I have no idea how long I trudged through despair and futility so palpable that every step felt like slogging through wet cement. Temporal divisions did not exist in this place. There were no watches or clocks, no minutes or hours, no night or day, no sun or moon. Just relentless black and white and blue matched by relentless misery.

How many times had I walked this path while I slept? If I’d been having the dream since birth—more than eight thousand.

Repetition had made every step instinctual. I skirted dangerously thin ice that I couldn’t have known was there. I intuited the location of bottomless drifts. I knew the shape and number of the entrances in the caves in the black walls high above my head. I recognized landmarks too insignificant to be noticed by anyone who hadn’t walked this path countless times.

If my heart could have pounded, it would have. I had no idea what awaited me. If I’d ever gotten to the end of my journey in my dreams, I’d blocked it thoroughly.

It had always been a woman’s voice commanding me, ordering me to obey. Had my inner concubine been taking over every time I’d fallen asleep and fed me dreams, trying to force me to remember and make me do something?

Darroc had told me that some said the Unseelie King was entombed in black ice, slumbering in his prison eternally. Had he been tricked into a trap and he’d been reaching out to me in the Dreaming to teach me all I needed to know to free him? Was that what my whole life had been about?

Despite the love I knew he and the concubine shared, I resented that my mortal existence had been used up without regard for what it might have been, what I might have been. Hadn’t she lived long enough once before, waiting for him to wake up, to pull his head out and live?

It was no wonder I’d always felt so psychotic in high school! I’d been walking around since childhood with the suppressed memories of another fantastical lifetime embedded in my subconscious!

I suddenly found everything about myself suspect. Did I really love sunshine so much, or was it a leftover feeling from her? Was I really crazy about fashion, or was I obsessing over the concubine’s closet of a thousand stunning gowns? Was I truly enthralled by beautifying my surroundings, or was it an outlet for her need to change the face of her confinement while she waited for her lover?

Did I even like the color pink?

I tried to remember how many of her dresses had been some shade of rose.

“Ugh,” I said. It came out as a deep, booming gong.

I didn’t want to be her. I wanted to be me. But, as far as I knew, I hadn’t even been born.

A terrible thought occurred to me. Maybe I wasn’t the concubine reincarnated; maybe I was the concubine and somebody had forced me to drink from the cauldron!

“Right, then sent me to a plastic surgeon and re-created my face?” I muttered. I didn’t look anything like the concubine.

My head was spinning with fears, each more disturbing than the last.

I stopped, as if a homing beacon that had been beeping faster and faster inside me had abruptly become a single long sound.

I was there. Wherever “there” was supposed to be. Whatever fate awaited me, whatever, whoever had brought me here, was just over the next ridge of black ice, some twenty feet away.

I stood still so long that I iced again.

Despair filled me. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to top the ridge. What if I didn’t like what I found? Had I blocked this memory because I was going to die here?

What if I was too late?

The prison was empty. There was no point in going on. I should just give in, turn to ice permanently, and forget. I didn’t want to be the concubine. I didn’t want to find the king. I didn’t want to stay in Faery or be his forever love.

I wanted to be human. I wanted to live in Dublin and Ashford and love my mom and dad. I wanted to fight with Jericho Barrons and run a bookstore one day when our world was rebuilt. I wanted to watch Dani grow up and fall in love for the first time. I wanted to replace that old woman at the abbey with Kat and take tropical vacations on human beaches.

I stood, torn by indecision. Go greet my destiny, like a good little automaton? Freeze and forget, as the overwhelming stain of futility in this place was trying to convince me to do? Or turn and walk away? That thought appealed to me a lot. It smacked of personal will, of choosing to set sail on my own course and terms.

If I never crested that ridge and never discovered the end of this dream that had been plaguing me all my life, would I be free of it?

There was no higher power forcing me to go on, no divine being charging me with tracking the Book and getting the walls back up. Just because I could track it didn’t mean I had to. I didn’t have to fight the Fae. I was a free agent. I could leave right now, move far away, shirk responsibility, look out for myself, and leave this mess to somebody else. It was a strange new world. I could stop resisting, adapt, and make the best of it. If I’d proved nothing else to myself over the past few months, I was good at adapting and figuring out how to go on when things weren’t remotely what I’d thought they were.