“I am saying that it would be unwise to force me to use all the power I have been given by the Goddess to defend myself. And I will use every ounce of power I have to keep from being forced back to Taranis. I will not be his victim again. I will not be raped again, not even by the King of the Seelie.”
Lord Hugh had stepped back a little from the mirror. “We hear your words, Princess Meredith.”
“Queen Meredith,” I said.
He gave a little bow of his head. “Queen Meredith.”
“Then disband this ill-conceived and unneeded rescue attempt. Go back to your faerie mound and your deluded king, and leave us in peace.”
“His orders were very specific, Queen Meredith. We are to come back with you and the chalice, or not return at all.”
“He has exiled you, unless you succeed?” I asked.
“Not in those words, but we are left few choices.”
“You must kidnap me for him, or be kicked out,” I said.
Lord Hugh spread his hands wide. “Blunter than I would have put it, but not inaccurate, unfortunately, for all concerned.”
There was movement in the tent wall, and Lord Hugh said, “Please, forgive me, Queen Meredith, but I have a message.” He bowed again and left me looking at my mother.
She said, “You look lovely in a crown, Meredith, just as I always knew you would.” She even looked pleased, as if what she said were true.
I could have said a lot of things in that moment. Like “If you thought I would ever rule, why did you let Taranis nearly beat me to death as a child?” Or, “If you thought I would ever be queen, why did you give me away, and never wish to see me?” What I said out loud was “I knew you would like the crown, Mother.”
Lord Hugh came back into sight. He bowed lower. “I am told that human police and soldiers are coming. You called the humans for help.”
“I did.”
“Now if we attack, the Seelie Court could be banished from this new land, which would leave the Unseelie and the sluagh in place, and in control of the last remnants of faerie.”
I smiled sweetly at him.
“You would win all that Queen Andais has sought to win for centuries without the Unseelie, or the sluagh, striking a blow.”
“The point is to not strike the blow,” I said.
He gave the lowest bow yet, a real one, causing him to partially vanish from the view of the mirror. When he stood up, he had a look of naked admiration on his face. “It seems as if the Goddess and faerie have not chosen ill in their new queen. You have won. We will retreat, and you have given us a reason that even King Taranis will understand. He would never risk our entire court being cast from these shores.”
“I am very glad that your king will take you back, and understand that to do anything but retreat would be extremely unfortunate,” I said.
He bowed again. “I thank you for finding a way out of our dilemma, Queen Meredith. I had not heard that you played politics well.”
“I have my moments,” I said.
He smiled, bowed once more, and said, “We will leave you to be rescued by the humans then.”
“We aren’t going to leave her with the sluagh,” my mother said, as if horrified at her daughter’s fate.
“Give it a rest, Mother,” I said, and blanked the mirror.
She was still arguing with Lord Hugh, as if she believed what Taranis had told her. It was clear that Lord Hugh did not. But then if I went back as Taranis’s queen, Besaba wouldn’t be the mother of the new queen of the Seelie. She had more to gain politically, if Taranis was telling the truth.
Sholto kissed my hand, smiling. “That was very well done, My Queen.”
I grinned at him. “It helps when faerie itself crowns you, and major relics keep popping up.”
“No, Meredith,” Doyle said, “that was well played. Your father would have been very proud.”
“Indeed,” Mistral said.
And in that moment, holding a weapon that only myself and my father could have safely wielded, covered in faerie’s blessing, and knowing that my father would have been proud of me meant more than all the rest. I guess in the end you never outgrow wanting to please your parents. Since I’d never please my mother, my father was all I had left. He always had been. He and Gran.
My parents were dead now, both of them. The woman in the mirror was just the person whose body spit me out. It takes much more than that to be a mother. I prayed that I would be a good mother, and for help to keep all of us safe. There was a shower of white rose petals from nowhere, coming down like perfumed snow. I guess that was answer enough. The Goddess was with me. As help went, it didn’t get much better than that. As the Christians said, if God is with me, who can be against me? The answer, unfortunately, was almost everyone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
WE BUCKLED ON OUR NEW WEAPONS. I WAS VERY SERIOUS about putting the lock loops on my sword. As long as it was sheathed, someone could bump it without harm. If it was unsheathed, even a little, there was a chance that it would turn some poor soldier’s arm inside out.
