Swallowing Darkness
Chapter 7-8
Chapter Seven
We swept into the great room where just a few hours ago there had been reporters, cameras, and police. Now there were brownies cleaning up, levitating chairs and tables, and making the trash of paper and plastic roll like small tumbleweeds. They looked up at us, eyes wide. I had a moment of my heart squeezing so tightly that I could not breathe. Would they fight us, as Gran had? But none of them lifted a hand, or threw so much as a dust rag at us. Then we were past them, and the far door that had looked too small to let the horses through was suddenly just big enough. The faerie mound, the sithen, was shaping itself to our use.
But beyond the doors was a solid wall of roses and thorns. Thorns like daggers pointed at us, roses bloomed and filled the hallway with sweet perfume. It was a lovely way to defend, so terribly Seelie.
I thought we were stopped, but the wall to the right widened, with a sound like rock crying. The sithen widened the hallway, not in inches, but in horse lengths, so that the lovely and deadly vines collapsed inward, like any climbing rose will do when its support is cut. That heavy mass of thorns fell inward, and into the ringing silence after the rock had stopped moving I could hear the screams of the guards underneath the painful blanket.
Fire blossomed out from the edge of the thorns rich and orange, and the heat reached us, but it was like the winter cold. I could feel it, but it did not move me. The fire spattered into wasted sparks, curling into empty air, as if the fire itself turned away rather than hit us.
We swept through rooms of colored marble, silver-and gold-edged. I had a vague memory of coming this way in Lord Hugh's arms, when he and the nobles who had wanted me to be their queen had rescued me from the king's bedchamber. Then I'd had time to see it all, admire the cold beauty of it, and think that it wasn't a place for nature deities. No matter how beautiful, the trees and flowers inside our sithens should not be formed of metal and rock. They should live.
Two lines of guards appeared ahead of us in the hallway. The last time I'd seen them, they'd been dressed in modern business suits to make the human reporters more comfortable. One of the things that Taranis had insisted on but that Andais never had was uniforms. The tunics and trousers were every color of the rainbow, with more modern colors added in, but the tabards that covered them front and back like elegant cloth sandwich boards bore a stylized flame, burning against an orange-red background. Gold thread glittered around the edge of everything. Once Taranis had been worshipped by burning people alive. Not often, but sometimes. I'd always found it interesting that Taranis chose the flame and not his lightning for his coat of arms.
They began shooting arrows, but the shafts turned away, as if some great wind had caught them, to cast them shattering on the walls long before they reached us. I saw the fear on some of their faces then, and again that fierce joy hit me.
Sholto urged his horse up beside mine, and the corridor was simply wide enough. The hounds boiled at our feet, the riderless horses seemed to push at our backs, and the formless things that pushed and writhed at the tail of our train surged forward. I felt the ceiling go away, as if there were sky above us now. Sky enough for the sluagh's shining whiteness to rise above us like a mountain of shining nightmares.
Some of the guards ran, their nerves broken. Two fell to their knees, their minds broken. The rest fired their hands of power. Silver sparkles fell far short of us. A bolt of yellow energy rolled back upon itself, like the fire before it, as if the magic simply would not touch us. Colors, shapes, illusion, reality - they threw it all at us. These were the great warriors of the Seelie Court, and they fought, but nothing could touch us. Nothing could even slow our run.
We leaped over them as if they were a fence. One of them pulled a sword that did not glow of magic. He sliced upward at the leg of a hound and got blood. Cold iron can harm all in faerie.
The wounded hound dropped away from us, and a riderless horse went with it. I might have stopped, but Sholto urged his horse forward and mine followed. When the marble of the hallway had changed to yet another color, pink with veins of gold, we had a third rider with us. The guard who had wounded the dog was now astride the horse. It had changed slightly, and its eyes were filled with yellow shine, its hooves edged in gold. Its eyes were no less yellow than its rider's hair. The gold of its hooves echoed in the gold of the Seelie's eyes. Dacey, I thought his name was, Dacey the Golden. The horse had a gold and silk bridle on it now, and a bit between its teeth. The guard was forced to join us for the crime of fighting back, but his touch had changed the horse for him. Wild magic is like water; it seeks a shape to take.
Two more guards realized that cold iron was the only thing that could harm us. They joined the hunt. One horse turned pale colors under its white skin, as if pastel rainbows moved and flowed beneath. The last horse was green, with vines laced around it as its bridle. The vines moved and waved, and began to cover the rider on its back in a suit of living green. Turloch had the pale horse, and Yolland the green.
I'd thought to find my cousin in her room, or in a back place where the poor nobles are put, those with no political power, or favor of the king. But the hounds led us to the main doors, to the main throne room. I think if we had gone anywhere else, the guards would have given up by now, but because we went for the throne room, and because the king was presumably inside, the guards thought we were here for Taranis. They might have given up for anything short of the king, but they were oath bound to protect him. When faced by the wild hunt you don't want to be an oathbreaker. You can go from defending someone else to being fresh prey if you are not careful. So I think they did not truly fight for the king, but for themselves, and their oath. But perhaps I was wrong about that. Perhaps they saw in their king things I had never seen. Things worth fighting and dying for. Perhaps.
But it wasn't the guard's abilities that stopped the hunt in the great room just outside the throne room doors. It was the room itself. Just as there was an antechamber in the Unseelie Court that held last-ditch defenses, so was there one here in the Seelie Court. The Unseelie had their living roses and thorns that would drag any unwanted visitors to their bloody death. It was a magic very similar to the wall of thorns that had tried to stop us earlier. The magic of each court is not cleanly cut, but intermingled, though both sides would deny it.
What did the Seelie have in their chamber?
A great oak spread up and up, toward a ceiling that spilled into a distant sparkle of sky, like a piece of daylight forever stored in the limbs of the great tree. You knew you were underground, but there were glimpses of blue sky and clouds forever caught in the tree's upper limbs. It was like the things you see from the corners of your eyes. If you look directly at them, they aren't there, but yet you see them. The sky was like that, almost there. The trunk of the tree was large enough that it was quite a feat to walk around it to get to the huge jeweled doors of the throne room. But it was just a tree, so what made it the last defense?
We spilled into the great chamber at a full run, the other riders at our backs, our hounds howling, the boil of not-creatures at the end of it all pushing at us like fuel, or will. It wanted to be used, the stuff that followed in our wake.
Sunlight flared down from the leaves of the tree. Bright, hot sunlight spilled over us. For a second I thought it would burn as Taranis's hand of power could, as my cousin's hand of power had, but it was sunlight. It was real sunlight. The heat of a summer's day held forever in that room, waiting to burst into life and cover us with that life-giving warmth.
One moment we were riding over stone, the next we galloped over green grass with tall summer flowers brushing our horses' bellies. The only thing that remained was the huge oak tree spreading its branches above the meadow.
Sholto yelled, "Ride for the oak. It's real. The rest isn't."
He was so certain, so utterly certain, that it left no room for doubts in my mind. I kicked my mare forward, and rode at Sholto's shoulder. The riders in back of us came with us, with no doubts voiced. I wasn't certain whether they truly had no doubts, or whether they simply had no choice but to follow the huntsmen. In that moment, I did not care, only that we pushed forward, and Sholto knew the way.
His horse hit the far side of the oak, and it was as if a curtain peeled back. One breath we rode in a summer meadow, the next we clattered on stone, and were before the jeweled doors.
Sholto's many-legged stallion reared in front of the doors, as if he could not pass. Powerful magic indeed to stop the hunt. I'd known that the doors were old, but I hadn't realized that they were one of the ancient relics brought here from the old country. These doors had stood before the throne room of the Seelie Court when my human ancestors were still making houses out of animal skins.
I urged my mare forward slowly. The hounds whined and scratched at the door, high, eager sounds that sounded almost too puppyish to come from the thick throats of the white mastiffs. Our prey was within.
I smelled roses, and I whispered, "What would you have of me, Goddess?"
The answer came not in words, but in knowledge. I simply knew what needed doing. I turned the horse so we were sideways to the huge doors. I pressed my hand against them, a hand covered in the drying blood of my grandmother. I felt the pulse of the doors, almost a heartbeat. The truly ancient objects could have that, a semblance of life, so strong was their magic, so powerful the powers that forged them. It meant that certain objects had opinions, could make choices, all on their own; as some enchanted weapons will only fight in the hands of their choosing, so other things will listen to reason.
I pressed the blood against the door, reached for that pulse of almost life, and spoke. "By the blood of my kinswoman, by the death of the only mother I ever truly had, I call kin slayer on Cair. We are the wild hunt. Taste the blood of my loss, and let us pass."
The doors made a sound, almost a sigh, if wood and metal could make such a sound. Then the double doors began to open, revealing a slice of the glittering room beyond.
