Swallowing Darkness (Merry Gentry #7)(17)

Barris was staring in horror at the huge white hounds as they crept forward. There was something in the way they moved that reminded me of images of lions stalking on a savannah. Barris didn’t look as if he enjoyed playing the part of the gazelle.
“Father,” he said, and looked at Finbar.
Finbar’s face was no longer arrogant. If he’d been human, I’d have said that he looked tired, but there weren’t enough lines and circles under those pretty eyes for that.
The hounds began to herd Barris with snaps of teeth and presses of huge bodies. He made a small frightened noise.
“You always were an idiot,” Finbar said. I was pretty sure he wasn’t talking to us.
“I know what you hoped to gain, Cair, but what did Finbar hope to gain by the deaths of my men?”
“He wanted to strip you of your most dangerous consorts.”
“Why?” I asked, and I felt strangely calm.
“So that the Seelie nobles could control you once you were queen.”
“You thought that if Doyle and I were dead you could control Meredith?” Sholto asked.
“Of course,” she said.
Sholto laughed, and it was both a good laugh and a bad one, the kind of laugh that you might describe as evil. “They do not know you, Meredith.”
“They never did,” I said.
“Did you really think that Rhys, Galen, and Mistral would let you control Meredith?”
“Rhys and Galen, yes, but not the Storm Lord,” she said.
“Quiet, girl,” Finbar said at last. It wasn’t a lie or an oath. He could order her about or insult her in safety.
“You have betrayed me, Finbar, and proved your word as worthless. I owe you nothing.” She turned to me, those long, graceful hands reaching out to me, past the crowding dogs. “I will tell you all, please, Meredith, please. Faerie itself has taken care of the Killing Frost, but the Darkness and the Lord of Shadows needed to go.”
“Why did you spare Rhys, Galen, and Mistral?” I asked.
“Rhys was once a lord of this court. He was reasonable, and we thought he would be reasonable again if he could come back to the Golden Court.”
It wasn’t just me that they didn’t understand. “How long has it been since Rhys was a member of this court?”
Cair looked at Rhys. “Eight hundred years, maybe a little more.”
“Did it occur to you that he might have changed in that many years?” I asked.
The look on her face was enough; it hadn’t. “Everyone wants to be a noble in the Golden Court,” she said, and she believed it. The proof was in her eyes, her face, so earnest.
“And Galen?” I asked.
“He is not a threat, and we cannot deprive you of all your mates.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said. I don’t think she picked up on the sarcasm. I’d found that many of the nobles missed it.
“What of Mistral?” Sholto asked.
There was a flicker of eyes, as Cair and Barris looked at each other, then at Finbar. He did not look at anyone. He kept his face and every inch of himself to himself.
“Have you set a trap for him too?” Sholto asked.The younger ones did the nervous look. Finbar remained impassive. I didn’t like either reaction. I urged the mare forward until she nudged my cousin and Barris with the width of her chest. The dogs had herded him to stand beside his would-be bride.
“Have you sent someone to kill Mistral?”
“You are going to kill me either way,” Cair said.
“You are right, but we are not here for Barris tonight. I called kin slayer, and he is not our kin.” I looked at the young lord. “Do you want to survive this night, Barris?”
He looked up at me, and I saw in his blue eyes the weakness that must have made a political animal like Finbar despair. He wasn’t just weak, he also wasn’t bright. I’d offered him a chance to survive tonight, but there would be other nights. That I vowed.
Finbar said, “Do not speak.”
“The king will save you, Father, but he has no use for me.”
“The Darkness is injured badly enough that he is not at her side. It must be grave. We have missed the Shadow Lord, but if the Storm Lord dies this night, then we will be rewarded.”
“If Mistral dies this night, Barris, you will follow him, and soon. This I promise you.” The mare shifted underneath me, uneasy.
“Even you, Barris, must know what a promise like that means when the princess sits a horse of the wild hunt,” Sholto said.
Barris swallowed hard, then said, “If she breaks the promise, the hunt will destroy her.”
“Yes,” Sholto said, “so you had better talk while there is still time to save the Storm Lord.”
