Swallowing Darkness (Merry Gentry #7)(18)

“The wild hunt comes to my vengeance, the Goddess moves through me, the Consort comes to me in visions; I am sidhe!” I used both hands to plunge the spear downward through her thin chest. I felt the tip grate on bone, and pushed that last inch to feel the tip break out of her body, and hit empty air on her other side. With more meat on her bones it would have been harder, but there wasn’t enough to her to stop that weapon and the strength of my sorrow.Cair stared up at me, her hands grabbing at the spear, but she couldn’t seem to make her hands work quite right. Her brown eyes stared up at me, as if she couldn’t quite believe what was happening. I looked into those eyes, a mirror of Gran’s eyes, and watched the fear fade, to leave puzzlement. Blood trickled from her lipless mouth. She tried to speak, but no words came. Her hands fell to her side. I watched her eyes begin to fade. People say that it’s light that fades when humans die, but it’s not; it’s them. The look in their eyes that makes them who they are, that is what fades.
I jerked the spear backward, twisting it, not to cause more damage, but simply to loosen it from its sheath of flesh and bone. When the spear had come far enough back through her body, she began to fall to the floor. I just had to hold on, and the weight of her body and gravity pulled her free of it.
I looked at the bloody spear and tried to feel something, anything. I used the hem of my gown to clean the blood away, then I handed the spear back to Sholto. I would need both hands to ride.
He took the spear from me, but leaned in and gave me a gentle kiss, the tentacles brushing me gently, like hands trying to comfort me. I could not afford that comfort yet. There was work to do, and the night would fade.
I drew back from all the comfort he offered and said, “We ride.”
“To save your Storm Lord,” he said.
“To save the future of faerie.” I turned the mare, and this time she came easily to my hand. I set my heels in her flanks, and she bounded forward in a flare of green flame and smoke. The others spilled behind me, and the glow was as white and pure as the full moon, but here and there the gold of the Seelie banquet room seemed to have absorbed into the white, so we kept that silver and gold glow. My grandfather saluted me as I rode past. I did not return the gesture. The jeweled doors opened for us.
I whispered, “Goddess, Consort, help me, help us be in time.”
We rode past the great oak, and again there was that sensation of movement, but there was no summer meadow, no illusion. One moment we rode on stone, in the halls of the Seelie, the next our horses were on grass, in the night outside the faerie mounds.
Lightning cut the darkness ahead of us. Lightning not from the sky to the ground, but from the ground to the sky. I called, “Mistral!”
We rode toward the fight, rising above the grass, gaining the sky, and rushing like wind and stars toward my Storm Lord.
CHAPTER NINE
LIGHTNING CUT ALONG THE GROUND, ILLUMINATING THE DARK scene below. It was like seeing the fight through strobe flashes—bits and pieces, frozen, but nothing whole.
Mistral on his knees, one hand outstretched; arrows flying, their heads glinting dully in the hot, white light. Dark figures in the trees. Something smaller moving on the ground behind Mistral. 
I tracked the flight of arrows not by sight but by the reaction of Mistral’s body as they hit him. He staggered, if you could stagger when you were already on your knees. His body hunched forward, then fell to one side, only his arm keeping him from the ground. He shot another bolt of lightning from his other hand, but it fell far from the trees, scorching the ground but not reaching his attackers.
I leaned low over the mare’s white shoulders. Down there was one of the fathers of the children inside me. I would not lose another of them. I would not.
Sholto seemed to understand, because he called to me, “We will take the attackers. You see to the Storm Lord.”
I didn’t argue. Mistral was shot full of cold metal. If he was to be saved, it would have to be soon. I didn’t want vengeance in that moment. I wanted him alive.
Mistral fell on his side in the winter-ruined grass. The wind of our passage blew his hair around his body, tugged at the cloak that spilled around him. He didn’t seem to notice. He pointed his hand at the trees. Lightning flared, and we were close enough that my night vision was torn; when the light left, I was blind in the dark.
There was an art to sitting a horse when it went from flying to being on the ground again. I did not have that art complete, so it was jarring as the horse’s hooves crunched on the frosted grass. I had to sit on the horse in the dark while I waited for my vision to clear. It was spotted sight that returned, but it was enough to show me Mistral’s body terribly still on the white and black of the ground.