Chapter Eight
There was a confusion of colors: yellows, reds, and oranges, and over it all was gold. Gold like the metal of a piece of jewelry, edging everything. The air itself was full of sparkles, as if gold dust were permanently suspended in the air, so that the very air you breathed was formed of it.
The gold spilled around us, moved by the speed of our passage so that it rained around us, trailed behind us, mingling with the white glow of the magic so that we appeared in the midst of the court in a vision of silver and gold.
There was a moment when I saw the Golden Court spilled out before us. A moment to see Taranis on his huge golden and jeweled throne, with all his magic, all his illusion turning him to a thing of sunset colors and near-sunlike brilliance. His court spilled to either side in its standing lines, and the smaller chairs were like a garden of brilliant flowers formed of gold and silver and jewels. His people had hair in every color of the rainbow, their clothes chosen to complement and please the king. He liked the color of jewels and fire, so as Andais's court looked as if it were always ready for a funeral, Taranis's court looked like a bright version of hell.
I had a moment to see fear on my uncle's handsome face, then his guards poured around the throne. There were cries of, "He is forsworn! To the King! To the King!" Some of that glorious court poured toward the throne and prepared to aid the guards, but some got farther away from the throne, and what they thought would be the center of the fight.
I glimpsed my grandfather, Uar the Cruel, standing head and shoulders above most of the people as they fled. He was like a tree in the midst of their shining river. Looking at him as he stood, tall and every inch a war god, I realized that I had my grandfather's hair. I saw him so seldom, I hadn't realized it until that moment.
Magic flared around us in a deadly rainbow of color, fire, ice, and storm. The guards were defending their king, for whom else would I have been able to call down the wild hunt upon? So many crimes, so many traitors; I felt again that call to be at the head of the hunt forever. So simple, so painless, to ride every night and find our prey. So much simpler than the life I was trying to lead.
A hand gripped my arm, and the touch was enough. I turned to see Sholto, his face serious, his yellow and gold eyes searching my face. His touch kept bringing me back from the thought, but the fact that he knew to keep bringing me back from the brink told me that he'd had his own temptations at the head of the hunt. You can best protect others from temptation if you are, yourself, tempted.
We stood in the center of a magical storm, formed of different spells colliding. Small twisters whirled around the room, formed when powers of heat hit powers of cold. There were screams, and outside the glow of our own magic, I could see people running. Some ran toward the throne to protect their king, others fled to save themselves, and still others huddled near the walls and under the heavy tables. We watched it all through the frosted "glass" of the magic that surrounded us.
The dogs never hesitated, were never distracted by the spells of others. They had but one purpose, one prey. The hail of spells, and the storms that they themselves were causing, began to die down. The guards had finally realized that we had no interest in the throne. We moved inexorably toward the side of the room. The huge dogs shouldered their way under the tables, and spilled around a figure that was huddled against the wall.
I felt my mare's muscles bunch under me, and I had time to shift my weight forward and get a better grip on her mane before she leaped the wide table in one powerful jump.
The mare danced on the stones, her hooves raising green sparks, little licks of green and red flame coming with the smoke from her nostrils. The red glow in her eyes became small red flames that licked the edges of her eye sockets.
The dogs had trapped my cousin against the stone wall. She pressed that tall, thin sidhe frame as tightly as she could, as if the stone would give way and she would be able to escape that way. Her orange dress was very bright against the white marble wall. There would be nothing that easy for her this night. Again, that spurt of rage and deeply satisfying vengeance came to me. Her face was lovely and pale, and if she had only had a nose and enough skin to cover her mouth with lips, she'd have been as attractive as any in court. There had been a time when I had thought Cair truly beautiful, because I had not seen what she lacked as a mark of ugliness. I loved Gran's face, so her face combined with the face of a sidhe, who were all so lovely, well, Cair could be nothing but beautiful to me. But she had not felt that way, and she had let me know with the back of her hand when no one was looking, with small petty cruelties, that she hated me. I realized as I grew older that the reason was that she would have traded her tall, lithe body for my face. She made me think that being short and curved was a crime, but my face with its more-sidhe features was what she wanted. As a child, I had simply thought that I was ugly.
Now I saw her pressed against the wall, the brown eyes of our grandmother in her face, with its so-similar bone structure, and I wanted her to be afraid. I wanted her to know what she'd done and regret it, then I wanted her to die in terror. Was that petty? Did I care? No, I did not.
Cair looked up at me with my grandmother's eyes - eyes filled with terror, and behind the fear, knowledge. She knew why we were here.
I urged my horse forward, through the growling pack of hounds. I reached out to her with the dried blood on my hands.
She screamed and tried to move, but the huge white and red dogs moved closer. The threat was there in the bass rumble of their growls, the drawn lips showing fangs that were meant for rending flesh.
She closed her eyes, and I leaned forward, my hand reaching for that perfect white cheek. My hand touched her, gently. She winced as if I'd struck her. One moment the blood was dried and beginning to cake on my skin, the next it was wet and fresh. I left a crimson print of my small hand against her perfect bone structure. All the blood on my hands and gown was liquid and running again. The old wives' tale that a murder victim will bleed afresh if its murderer lays hands on it is based on truth.
I held my bloody hand up so the sidhe could see it, and cried out, "Kin slayer I name her. By the blood of her victim, she is accused."
It was my Aunt Eluned, Cair's mother, who came to the edge of the dogs, and held her white hands out to me. "Niece, Meredith, I am your mother's sister, and Cair is my daughter. What kin did she slay to bring you here like this?"
I turned to look at her, so lovely. She was my mother's twin, but they weren't identical. Eluned was just a little more sidhe than my mother, a little less human. She wore gold from head to toe. Her red hair like my own and her father's sparkled against her dress. Her eyes were the many-petaled eyes of Taranis, except that my aunt's were shades of gold and green intermingled. I stared into those eyes and had a memory so sharp that it stabbed through me from stomach to head. I saw eyes like these except only shades of green - Taranis's eyes above me, as if in a dream, but I knew it wasn't a dream.
Sholto touched my arm, lightly this time. "Meredith."
I shook my head at him, then held my bloody hand out toward my aunt. "This is your mother's blood, our grandmother's blood, Hettie's blood."
"Are you saying that... our mother is dead?"
"She died in my arms."
"But how?"
I pointed at my cousin. "She used a spell to make Gran into her instrument, to give her Cair's hand of power. She forced Gran to attack us with fire. My Darkness is still in the hospital with injuries that Gran gave him with a hand of power she never owned."
"You lie," my cousin said.
The dogs growled.
"If I lied I could not have called the hunt, and pronounced you kin slayer. The hunt will not come if the vengeance is not righteous."
"The blood of her victim marks her," Sholto said.
Aunt Eluned drew herself up to her full sidhe height and said, "You have no voice here, Shadowspawn."
"I am a king, and you are not," he said, in a voice as haughty and arrogant as her own.
"King of nightmares," Eluned said.
Sholto laughed. His laughter made light play in his hair, as if laughter could be yellow light to spill in the whiteness of his hair. "Let me show you nightmares," he said, and his voice held that anger that has passed heat and become a cold thing. Heated anger is about passion; cold anger is about hate.
I didn't think he hated my aunt specifically, but all the sidhe who had ever treated him as less. A few short weeks ago a sidhe woman had lured him to a bit of tie-me-up sex. But instead of sex, sidhe warriors had come and cut off his tentacles, skinned all the extra bits away. The woman had told Sholto that when he healed, and was free of taint, she might actually sleep with him.
The magic of the hunt changed slightly, felt... angrier. It was my turn to reach out and warn him. I'd always known that to be drafted to ride in the hunt could mean being trapped, but I hadn't realized that calling it could also trap the huntsman. The hunt wanted a permanent huntsman, or huntswoman. It wanted to be led now that it was back. And strong emotions could give it the key to your soul. I'd felt it, and now I saw Sholto begin to be incautious.
I gripped his arm until he looked at me. The blood that had left a mark so bright and fresh on Cair's face left no mark on his arm. I stared into his eyes until I saw him look back, not in anger, but with that wisdom that had let the sluagh keep their independence when most of the other lesser kingdoms had been swallowed up.
He smiled at me, that gentler version that I had only seen since he found out that he was to be a father. "Shall I show them that they did not unman me?"
I knew what he meant. I smiled back, and nodded. The smiles saved us, I think. We shared a moment that had nothing to do with the hunt's purpose. A moment of hope, of shared intimacy, of friendship as well as love.
He'd meant to show Aunt Eluned what nightmares could truly be. To show his extra bits in anger to horrify. Now he would reveal himself to prove that the nobles who had hurt him had failed to mutilate him. He was whole. More than whole, he was perfect.
