack near the edge of the bathing pool.

There was an open shower beside the pool, with a tiled base and no shower curtain. The whole thing seemed to be based on a Japanese bathhouse. There was a public bathhouse and spar in Brisbane that I wanted to go to, but I was still struggling to get up the confidence to face the optional nudity. I didn't know if I could handle being naked in front of other people (even if it was segregated by sex), or seeing other people naked. But the idea of soaking in so much hot water still held an undeniable appeal. I started unbuttoning my vest.

I blushed, realizing how much I'd overreacted at being locked in. Maybe Zephan hadn't been locking me in the room, he'd just locked the door for me on the way out, so I could relax in the privacy of my bath. The fact that I didn't have a key was probably just an oversight. At least, that's what I told myself as I stripped off for the bath. It's amazing, the effectiveness of hot water at relaxing the mind. I felt all of the tension and doubt I had drain away as I slid into the hot water.

I sat on the slightly raised step on the inside of the pool and leaned back against the side. I leant my head back, and closed my eyes, letting the hot water carry me away in its gentle embrace.

A woman stood over me, wrapped in a dark cloak.

"Who are you?" I asked. The hood cast a deep shadow across her face so that I couldn't distinguish her features.

"We are the spirits of the land," she said in a deep, melodious voice that echoed around the bathroom. "We demand justice."

"I haven't done anything," I said. Her voice struck a note of fear through me. It was a primal kind of fear, something so deep, and so old that I didn't wholly understand it.

"What you have done," she said, "is not what concerns us." Yet, I felt no relief, hearing those words.

"What does?" I asked, trying to ignore the tremble in my voice.

"There is one who has committed the worst of crimes," she said, leaning closer to me. "One who has gone against the oldest laws of the land, the first law."

"The first law?" I asked, searching the darkness beneath her hood, looking for her eyes.

"I call him kin slayer," she said, "and I name him king slayer."

"Who?"

"The dead demand justice," she leaned closer still, and still I could not see her eyes, "the land demands the wild hunt." I opened my mouth to ask what she wanted me to do and she leaned closer again. She leaned so close that her hood fell over my head and I saw that there was nothing but darkness under that hood. It fell over me, coating me, and the world turned black.

I woke up, gasping for breath. I slipped and went under. The water closed over the top of me. I couldn't breathe, couldn't see. I felt around in the dark, trying to find the tiles at the bottom of the pool. I spun, searching. I thought I was going to drown. Then I felt tiles beneath my hand. I pushed against them, turning back towards the surface of the water.

I broke through, standing up in the shallow pool, coughing and gasping for air. I walked back to the side of the pool and leaned against it. I couldn't believe I'd fallen asleep in the bath. Who did that?

I got out of the water, wondering how long I'd been in for. I pulled the towelling robe on and sat down, next to the pool. My dream haunted me still. The woman in the cloak of darkness. The wild hunt. I didn't even know what the wild hunt was. I thought it might have been some snippet of speech that my subconscious had strung together, a phrase I'd read somewhere.

The haunting quality of the dream was its realism. I hadn't found myself in another place, hadn't been transported to some distant grassy knoll. I was in the bath still, and the woman had knelt above me.

It made me wonder if it actually was a dream, or if it was something more. I'd heard of trance states, of visions, and dream walking. Was it possible that I'd actually communed with the spirits of the land? If I had, then the accusation that someone had killed the king might be true.

If someone had killed the king, and the land had named that person as kin to him, that meant that he had not only known his killer, he'd been related to them. The only relatives of the dead king that I had met, other than Eolande, were Kieran and Zephan.

I wondered if it was possible that one of the princes had killed the king, and if it was, which of them had done it?

---------------------------------

ooooh, someone is a kinslayer. Who do you think it is, Zephan or Kieran? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Til next time,

x zuz