The only light was the green of the flames from the mare’s hooves. It was a glow that reminded me of the fire Doyle could call to his hands. I had left him hurt. If he was conscious he must be wild with worry, but one disaster at a time. Doyle had doctors, while Mistral had only me in that moment. I slipped off the mare, and the thickly frosted grass was cold under my bare feet. The night was suddenly cold. The mare pulled away from my hand, and ran after the others. I realized in that moment that I was alone. My vengeance was done; Cair was dead. I was at Mistral’s side, and the magic that had sustained me this night was leaving. It was running at Sholto’s side with the men we’d shanghaied from the Seelie Court. I could hear the hounds baying in the distance. They glowed against the trees, and gave enough light that I could see three figures, firing up into the hunt before the hounds spilled down upon them. I didn’t think Sholto would have my squeamishness. He would use the hounds.
I went to my knees on the hard winter grass. Mistral’s blood had melted the hard frost, so the ground was softer from the spill of his blood. His face was hidden by the fall of all that gray hair, not gray with age, for he would never age, but the gray of storm clouds. His hair was warm to the touch as I moved it away so I could search for the big pulse in his neck. I was never good at finding it in the wrist, and without the magic of the hunt, I was very aware that I wore only a thin gown. I was starting to shiver even as I searched for his pulse.
At first, I was afraid we were too late, but then, under my shaking fingers, I felt it. He was alive. Until I felt the pulse I hadn’t wanted to look at how badly he was hurt. It was as if I were trying to pretend, but now I had to look. I had to see what was there.
His broad shoulders, his whole strong body, was pierced with arrows. I counted five. Strangely, none of them were a heart shot. The only thing I could think was that the lightning had ruined their vision as it had ruined mine. I wasn’t certain if his hand of power had taken out a single attacker, but it had spoiled their aim, and saved his life. If I could get him medical help maybe he would not bleed to death, or die from the touch of so much cold iron plunged into the meat of his body. That alone was poisonous to the creatures of faerie.The hunt was still busy, and they were still lost in the magic of it. Only I had woken from the spell. I had seen Mistral, and saving him had meant more to me than anyone else’s death. Maybe that was why most of the legends of the wild hunt had male huntsmen. To be female was a more practical thing. Life meant more to us than death.
I knelt in the strangely warm grass, warmed by the spill of Mistral’s life, melting the hard frost. There was a shaft in the ground. I pulled it from the winter-hardened ground carefully, because I didn’t want it to break off in the ground. The shaft was wood, so the archers could handle them safely, but when I could finally see the arrowhead, my worst fears were confirmed. They hadn’t even used modern metal. It was cold forged iron—the very worst thing you could use on faerie folk.
My human blood made iron no more deadly to me than any other metal. I could touch the arrowhead with no harm done, but a wooden spear could have killed me, and Mistral would have ignored it.
If the arrows had been ordinary ones, it would have been bad to remove them without medical help, but the arrowheads themselves were poisoning him. Every moment they stayed inside his body was another moment of death leaching into his system. But if I drew the arrows out, they’d widen the wounds. Damnit, I didn’t know what to do. Some queen I was. I couldn’t even decide this one thing.
I laid the arrow that I’d pulled from the ground beside my knees, and put my hands on his side, laid my forehead on his shoulder, and prayed. “Goddess guide me. What do I do to save him?”
“Isn’t this touching?” a male voice said.
I jerked up, and Onilwyn was there, in the dark. He’d been one of my guards for a few months, but when last we left faerie he’d remained behind. Admittedly, he’d been helping wrestle my insane cousin Cel into submission at the time, but he hadn’t asked to return to my service. He had always been Cel’s friend, never mine, and I had found excuses not to bed him.
“The problem with the magic of the wild hunt,” he said, “is that it makes you lose track of important things, like leaving your princess alone in the night with no guards. I would never be so careless, Princess Meredith.”
He gave a low bow, sweeping his cloak aside, letting the thick waves of his hair fall forward. It was hard to see in the darkness, but his hair was a deep green, and his eyes were a grass green with a star-burst of liquid gold around the pupil. He was a little short and wide, built more like a square than the usual lithe guards, but that wasn’t what had kept him out of my bed. I simply did not like him, nor he me. He wanted to bed me only because it was the only way to ease his enforced abstinence. Oh, and a chance to be king to my queen. Mustn’t forget that. Onilwyn was far too ambitious to have forgotten it.