“I will try not to,” I said softly.
“I rule here, Meredith, not you.”
“I do not want to take your throne, Sholto. But I can’t help being what I am.”
“What are you?”
“I am sidhe.”
“Then if you are sidhe and not sluagh, run.”
“What?” I asked, trying to move a little away from Doyle and closer to Sholto. Doyle held me tight and wouldn’t let me do it.
“Run,” Sholto said again.
“Why?” I asked.
“I am going to call the wild hunt, Meredith. If you are not sluagh, then you will be prey.”
“No, Sholto! Let us take the princess to safety first, I beg this of you,” Doyle said urgently.
“The Darkness does not usually beg. I am flattered, but if she can call back the sun to drive away the night, I must call the hunt now. She must be the prey. You know that.”
I was startled. Was this the same man who had refused to sacrifice me just moments ago? Who had looked on me with such tenderness? The magic was indeed working powerfully in him, to make this change.
Rhys’s voice came, cautious: “You wear a crown of flowers, King Sholto. Are you so certain that the wild hunt will recognize you as sluagh?”
“I am their king.”
“You look sidhe enough to be welcome in the queen’s bed right now,” Rhys said.
Sholto touched his flat stomach with its healed flesh and tattoo. He hesitated, then shook his head. “I will call the wild magic. I will call the hunt. If they see me as prey and not as sluagh, then so be it.” He smiled, and even in the uncertain light it didn’t look particularly happy. He laughed, and the night echoed with it. There was the call of some sweet-voiced bird, sleepy from the distant shore.
Sholto spoke again. “It is a long tradition among us, Lord Rhys, to slay our kings to bring back life to the land. If by my life, or my death, I can bring my people back to their power, I will do it.”
“Sholto,” I said, “don’t. Don’t say that.”
“It is done,” he said.
Doyle started moving us toward the other side of the island. “Short of killing him, we cannot stop him,” he told me. “You both reek of the oldest of magicks. I am not certain that he can be killed right now.”
“We need to leave then,” Rhys said.
Abeloec was finally pulling himself up on the shore. He still had his cup in his hand, and it seemed as if the weight of it had kept him from coming sooner. “Don’t tell me I have to get back in the lake,” he said. “If she’s touched with the magic of creation, let her create a bridge.”
I didn’t wait. I said, “I want a bridge to the shore.” A graceful white bridge appeared, just like that.
“Cool,” Rhys said. “Let’s go.”
Sholto spoke in a ringing voice. “I call the wild hunt, by Herne and huntsman, by horn and hound, by wind and storm, and wreck of winter, I call us home.”
The dark near the roof of the cavern split open as if someone had cut it with a knife. It split open and things boiled out of it.
Doyle turned my face away and said, “Do not look back.” He began to run, dragging me with him. We all began to run. Only Sholto and his uncles stayed on the island as the night itself ripped open and poured nightmares behind us.
CHAPTER 17
WE MADE THE FAR SHORE, BUT I TRIPPED ON A SKELETON buried in the ground. Doyle picked me up and kept running. Gunshots echoed, and I saw Frost firing at Agnes as she threw herself on top of him. I had a glimpse of her face; something was wrong with it, as if her bones were sliding around under her skin. I screamed, “Frost,” as a glint of metal showed in her hand. More shots sounded. Mistral was beside Frost, blades flashing.
“Doyle, stop!” I shouted.
He ignored me, and kept running with me in his arms. Abe and Rhys were with him.
“We can’t leave Frost behind!” I said.
Doyle said, “We cannot risk you, not for anyone.”
“Call a door,” Abe said.
Doyle glanced behind us, but not at Mistral and Frost’s fight with the night-hag. He glanced higher than that. It made me look up, too.
At first my eyes perceived clouds, black and grey rolling clouds, or smoke—but that was only my mind trying to make sense of it. I thought I had seen all the sluagh had to offer, but I was wrong. What was pouring down toward the island where Sholto stood was nothing my mind could accept. When I worked for the investigative agency…sometimes at a crime scene—if it’s bad enough—sometimes your mind refuses to make an image out of it. It’s just a jumble. Your mind gives you a moment to not see this horrible thing. If you have the chance to close your eyes and not look a second time, you can save yourself. This horror will not go into your mind and stain your soul. At most crime scenes I didn’t have the choice of not seeing. But this; I looked away. If we didn’t get away, then I’d have to look.