His eyes with their circles of blue showed too much white like a frightened horse. One of the hounds nudged his leg, and he made a small sound that in anyone else would have been a scream. But the nobles of the Seelie Court did not scream just because a dog nudged them.
Finbar said, “Remember who you are, Barris.”
He looked back at his father. “I remember who I am, Father, but you taught me that all are equal before the hunt. Did you not call it the great leveler?” Barris’s voice held sorrow, or perhaps disappointment. The fear was beginning to fade under the weight of years. Years of never quite being what his father wanted in a son. Years of knowing that though he looked every inch a Seelie noble, he was pretending as hard as he could.
I looked at Barris, who had always seemed as perfectly arrogant as all the rest. I had never seen beyond that perfect, handsome mask. Was it the magic of the hunt that was giving me clear vision, or had I simply assumed that if you looked perfectly sidhe—tall, thin, and so perfect—you would be happy and secure? Had I truly still believed that beauty was security? That if I had only been taller, thinner, less human-looking and more sidhe my life would have been…perfect? 
I looked into Barris’s face, saw all that disappointment, all that failure, because his beauty hadn’t been enough to win him his father’s heart.
I felt something I hadn’t expected: pity.
“Help us save Mistral and you may yet keep your life. Keep silent, let him die, and I cannot help you, Barris.”
Sholto looked at me, his face careful not to show surprise, but I think he’d heard that note of pity in my voice, and found it unexpected. I couldn’t blame him. Barris had helped kill my grandmother, and tried to kill my lovers, my future kings, but it hadn’t been him. He had been trying to please his father, and had bargained with the only asset he had, his pure sidhe blood and all that tall, unnaturally slender beauty.
Finbar had had nothing to bargain with with Cair except his son’s pale beauty. To be accepted in the court, to have a pure-blooded sidhe lover and perhaps husband, that had been the price for Gran’s life. It was the same price for which Gran had agreed to marry Uar the Cruel all those centuries ago. A chance to marry into the Golden Court—for a half human, half brownie, a once-in-a-millennium chance.
“Tell us, Barris, or you will die another night.”
“Tell them,” Cair said, her voice thin with fear. Which said that she didn’t know what their plan was for Mistral, only that there was one.
“We found a traitor to lure him out into the open. Our archers will use cold iron arrowheads.”
“Where is it to take place?” Sholto asked.
Barris told us. He confessed everything while some of the king’s guards held Finbar. The King was indeed gone. He’d vanished to safety. The guards didn’t hold Finbar for what he’d tried to do to me, but because his actions could be seen as acts of war against the Unseelie Court. That was a killing offense at both courts, to act without the express orders of your king or queen in such a way that it could cause war. Though part of me was certain that Taranis had agreed to the plan, although not outright. He was of a flavor of kingship to ask, “Who will rid me of this inconvenient man?” Deniability that he could take oath on. But Taranis was prey for another court, and another day.
I tried to turn my mare toward the doors and the saving of Mistral, but it shook its head. It pranced nervously, but would not move.
“We must finish here, or the hunt will not move on,” Sholto said.
It took me a moment to understand, then I turned to Cair, where she stood pressed to the wall, surrounded on all sides by the great hounds. I could have used them as my weapon. They would have torn her apart for me, but I wasn’t certain if I could sit through that, and it would take longer. We needed something quicker, for Mistral’s sake and for my own peace of mind.
Sholto held out a spear formed of bone. Did it appear out of the air? It was one of the marks of kingship among the sluagh, but it had been lost centuries ago, long before he took the throne. It and the dagger of bone in his hand had returned with the wild magic when we had first made love.
I took the spear.
Cair began to scream, “No, Meredith, no!”
I moved the long pole until I had the weight of it. I would not throw it; there was no room and no need. “She died in my arms, Cair.”
She reached out to someone behind me. “Grandfather, help me!”
His voice came, and he said what I thought he’d say, “The wild hunt cannot be stopped. And I have no time for weaklings.”
Cair turned back to me. “Look what she did to you and me, Meredith! She made us into things that could never be accepted by our own people.”