One moment it was a tattoo that decorated his stomach and upper chest, the next it was the reality. Light and color played on the pale skin, gold and pale pink. Shades of pastel light shone and moved under the skin of the many moving parts. They waved like some graceful sea creature, moved by some warm tropical current. When last he'd come to this court, he'd been ashamed of this part of himself. Now he was not, and it showed.
There were screams from some of the ladies, and my aunt, though a little pale, said, "You are a nightmare yourself, Shadowspawn."
Yolland of the black hair and vine-covered horse said, "She seeks to distract you from her daughter's guilt."
My aunt looked at him and said, in a shocked voice, "Yolland, how can you help them?"
"I did my duty to king and land, but the hunt has me now, Eluned, and I see things differently. I know that Cair used her own grandmother as a stalking horse and a trap. Why would anyone do that? Have we become so heartless that the murder of your own mother means nothing to you, Eluned?"
"She is my only child," she said, in a voice that was not so sure of itself.
"And she has killed your only mother," he said.
She turned and looked at her daughter, who was still pressed against the wall in a circle of the white mastiffs, with our horses at the front of the circle.
"Why, Cair?" Not "how could you?" but simply "why?"
Cair's face showed a different kind of fear now. It wasn't fear of the dogs pressing so closely. She looked at her mother's face, almost desperately. "Mother."
"Why?" her mother said.
"I have heard you deny her in this court day after day. You called her a useless brownie who had deserted her own court."
"That was talk for the other nobles, Cair."
"You never said differently in private with me, Mother. Aunt Besaba says the same. She is a traitor to this court for leaving, first to live with the Unseelie, then to live among the humans. I have heard you agree with such words all my life. You said you took me to visit her because it was duty. Once I was old enough to have a choice, we stopped going."
"I visited her in private, Cair."
"Why did you not tell me?"
"Because your heart is as cold as my sister's, and your ambition as hot. You would have seen my care for our mother as a weakness."
"It was a weakness," she said.
Eluned shook her head, a look of deep sorrow on her face. She stepped back from the line of dogs, back from her daughter. She looked up at us. "Did she die knowing that Cair had betrayed her?"
"Yes."
"Knowing that her own granddaughter betrayed her would have broken her heart."
"She did not have the knowledge long," I said. It was cold comfort, but it was all I had to give her. I rode with the wild hunt, and truth, harsh or kind, was the only thing I could speak this night.
"I will not stand in your way, niece."
"Mother!" Cair reached out. The dogs closed in around her, giving that low bass growl that seemed to tiptoe up the spine and hit something low in the brain. If you heard that sound, you knew that it was bad.
Cair yelled again. "Mother, please!"
Eluned yelled back, "She was my mother!"
"I'm your daughter."
Eluned moved backward in her long golden dress. "I have no daughter." She walked away, and she did not look back. The nobles who had clustered by the door moved apart to let her pass. She did not stop until the far jeweled doors closed behind her. She would not fight us for her daughter's life, but she would not watch us take it either. I could not blame her.
Cair looked around frantically. "Lord Finbar, help me!" she cried.
Most of the eyes in the room went to the far table, where the king was completely hidden behind a wall of guards and sparkling courtiers. One of those was Lord Finbar, tall and handsome with his yellow, almost human-colored hair. Only the feeling of power from him and the otherworldly handsome face marked him as more. Uar was still standing to one side watching the show, but not shielding his brother. Lord Finbar was planted in front of his monarch. He was an intimate of the king's, but no friend to my aunt or my cousin, last I knew. Why would she appeal to him now?
The king was completely hidden behind the glittering, bejeweled throng that included Finbar. Maybe he was no longer even in the room, and the nobles were only using themselves as a stalking horse. But tonight, that did not matter. What did matter was why Cair would appeal to the tall blond noble who had never been her friend.
His high, sculpted-cheekboned face was set in arrogant lines, as cold as any I'd seen. It made me think of my lost Frost, when he was either at his most afraid, or most embarrassed. It was a face to hide behind, that arrogance.
Cair called out to him again, more frantically. "Lord Finbar, you promised."
He spoke then. "The girl is clearly deranged. The killing of her own matriarch is proof of that." His voice was as cold and clear as the pale line of his cheek. The words dripped surety and an arrogance bred from centuries, not of his ancestors' ruling, but of he himself ruling. Immortal and noble; it was a recipe for arrogance, and stupidity.
Cair cried out, "Finbar, what are you saying? You promised you would protect me. You swore."
"She is deranged," he repeated.
Sholto looked at me, and I understood. I spoke, and my voice carried, echoing. Tonight I held more than my own magic. "Lord Finbar, give us your oath that you did not promise my cousin your protection, and we will believe you. She is deranged."
"I do not answer to you, Meredith, not yet."
"It is not I, Meredith, who asks for your oath. Tonight I ride at the head of a different court. It is with that power that I ask a second time, Finbar. Give your oath that she lies about your protection, and no more need be said."
"I do not owe the perverse creature at your side my oath."
He had used Queen Andais's nickname for Sholto. She had called him her Perverse Creature, sometimes simply Creature. Bring me my Creature. Sholto had hated the nickname, but you did not correct a queen.
Sholto urged his many-legged horse forward, with his own extras echoing the theme. I thought he'd lose his temper, but his voice was as calm and arrogant as Finbar's had been. "How does a lord of the Seelie know the Dark Queen's nicknames for her guards?"
"We have spies, as you do."
Sholto nodded, his hair catching the yellow light, except that there was no light in the room quite the color that was sparkling in his hair. "But tonight I am not her creature. I am the King of the sluagh, and the Huntsman, this night. Would you refuse your oath to the Huntsman?"
"You are not the Huntsman," Finbar said.
It was the blond-haired noble who rode with us who said, "We attacked the hunt, now we ride with it. They are the huntsmen for this night."
"You are bespelled, Dacey," Finbar said.
"If the Great Hunt is a spell, then I am under it."
One of the other nobles said, "Finbar, simply give your oath that the madwoman lies, and this will be done."
Finbar said nothing to that. He just looked handsome and arrogant. In the end, it was the last defense of the sidhe, beauty and pride. I'd never had enough of either to learn the trick of it.
"He cannot give oath," Cair said, "for he would be forsworn with the wild hunt standing in front of him. It would be his doom." She sounded angry now. She, like me, had never been beautiful enough to earn the arrogance that the true sidhe had. We could have been friends, she and I, if she hadn't resented me so.
"Tell us what he promised you, Cair," I said.
"He knew I could get close enough to her to place the spell upon her."
"She lies." This came not from Finbar, but from his son, Barris.
Finbar said, "Barris, no!"
Some of the hounds had turned toward Barris where he stood at the end of the far side of the room. He had not joined his father in protecting the king. The huge dogs began to creep toward him, growling that low, threatening sound. "Liars were once the prey of the hunt," Sholto said, and he was smiling, a very satisfied smile.
I touched his arm again, to remind him not to enjoy the power too much. The hunt was a trap, and the longer we rode in it, the harder it would become to remember that.
He reached back, and took my hand in his. He nodded and said, "Think carefully, Barris. Is Cair a liar, or does she tell the truth?"
Cair spoke. "I am telling the truth. Finbar told me what to do, and promised that if I did it, he would let Barris and me be a couple. And that if I became with child, we would marry."
"Is that true, Barris?" I asked.
Barris was staring in horror at the huge white hounds as they crept forward. There was something in the way they moved that reminded me of images of lions stalking on a savannah. Barris didn't look as if he enjoyed playing the part of the gazelle.
"Father," he said, and looked at Finbar.
Finbar's face was no longer arrogant. If he'd been human, I'd have said that he looked tired, but there weren't enough lines and circles under those pretty eyes for that.
The hounds began to herd Barris with snaps of teeth and presses of huge bodies. He made a small frightened noise.
"You always were an idiot," Finbar said. I was pretty sure he wasn't talking to us.
"I know what you hoped to gain, Cair, but what did Finbar hope to gain by the deaths of my men?"
"He wanted to strip you of your most dangerous consorts."
"Why?" I asked, and I felt strangely calm.
"So that the Seelie nobles could control you once you were queen."
"You thought that if Doyle and I were dead you could control Meredith?" Sholto asked.
"Of course," she said.
Sholto laughed, and it was both a good laugh and a bad one, the kind of laugh that you might describe as evil. "They do not know you, Meredith."
"They never did," I said.
"Did you really think that Rhys, Galen, and Mistral would let you control Meredith?"
"Rhys and Galen, yes, but not the Storm Lord," she said.
"Quiet, girl," Finbar said at last. It wasn't a lie or an oath. He could order her about or insult her in safety.
"You have betrayed me, Finbar, and proved your word as worthless. I owe you nothing." She turned to me, those long, graceful hands reaching out to me, past the crowding dogs. "I will tell you all, please, Meredith, please. Faerie itself has taken care of the Killing Frost, but the Darkness and the Lord of Shadows needed to go."
