“THE LOOK ON YOUR FACE, MEREDITH—YOU DIDN’T KNOW. YOU really didn’t know.” His voice sounded calmer, half relieved, half reinjured, as if he hadn’t expected it.
I forced myself to look away from the wound, and at his face. The eyes were too wide, his mouth open, as if he were panting. He looked like he was in shock. I found my voice, but it was a hoarse whisper. “I did not know.” I licked my lips and tried to get hold of myself. I was Princess Meredith NicEssus, wielder of two hands of power, trying to be queen; I had to do better than this. I was huddled against Doyle, but pulled myself away. If Sholto could survive such a wound, then the least I could do was not cower in the face of it.
The high-pitched voice came from one of the shorter guards again, and Sholto spoke as if in response. “Ivar is right. The looks on all your faces make it clear—none of you knew. On the one hand, I feel less betrayed; on the other, what it tells me about the politics at work here says it’s more dangerous for our court—for both our courts.”
I stepped toward him, slowly, the way you’d approach a wounded animal. Slowly, so you don’t scare him more. “Who did this?” I asked.
“The golden court did this.”
“You mean the Seelie?”
He gave a small nod.
Doyle said, “Only Taranis himself might be able to wrest you away from your sluagh. No other noble at his court is powerful enough to take you like that.”
Sholto looked at Doyle, a long, considering look. “That is high praise from the Queen’s Darkness.”
“It is truth. The princess said it best: The sluagh are the last of the wild hunts. The last left in all of faerie. You and your people alone still have the wild magic running through your veins. It is not a small power, King Sholto.”
“We should have heard the battle even inside our own sithen,” Frost said, and there was a question in his voice.
Sholto’s eyes flicked to him, then away again, as if he suddenly found that he didn’t want to meet anyone’s eyes.
Segna the Gold’s voice whined from out of her dirty yellow hood. “What cannot be taken with force of arms, can easily be won with soft flesh.”
Sholto didn’t tell her to be quiet. He actually hung his head, so that a sweep of his own pale hair shadowed his face. I didn’t understand what Segna meant, but it had clearly hit home for him.
“I would not ask this of you,” Doyle said, “but if Taranis’s people have harmed you, then it is a direct challenge to our queen’s authority. Either he believes we will not retaliate, or he believes we are not strong enough to retaliate.”
Sholto looked up then. “Now do you understand why I thought Queen Andais had to know?”
Doyle nodded. “Because if she had not given her permission, then this attack makes even less sense.”
“Wars have begun over less,” Mistral said.
The comment earned him a glance from Sholto. “The last time I saw you, you sat in the consort’s chair, at the feet of Princess Meredith.”
Mistral bowed. “I was so honored.”
“I have sat in the chair, and it was an empty honor. Have you found it so?”
Mistral hesitated, then said, “I have found it everything I would hope it to be, and more.”
I fought not to glance back at him. His voice was so careful, I knew he saw something in the king before us that I hadn’t seen until now. He was desperate to know the touch of another sidhe; he wanted to have another’s glow of high magic to match his own. It hadn’t occurred to me that Sholto had been here in his own kingdom pining for me to keep my promise and offer him my body. Assassination attempts, murders, and more political machinations than I could keep track of had kept me from fulfilling it. But I hadn’t meant to ignore Sholto.
“I did not mean it to be an empty honor, King Sholto,” I said. “I mean to keep my promise to you.”
“Now—you will bed him now.” Segna’s voice again, like a grating whine. “It’s what the Seelie bitch said, too, that once he healed up, she’d bed him.”
I stared up at him. “You allowed someone to do this to you?”
He shook his head. “Never.”
Agnes’s voice, more cultured, more human than her sister hag’s. “Sholto, you have dreamt of being sidhe, completely sidhe, since you were small. Do not lie to someone who helped raise you.”
“I also wanted the wings of a nightflyer to come out of my back when I was small—do you remember that?”
She nodded, that head seeming too large for the narrow shoulders. “You cried when you realized you would never have wings.”
