Doyle sat to my right, wearing black jeans and nothing else. “The King of Light and Illusion thought the cauldron had been stolen. He nearly went to war with our court over it.” He leaned toward the table, his cup of tea still untouched in his hands. “But it hadn’t been stolen. It had merely changed.”
I sipped my own tea. “You mean the way the Black Coach of the wild hunt started its existence as a chariot, then changed to a coach when no one drove chariots anymore, and now is a big black shiny limousine?”
“Yes,” he said, and finally took a drink of his own tea. His eyes never left the chalice, as if nothing else really mattered.
“The wild magicks have a mind of their own,” Kitto said from where he huddled in the chair to my left. He held his mug of hot chocolate between both his hands the way a child will drink from an overly large cup. He had his knees tucked up to his chest, and the legs of his satin night shorts were just a thin strip of burgundy cloth.
“What do the goblins know of relics?” Rhys asked. There was a hint of his old hostility.
“We have our items of power,” Kitto said.
Rhys opened his mouth, and Doyle said, “Stop. We will not squabble tonight, not with one of the sidhe’s greatest treasures returned.”
That shut everybody up again. I’d never seen all of them at such a loss for words. “I would think all of you would be celebrating. Instead you act as if someone has died.” I knew why I was scared. I’d been around magic all my life, but I’d never had anything follow me home from a dream before. I didn’t like it. Greatest treasure or not, the idea that things in my dreams could become real and cross over to the real world was a very frightening thought.
“You still don’t understand,” Doyle said. “This is the cauldron. The cauldron that can feed thousands, and never go empty. The cauldron from which the dead warriors can rise again, alive the next day, though robbed of their speech. This is a thing of elemental power for our people, Meredith. It appeared among us one day, like the Black Coach, like so many things just appeared. Then one day it vanished, and we lost our ability to feed the masses of our followers, and for the first time we watched them starve.” He rose and turned, pressing his hands against the window’s dark glass, leaning his face so close to it that it looked as if he meant to kiss the darkness outside. “We were not in the country when the great famine hit, but if we had still possessed the cauldron I would have strapped it to my back and swum to Ireland.” For the first time I heard a bur of brogue in his voice. Most of the sidhe pride themselves on having no accent. I’d never heard Doyle sound like anything or anywhere in particular.
“Are you talking about the great potato famine?” I asked.
“Yes.” His voice was almost a growl.
He was mourning people who had died nearly two hundred years before I was born. But the pain was as real to him now as if it had been last week. I’d noticed that the immortals carry all the strong emotions—love, hate, grief—for longer than a human lifetime. It’s as if time moves differently for them, and even sitting beside them, living with them, my time and their time weren’t the same.
He spoke without turning around, as if he spoke more to the darkness outside than to us. “What do the gods do when once they could answer the prayers of their followers, then suddenly they cannot? One day they simply have to watch their people die of diseases that only weeks before they could have healed. You are too young, Meredith, and even Galen; neither of you really understands what it was like. Not your fault. Not your fault.” He spoke the last in a whisper to the glass, his face finally pressed gently to it.
I got up from my chair and went to him. He flinched when I touched his back, then moved away from the glass enough for me to slide my arms around his waist, pressing my body against his. He let me hold him, but he didn’t relax against me. I tried to give comfort, but in a way, he wouldn’t take it.
I spoke with my cheek pressed to the warm smoothness of his back. “I know that there was more than one cauldron. I know that there were three main ones. I know that they all changed form, and became cups. My father blamed it on all the King Arthur stories about the Holy Grail. If enough people believe something, then it can affect everything. Flesh affects spirit.” Somewhere in my matter-of-fact talking, Doyle began to relax against me. He began to let the hurt go, a little.
“Yes,” he said, “but the first cauldron given was the great cauldron that could do all that any could do. There were two lesser cauldrons. One could heal and feed, and the other held treasure, gold and such.” The way he said the last words showed clearly that he didn’t think that gold and such were worth nearly as much as healing and food.
“There were more cauldrons than that,” Rhys said.
Doyle pushed away from the glass enough to turn his head and look behind him at the other men. I stayed wrapped around his back. “Not real ones,” Doyle said.
“They were real, Doyle, they just weren’t given to us by the gods. Some among us had the ability to make such things.”
“They could not do what the great cauldrons could do,” Doyle said.
“No, but they didn’t disappear when the gods withdrew their favor, either.”
Doyle turned, and I had to let him go so he could pace back toward Rhys. “They did not withdraw their favor. We gave up the power to work directly with them. We gave them up, they did not give us up.”
Rhys held up his hands. “I don’t want to have this argument, Doyle. I don’t think a few centuries will make the fight any more fun. Let’s just agree to disagree. All we know for certain is that one day the great relics began to vanish. The things that the fey had made themselves, from their own magic, remained behind.”
“Until the second weirding magic,” Frost said. It was the longest sentence I’d gotten out of him since this afternoon. I’d tried to speak to him in the hall, and he’d been curt and avoided me. I was the one who had nearly died, but he was the one throwing the fit. Typical Frost.“Yes,” Nicca said in his soft voice, “and then the items we’d wrought ourselves began to break, or just stopped working. It was as if the spell drained them.”
I knew that Nicca was centuries old, but I kept forgetting until he said something that forced me to remember.
“I don’t think everyone would have agreed to the second weirding if they’d known what would happen to our wands, our staffs.” Nicca shook his head, sending his deep brown hair glimmering in the lights. “I wouldn’t have agreed.”
“Many of us would not have agreed,” Doyle said.
“If that’s true,” I said, “then how did you all agree to the weirding that made the Nameless? That was the third weirding, so you all knew what to expect. You all knew how much you could lose.”
“What choice did we have?” Rhys said. “It was either give up more of our power or be exiles without a country.”
“We could have stayed in Europe,” Frost said.
“And what,” Doyle said, “be forced out of our hollow hills to buy houses and live next door to humans? To be forced to intermarry with humans.” He looked back at me and said, “I don’t mean to insult the princess, but a little mixed blood is one thing; to be forced to marry humans is something else. Those who remained behind in Europe had to sign treaties to give up their culture.” He spread his arms and hands wide. “Without their culture and belief a people do not exist.”
“That’s why they did it,” Rhys said. “It was a way of destroying us that didn’t smack of genocide.”
“The humans were not strong enough to kill us all,” Frost said.
“No,” Rhys said, “but they were strong enough to bring us to the treaty table and force a peace that more than half of every race of the fey thought was unfair.”
“I know the facts of what happened,” I said, “but this is the first time I’ve ever heard any of you talk about the exile with this much emotion.”
“We left Europe to save what was left of faerie,” Doyle said. “Now that cup sits on the table, and it will all begin again.”
“What will begin again?” I asked.
“The Goddess gave us her gifts, the Consort gave us his gifts, then one day they were gone. How can we trust that whatever gift we are given will not abandon us at our hour of need?” Pain, anger, frustration, hope, all fought across the darkness of his face.
“I think you’re borrowing trouble,” I said. “I think that we should figure out if the cauldron still does what it used to do before we worry about it disappearing again.”
Rhys shook his head. “It never worked just because we wanted it to. It feeds us when we need to be fed. It heals when we need healing. The high holy relics are not sideshow entertainment. They only work if there’s need.”
“It’s a matter of faith,” Nicca said. “We have to have faith that it will help us when we need it.” He didn’t sound happy about it when he said it.
“Faith,” Rhys said, so full of emotion that his voice was lower than normal, thick with things unsaid. “I gave that up a long time ago, Nicca. I’m not sure I can pick it back up again.”