"Why did you spare Rhys, Galen, and Mistral?" I asked.
"Rhys was once a lord of this court. He was reasonable, and we thought he would be reasonable again if he could come back to the Golden Court."
It wasn't just me that they didn't understand. "How long has it been since Rhys was a member of this court?"
Cair looked at Rhys. "Eight hundred years, maybe a little more."
"Did it occur to you that he might have changed in that many years?" I asked.
The look on her face was enough; it hadn't. "Everyone wants to be a noble in the Golden Court," she said, and she believed it. The proof was in her eyes, her face, so earnest.
"And Galen?" I asked.
"He is not a threat, and we cannot deprive you of all your mates."
"Glad to hear it," I said. I don't think she picked up on the sarcasm. I'd found that many of the nobles missed it.
"What of Mistral?" Sholto asked.
There was a flicker of eyes, as Cair and Barris looked at each other, then at Finbar. He did not look at anyone. He kept his face and every inch of himself to himself.
"Have you set a trap for him too?" Sholto asked.
The younger ones did the nervous look. Finbar remained impassive. I didn't like either reaction. I urged the mare forward until she nudged my cousin and Barris with the width of her chest. The dogs had herded him to stand beside his would-be bride.
"Have you sent someone to kill Mistral?"
"You are going to kill me either way," Cair said.
"You are right, but we are not here for Barris tonight. I called kin slayer, and he is not our kin." I looked at the young lord. "Do you want to survive this night, Barris?"
He looked up at me, and I saw in his blue eyes the weakness that must have made a political animal like Finbar despair. He wasn't just weak, he also wasn't bright. I'd offered him a chance to survive tonight, but there would be other nights. That I vowed.
Finbar said, "Do not speak."
"The king will save you, Father, but he has no use for me."
"The Darkness is injured badly enough that he is not at her side. It must be grave. We have missed the Shadow Lord, but if the Storm Lord dies this night, then we will be rewarded."
"If Mistral dies this night, Barris, you will follow him, and soon. This I promise you." The mare shifted underneath me, uneasy.
"Even you, Barris, must know what a promise like that means when the princess sits a horse of the wild hunt," Sholto said.
Barris swallowed hard, then said, "If she breaks the promise, the hunt will destroy her."
"Yes," Sholto said, "so you had better talk while there is still time to save the Storm Lord."
His eyes with their circles of blue showed too much white like a frightened horse. One of the hounds nudged his leg, and he made a small sound that in anyone else would have been a scream. But the nobles of the Seelie Court did not scream just because a dog nudged them.
Finbar said, "Remember who you are, Barris."
He looked back at his father. "I remember who I am, Father, but you taught me that all are equal before the hunt. Did you not call it the great leveler?" Barris's voice held sorrow, or perhaps disappointment. The fear was beginning to fade under the weight of years. Years of never quite being what his father wanted in a son. Years of knowing that though he looked every inch a Seelie noble, he was pretending as hard as he could.
I looked at Barris, who had always seemed as perfectly arrogant as all the rest. I had never seen beyond that perfect, handsome mask. Was it the magic of the hunt that was giving me clear vision, or had I simply assumed that if you looked perfectly sidhe - tall, thin, and so perfect - you would be happy and secure? Had I truly still believed that beauty was security? That if I had only been taller, thinner, less human-looking and more sidhe my life would have been... perfect?
I looked into Barris's face, saw all that disappointment, all that failure, because his beauty hadn't been enough to win him his father's heart.
I felt something I hadn't expected: pity.
"Help us save Mistral and you may yet keep your life. Keep silent, let him die, and I cannot help you, Barris."
Sholto looked at me, his face careful not to show surprise, but I think he'd heard that note of pity in my voice, and found it unexpected. I couldn't blame him. Barris had helped kill my grandmother, and tried to kill my lovers, my future kings, but it hadn't been him. He had been trying to please his father, and had bargained with the only asset he had, his pure sidhe blood and all that tall, unnaturally slender beauty.
Finbar had had nothing to bargain with with Cair except his son's pale beauty. To be accepted in the court, to have a pure-blooded sidhe lover and perhaps husband, that had been the price for Gran's life. It was the same price for which Gran had agreed to marry Uar the Cruel all those centuries ago. A chance to marry into the Golden Court - for a half human, half brownie, a once-in-a-millennium chance.
"Tell us, Barris, or you will die another night."
"Tell them," Cair said, her voice thin with fear. Which said that she didn't know what their plan was for Mistral, only that there was one.
"We found a traitor to lure him out into the open. Our archers will use cold iron arrowheads."
"Where is it to take place?" Sholto asked.
Barris told us. He confessed everything while some of the king's guards held Finbar. The King was indeed gone. He'd vanished to safety. The guards didn't hold Finbar for what he'd tried to do to me, but because his actions could be seen as acts of war against the Unseelie Court. That was a killing offense at both courts, to act without the express orders of your king or queen in such a way that it could cause war. Though part of me was certain that Taranis had agreed to the plan, although not outright. He was of a flavor of kingship to ask, "Who will rid me of this inconvenient man?" Deniability that he could take oath on. But Taranis was prey for another court, and another day.
I tried to turn my mare toward the doors and the saving of Mistral, but it shook its head. It pranced nervously, but would not move.
"We must finish here, or the hunt will not move on," Sholto said.
It took me a moment to understand, then I turned to Cair, where she stood pressed to the wall, surrounded on all sides by the great hounds. I could have used them as my weapon. They would have torn her apart for me, but I wasn't certain if I could sit through that, and it would take longer. We needed something quicker, for Mistral's sake and for my own peace of mind.
Sholto held out a spear formed of bone. Did it appear out of the air? It was one of the marks of kingship among the sluagh, but it had been lost centuries ago, long before he took the throne. It and the dagger of bone in his hand had returned with the wild magic when we had first made love.
I took the spear.
Cair began to scream, "No, Meredith, no!"
I moved the long pole until I had the weight of it. I would not throw it; there was no room and no need. "She died in my arms, Cair."
She reached out to someone behind me. "Grandfather, help me!"
His voice came, and he said what I thought he'd say, "The wild hunt cannot be stopped. And I have no time for weaklings."
Cair turned back to me. "Look what she did to you and me, Meredith! She made us into things that could never be accepted by our own people."
"The wild hunt comes to my vengeance, the Goddess moves through me, the Consort comes to me in visions; I am sidhe!" I used both hands to plunge the spear downward through her thin chest. I felt the tip grate on bone, and pushed that last inch to feel the tip break out of her body, and hit empty air on her other side. With more meat on her bones it would have been harder, but there wasn't enough to her to stop that weapon and the strength of my sorrow.
Cair stared up at me, her hands grabbing at the spear, but she couldn't seem to make her hands work quite right. Her brown eyes stared up at me, as if she couldn't quite believe what was happening. I looked into those eyes, a mirror of Gran's eyes, and watched the fear fade, to leave puzzlement. Blood trickled from her lipless mouth. She tried to speak, but no words came. Her hands fell to her side. I watched her eyes begin to fade. People say that it's light that fades when humans die, but it's not; it's them. The look in their eyes that makes them who they are, that is what fades.
I jerked the spear backward, twisting it, not to cause more damage, but simply to loosen it from its sheath of flesh and bone. When the spear had come far enough back through her body, she began to fall to the floor. I just had to hold on, and the weight of her body and gravity pulled her free of it.
I looked at the bloody spear and tried to feel something, anything. I used the hem of my gown to clean the blood away, then I handed the spear back to Sholto. I would need both hands to ride.
He took the spear from me, but leaned in and gave me a gentle kiss, the tentacles brushing me gently, like hands trying to comfort me. I could not afford that comfort yet. There was work to do, and the night would fade.
I drew back from all the comfort he offered and said, "We ride."
"To save your Storm Lord," he said.
"To save the future of faerie." I turned the mare, and this time she came easily to my hand. I set my heels in her flanks, and she bounded forward in a flare of green flame and smoke. The others spilled behind me, and the glow was as white and pure as the full moon, but here and there the gold of the Seelie banquet room seemed to have absorbed into the white, so we kept that silver and gold glow. My grandfather saluted me as I rode past. I did not return the gesture. The jeweled doors opened for us.
I whispered, "Goddess, Consort, help me, help us be in time."
We rode past the great oak, and again there was that sensation of movement, but there was no summer meadow, no illusion. One moment we rode on stone, in the halls of the Seelie, the next our horses were on grass, in the night outside the faerie mounds.
Lightning cut the darkness ahead of us. Lightning not from the sky to the ground, but from the ground to the sky. I called, "Mistral!"
We rode toward the fight, rising above the grass, gaining the sky, and rushing like wind and stars toward my Storm Lord.
