Swallowing Darkness

Chapter Eighteen

Chattan, Sholto's cousin, was on the door as guard again. His brother was not with him. A nightflyer stood on the other side of the door, flat upon the floor, its great wings pulled tight around it so that it looked like a black cloak. Standing, the nightflyer was a little shorter than I. I looked into its huge, lidless eyes, and a glance at Chattan's own eyes showed plainly where the genetics for those large liquid dark eyes had come from.

He was Sholto's cousin on his father's side.

Chattan came to attention, saying, "Princess Meredith, it is good to see you up and well. This is Tarlach. He is our uncle."

I knew what he meant by the "our."

"Greetings, Uncle Tarlach. It is good to meet another of my king's relatives."

Tarlach bowed in that liquid way that the nightflyers had, as if their spines worked in ways that human spines never would. His voice had some of the sibilance of a snake goblin, but there was also a sound of wind and open sky in his words, as if the sound that wild geese make in the autumn could be mingled with the edge of a storm and become human speech.

"It has been long since a sidhe called me uncle."

"I bear the child of your nephew and your king. By sluagh law that makes us family. The sluagh have never stood on ceremony to make their family larger. Blood calls to blood." In the Unseelie Court that would have been a threatening line, blood to blood, but among the sluagh it simply meant that I carried Tarlach's genetics in my body.

"You know our ways; that is good. You are your father's daughter."

"Everywhere I go outside the Unseelie Court I find people who respected my father. I am beginning to wish that he was a tenth less likeable and a tenth more ruthless."

Tarlach moved what would have passed for shoulders if he'd had more of them, but I knew from my nightflyer tutor, Bhátar, that it was their nod.

"You think it would have kept him alive?" Tarlach asked.

"I plan to find out."

"You plan to be more ruthless than your father?" Chattan asked.

I looked at the taller sluagh and nodded. "Take me to the office so that I can make a phone call, and I will try to be both practical and surprising."

"What help is there from a phone against the Seelie?" Tarlach asked, in his wind and storm voice. Not all the nightflyers had such voices. It was a mark of royal blood among them, but more than that, it was a mark of great power. Even among the royal not all had the voice of storm.

"I will call the police and tell them that my uncle seeks to kidnap me again. They will come and rescue me, and once I am gone the Seelie danger to you all will go with me."

"If the sluagh cannot stand against the Seelie, then the humans cannot," Chattan said.

"But if the Seelie dare to attack human police, it is a breach of the treaty they signed when they first came to this country. It is war on American soil, and war on humans. They can be exiled from this country for that."

"You seek not to fight, but to make it impossible for them to fight," Tarlach said.

"Exactly."

His slit of a mouth smiled enough that it crinkled his lidless eyes into happy smiles, or that's how I'd always thought of it as a child when I'd made Bhátar smile that broadly. "We will take you to the office, but our king and nephew is fighting a different fight, which the human police cannot help with."

"Let us walk as you explain," Mistral said.

Tarlach looked up and gave the tall sidhe a look that was not friendly, though I wasn't certain that Mistral would be able to read it. I'd grown up staring into the face of a nightflyer, so I could.

"The sidhe do not rule here." Then he looked at Doyle.

"Once the queen ordered me to come and try to be your king, but you rejected me, and the sluagh's vote is final. I did as I was ordered, nothing more."

"It left a bad taste on our skin," Tarlach said.

"The queen orders, and the ravens obey," Doyle said, an old saying among the Unseelie that I hadn't heard in a long time.

"Some say the princess is only a puppet for the Darkness, but you have remained silent."

"The princess does well enough on her own."

"Yes, she does." Tarlach seemed to decide something, because he began to walk down the hallway. As graceful as they are in the air, they are less so on the ground.

"We heard that the sluagh had voted a new proxy king because they feared Sholto would not wake in time to deal with the Seelie," I said as I fell in step beside him. Mistral and Doyle came in behind me, much as they would have for the queen herself. Chattan brought up the rear.

"It was more than that, Princess Meredith. The bower you had created was terribly Seelie, though the bone gate was a nice touch."

"It was made of magic from Sholto and myself."

"But it was mostly flowers and sunshine. That is not very Unseelie, and most definitely not very sluagh."

"I cannot always choose how the magic will come."

"It is wild magic, and it chooses its own way like water finding a cleft in a rock," he said.

I simply agreed. "Is there a chance that they will try to dispossess Sholto?"

"Some fear that in joining with you he will destroy the sluagh. They have chosen a full-blooded nightflyer in his place as proxy. Only the fact that Sholto has been the best and fairest of kings saved him from waking to a kingdom that was his no more."

"Forgive me," Doyle said, "but could the sluagh simply vote their king out of office?"

Tarlach spoke without trying to look back at Doyle. "It has been done before."

We walked in silence for a few minutes. The sluagh's sithen looked much like the Unseelie's, with dark stone walls, and floors of cold, worn stone. But the energy was different. That thrumming, pulsing energy that was always present inside a fairie mound, unless you blocked it out, was slightly different. It was like the difference between a Porsche and a Mustang. They were both high-performance cars, but one purred and the other roared. The sluagh's sithen roared, the power calling to me louder and louder as we walked.

I stopped so abruptly that Doyle had to touch my shoulder to keep from walking into me. "What is wrong?" he asked.

"We will call, but Sholto needs me now, right now."

"You at his side will not comfort them," Tarlach said.

"I know I look too sidhe for them, but it is the power that they need to see. The sithen is talking. Don't you hear it?"

Tarlach gazed up at me. "I hear it, but I am nightflyer."

"It is roaring at me, getting louder, like the rain and wind of some great storm coming ever closer. I need to be at Sholto's side while he faces his people."

"You are too sidhe to help him," Chattan said.

I shook my head. "Your sithen doesn't think so."

The sound pulsed against my skin, as if I were leaning against some great engine, so that it vibrated along my body. "There is no time. The sithen chose Sholto as its king, as all the sithens once did. It will not take another, and your people are not listening to it."

"If you are truly his queen, and the sithen truly speaks, then ask it to open the way from here to the chamber of decision. It may speak to you, but does it listen to you?"

I remembered the wall trying to close against my wish, but that had been my desire, and the new king had been working against me. Now the sithen wanted something, and I wanted the same thing. We wanted to help our king.

I spoke. "Sithen, open the way to your king and the chamber of decision."

The vibrating energy grew so loud that I could hear nothing but the roar and pulse of it. It staggered me for a moment so that I reached out to Tarlach's slick muscled form for steadiness. Maybe it was the fact that I reached to a nightflyer and not a sidhe, but whatever the reason, the corridor in front of us ended, and became something else. It was suddenly the opening of a great cavern. I could see seats full of sluagh going up and up in a great amphitheater.

Sholto stood on the sand-covered floor facing a huge nightflyer almost as tall as himself. It unfurled its wings, and shrieked at us. Sholto turned a startled face to us. He only had time to say "Meredith" before the nightflyer launched itself at us. Tarlach threw himself skyward and met the larger form in a twisting fight that went upward.

"You should not have come," Sholto said, but he took my hand in his as the benches began to broil into a riot. The sluagh were fighting among themselves.