"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."

"Sholto," I whispered.

"Don't, Princess - I have seen you flinch away from me, too."

I moved toward him. "At first, yes. But since then I have seen you shining in your power, with a play of colors in those extras so that they shone like jewels in the sun. I have felt your body thrumming with magic and power, your nakedness inside my body." I touched his arm.

He didn't pull away.

"You did not fuck him," Segna said.

"No, but I've held him in my mouth, and if you hadn't interrupted that night, we might have done more." I had not enjoyed Sholto's extra bits, but once he had started to glow with power, his magic responding to my touch, I had seen him clearly for a shining moment. Seen him as handsome and seen that nest of tentacles not as a deformity but just as another part of him. I doubted I could have slept in the same bed with him, but sex...sex had seemed like a good idea in that moment. I tried to let him see that in my face now, but perhaps it showed, because he drew away and began to tell the story of the deception.

"I should have known it was a lie," he said. "Lady Clarisse offered to meet with me. She sent a note saying that she had glimpsed me without my shirt, and had not been able to stop fantasizing about it. I leapt at the chance, not stopping to question. I wanted so much to be with another sidhe, even if it was for only a night."

I didn't feel guilty very often - few in faerie do - but in that moment I knew that if I had taken him to my bed, he wouldn't have been vulnerable to the Seelie's trick. Or maybe he would have been more vulnerable - we'd never know.

I tried to hug him without hurting the front of his body. Segna reached around and shoved me away.

"Do not touch her again," Sholto snapped at Segna, and his voice was full of a choking anger.

"Now she'll cuddle you," Segna whined, "now she'll touch you, because the icky bits are gone. Now she wants you, just like the other sidhe bitch."

"She would have touched me that night in Los Angeles if you had left us alone," he said.

Agnes reached to the other hag and drew her back. "He is right, Segna. We bear blame in this atrocity, too."

A tear trailed down out of the sickly yellow of Agnes's eye. She turned away so I wouldn't see. Most of faerie cried when we cried, and displayed any emotion out in the open. It was only when we got close to a throne that we learned to hide what we felt. We were meant to be a freer people than this.

"Lady Clarisse," Sholto continued, "took me inside the Seelie sithen. She led me cloaked through back ways to her room. Then she told me that although the tentacles fascinated her, she also feared them. She said she could not bear to have the tentacles touch her while we made love. Here I was truly a fool - I let her tie me up, so I would not accidentally brush her with the parts she feared, and said she craved." He wouldn't meet anyone's eyes again. I watched his face redden even through the strands of his white hair. He burned with embarrassment. "When I was helpless, other sidhe slipped into the room. They did to me what you see."

"Was their king with them?" Doyle asked.

Sholto shook his head. "He is not a king who does his own dirty work. You know that, Darkness."

"Did the king know?" Doyle said.

"They would not have done this without his knowledge," I said. "They fear him too much."

"But by not being present, he has left himself room to deny it," Sholto said. "If I could see what he hoped to gain from this, I would believe it of him. But what does this accomplish?"

"Some of your people believed that Queen Andais did this to you, allowed it to be done. Perhaps this atrocity was committed with that as the intent. You are her strongest ally, King Sholto. If you had left her side, what then?" Doyle asked.

"The only reason for the king to want our queen shorn of her allies is that he means to make war. And if any of faerie make war on another, our treaty with America is breached. We will all be cast out of the last country that would take us in. If Taranis caused that, the rest of faerie would rise up against him, and he would be destroyed."

We knew that Taranis had done something almost as bad earlier in the year. He had released the Nameless, a formless being. It had been made of the discarded power that all the fey had been forced to shed in order to be allowed to remain in America - one of the restrictions placed on us when President Jefferson allowed us to immigrate. The faerie had done two weirding spells in Europe, trying to control ourselves enough to live peaceably with the humans, but we had done one more here. I don't think any of the sidhe understood what we were giving up. I was born long after the spell, so that I knew our glorious past as stories, legends, rumors.

Taranis had released that trapped magic, tried to use it to kill Maeve Reed. Reed was the golden goddess of Hollywood - and once upon a time, the goddess of cinema. She had known his secret, that he was infertile, that the problem of his childlessness wasn't in the long string of wives that he kept replacing. It was him, and he had suspected it for a hundred years, when he cast Maeve Reed out of faerie for refusing his bed. She had done so on the grounds that the last wife he'd put aside had gotten pregnant by someone else. She'd told the king to his face that she thought he was infertile, and these many years later, he'd tried to take his revenge.