We swept into the great room where just a few hours ago there had been reporters, cameras, and police. Now there were brownies cleaning up, levitating chairs and tables, and making the trash of paper and plastic roll like small tumbleweeds. They looked up at us, eyes wide. I had a moment of my heart squeezing so tightly that I could not breathe. Would they fight us, as Gran had? But none of them lifted a hand, or threw so much as a dust rag at us. Then we were past them, and the far door that had looked too small to let the horses through was suddenly just big enough. The faerie mound, the sithen, was shaping itself to our use.
But beyond the doors was a solid wall of roses and thorns. Thorns like daggers pointed at us, roses bloomed and filled the hallway with sweet perfume. It was a lovely way to defend, so terribly Seelie.
I thought we were stopped, but the wall to the right widened, with a sound like rock crying. The sithen widened the hallway, not in inches, but in horse lengths, so that the lovely and deadly vines collapsed inward, like any climbing rose will do when its support is cut. That heavy mass of thorns fell inward, and into the ringing silence after the rock had stopped moving I could hear the screams of the guards underneath the painful blanket.
Fire blossomed out from the edge of the thorns rich and orange, and the heat reached us, but it was like the winter cold. I could feel it, but it did not move me. The fire spattered into wasted sparks, curling into empty air, as if the fire itself turned away rather than hit us.
We swept through rooms of colored marble, silver-and gold-edged. I had a vague memory of coming this way in Lord Hugh's arms, when he and the nobles who had wanted me to be their queen had rescued me from the king's bedchamber. Then I'd had time to see it all, admire the cold beauty of it, and think that it wasn't a place for nature deities. No matter how beautiful, the trees and flowers inside our sithens should not be formed of metal and rock. They should live.
Two lines of guards appeared ahead of us in the hallway. The last time I'd seen them, they'd been dressed in modern business suits to make the human reporters more comfortable. One of the things that Taranis had insisted on but that Andais never had was uniforms. The tunics and trousers were every color of the rainbow, with more modern colors added in, but the tabards that covered them front and back like elegant cloth sandwich boards bore a stylized flame, burning against an orange-red background. Gold thread glittered around the edge of everything. Once Taranis had been worshipped by burning people alive. Not often, but sometimes. I'd always found it interesting that Taranis chose the flame and not his lightning for his coat of arms.
They began shooting arrows, but the shafts turned away, as if some great wind had caught them, to cast them shattering on the walls long before they reached us. I saw the fear on some of their faces then, and again that fierce joy hit me.
Sholto urged his horse up beside mine, and the corridor was simply wide enough. The hounds boiled at our feet, the riderless horses seemed to push at our backs, and the formless things that pushed and writhed at the tail of our train surged forward. I felt the ceiling go away, as if there were sky above us now. Sky enough for the sluagh's shining whiteness to rise above us like a mountain of shining nightmares.
Some of the guards ran, their nerves broken. Two fell to their knees, their minds broken. The rest fired their hands of power. Silver sparkles fell far short of us. A bolt of yellow energy rolled back upon itself, like the fire before it, as if the magic simply would not touch us. Colors, shapes, illusion, reality - they threw it all at us. These were the great warriors of the Seelie Court, and they fought, but nothing could touch us. Nothing could even slow our run.
We leaped over them as if they were a fence. One of them pulled a sword that did not glow of magic. He sliced upward at the leg of a hound and got blood. Cold iron can harm all in faerie.
The wounded hound dropped away from us, and a riderless horse went with it. I might have stopped, but Sholto urged his horse forward and mine followed. When the marble of the hallway had changed to yet another color, pink with veins of gold, we had a third rider with us. The guard who had wounded the dog was now astride the horse. It had changed slightly, and its eyes were filled with yellow shine, its hooves edged in gold. Its eyes were no less yellow than its rider's hair. The gold of its hooves echoed in the gold of the Seelie's eyes. Dacey, I thought his name was, Dacey the Golden. The horse had a gold and silk bridle on it now, and a bit between its teeth. The guard was forced to join us for the crime of fighting back, but his touch had changed the horse for him. Wild magic is like water; it seeks a shape to take.
Two more guards realized that cold iron was the only thing that could harm us. They joined the hunt. One horse turned pale colors under its white skin, as if pastel rainbows moved and flowed beneath. The last horse was green, with vines laced around it as its bridle. The vines moved and waved, and began to cover the rider on its back in a suit of living green. Turloch had the pale horse, and Yolland the green.
I'd thought to find my cousin in her room, or in a back place where the poor nobles are put, those with no political power, or favor of the king. But the hounds led us to the main doors, to the main throne room. I think if we had gone anywhere else, the guards would have given up by now, but because we went for the throne room, and because the king was presumably inside, the guards thought we were here for Taranis. They might have given up for anything short of the king, but they were oath bound to protect him. When faced by the wild hunt you don't want to be an oathbreaker. You can go from defending someone else to being fresh prey if you are not careful. So I think they did not truly fight for the king, but for themselves, and their oath. But perhaps I was wrong about that. Perhaps they saw in their king things I had never seen. Things worth fighting and dying for. Perhaps.
But it wasn't the guard's abilities that stopped the hunt in the great room just outside the throne room doors. It was the room itself. Just as there was an antechamber in the Unseelie Court that held last-ditch defenses, so was there one here in the Seelie Court. The Unseelie had their living roses and thorns that would drag any unwanted visitors to their bloody death. It was a magic very similar to the wall of thorns that had tried to stop us earlier. The magic of each court is not cleanly cut, but intermingled, though both sides would deny it.
What did the Seelie have in their chamber?
A great oak spread up and up, toward a ceiling that spilled into a distant sparkle of sky, like a piece of daylight forever stored in the limbs of the great tree. You knew you were underground, but there were glimpses of blue sky and clouds forever caught in the tree's upper limbs. It was like the things you see from the corners of your eyes. If you look directly at them, they aren't there, but yet you see them. The sky was like that, almost there. The trunk of the tree was large enough that it was quite a feat to walk around it to get to the huge jeweled doors of the throne room. But it was just a tree, so what made it the last defense?
We spilled into the great chamber at a full run, the other riders at our backs, our hounds howling, the boil of not-creatures at the end of it all pushing at us like fuel, or will. It wanted to be used, the stuff that followed in our wake.
Sunlight flared down from the leaves of the tree. Bright, hot sunlight spilled over us. For a second I thought it would burn as Taranis's hand of power could, as my cousin's hand of power had, but it was sunlight. It was real sunlight. The heat of a summer's day held forever in that room, waiting to burst into life and cover us with that life-giving warmth.
One moment we were riding over stone, the next we galloped over green grass with tall summer flowers brushing our horses' bellies. The only thing that remained was the huge oak tree spreading its branches above the meadow.
Sholto yelled, "Ride for the oak. It's real. The rest isn't."
He was so certain, so utterly certain, that it left no room for doubts in my mind. I kicked my mare forward, and rode at Sholto's shoulder. The riders in back of us came with us, with no doubts voiced. I wasn't certain whether they truly had no doubts, or whether they simply had no choice but to follow the huntsmen. In that moment, I did not care, only that we pushed forward, and Sholto knew the way.
His horse hit the far side of the oak, and it was as if a curtain peeled back. One breath we rode in a summer meadow, the next we clattered on stone, and were before the jeweled doors.
Sholto's many-legged stallion reared in front of the doors, as if he could not pass. Powerful magic indeed to stop the hunt. I'd known that the doors were old, but I hadn't realized that they were one of the ancient relics brought here from the old country. These doors had stood before the throne room of the Seelie Court when my human ancestors were still making houses out of animal skins.
I urged my mare forward slowly. The hounds whined and scratched at the door, high, eager sounds that sounded almost too puppyish to come from the thick throats of the white mastiffs. Our prey was within.
I smelled roses, and I whispered, "What would you have of me, Goddess?"
The answer came not in words, but in knowledge. I simply knew what needed doing. I turned the horse so we were sideways to the huge doors. I pressed my hand against them, a hand covered in the drying blood of my grandmother. I felt the pulse of the doors, almost a heartbeat. The truly ancient objects could have that, a semblance of life, so strong was their magic, so powerful the powers that forged them. It meant that certain objects had opinions, could make choices, all on their own; as some enchanted weapons will only fight in the hands of their choosing, so other things will listen to reason.
I pressed the blood against the door, reached for that pulse of almost life, and spoke. "By the blood of my kinswoman, by the death of the only mother I ever truly had, I call kin slayer on Cair. We are the wild hunt. Taste the blood of my loss, and let us pass."
The doors made a sound, almost a sigh, if wood and metal could make such a sound. Then the double doors began to open, revealing a slice of the glittering room beyond.
