“Get up, get up, and do not mock me!” Sholto’s words were inexplicably rage-filled.
I looked up to find that handsome face consumed with anger, twisted with it. “I do not understand — ” I began, but he didn’t give me time to finish the sentence. He strode forward, grabbed my hand, and jerked me to my feet. Doyle came with me, tightening his grip on my other hand.
Sholto’s fingers dug into my upper arm as he pulled me closer and raged inches from my face. “I did not believe Agnes. I did not believe that Andais would allow such outrage, but now I do. Now I believe it!” He shook me hard enough to make me stumble. Only Doyle’s hand kept me from falling.
I fought to keep my voice even as I said, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“Don’t you, don’t you!” He let go of me abruptly, sending me stumbling back against Doyle. Sholto dug his uninjured hand into the bandages at his chest and stomach, tearing at them.
Doyle turned his body so that I was on the other side of him, and his body would be between me and whatever was about to happen. I didn’t argue with him. Sholto was moody, but I’d never seen him like this.
“Did you come so you could see what they did? Did you want to see it?” He screamed the last, filling the cave with echoes, as if the walls themselves screamed back.
I could see what was under the bandages now. Sholto’s mother had been a noble lady of the Unseelie Court, but his father had been a nightflyer. The last time I’d seen Sholto’s upper body bare, without him wasting magic to make it look smooth and muscled, and fully sidhe, there had been a nest of tentacles starting a few inches below the breast area to stop just above his groin. He had the full set of tentacles that the nightflyers used as arms and legs, as well as the tiny suction-tipped tentacles that were secondary sexual organs. It had been these little extras that had made me avoid taking him to my bed — Goddess help me, I’d seen them as a deformity. But that wasn’t a problem now. The skin where the tentacles had been was now just raw, red, naked flesh. Whoever had done it hadn’t just chopped the tentacles off, they had shaved them away, along with most of his skin.
CHAPTER 11
“THE LOOK ON YOUR FACE, MEREDITH — YOU DIDN’T KNOW. YOU really didn’t know.” His voice sounded calmer, half relieved, half reinjured, as if he hadn’t expected it.
I forced myself to look away from the wound, and at his face. The eyes were too wide, his mouth open, as if he were panting. He looked like he was in shock. I found my voice, but it was a hoarse whisper. “I did not know.” I licked my lips and tried to get hold of myself. I was Princess Meredith NicEssus, wielder of two hands of power, trying to be queen; I had to do better than this. I was huddled against Doyle, but pulled myself away. If Sholto could survive such a wound, then the least I could do was not cower in the face of it.
The high-pitched voice came from one of the shorter guards again, and Sholto spoke as if in response. “Ivar is right. The looks on all your faces make it clear — none of you knew. On the one hand, I feel less betrayed; on the other, what it tells me about the politics at work here says it’s more dangerous for our court — for both our courts.”
I stepped toward him, slowly, the way you’d approach a wounded animal. Slowly, so you don’t scare him more. “Who did this?” I asked.
“The golden court did this.”
“You mean the Seelie?”
He gave a small nod.
Doyle said, “Only Taranis himself might be able to wrest you away from your sluagh. No other noble at his court is powerful enough to take you like that.”
Sholto looked at Doyle, a long, considering look. “That is high praise from the Queen’s Darkness.”
“It is truth. The princess said it best: The sluagh are the last of the wild hunts. The last left in all of faerie. You and your people alone still have the wild magic running through your veins. It is not a small power, King Sholto.”
“We should have heard the battle even inside our own sithen,” Frost said, and there was a question in his voice.
Sholto’s eyes flicked to him, then away again, as if he suddenly found that he didn’t want to meet anyone’s eyes.
Segna the Gold’s voice whined from out of her dirty yellow hood. “What cannot be taken with force of arms, can easily be won with soft flesh.”
Sholto didn’t tell her to be quiet. He actually hung his head, so that a sweep of his own pale hair shadowed his face. I didn’t understand what Segna meant, but it had clearly hit home for him.
“I would not ask this of you,” Doyle said, “but if Taranis’s people have harmed you, then it is a direct challenge to our queen’s authority. Either he believes we will not retaliate, or he believes we are not strong enough to retaliate.”
Sholto looked up then. “Now do you understand why I thought Queen Andais had to know?”
Doyle nodded. “Because if she had not given her permission, then this attack makes even less sense.”
“Wars have begun over less,” Mistral said.
The comment earned him a glance from Sholto. “The last time I saw you, you sat in the consort’s chair, at the feet of Princess Meredith.”
Mistral bowed. “I was so honored.”
“I have sat in the chair, and it was an empty honor. Have you found it so?”
Mistral hesitated, then said, “I have found it everything I would hope it to be, and more.”
I fought not to glance back at him. His voice was so careful, I knew he saw something in the king before us that I hadn’t seen until now. He was desperate to know the touch of another sidhe; he wanted to have another’s glow of high magic to match his own. It hadn’t occurred to me that Sholto had been here in his own kingdom pining for me to keep my promise and offer him my body. Assassination attempts, murders, and more political machinations than I could keep track of had kept me from fulfilling it. But I hadn’t meant to ignore Sholto.
“I did not mean it to be an empty honor, King Sholto,” I said. “I mean to keep my promise to you.”
“Now — you will bed him now.” Segna’s voice again, like a grating whine. “It’s what the Seelie bitch said, too, that once he healed up, she’d bed him.”
I stared up at him. “You allowed someone to do this to you?”
He shook his head. “Never.”
Agnes’s voice, more cultured, more human than her sister hag’s. “Sholto, you have dreamt of being sidhe, completely sidhe, since you were small. Do not lie to someone who helped raise you.”
“I also wanted the wings of a nightflyer to come out of my back when I was small — do you remember that?”
She nodded, that head seeming too large for the narrow shoulders. “You cried when you realized you would never have wings.”
“We want many things when we are children. I admit that there were times when I wished they were gone.” He made a motion as if he would touch what was no longer there, the way an amputee will try to scratch a ghost limb. His hand fell away before it made contact with the raw ruin of his stomach.
“How did they trap you, and why did they do this?” Doyle asked.
“I am a king in my own right, not just a noble of the queen’s guard. If the Seelie did not see me as an unclean thing, I could have bedded one of their sidhe women long ago. But I am considered a worse crime than a mere Unseelie sidhe. Queen Andais calls me her Perverse Creature, and the Seelie truly believe that. I am a creature, a thing, an abomination to them.”