One of the things that prompted Queen Andais to call me back from exile had been her discovery from human doctors that she was infertile. The ruler of a faerie land is the land, and if they are not fertile - not healthy - the land and people die. It is a very old magic, and a true one. If Taranis had known about his infertility for a hundred years without revealing it, then he had condemned his people to death, knowingly. They killed rulers for such crimes in faerie.

"You are all entirely too quiet," Sholto said to us. "You know something. Something that I need to know."

"We are not free to discuss it, not openly," Doyle said.

"You will not be allowed to be alone with him," Agnes said. "We are not such fools as that."

"I cannot argue with Agnes on this," Sholto said. Again he made that gesture as if he would stroke the missing bits. "I have put myself at the mercy of the sidhe once too often of late."

"We cannot tell this tale without our queen's permission," Doyle said. "It would earn us, at the very least, a trip to the Hallway of Mortality."

"I would not ask that of anyone," Sholto said. He lowered his head, and a sound escaped him. It was almost a sob. I wanted to hug him, but I didn't want to anger his hags any further. Besides, they were partially right - I could touch him now without flinching. Still, I saw it for what it was, something cruelly done - an amputation. I had felt those muscular tentacles on my body - just a touch, but they had been real - and they'd had uses, which he now had lost.

Sholto spoke low. "The Seelie said they were doing me a favor. That if I healed without the deformity coming back, the lady in question would keep her word and bed me for a night."

In sympathy, I started to touch him where the bits had been, then stopped because the wound was bleeding and raw, and touching it must hurt. "But the tentacles are part of you. It is like cutting off an arm, or worse."

"Do you know how often I have dreamt of looking like them?" He motioned at the men at my back. "Agnes is right. I have dreamt of looking fully sidhe for so long, and now it is as you say, I have lost pieces of myself. I have lost arms, and more."

"The queen does not know this," Doyle said.

"Are you certain of that, Darkness? Beyond doubt?"

Doyle started to simply say yes, then stopped himself. "No, I am not certain, but she has not told us otherwise; nor have rumors to the contrary touched our court."

"Wars have begun over less than this, Darkness. Wars between the courts of faerie."

Doyle nodded. "I know."

"Agnes says that Andais had to have given Taranis her approval - even if just tacitly - or Taranis would not have risked it. Do you think my hag is right? Do you think the queen allowed this to happen?"

"The sluagh are too important to the queen, King Sholto. I cannot imagine a set of circumstances in which Andais would risk such hurt to the sluagh's vows to her court. I think it more likely that this was done, at least partially, in a bid to strip our queen of your might. Why didn't you tell the queen, the court?"

"I thought she must know. That she must have given permission. I agreed with the hags - I did not think even Taranis would dare to do this without Andais's knowledge."

"I cannot argue your reasoning, but I do not believe she knows," Doyle said.

"Why didn't you tell me, Sholto?" I asked. "You once said to me that only the two of us understand what it is like to be almost sidhe. Almost tall enough, slender enough, almost - but not quite pure enough to be accepted."

He almost smiled, almost. "We may have had that in common, but as I told you in Los Angeles, no man had ever complained about your body; only envious women."

I smiled at him. "About my breasts, you were right." That earned me a smile in return, which, given that awful wound, made me breathe more easily. "But I am too short, too human looking for most of the sidhe, male or female, to let me forget it."

"I told you then: They were fools," Sholto said. He took my hand in his and raised it up for a kiss, but when he tried to bend over me, the pain stopped him in midmotion.

I pressed his hand to my cheek. "Sholto, oh, Sholto."

"I had hoped to hear tenderness in your voice, but not for this reason. Don't pity me, Meredith, I could not bear it."

I didn't know how to respond. I just held his hand against my face, and tried to think of anything I could say that wouldn't make him feel worse. How could I not feel pity?

"When did this happen, King Sholto?" Doyle asked.

Sholto looked past me to the other man. "Two days ago, just before your second press conference."

"The one during which two murders were committed," Rhys said.

Sholto looked at him. "You caught your murderer, though the human police don't know it yet. I hear you're trying to let him heal from the torture before showing him to the human police."

"Our queen made a mess of him," Rhys said.

"He is guilty?" Sholto made it a question.

"We believe so," Doyle said.

"But you are not certain?"

"What was done to your stomach, Queen Andais did to every inch of Lord Gwennin."

Sholto winced, and nodded. "One would do much to stop such pain."

"Even confess to something you did not do," Doyle said.