Chapter Eight
There was a confusion of colors: yellows, reds, and oranges, and over it all was gold. Gold like the metal of a piece of jewelry, edging everything. The air itself was full of sparkles, as if gold dust were permanently suspended in the air, so that the very air you breathed was formed of it.
The gold spilled around us, moved by the speed of our passage so that it rained around us, trailed behind us, mingling with the white glow of the magic so that we appeared in the midst of the court in a vision of silver and gold.
There was a moment when I saw the Golden Court spilled out before us. A moment to see Taranis on his huge golden and jeweled throne, with all his magic, all his illusion turning him to a thing of sunset colors and near-sunlike brilliance. His court spilled to either side in its standing lines, and the smaller chairs were like a garden of brilliant flowers formed of gold and silver and jewels. His people had hair in every color of the rainbow, their clothes chosen to complement and please the king. He liked the color of jewels and fire, so as Andais's court looked as if it were always ready for a funeral, Taranis's court looked like a bright version of hell.
I had a moment to see fear on my uncle's handsome face, then his guards poured around the throne. There were cries of, "He is forsworn! To the King! To the King!" Some of that glorious court poured toward the throne and prepared to aid the guards, but some got farther away from the throne, and what they thought would be the center of the fight.
I glimpsed my grandfather, Uar the Cruel, standing head and shoulders above most of the people as they fled. He was like a tree in the midst of their shining river. Looking at him as he stood, tall and every inch a war god, I realized that I had my grandfather's hair. I saw him so seldom, I hadn't realized it until that moment.
Magic flared around us in a deadly rainbow of color, fire, ice, and storm. The guards were defending their king, for whom else would I have been able to call down the wild hunt upon? So many crimes, so many traitors; I felt again that call to be at the head of the hunt forever. So simple, so painless, to ride every night and find our prey. So much simpler than the life I was trying to lead.
A hand gripped my arm, and the touch was enough. I turned to see Sholto, his face serious, his yellow and gold eyes searching my face. His touch kept bringing me back from the thought, but the fact that he knew to keep bringing me back from the brink told me that he'd had his own temptations at the head of the hunt. You can best protect others from temptation if you are, yourself, tempted.
We stood in the center of a magical storm, formed of different spells colliding. Small twisters whirled around the room, formed when powers of heat hit powers of cold. There were screams, and outside the glow of our own magic, I could see people running. Some ran toward the throne to protect their king, others fled to save themselves, and still others huddled near the walls and under the heavy tables. We watched it all through the frosted "glass" of the magic that surrounded us.
The dogs never hesitated, were never distracted by the spells of others. They had but one purpose, one prey. The hail of spells, and the storms that they themselves were causing, began to die down. The guards had finally realized that we had no interest in the throne. We moved inexorably toward the side of the room. The huge dogs shouldered their way under the tables, and spilled around a figure that was huddled against the wall.
I felt my mare's muscles bunch under me, and I had time to shift my weight forward and get a better grip on her mane before she leaped the wide table in one powerful jump.
The mare danced on the stones, her hooves raising green sparks, little licks of green and red flame coming with the smoke from her nostrils. The red glow in her eyes became small red flames that licked the edges of her eye sockets.
The dogs had trapped my cousin against the stone wall. She pressed that tall, thin sidhe frame as tightly as she could, as if the stone would give way and she would be able to escape that way. Her orange dress was very bright against the white marble wall. There would be nothing that easy for her this night. Again, that spurt of rage and deeply satisfying vengeance came to me. Her face was lovely and pale, and if she had only had a nose and enough skin to cover her mouth with lips, she'd have been as attractive as any in court. There had been a time when I had thought Cair truly beautiful, because I had not seen what she lacked as a mark of ugliness. I loved Gran's face, so her face combined with the face of a sidhe, who were all so lovely, well, Cair could be nothing but beautiful to me. But she had not felt that way, and she had let me know with the back of her hand when no one was looking, with small petty cruelties, that she hated me. I realized as I grew older that the reason was that she would have traded her tall, lithe body for my face. She made me think that being short and curved was a crime, but my face with its more-sidhe features was what she wanted. As a child, I had simply thought that I was ugly.
Now I saw her pressed against the wall, the brown eyes of our grandmother in her face, with its so-similar bone structure, and I wanted her to be afraid. I wanted her to know what she'd done and regret it, then I wanted her to die in terror. Was that petty? Did I care? No, I did not.
Cair looked up at me with my grandmother's eyes - eyes filled with terror, and behind the fear, knowledge. She knew why we were here.
I urged my horse forward, through the growling pack of hounds. I reached out to her with the dried blood on my hands.
She screamed and tried to move, but the huge white and red dogs moved closer. The threat was there in the bass rumble of their growls, the drawn lips showing fangs that were meant for rending flesh.
She closed her eyes, and I leaned forward, my hand reaching for that perfect white cheek. My hand touched her, gently. She winced as if I'd struck her. One moment the blood was dried and beginning to cake on my skin, the next it was wet and fresh. I left a crimson print of my small hand against her perfect bone structure. All the blood on my hands and gown was liquid and running again. The old wives' tale that a murder victim will bleed afresh if its murderer lays hands on it is based on truth.
I held my bloody hand up so the sidhe could see it, and cried out, "Kin slayer I name her. By the blood of her victim, she is accused."
It was my Aunt Eluned, Cair's mother, who came to the edge of the dogs, and held her white hands out to me. "Niece, Meredith, I am your mother's sister, and Cair is my daughter. What kin did she slay to bring you here like this?"
I turned to look at her, so lovely. She was my mother's twin, but they weren't identical. Eluned was just a little more sidhe than my mother, a little less human. She wore gold from head to toe. Her red hair like my own and her father's sparkled against her dress. Her eyes were the many-petaled eyes of Taranis, except that my aunt's were shades of gold and green intermingled. I stared into those eyes and had a memory so sharp that it stabbed through me from stomach to head. I saw eyes like these except only shades of green - Taranis's eyes above me, as if in a dream, but I knew it wasn't a dream.
Sholto touched my arm, lightly this time. "Meredith."
I shook my head at him, then held my bloody hand out toward my aunt. "This is your mother's blood, our grandmother's blood, Hettie's blood."
"Are you saying that... our mother is dead?"
"She died in my arms."
"But how?"
I pointed at my cousin. "She used a spell to make Gran into her instrument, to give her Cair's hand of power. She forced Gran to attack us with fire. My Darkness is still in the hospital with injuries that Gran gave him with a hand of power she never owned."
"You lie," my cousin said.
The dogs growled.
"If I lied I could not have called the hunt, and pronounced you kin slayer. The hunt will not come if the vengeance is not righteous."
"The blood of her victim marks her," Sholto said.
Aunt Eluned drew herself up to her full sidhe height and said, "You have no voice here, Shadowspawn."
"I am a king, and you are not," he said, in a voice as haughty and arrogant as her own.
"King of nightmares," Eluned said.
Sholto laughed. His laughter made light play in his hair, as if laughter could be yellow light to spill in the whiteness of his hair. "Let me show you nightmares," he said, and his voice held that anger that has passed heat and become a cold thing. Heated anger is about passion; cold anger is about hate.
I didn't think he hated my aunt specifically, but all the sidhe who had ever treated him as less. A few short weeks ago a sidhe woman had lured him to a bit of tie-me-up sex. But instead of sex, sidhe warriors had come and cut off his tentacles, skinned all the extra bits away. The woman had told Sholto that when he healed, and was free of taint, she might actually sleep with him.
The magic of the hunt changed slightly, felt... angrier. It was my turn to reach out and warn him. I'd always known that to be drafted to ride in the hunt could mean being trapped, but I hadn't realized that calling it could also trap the huntsman. The hunt wanted a permanent huntsman, or huntswoman. It wanted to be led now that it was back. And strong emotions could give it the key to your soul. I'd felt it, and now I saw Sholto begin to be incautious.
I gripped his arm until he looked at me. The blood that had left a mark so bright and fresh on Cair's face left no mark on his arm. I stared into his eyes until I saw him look back, not in anger, but with that wisdom that had let the sluagh keep their independence when most of the other lesser kingdoms had been swallowed up.
He smiled at me, that gentler version that I had only seen since he found out that he was to be a father. "Shall I show them that they did not unman me?"
I knew what he meant. I smiled back, and nodded. The smiles saved us, I think. We shared a moment that had nothing to do with the hunt's purpose. A moment of hope, of shared intimacy, of friendship as well as love.
He'd meant to show Aunt Eluned what nightmares could truly be. To show his extra bits in anger to horrify. Now he would reveal himself to prove that the nobles who had hurt him had failed to mutilate him. He was whole. More than whole, he was perfect.
