Swallowing Darkness (19 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHATTAN, SHOLTO’S COUSIN, WAS ON THE DOOR AS GUARD
again. His brother was not with him. A nightflyer stood on the other side of the door, flat upon the floor, its great wings pulled tight around it so that it looked like a black cloak. Standing, the nightflyer was a little shorter than I. I looked into its huge, lidless eyes, and a glance at Chattan’s own eyes showed plainly where the genetics for those large liquid dark eyes had come from.

He was Sholto’s cousin on his father’s side.

Chattan came to attention, saying, “Princess Meredith, it is good to see you up and well. This is Tarlach. He is our uncle.”

I knew what he meant by the “our.”

“Greetings, Uncle Tarlach. It is good to meet another of my king’s relatives.”

Tarlach bowed in that liquid way that the nightflyers had, as if their spines worked in ways that human spines never would. His voice had some of the sibilance of a snake goblin, but there was also a sound of wind and open sky in his words, as if the sound that wild geese make in the autumn could be mingled with the edge of a storm and become human speech.

“It has been long since a sidhe called me uncle.”

“I bear the child of your nephew and your king. By sluagh law that makes us family. The sluagh have never stood on ceremony to make their family larger. Blood calls to blood.” In the Unseelie Court that would have been a threatening line, blood to blood, but among the sluagh it simply meant that I carried Tarlach’s genetics in my body.

“You know our ways; that is good. You are your father’s daughter.”

“Everywhere I go outside the Unseelie Court I find people who respected my father. I am beginning to wish that he was a tenth less likeable and a tenth more ruthless.”

Tarlach moved what would have passed for shoulders if he’d had more of them, but I knew from my nightflyer tutor, Bhátar, that it was their nod.

“You think it would have kept him alive?” Tarlach asked.

“I plan to find out.”

“You plan to be more ruthless than your father?” Chattan asked.

I looked at the taller sluagh and nodded. “Take me to the office so that I can make a phone call, and I will try to be both practical and surprising.”

“What help is there from a phone against the Seelie?” Tarlach asked, in his wind and storm voice. Not all the nightflyers had such voices. It was a mark of royal blood among them, but more than that, it was a mark of great power. Even among the royal not all had the voice of storm.

“I will call the police and tell them that my uncle seeks to kidnap me again. They will come and rescue me, and once I am gone the Seelie danger to you all will go with me.”

“If the sluagh cannot stand against the Seelie, then the humans cannot,” Chattan said.

“But if the Seelie dare to attack human police, it is a breach of the treaty they signed when they first came to this country. It is war on American soil, and war on humans. They can be exiled from this country for that.”

“You seek not to fight, but to make it impossible for them to fight,” Tarlach said.

“Exactly.”

His slit of a mouth smiled enough that it crinkled his lidless eyes into happy smiles, or that’s how I’d always thought of it as a child when I’d made Bhátar smile that broadly. “We will take you to the office, but our king and nephew is fighting a different fight, which the human police cannot help with.”

“Let us walk as you explain,” Mistral said.

Tarlach looked up and gave the tall sidhe a look that was not friendly, though I wasn’t certain that Mistral would be able to read it. I’d grown up staring into the face of a nightflyer, so I could.

“The sidhe do not rule here.” Then he looked at Doyle.

“Once the queen ordered me to come and try to be your king, but you rejected me, and the sluagh’s vote is final. I did as I was ordered, nothing more.”

“It left a bad taste on our skin,” Tarlach said.

“The queen orders, and the ravens obey,” Doyle said, an old saying among the Unseelie that I hadn’t heard in a long time.

“Some say the princess is only a puppet for the Darkness, but you have remained silent.”

“The princess does well enough on her own.”

“Yes, she does.” Tarlach seemed to decide something, because he began to walk down the hallway. As graceful as they are in the air, they are less so on the ground.

“We heard that the sluagh had voted a new proxy king because they feared Sholto would not wake in time to deal with the Seelie,” I said as I fell in step beside him. Mistral and Doyle came in behind me, much as they would have for the queen herself. Chattan brought up the rear.

“It was more than that, Princess Meredith. The bower you had created was terribly Seelie, though the bone gate was a nice touch.”

“It was made of magic from Sholto and myself.”

“But it was mostly flowers and sunshine. That is not very Unseelie, and most definitely not very sluagh.”

“I cannot always choose how the magic will come.”

“It is wild magic, and it chooses its own way like water finding a cleft in a rock,” he said.

I simply agreed. “Is there a chance that they will try to dispossess Sholto?”