Doyle had put the horn of madness across his body on its leather strap.
“Shouldn’t you put that in a sack or something?” Sholto asked.
“As long as I wear the horn across my body, it will not react to anyone bumping against it. It is only out of my hands that it becomes a danger.”
“How do I carry the spear so that the Seelie do not see what it is?” Mistral asked.
“I don’t think even Taranis will attack you for the spear today, in front of the humans,” I said.
“But there will be other days,” Mistral said. “He came to the Western Lands to find you, Meredith. I think for one of his items of power he might travel again.” He hefted the spear as he talked, as if judging the weight of it. It was a slender weapon, longer than Sholto’s spear of bone that I’d used to slay Cair. I realized that Mistral’s spear was almost too slender to stab or thrust with.
“Is it meant to be an actual spear, or is it like some huge lightning rod?”
Mistral gazed up at the shining spear, then smiled down at me. “You are correct. It is not meant to hack at men’s bodies. It is more a great magic wand, or staff. With this in my hand, and a little practice, I could call lightning from a clear sky miles away to strike down an enemy.”“You mean you could use it as a tool of assassination?”
He seemed to think about it, then nodded.
“Let go of that thought,” Sholto said.
Mistral and I looked at him. “What thought?” I asked.
He smiled and shook his head. “Don’t be coy, Meredith. I see your faces. You’re thinking you could use the lightning to rid us of a few enemies and no one would know. But it is too late for secrecy.”
“Why?” I asked, then realized. “Oh, the entire sluagh saw.”
“And some of them are as old as the oldest of the sidhe. They will have seen the spear in the hand of a king before, and they will know what it can do. My people are loyal, and would not betray us on purpose, I don’t believe, but they will talk. The skeletal brides, the relics of power returning; it is all too good a story not to share it.”
I sighed. “Well, that’s disappointing.”
Doyle came to me. “We need to go outside and welcome our human rescuers, but Merry, are you truly thinking of assassination as a cure for our problems?” There was no judgment on his face, just that patient waiting. That look that said that he simply wanted to know.
“Let us just say that I am no longer ruling out any solution to our problems,” I said.
He cupped my chin in his fingers, and looked deeply into my eyes. “You mean that. What is it that has made you suddenly so much harder?” Then his fingers dropped away, and his face looked uncertain. “I am a fool. You watched your grandmother die.”
I grabbed his arm, made him look at me. “I also had to watch you carried out by doctors, and thought you might die again. Taranis and the rest seemed very determined that you had to die first.”
“They fear him the most,” Sholto said.
“They tried to kill you too,” Doyle said, looking at the other man.
Sholto nodded. “But it is not me personally they fear, it is the sluagh, and my command of them.”
“Why did I get singled out then?” Mistral asked. “I have no army to command. I have never been the queen’s right or left hand. Why did they go to such lengths to kill me as well?”
“There are those who are old enough to remember you in battle, my friend,” Doyle said.
Mistral looked down, his hair falling around his face like gray clouds covering the sky. “That was very long ago.”
“But much of the old power is returning. Perhaps the oldest among both courts feared what you would do if you were your old self again,” Doyle said.
I had a thought. “Mistral is also the only storm deity we have in the Unseelie Court. The others either stayed in Europe or are Seelie.”
“That is true,” Doyle said, “but that is not your point.”
“My point is,” I said, “what if Taranis feared exactly what has happened? He knew that if his spear came back to a Seelie Storm Lord, he could command and they would give it over. But he cannot command Mistral. He cannot demand anything from the Unseelie.”
“Do you truly think that he believed this would return?” Mistral asked, holding the spear ceilingward.