One moment it was a tattoo that decorated his stomach and upper chest, the next it was the reality. Light and color played on the pale skin, gold and pale pink. Shades of pastel light shone and moved under the skin of the many moving parts. They waved like some graceful sea creature, moved by some warm tropical current. When last he'd come to this court, he'd been ashamed of this part of himself. Now he was not, and it showed.
There were screams from some of the ladies, and my aunt, though a little pale, said, "You are a nightmare yourself, Shadowspawn."
Yolland of the black hair and vine-covered horse said, "She seeks to distract you from her daughter's guilt."
My aunt looked at him and said, in a shocked voice, "Yolland, how can you help them?"
"I did my duty to king and land, but the hunt has me now, Eluned, and I see things differently. I know that Cair used her own grandmother as a stalking horse and a trap. Why would anyone do that? Have we become so heartless that the murder of your own mother means nothing to you, Eluned?"
"She is my only child," she said, in a voice that was not so sure of itself.
"And she has killed your only mother," he said.
She turned and looked at her daughter, who was still pressed against the wall in a circle of the white mastiffs, with our horses at the front of the circle.
"Why, Cair?" Not "how could you?" but simply "why?"
Cair's face showed a different kind of fear now. It wasn't fear of the dogs pressing so closely. She looked at her mother's face, almost desperately. "Mother."
"Why?" her mother said.
"I have heard you deny her in this court day after day. You called her a useless brownie who had deserted her own court."
"That was talk for the other nobles, Cair."
"You never said differently in private with me, Mother. Aunt Besaba says the same. She is a traitor to this court for leaving, first to live with the Unseelie, then to live among the humans. I have heard you agree with such words all my life. You said you took me to visit her because it was duty. Once I was old enough to have a choice, we stopped going."
"I visited her in private, Cair."
"Why did you not tell me?"
"Because your heart is as cold as my sister's, and your ambition as hot. You would have seen my care for our mother as a weakness."
"It was a weakness," she said.
Eluned shook her head, a look of deep sorrow on her face. She stepped back from the line of dogs, back from her daughter. She looked up at us. "Did she die knowing that Cair had betrayed her?"
"Yes."
"Knowing that her own granddaughter betrayed her would have broken her heart."
"She did not have the knowledge long," I said. It was cold comfort, but it was all I had to give her. I rode with the wild hunt, and truth, harsh or kind, was the only thing I could speak this night.
"I will not stand in your way, niece."
"Mother!" Cair reached out. The dogs closed in around her, giving that low bass growl that seemed to tiptoe up the spine and hit something low in the brain. If you heard that sound, you knew that it was bad.
Cair yelled again. "Mother, please!"
Eluned yelled back, "She was my mother!"
"I'm your daughter."
Eluned moved backward in her long golden dress. "I have no daughter." She walked away, and she did not look back. The nobles who had clustered by the door moved apart to let her pass. She did not stop until the far jeweled doors closed behind her. She would not fight us for her daughter's life, but she would not watch us take it either. I could not blame her.
Cair looked around frantically. "Lord Finbar, help me!" she cried.
Most of the eyes in the room went to the far table, where the king was completely hidden behind a wall of guards and sparkling courtiers. One of those was Lord Finbar, tall and handsome with his yellow, almost human-colored hair. Only the feeling of power from him and the otherworldly handsome face marked him as more. Uar was still standing to one side watching the show, but not shielding his brother. Lord Finbar was planted in front of his monarch. He was an intimate of the king's, but no friend to my aunt or my cousin, last I knew. Why would she appeal to him now?
The king was completely hidden behind the glittering, bejeweled throng that included Finbar. Maybe he was no longer even in the room, and the nobles were only using themselves as a stalking horse. But tonight, that did not matter. What did matter was why Cair would appeal to the tall blond noble who had never been her friend.
His high, sculpted-cheekboned face was set in arrogant lines, as cold as any I'd seen. It made me think of my lost Frost, when he was either at his most afraid, or most embarrassed. It was a face to hide behind, that arrogance.
Cair called out to him again, more frantically. "Lord Finbar, you promised."
He spoke then. "The girl is clearly deranged. The killing of her own matriarch is proof of that." His voice was as cold and clear as the pale line of his cheek. The words dripped surety and an arrogance bred from centuries, not of his ancestors' ruling, but of he himself ruling. Immortal and noble; it was a recipe for arrogance, and stupidity.
Cair cried out, "Finbar, what are you saying? You promised you would protect me. You swore."
"She is deranged," he repeated.
Sholto looked at me, and I understood. I spoke, and my voice carried, echoing. Tonight I held more than my own magic. "Lord Finbar, give us your oath that you did not promise my cousin your protection, and we will believe you. She is deranged."
"I do not answer to you, Meredith, not yet."
"It is not I, Meredith, who asks for your oath. Tonight I ride at the head of a different court. It is with that power that I ask a second time, Finbar. Give your oath that she lies about your protection, and no more need be said."
"I do not owe the perverse creature at your side my oath."
He had used Queen Andais's nickname for Sholto. She had called him her Perverse Creature, sometimes simply Creature. Bring me my Creature. Sholto had hated the nickname, but you did not correct a queen.
Sholto urged his many-legged horse forward, with his own extras echoing the theme. I thought he'd lose his temper, but his voice was as calm and arrogant as Finbar's had been. "How does a lord of the Seelie know the Dark Queen's nicknames for her guards?"
"We have spies, as you do."
Sholto nodded, his hair catching the yellow light, except that there was no light in the room quite the color that was sparkling in his hair. "But tonight I am not her creature. I am the King of the sluagh, and the Huntsman, this night. Would you refuse your oath to the Huntsman?"
"You are not the Huntsman," Finbar said.
It was the blond-haired noble who rode with us who said, "We attacked the hunt, now we ride with it. They are the huntsmen for this night."
"You are bespelled, Dacey," Finbar said.
"If the Great Hunt is a spell, then I am under it."
One of the other nobles said, "Finbar, simply give your oath that the madwoman lies, and this will be done."
Finbar said nothing to that. He just looked handsome and arrogant. In the end, it was the last defense of the sidhe, beauty and pride. I'd never had enough of either to learn the trick of it.
"He cannot give oath," Cair said, "for he would be forsworn with the wild hunt standing in front of him. It would be his doom." She sounded angry now. She, like me, had never been beautiful enough to earn the arrogance that the true sidhe had. We could have been friends, she and I, if she hadn't resented me so.
"Tell us what he promised you, Cair," I said.
"He knew I could get close enough to her to place the spell upon her."
"She lies." This came not from Finbar, but from his son, Barris.
Finbar said, "Barris, no!"
Some of the hounds had turned toward Barris where he stood at the end of the far side of the room. He had not joined his father in protecting the king. The huge dogs began to creep toward him, growling that low, threatening sound. "Liars were once the prey of the hunt," Sholto said, and he was smiling, a very satisfied smile.
I touched his arm again, to remind him not to enjoy the power too much. The hunt was a trap, and the longer we rode in it, the harder it would become to remember that.
He reached back, and took my hand in his. He nodded and said, "Think carefully, Barris. Is Cair a liar, or does she tell the truth?"
Cair spoke. "I am telling the truth. Finbar told me what to do, and promised that if I did it, he would let Barris and me be a couple. And that if I became with child, we would marry."
"Is that true, Barris?" I asked.
Barris was staring in horror at the huge white hounds as they crept forward. There was something in the way they moved that reminded me of images of lions stalking on a savannah. Barris didn't look as if he enjoyed playing the part of the gazelle.
"Father," he said, and looked at Finbar.
Finbar's face was no longer arrogant. If he'd been human, I'd have said that he looked tired, but there weren't enough lines and circles under those pretty eyes for that.
The hounds began to herd Barris with snaps of teeth and presses of huge bodies. He made a small frightened noise.
"You always were an idiot," Finbar said. I was pretty sure he wasn't talking to us.
"I know what you hoped to gain, Cair, but what did Finbar hope to gain by the deaths of my men?"
"He wanted to strip you of your most dangerous consorts."
"Why?" I asked, and I felt strangely calm.
"So that the Seelie nobles could control you once you were queen."
"You thought that if Doyle and I were dead you could control Meredith?" Sholto asked.
"Of course," she said.
Sholto laughed, and it was both a good laugh and a bad one, the kind of laugh that you might describe as evil. "They do not know you, Meredith."
"They never did," I said.
"Did you really think that Rhys, Galen, and Mistral would let you control Meredith?"
"Rhys and Galen, yes, but not the Storm Lord," she said.
"Quiet, girl," Finbar said at last. It wasn't a lie or an oath. He could order her about or insult her in safety.
"You have betrayed me, Finbar, and proved your word as worthless. I owe you nothing." She turned to me, those long, graceful hands reaching out to me, past the crowding dogs. "I will tell you all, please, Meredith, please. Faerie itself has taken care of the Killing Frost, but the Darkness and the Lord of Shadows needed to go."