“Some fear that in joining with you he will destroy the sluagh. They have chosen a full-blooded nightflyer in his place as proxy. Only the fact that Sholto has been the best and fairest of kings saved him from waking to a kingdom that was his no more.”

“Forgive me,” Doyle said, “but could the sluagh simply vote their king out of office?”

Tarlach spoke without trying to look back at Doyle. “It has been done before.”

We walked in silence for a few minutes. The sluagh’s sithen looked much like the Unseelie’s, with dark stone walls, and floors of cold, worn stone. But the energy was different. That thrumming, pulsing energy that was always present inside a fairie mound, unless you blocked it out, was slightly different. It was like the difference between a Porsche and a Mustang. They were both high-performance cars, but one purred and the other roared. The sluagh’s sithen roared, the power calling to me louder and louder as we walked.

I stopped so abruptly that Doyle had to touch my shoulder to keep from walking into me. “What is wrong?” he asked.

“We will call, but Sholto needs me now, right now.”

“You at his side will not comfort them,” Tarlach said.

“I know I look too sidhe for them, but it is the power that they need to see. The sithen is talking. Don’t you hear it?”

Tarlach gazed up at me. “I hear it, but I am nightflyer.”

“It is roaring at me, getting louder, like the rain and wind of some great storm coming ever closer. I need to be at Sholto’s side while he faces his people.”

“You are too sidhe to help him,” Chattan said.

I shook my head. “Your sithen doesn’t think so.”

The sound pulsed against my skin, as if I were leaning against some great engine, so that it vibrated along my body. “There is no time. The sithen chose Sholto as its king, as all the sithens once did. It will not take another, and your people are not listening to it.”

“If you are truly his queen, and the sithen truly speaks, then ask it to open the way from here to the chamber of decision. It may speak to you, but does it listen to you?”

I remembered the wall trying to close against my wish, but that had been my desire, and the new king had been working against me. Now the sithen wanted something, and I wanted the same thing. We wanted to help our king.

I spoke. “Sithen, open the way to your king and the chamber of decision.”

The vibrating energy grew so loud that I could hear nothing but the roar and pulse of it. It staggered me for a moment so that I reached out to Tarlach’s slick muscled form for steadiness. Maybe it was the fact that I reached to a nightflyer and not a sidhe, but whatever the reason, the corridor in front of us ended, and became something else. It was suddenly the opening of a great cavern. I could see seats full of sluagh going up and up in a great amphitheater.

Sholto stood on the sand-covered floor facing a huge nightflyer almost as tall as himself. It unfurled its wings, and shrieked at us. Sholto turned a startled face to us. He only had time to say “Meredith” before the nightflyer launched itself at us. Tarlach threw himself skyward and met the larger form in a twisting fight that went upward.

“You should not have come,” Sholto said, but he took my hand in his as the benches began to broil into a riot. The sluagh were fighting among themselves.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE TATTOOS ON OUR HANDS FLARED TO LIFE, NOT AS REAL
roses, but as glowing, pulsing works of art. The smell of herbs and roses was thick on the air. I felt the weight of the crown as it curled through my hair, and I knew I was crowned once more with white roses and mistletoe. I did not need to look at Sholto to know that his crown was in place, a mist of herbs blooming above his pale hair.

Rose petals began to fall like rain, but they were not the pink and lavender that they had been before. White petals fell around the two of us.

It slowed the riot, stopped most of the fighting. It turned their faces to us, wide with astonishment. For a second I hoped that the fight would end, and we could talk, then the yelling began.

There were screams. “Sidhe! They are sidhe!” Others screamed “Betrayed! We are betrayed!”

Doyle was at my back, and I think he was talking to Sholto. “We need weapons.”

I raised my face to the fall of white petals, felt them hit my face like soft blows. I spoke to the air. “We need weapons.”

Sholto had the spear of bone and the dagger in his hand. I stood separate from him, unarmed. The ground underfoot shuddered, then began to split open. Doyle and Mistral grabbed me, pulled me back, but I wasn’t afraid. I could feel the power of the sithen revving like the great magical engine that it was.

The opening widened, then stopped. It was a spiral staircase as white and shining as any in the Seelie Court, leading down into the ground. The banister was formed of human bones, and larger bones of things that had never been humanoid.

When the sound of the ground opening stopped there was no sound from the sluagh. It was so quiet that the sound of the rose petals hitting the sand made a noise like snow falling.