We had to get away.
Doyle yelled, “Don’t look. Call the door.”
I did what he asked. “I need a door to the Unseelie sithen.” The door appeared, hanging in the middle of nowhere, just like before.
“No doors,” Sholto screamed behind us.
The door vanished.
Rhys cursed.
Frost and Mistral were with us now. There was blood on their swords. I glanced back at the shore, and saw Agnes—a dark, still shape on the ground.Doyle started running again, and the others joined us. “Call something else,” Abe said, near breathless trying to keep up with Doyle’s pace. “And do it quietly, so Sholto can’t hear what you’re doing.”
“What?” I asked.
“You have the power of creation,” he panted. “Use it.”
“How?” My brain wasn’t working under the pressure.
“Conjure something,” he said, and stumbled, falling. He rejoined us, blood pouring down his chest from a new cut.
“Let the ground be grass and gentle to our feet.” Grass flowed at our feet like green water. It didn’t spread over everything like the herbs on the island. The grass sprang up in a path where we ran, and nowhere else.
“Try something else,” Rhys said from the other side of us. He was shorter than the rest, and his voice showed the strain of keeping up with the longer legs of the others.
What could I call from the ground, from the grass, that could save us? I thought it and had my answer; one of the most magical of plants. “Give me a field of four-leaf clover.” The grass spread out before us wide and smooth, then white clover began to grow through the grass, until we stood in the center of a field of it. White globes of sweet-smelling flowers burst like stars across all the green.
Doyle slowed, and the others slowed with him. Rhys said it out loud: “Not bad, not bad at all. You think well in a crisis.”
“The wild hunt is of ill intent,” Frost said. “They should be stopped at the field’s edge.”
Doyle sat me down amid the ankle-high clover. The plants brushed against me as if they were little hands. “Four-leaf clover is the most powerful plant protection from faerie,” I said.
“Aye,” Abe said, “but some of what is coming does not have to walk, Princess.”
“Make us a roof, Meredith,” Doyle said.
“A roof of what?”
“Rowan, thorn, and ash,” Frost said.
“Of course,” I said. Anywhere that the three trees grew together was a magical place—a place both of protection and of a weakening in the reality between worlds. Such a place would save you from faerie, or call faerie to you—like so many things with us, there was never a yes, or no, but a yes, a no, and a sometimes.
The earth underneath us trembled as if an earthquake were coming; then the trees blasted out of the ground, showering rock and dirt and clover over us. The trees stretched to the sky with a sound like a storm or a train, barreling down, but with a scream of wood to it. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before. While the trees knit themselves together above our heads, I looked back. I could not help it.
Sholto was covered in the nightmares he had called. Tentacles writhed; bits and pieces that I had no word for flowed and struck. There were teeth everywhere, as if wind could be made solid and given fangs to tear and destroy. Sholto’s uncles attacked the creatures with blade and muscle, but they were losing. Losing, but fighting hard enough that they had given us time to make our sanctuary.
Frost moved to stand so that his broad chest blocked my view. “It is not good to gaze too long upon them.” There was a bloody furrow down one side of his face, as if Agnes had tried to claw his eyes out. I made as if to touch the wound, and he pulled away, catching my hand in his. “I will heal.”
He didn’t want me to fuss over him in front of Mistral. If it had just been Doyle and Rhys, he might have allowed it. But he would not have Mistral see him weak. I wasn’t sure how he felt about Abe, but I knew he viewed Mistral as a threat. Men don’t like to look weak in front of their rivals. Whatever I thought of Mistral, that was how Frost and Doyle saw him.
I took Frost’s hand and tried not to act concerned about his wounds. “He called the hunt. Why are they attacking him?” I asked.
“I warned him that he looked too sidhe,” Rhys said. “I wasn’t saying that just to stop him from doing something dangerous to us.”
Something warm dripped over my hand. I looked down to find Frost’s blood painting my skin. I fought the spurt of panic and asked calmly, “How badly are you hurt?” The blood was coming steadily—not good.