"Why did you spare Rhys, Galen, and Mistral?" I asked.
"Rhys was once a lord of this court. He was reasonable, and we thought he would be reasonable again if he could come back to the Golden Court."
It wasn't just me that they didn't understand. "How long has it been since Rhys was a member of this court?"
Cair looked at Rhys. "Eight hundred years, maybe a little more."
"Did it occur to you that he might have changed in that many years?" I asked.
The look on her face was enough; it hadn't. "Everyone wants to be a noble in the Golden Court," she said, and she believed it. The proof was in her eyes, her face, so earnest.
"And Galen?" I asked.
"He is not a threat, and we cannot deprive you of all your mates."
"Glad to hear it," I said. I don't think she picked up on the sarcasm. I'd found that many of the nobles missed it.
"What of Mistral?" Sholto asked.
There was a flicker of eyes, as Cair and Barris looked at each other, then at Finbar. He did not look at anyone. He kept his face and every inch of himself to himself.
"Have you set a trap for him too?" Sholto asked.
The younger ones did the nervous look. Finbar remained impassive. I didn't like either reaction. I urged the mare forward until she nudged my cousin and Barris with the width of her chest. The dogs had herded him to stand beside his would-be bride.
"Have you sent someone to kill Mistral?"
"You are going to kill me either way," Cair said.
"You are right, but we are not here for Barris tonight. I called kin slayer, and he is not our kin." I looked at the young lord. "Do you want to survive this night, Barris?"
He looked up at me, and I saw in his blue eyes the weakness that must have made a political animal like Finbar despair. He wasn't just weak, he also wasn't bright. I'd offered him a chance to survive tonight, but there would be other nights. That I vowed.
Finbar said, "Do not speak."
"The king will save you, Father, but he has no use for me."
"The Darkness is injured badly enough that he is not at her side. It must be grave. We have missed the Shadow Lord, but if the Storm Lord dies this night, then we will be rewarded."
"If Mistral dies this night, Barris, you will follow him, and soon. This I promise you." The mare shifted underneath me, uneasy.
"Even you, Barris, must know what a promise like that means when the princess sits a horse of the wild hunt," Sholto said.
Barris swallowed hard, then said, "If she breaks the promise, the hunt will destroy her."
"Yes," Sholto said, "so you had better talk while there is still time to save the Storm Lord."
His eyes with their circles of blue showed too much white like a frightened horse. One of the hounds nudged his leg, and he made a small sound that in anyone else would have been a scream. But the nobles of the Seelie Court did not scream just because a dog nudged them.
Finbar said, "Remember who you are, Barris."
He looked back at his father. "I remember who I am, Father, but you taught me that all are equal before the hunt. Did you not call it the great leveler?" Barris's voice held sorrow, or perhaps disappointment. The fear was beginning to fade under the weight of years. Years of never quite being what his father wanted in a son. Years of knowing that though he looked every inch a Seelie noble, he was pretending as hard as he could.
I looked at Barris, who had always seemed as perfectly arrogant as all the rest. I had never seen beyond that perfect, handsome mask. Was it the magic of the hunt that was giving me clear vision, or had I simply assumed that if you looked perfectly sidhe - tall, thin, and so perfect - you would be happy and secure? Had I truly still believed that beauty was security? That if I had only been taller, thinner, less human-looking and more sidhe my life would have been... perfect?
I looked into Barris's face, saw all that disappointment, all that failure, because his beauty hadn't been enough to win him his father's heart.
I felt something I hadn't expected: pity.
"Help us save Mistral and you may yet keep your life. Keep silent, let him die, and I cannot help you, Barris."
Sholto looked at me, his face careful not to show surprise, but I think he'd heard that note of pity in my voice, and found it unexpected. I couldn't blame him. Barris had helped kill my grandmother, and tried to kill my lovers, my future kings, but it hadn't been him. He had been trying to please his father, and had bargained with the only asset he had, his pure sidhe blood and all that tall, unnaturally slender beauty.
Finbar had had nothing to bargain with with Cair except his son's pale beauty. To be accepted in the court, to have a pure-blooded sidhe lover and perhaps husband, that had been the price for Gran's life. It was the same price for which Gran had agreed to marry Uar the Cruel all those centuries ago. A chance to marry into the Golden Court - for a half human, half brownie, a once-in-a-millennium chance.
"Tell us, Barris, or you will die another night."
"Tell them," Cair said, her voice thin with fear. Which said that she didn't know what their plan was for Mistral, only that there was one.
"We found a traitor to lure him out into the open. Our archers will use cold iron arrowheads."
"Where is it to take place?" Sholto asked.
Barris told us. He confessed everything while some of the king's guards held Finbar. The King was indeed gone. He'd vanished to safety. The guards didn't hold Finbar for what he'd tried to do to me, but because his actions could be seen as acts of war against the Unseelie Court. That was a killing offense at both courts, to act without the express orders of your king or queen in such a way that it could cause war. Though part of me was certain that Taranis had agreed to the plan, although not outright. He was of a flavor of kingship to ask, "Who will rid me of this inconvenient man?" Deniability that he could take oath on. But Taranis was prey for another court, and another day.
I tried to turn my mare toward the doors and the saving of Mistral, but it shook its head. It pranced nervously, but would not move.
"We must finish here, or the hunt will not move on," Sholto said.
It took me a moment to understand, then I turned to Cair, where she stood pressed to the wall, surrounded on all sides by the great hounds. I could have used them as my weapon. They would have torn her apart for me, but I wasn't certain if I could sit through that, and it would take longer. We needed something quicker, for Mistral's sake and for my own peace of mind.
Sholto held out a spear formed of bone. Did it appear out of the air? It was one of the marks of kingship among the sluagh, but it had been lost centuries ago, long before he took the throne. It and the dagger of bone in his hand had returned with the wild magic when we had first made love.
I took the spear.
Cair began to scream, "No, Meredith, no!"
I moved the long pole until I had the weight of it. I would not throw it; there was no room and no need. "She died in my arms, Cair."
She reached out to someone behind me. "Grandfather, help me!"
His voice came, and he said what I thought he'd say, "The wild hunt cannot be stopped. And I have no time for weaklings."
Cair turned back to me. "Look what she did to you and me, Meredith! She made us into things that could never be accepted by our own people."
"The wild hunt comes to my vengeance, the Goddess moves through me, the Consort comes to me in visions; I am sidhe!" I used both hands to plunge the spear downward through her thin chest. I felt the tip grate on bone, and pushed that last inch to feel the tip break out of her body, and hit empty air on her other side. With more meat on her bones it would have been harder, but there wasn't enough to her to stop that weapon and the strength of my sorrow.
Cair stared up at me, her hands grabbing at the spear, but she couldn't seem to make her hands work quite right. Her brown eyes stared up at me, as if she couldn't quite believe what was happening. I looked into those eyes, a mirror of Gran's eyes, and watched the fear fade, to leave puzzlement. Blood trickled from her lipless mouth. She tried to speak, but no words came. Her hands fell to her side. I watched her eyes begin to fade. People say that it's light that fades when humans die, but it's not; it's them. The look in their eyes that makes them who they are, that is what fades.
I jerked the spear backward, twisting it, not to cause more damage, but simply to loosen it from its sheath of flesh and bone. When the spear had come far enough back through her body, she began to fall to the floor. I just had to hold on, and the weight of her body and gravity pulled her free of it.
I looked at the bloody spear and tried to feel something, anything. I used the hem of my gown to clean the blood away, then I handed the spear back to Sholto. I would need both hands to ride.
He took the spear from me, but leaned in and gave me a gentle kiss, the tentacles brushing me gently, like hands trying to comfort me. I could not afford that comfort yet. There was work to do, and the night would fade.
I drew back from all the comfort he offered and said, "We ride."
"To save your Storm Lord," he said.
"To save the future of faerie." I turned the mare, and this time she came easily to my hand. I set my heels in her flanks, and she bounded forward in a flare of green flame and smoke. The others spilled behind me, and the glow was as white and pure as the full moon, but here and there the gold of the Seelie banquet room seemed to have absorbed into the white, so we kept that silver and gold glow. My grandfather saluted me as I rode past. I did not return the gesture. The jeweled doors opened for us.
I whispered, "Goddess, Consort, help me, help us be in time."
We rode past the great oak, and again there was that sensation of movement, but there was no summer meadow, no illusion. One moment we rode on stone, in the halls of the Seelie, the next our horses were on grass, in the night outside the faerie mounds.
Lightning cut the darkness ahead of us. Lightning not from the sky to the ground, but from the ground to the sky. I called, "Mistral!"
We rode toward the fight, rising above the grass, gaining the sky, and rushing like wind and stars toward my Storm Lord.