Then into that silence came the sound of cloth and footsteps. The sound was coming from the stairs. The first figure came, clothed all in white, hidden behind a cloak and robes that hadn’t been worn in faerie for centuries. Hands as white as the cloth held a sword by its hilt. I thought at first that the hands were moonlight skin like Sholto’s and mine, but then as the figure came farther up the stairs, I saw that the hands were bones. Skeletal hands held the white handle of the sword. The blade was white too, though it gleamed like metal and not bone.

The figure was tall, as tall as any sidhe. It looked at us with a skull for a face, hidden behind a gauzy veil. Empty eye sockets stared at me. It turned to Sholto, and offered the sword.

He hesitated for a second, then reached for the hilt. He brushed the skeletal hands, but did not seem to mind. The figure walked through the growing puddle of petals, the long trailing gown like some macabre wedding dress. She, for it was she, stood to one side and waited.

The next figure looked like a duplicate of the first: all white, all bone, that gauzy veil in front of the skull face. This one offered a woven white belt and scabbard. Sholto took them, fastening the belt around his waist and sheathing the sword.

A third skeletal figure came, but this one held a shield, as white as the sword. The shield was carved with figures of skeletons and tentacled beasts. If I hadn’t seen the sluagh in their wildest form, I’d have mistaken the animals for great sea beasts, but I knew better now.

The skeleton bride offered the shield to Sholto. He took it, and once it was on his arm, the sithen roared around us. It was a sound, not just inside the head for magic, but as if the sithen were some great beast.

I would have thought that the parade of weapons was over, but I could see more of the figures on the stairs. The curve kept me from seeing how many, but I knew there were more.

The next figure came to me. She held a pale sword, not white, but almost flesh-colored in its hilt. I reached for it, but Doyle stopped me with a hand on my arm. “Touch it only with the hand that contains the hand of flesh, Meredith. It is the blade Aben-dul. Anyone who touches it who does not wield the hand of flesh will be consumed in the same way the hand of flesh destroys.”

My pulse was suddenly so hard in my throat that it hurt to breathe past it. The hand of flesh was by far my most terrible magic. I could turn someone inside out, and even meld two people together into one screaming mass. But the sidhe do not die from it. No, they live and scream.

I’d been reaching with my right hand, and it was the hand of flesh for me, but it was still good to know how terribly dangerous something was before you touched it. Always good to know that the same power that will help you will also trap you, but power is often like that, a two-edged sword.

I took the weapon, and a collective gasp went up from the sluagh. They had known what it was too, but they had shouted no warning. The hilt that had been plain moved under my hand so strongly that I had to grip it tightly to hold it. It felt alive. Images formed on the hilt of people and fey writhing and being welded together. Then it was suddenly carved with images of what the sword could do. In that moment, I knew that I could cut someone with it, as a normal sword, but I also knew that with it in my hand I could also project the hand of flesh over a distance in battle. It was the only object that I’d ever heard of in legend that was formed to be the perfect match for my hand of power. It had been lost to the sidhe long enough ago that it wasn’t even in any of the stories.

How did I know about it? My father had made certain that I memorized the list of lost objects of power. It was a litany of what we had lost as a people, but now I realized that it was also a list of what we could recover.

The next figure held a spear that sparkled silver and white, almost as if it were made of some light-reflecting jewel. There were several spears of legend, and it wasn’t until she moved around us and offered it to Mistral that I was certain of its name. It was simply Lightning. It had never been Mistral’s spear. Once it had belonged to Taranis, the Thunderer, before he tried to be too human, and turned from what he was meant to be.

Mistral hesitated, then he wrapped his big hand around the spear’s shaft. It could only be wielded by a storm deity. To touch it without the ability to call lightning meant it would burn your hand, or burn you up. I’d forgotten that about the old weapons. Most of them had only one hand that could wield them safely. To all others, they were destruction.

The spear flared in an eye-searing whiteness that left me blinking with ruined vision. Then the spear was a silver shaft, less brilliant, less otherworldly. Mistral gazed at it as if it were something wondrous, which it was. He could call lightning to his hand, and with the spear, legend had it, he could call and direct storms.

The next skeletal bride went to Doyle. He had a sword of power, and two magical daggers that had been his for many years. But I had asked for us to be armed, not just to pick and choose. Of course, what lay in the figure’s hands didn’t look like a weapon. It was a curved instrument formed of the horn of some animal I was not familiar with. It was black, and I could feel the weight of ages spilling off of it. It had a strap so it could be worn across the body.

There was a yell, and the huge nightflyer that had been fighting Tarlach landed beside us. I had a moment to wonder where Tarlach was, but then the nightflyer, the would-be king of the sluagh, reached for what lay in the skeletal hands.

Doyle did not try to stop him. None of us did.