“I think we all believed we were truly gods,” Doyle said, “equal to any. When the first lessening happened, we learned different.” He strode to the table and looked almost as if he was going to pick up the cup, but he didn’t. “We learned the difference between playing gods and being gods.” He shook his head. “It is not a lesson I want to learn twice.”
“Me, either,” Rhys said.
“I was never more than I am right now,” Frost said. “I learned different lessons.” He didn’t sound any happier about his lessons than the rest did about theirs.
My father had made sure I knew the cold facts of our history, but he’d never complained, never spoke of the pain I was seeing now. I’d known intellectually that the sidhe had lost much, but I hadn’t really understood. I probably didn’t understand even now, but I would try. Goddess help me, I would try.
“Didn’t the children of Dana demand that the goblins not be gods to the humans?” Kitto asked. “Wasn’t that your rule to the very first peace treaty with us? Is it that much different from what the humans have done to all of us?”
Rhys turned toward the smaller man. “How dare you compare—” He stopped in midsentence and shook his head. He rubbed his free hand across his face as if he was tired. “Kitto’s right,” he said.
The surprise showed on all our faces, even Doyle’s. “Did you just agree with Kitto?” Nicca asked.
Rhys nodded. “He’s right. When we first landed, we were as arrogant, and as determined to break the goblins’ power, as the humans are of us.”
“I’m not sure it’s arrogance on the humans’ part,” I said. “I think it’s mostly fear that another fey-and-human war might decimate Europe.”
“But it’s still arrogance to think that they can dictate rules of conduct to a civilization that existed millennia before their ancestors stopped living in caves,” Rhys said.
To that I could add nothing, so I didn’t try. “I concede the point.”
He grinned at me. “You’re not going to argue with me?”
I shrugged. “Why should I? You’re right.”
“You know, you have a mighty democratic way of thinking for the heir to a throne.”
“I was raised for ten years out among the democratic American humans. I think it helps keep me humble.” I smiled at him, because I couldn’t not smile. Rhys had that effect on me, sometimes.
“I hate to break up the love-fest,” Galen said, “but what are we going to do about the cauldron, chalice, whatever?”
Galen was hopeless at politics, but he was very good at being practical. “What is there to do?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, and his smile faded around the edges, “do we tell anyone?”
Everyone suddenly got even more serious. “He’s right,” Doyle said. “We need to decide whom we will tell, if anyone.”
“Are you thinking of withholding this information from the queen?” Frost asked.
“Not withholding, but simply not sharing just yet.” He motioned at Kitto. “We have had a very busy day and night, Frost. Kitto has come into his hand of power. A hand of power that hasn’t been seen among us since the second weirding.”“By the way,” I asked, “what is his hand of power called? I mean, mine is the hand of flesh and the hand of blood, but what do you call the mirror thingie?”
“It is called the hand of reaching,” Doyle answered, “because it reaches between two points of communication and brings people across from one point to the other. The hand of reaching, because it reaches out to people.”
“Logical, when it’s explained,” I said.
“Most things are logical when they’re explained.” He sounded almost normal, but his face showed the strain of all the unanswered questions. Of questions perhaps not only unanswered, but unanswerable.
“The queen will want to know of Kitto’s new power,” Frost said.
“I have told her already,” Doyle said.
“And Rhys’s coming back to his godlike powers?”
Doyle nodded. “She knows.”
“When did you have time to tell her all this?”
“When you went with the princess to the main house to see Maeve.”
Frost frowned. Then something very like fear flashed through his eyes, before he gained control of it and gave a handsome blank face to Doyle. “Does she know the rest?” His voice was more uncertain than his eyes.
“That Meredith seems to have brought Maeve back into her godhead, and perhaps given you godhead for the first time? Or the part where Meredith almost died doing it? Or do you mean have I told her that the princess seems now to have the gift of magical dreaming? Or maybe you wonder if the queen knows we have the chalice. Which of those things are you wondering about, Frost?”