“We want many things when we are children. I admit that there were times when I wished they were gone.” He made a motion as if he would touch what was no longer there, the way an amputee will try to scratch a ghost limb. His hand fell away before it made contact with the raw ruin of his stomach.
“How did they trap you, and why did they do this?” Doyle asked.
“I am a king in my own right, not just a noble of the queen’s guard. If the Seelie did not see me as an unclean thing, I could have bedded one of their sidhe women long ago. But I am considered a worse crime than a mere Unseelie sidhe. Queen Andais calls me her Perverse Creature, and the Seelie truly believe that. I am a creature, a thing, an abomination to them.”
“Sholto,” I whispered.
“Don’t, Princess—I have seen you flinch away from me, too.”
I moved toward him. “At first, yes. But since then I have seen you shining in your power, with a play of colors in those extras so that they shone like jewels in the sun. I have felt your body thrumming with magic and power, your nakedness inside my body.” I touched his arm.
He didn’t pull away.
“You did not fuck him,” Segna said.
“No, but I’ve held him in my mouth, and if you hadn’t interrupted that night, we might have done more.” I had not enjoyed Sholto’s extra bits, but once he had started to glow with power, his magic responding to my touch, I had seen him clearly for a shining moment. Seen him as handsome and seen that nest of tentacles not as a deformity but just as another part of him. I doubted I could have slept in the same bed with him, but sex…sex had seemed like a good idea in that moment. I tried to let him see that in my face now, but perhaps it showed, because he drew away and began to tell the story of the deception.“I should have known it was a lie,” he said. “Lady Clarisse offered to meet with me. She sent a note saying that she had glimpsed me without my shirt, and had not been able to stop fantasizing about it. I leapt at the chance, not stopping to question. I wanted so much to be with another sidhe, even if it was for only a night.”
I didn’t feel guilty very often—few in faerie do—but in that moment I knew that if I had taken him to my bed, he wouldn’t have been vulnerable to the Seelie’s trick. Or maybe he would have been more vulnerable—we’d never know.
I tried to hug him without hurting the front of his body. Segna reached around and shoved me away.
“Do not touch her again,” Sholto snapped at Segna, and his voice was full of a choking anger.
“Now she’ll cuddle you,” Segna whined, “now she’ll touch you, because the icky bits are gone. Now she wants you, just like the other sidhe bitch.”
“She would have touched me that night in Los Angeles if you had left us alone,” he said.
Agnes reached to the other hag and drew her back. “He is right, Segna. We bear blame in this atrocity, too.”
A tear trailed down out of the sickly yellow of Agnes’s eye. She turned away so I wouldn’t see. Most of faerie cried when we cried, and displayed any emotion out in the open. It was only when we got close to a throne that we learned to hide what we felt. We were meant to be a freer people than this.
“Lady Clarisse,” Sholto continued, “took me inside the Seelie sithen. She led me cloaked through back ways to her room. Then she told me that although the tentacles fascinated her, she also feared them. She said she could not bear to have the tentacles touch her while we made love. Here I was truly a fool—I let her tie me up, so I would not accidentally brush her with the parts she feared, and said she craved.” He wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes again. I watched his face redden even through the strands of his white hair. He burned with embarrassment. “When I was helpless, other sidhe slipped into the room. They did to me what you see.”
“Was their king with them?” Doyle asked.
Sholto shook his head. “He is not a king who does his own dirty work. You know that, Darkness.”
“Did the king know?” Doyle said.
“They would not have done this without his knowledge,” I said. “They fear him too much.”
“But by not being present, he has left himself room to deny it,” Sholto said. “If I could see what he hoped to gain from this, I would believe it of him. But what does this accomplish?”
“Some of your people believed that Queen Andais did this to you, allowed it to be done. Perhaps this atrocity was committed with that as the intent. You are her strongest ally, King Sholto. If you had left her side, what then?” Doyle asked.
“The only reason for the king to want our queen shorn of her allies is that he means to make war. And if any of faerie make war on another, our treaty with America is breached. We will all be cast out of the last country that would take us in. If Taranis caused that, the rest of faerie would rise up against him, and he would be destroyed.”