“She was alive, kept so in a cage of his making. But trapped, she withered, so for her, he created the Sifting Silvers and gave her worlds to explore. Although time passes outside them, within them it does not. One might spend a thousand centuries in there, and walk out not one hour older.”

“I thought the mirrors were used for travel between realms.”

“They are used for that, too. The Silvers are . . . complicated things, doubly so, since they were cursed. When the queen felt the power of the Silvers spring into existence, she called the king to court and demanded he destroy them. Creation was her right, not his. In truth, she was disturbed to discover he had grown so powerful. He claimed to have made them as a gift for her, which pleased her, as he had paid her no tribute in eons.

“But the king gave her only a portion of the Silvers. The other he kept hidden from her, for his concubine, where he planted lush gardens and built a great, shining white house upon a hill with hundreds of windows, and thousands of rooms. When his mortal grew restless, he made her the amulet, so she could shape reality with her will. When she complained of loneliness he made her the box.”

“What does it do?”

“I do not know. It has not been seen since.”

“Are you saying he also made her the Book? But why?”

“Patience, human. I tell this tale. The king’s experiments continued. Eons passed. He created more . . . aberrations. Over time, of which we have a fortunate abundance, they began to improve until some of them were as beautiful as any Seelie. The Unseelie royalty were born, the princes and princesses. Dark counterparts to the Light. And like their counterparts, they wanted what was rightfully theirs: power, freedom to come and go, dominion over lesser beings. The king refused. Secrecy was a necessary part of his plan.”

“But someone went to the queen,” I guessed. “One of the Unseelie.”

“Yes. When she learned of his treachery, she tried to strip him of his power but he had grown too strong, and learned too much. Not the Song, but another melody. A darker one. They battled fiercely, sending their armies against each other. Thousands of Fae died. In that age, we still had many weapons, not merely the few that remain. Faery withered and blackened; the skies ran with the lifeblood of our kind, the planet itself upon which we lived wept to see our shame, and cracked from end to end. And still they fought until he took up the sword and she took up the spear and the king killed the Faery Queen.”

I inhaled sharply. “The queen is dead?”

“And the Song died with her. She was slain before she was able to name her successor and pass on her essence. When she died, the king and all the Unseelie vanished. Before dying, she had managed to complete the walls of the prison, and with her last breath uttered the spell to contain them. Those Unseelie that eluded the spell’s radius were hunted by the Seelie, and killed.”

“So, where does the Book come into all this?”

“The Book was never meant to be what it was. It was created in an act of atonement.”

“Atonement?” I echoed. “You mean for killing the queen?”

“No. The king’s atonement was to his concubine. She slipped from the Silvers and took her own life. She hated what the king had become so much that she left him the only way she could.”

I shivered, chilled by the dark tale.

“They say the king went mad and when his madness finally abated, he beheld the dark kingdom he had created with horror. In her name, he vowed to change, to become the leader of his race. But he knew too much. Knowledge is power. Immense knowledge is immense power. So long as he had it, his race would never trust him. Aware they would not let him near the Cauldron of Forgetting, and even if they did, they would destroy him the second he drank from it, he created a mystical book into which to pour all his dark knowledge. Freed of it, he would banish it to another realm where it could never be found and used for harm. He would return to his people, their Seelie King, beg their forgiveness, and lead them into a new age. The Fae would become patriarchal. The Unseelie, of course, would be left to rot in their prison.”

“So that’s what the Book is,” I exclaimed, “part of the dark king himself! The worst part.”

“Over the eons it changed, as Fae things do, and became a living thing, far different from what it was when the king created it.”

“Why didn’t the king destroy it?”

“He had made . . . how do you say it? . . . his doppelgänger. It was his equal and he could not defeat it. He feared one day it might defeat him. He cast it out, and for much time it was lost.”