“He didn’t mean to make you angry,” I said.
“I don’t need you to defend me,” Frost said.
“What is wrong with you, Frost? You’ve been acting mad at me since I woke up.”
He looked down at the kitchen island in front of him. He hadn’t come closer to us than that, or perhaps it was me he avoided.
“How can you ask me that? I am your guard, your Raven, sworn to protect you from all harm, and I nearly killed you today.”
I walked over to stand beside him. I reached out to touch him, and he jerked away. “I don’t want to hurt you again.”
“You saw the end of what Maeve and I did together, Frost. I think I can touch your hand and be safe.”
He shook his head, using his long silver hair to hide his face and most of his body from me. His hair had always been the incredible color of Christmas tree tinsel, but tonight it seemed even shinier than normal. I reached out to touch that shining hair and found that it was damp.
He pulled back again, stepping away so that I couldn’t touch him. He put his back to the kitchen cabinets and hugged himself. “When your cries woke us, I was covered in ice.” He shook his head. “No, not ice, frost. I woke up covered in a rime of frost. It melted almost immediately, but it was thicker in my hair. My hair crackled like frozen tree branches when I first moved.” He looked frightened.
I reached out to him again, and he moved away. “No, Meredith, I don’t have control of these powers. It’s not a matter of relearning what I knew once. These aren’t my magicks.” He looked at me with wide, frightened eyes. “I don’t know how to be a god, Meredith. I’ve never been one before.”
“We’ll teach you,” Rhys said.
“What if I don’t want to learn?” Frost asked.
“That is a different problem, my old friend,” Doyle said. “The Goddess gives where She will, and it is not ours to question why or where.”
The fact that Doyle had been doing that very thing a few moments ago seemed to have escaped his notice—or maybe Doyle was the only one allowed to express doubts about the Goddess. Whatever the logic, or lack of it, no one pointed it out to him.
Chapter 10
“We have to tell the Queen that we have the chalice,” Rhys said.
“No.” Doyle shook his head hard enough to set the heavy braid of his hair swinging.
“She will be pissed if we keep this from her, and I for one do not want to spend another night in the Hallway of Mortality.” The Hallway of Mortality was the torture chamber for the Unseelie Court. Christians once thought the Unseelie were demons from hell. If any part of our court was the punishing hell that came to be after Dante’s Divine Comedy, it was the Hallway of Mortality.
“Nor I,” Frost said.
“Me, either,” Galen said.
“No,” Nicca said, “no.”
I leaned against the kitchen cabinets and looked at Doyle. He had been the Queen’s Darkness for more than a thousand years. Her left-hand man. Her ultimate assassin. He was loyal to her, though lately he’d begun to be loyal to me. But it still wasn’t like him to keep something this big from the queen, especially since eventually she would find out. She was the Queen of Air and Darkness; everything said in the dark would eventually float back to her. And words like cauldron, chalice, and such would prick her interest. It was just too big a secret to keep forever.
“Why don’t you want to tell the queen?” I asked.
“Because this is not our relic. This cauldron belonged to the Seelie Court. We nearly went to war over its disappearance centuries ago, when Taranis suspected us of stealing it. What would he do if he knew we actually had it?”
“The queen would never tell him,” Galen said.
Doyle gave him a look of such withering scorn that Galen took a step back. “Do you truly think that there are no spies among us? We certainly have spies at the Seelie Court, I must assume that Taranis has the same among us.” He motioned at the gleaming cup, sitting so innocently on the table. “This is simply too large a thing to keep secret. It will get out once it is known outside this room. We must think what to do when that happens.”
“What do you mean?” Frost asked.
“Taranis will demand the cup back. Do we give it to him? And if we don’t, are we willing to go to war for it?”
“We cannot give it to Taranis,” Nicca said.
We all turned and stared at him. It was so unlike him to be adamant about anything, and totally out of the question for him to say something so decisive and so potentially disastrous.