I looked at Doyle then. "Do you think Gwennin is innocent?"

"No. Nor do I believe he acted completely alone. Andais was using his own intestines as a leash on him, Meredith. He would have been a fool not to confess."

Sholto pressed my hand to his face. Segna tried to interfere but Agnes stopped her, and the other two guards moved between Sholto and the hags. I caught a glimpse of one of the guard's faces. Oblong eyes full of nothing but color, thin lipless mouth, and a face that was a strange mix of humanoid and nightflyer. They were like Sholto, but no one would have ever have mistaken them for sidhe. The eyes, though - the eyes were goblin eyes. The guard stared at me with his face that looked only half formed, the nostrils mere slits. I did not look away. I stared, memorized his face, for I had never seen another quite like it.

"You do not find me ugly." The guard's voice held that edge of twittering - almost bird-like, but deeper.

"No," I said.

"Do you know what I am?"

"The eyes are goblin blood, but the face is nightflyer. I'm not sure about the rest," I said.

"I am half-goblin and half-nightflyer."

"Ivar and Fyfe are my uncles on my father's side," Sholto said.

The second guard spoke for the first time. His voice was deeper, more "human." He gave me the full gaze of his face. His eyes were the same oblongs of color, a deep rich blue, but he had more nose, more lower jaw. If he'd been taller, he might have passed for a goblin. But the skin wasn't quite the right texture. "I am Fyfe, brother to Ivar." He gave the hags an unfriendly look. "Our king felt the need of some male guards, who were not conflicted about what to do with his body. We guard it, and that is all."

"This insult was not for lack of our ability to guard," Agnes said. "You, too, will be helpless when he chases his next bit of sidhe flesh. He won't want an audience, and he will go with her alone."

"Enough, Agnes. Enough, all of you." Sholto pressed my hand tighter against his face. "Why didn't I tell you, Princess? How could I admit that Seelie did this to me? That I was not warrior enough to save myself? That I fell into their trap, because they offered me what you had promised? Agnes is right in one thing: I am near blinded by my desire to be with another sidhe, so blinded that I let a Seelie woman bind me. So blinded I believed her lie that she was fascinated with my bits, but afraid of them, too." He shook his head. "I am King of the Sluagh, and even bound I should have had enough magic to save myself from this." He let go of me, stepped back.

"The Seelie have magic that we do not," Frost said.

"The sluagh have magic that the Seelie have never possessed," I said. I touched Sholto's arm. He flinched, but didn't pull away. I squeezed his arm, and wanted so badly to hold him, to try to chase this pain away. I rested my head against his bare arm. My throat closed up, and I was suddenly choking on tears. I began to weep, clutching at his arm. I couldn't stop.

He pulled me away from him enough to see my face. "You waste tears on me - why?"

I had to struggle to speak. "You are beautiful, Sholto, you are - don't let them make you think otherwise."

"Beautiful now that he's butchered," Segna said, looming over us, pushing her way past the uncles.

I shook my head. "You broke in on us in Los Angeles. You saw what I was doing with him. Why would I have been doing those things if he was less than beautiful to me?"

"All I remember from that night, white flesh, is that you killed my sister."

I had, but by accident. That night, in fear for my life, I had lashed out with magic I hadn't known I had. It had been the first night that my hand of flesh had manifested. It was a terrible power - the ability to turn living beings inside out, but they did not die. They lived on, impossibly on, with their mouths lost inside a ball of flesh, and still they screamed. I'd had to cut her to bits with a magical weapon to finally end her agony.

I don't know what shadows showed on my face, but Sholto reached for me. Reached for me, to hold me, to give comfort, and it was too much for Segna. She shoved the other two guards away as if they were straw before a storm wind. She struck at me, shrieking her rage.

Suddenly there was movement behind me, and in front of me. All the guards moved at once, but Sholto was closest. He used his own body to shield me, so Segna's razor claws sliced his own white skin. He took the brunt of the blow meant for me, and even what was left of that strike staggered me backward, numbing my arm from shoulder to elbow. It didn't hurt, because I couldn't feel it.

Sholto pushed me into Doyle's arms, and pivoted in the same movement. The movement was so fast that it surprised Segna, made her stumble nearer the edge of the lake. Sholto's good arm was a pale blur as he smashed into her. The blow sent her over the edge. She seemed to hang there in midair, her nearly naked body revealed by the wings of her cape. Then she fell.

P/S: Copyright -->www_novelfreereadonline_Com

***