Caedmon smiled winningly, and I swear, it was like the sun coming out. “Excellent! And once you’re done here, perhaps you might visit my palace. I have a wall in my solarium simply calling out for—”
“Stop trying to poach Rafe!” I said, taking his arm again, before I remembered who I was talking to. But Caedmon only laughed.
“That is exactly what I am doing,” he admitted. “I would steal him away permanently if I could.”
“I prefer it here,” Rafe told him dryly. “But we can talk about a painting—although not in a solarium. The sun would fade it.”
“Which would be a shame,” Caedmon agreed. “Perhaps you could—”
I stopped listening. There was a strange undercurrent in this new palace that I didn’t like. Not between the two men, who appeared to be getting along famously, but with the little knots of people here and there. The gallery, which is what I guessed the huge corridor was going to be, wasn’t even finished, yet there were people everywhere. And most of them seemed a little intense for art lovers.
And now most of them were looking at us.
“What’s going on?” I asked Rafe, who was one of the only vamps I knew who might tell me the truth.
And, yes, something weird was happening, because he glanced around first instead of just answering. “Come,” he said. “Let me show you my current project—and my personal favorite. It’s this way.”
And before I could stop him, he’d taken off down the hall, leaving two clueless demigods looking at each other. And then hurrying to catch up when Rafe turned around and snapped his fingers impatiently. Because I don’t care who you are, you don’t argue with genius.
Chapter Twelve
A hundred corridors seemed to branch off the main hall, although a lot of them were still under construction. I passed one covered by a tarp that had come loose and was blowing in the wind, showing only open air outside—and a huge tent city crowding the house and dotting the nearby hillsides. It looked like thousands of people were sheltering out there.
“The army,” Caedmon told me, as we hurried past, because the Rafe train wasn’t stopping. “The invasion is imminent.”
“How imminent?” Because I hadn’t heard anything.
“That is still being determined. There are a few impediments.”
I wanted to ask what kind, but didn’t get a chance. A bunch of workmen zoomed by with vampire speed and almost took me along with them, but Caedmon twirled me out of the way at the last second. It looked like a dance move and felt like one, too, as the corridor swirled around me. Then we were off again, a little farther up the hall, through a massive set of doors and into what I guessed was a waiting room.
It was a large space, but there had to be a few hundred people piled on sofas and propping up walls, or gazing at the room’s centerpiece, a gorgeous, golden . . . thing . . . that I didn’t even have a name for.
It sort of looked like an astrolabe, one of those old-fashioned devices that people once used to determine eclipses, with rings within rings. But it was huge, easily filling a quarter of the extended ceiling, maybe a couple of stories high at the top. And there was no sun at the center.
In fact, there was no sun at all. Just two planets whirling around each other in a crazy dance like the one Caedmon and I had just executed. Sometimes closer, sometimes farther away, but always turning, turning, turning.
And every time they did, every rotation they made, other things turned with them. The most eye-catching were the thousand or so golden strands, like threads on a loom, that moved over and beside and underneath the planets. How they didn’t get caught up in snarls and knots, I didn’t know, because they were crossing and crisscrossing all the time, in no discernible pattern that I could see. But they were beautiful, nonetheless: a woven metallic cat’s cradle dancing around and between the two worlds like—
Like ley lines, I thought, finally realizing what I was looking at.
“That’s earth and Faerie, isn’t it?” I asked Caedmon, who was looking at it, too.
“Indeed. And that is time, you see?”
He pointed to a silver ring encircling the planet that was meant to be earth, judging by the continents standing out in vague relief. Although it kind of looked like a fat kid with a hula hoop, because the metal ring wasn’t stationary. It was slinging about erratically, first to one side of the planet and then to the other. And all the while, it was expanding and contracting, sometimes almost touching the surface of the world, while at others flaring so far out that I was sure it would collide with a similar ring around Faerie.
The whole thing was a beautiful, kinetic sculpture, almost dizzying to watch. But kind of mesmerizing, too. Like the workings of a particularly complex watch.
“It’s only a representation, of course,” Caedmon murmured, when I said so. “But then, a clock is also only a representation of time, yet it serves.”
“Then that’s Faerie’s timeline?” I asked, pointing at the silver ring around the other planet, and he nodded.
“My artisans made this as a gift for your consul. Your people lacked an understanding of how time flows differently in our two realms. That gap in knowledge allowed Aeslinn to plan attacks seemingly back to back, knowing when time would be flowing faster in our world relative to yours. You and your people had scarce time to catch your breath from one battle before another was upon you, while he had months to plan in between.”
I nodded, remembering Mircea telling me something similar not long ago. Not that I’d needed it. The attacks from the other side had been like a barrage, falling fast and furious, leaving me not knowing what to do or where to run.
But they’d still lost, I thought, flashing back once more to that muddy battlefield. And no, it