Swallowing Darkness - Laurell K. Hamilton [32]
But it wasn’t the guard’s abilities that stopped the hunt in the great room just outside the throne room doors. It was the room itself. Just as there was an antechamber in the Unseelie Court that held last-ditch defenses, so was there one here in the Seelie Court. The Unseelie had their living roses and thorns that would drag any unwanted visitors to their bloody death. It was a magic very similar to the wall of thorns that had tried to stop us earlier. The magic of each court is not cleanly cut, but intermingled, though both sides would deny it.
What did the Seelie have in their chamber?
A great oak spread up and up, toward a ceiling that spilled into a distant sparkle of sky, like a piece of daylight forever stored in the limbs of the great tree. You knew you were underground, but there were glimpses of blue sky and clouds forever caught in the tree’s upper limbs. It was like the things you see from the corners of your eyes. If you look directly at them, they aren’t there, but yet you see them. The sky was like that, almost there. The trunk of the tree was large enough that it was quite a feat to walk around it to get to the huge jeweled doors of the throne room. But it was just a tree, so what made it the last defense?
We spilled into the great chamber at a full run, the other riders at our backs, our hounds howling, the boil of not-creatures at the end of it all pushing at us like fuel, or will. It wanted to be used, the stuff that followed in our wake.
Sunlight flared down from the leaves of the tree. Bright, hot sunlight spilled over us. For a second I thought it would burn as Taranis’s hand of power could, as my cousin’s hand of power had, but it was sunlight. It was real sunlight. The heat of a summer’s day held forever in that room, waiting to burst into life and cover us with that life-giving warmth.
One moment we were riding over stone, the next we galloped over green grass with tall summer flowers brushing our horses’ bellies. The only thing that remained was the huge oak tree spreading its branches above the meadow.
Sholto yelled, “Ride for the oak. It’s real. The rest isn’t.”
He was so certain, so utterly certain, that it left no room for doubts in my mind. I kicked my mare forward, and rode at Sholto’s shoulder. The riders in back of us came with us, with no doubts voiced. I wasn’t certain whether they truly had no doubts, or whether they simply had no choice but to follow the huntsmen. In that moment, I did not care, only that we pushed forward, and Sholto knew the way.
His horse hit the far side of the oak, and it was as if a curtain peeled back. One breath we rode in a summer meadow, the next we clattered on stone, and were before the jeweled doors.
Sholto’s many-legged stallion reared in front of the doors, as if he could not pass. Powerful magic indeed to stop the hunt. I’d known that the doors were old, but I hadn’t realized that they were one of the ancient relics brought here from the old country. These doors had stood before the throne room of the Seelie Court when my human ancestors were still making houses out of animal skins.
I urged my mare forward slowly. The hounds whined and scratched at the door, high, eager sounds that sounded almost too puppyish to come from the thick throats of the white mastiffs. Our prey was within.
I smelled roses, and I whispered, “What would you have of me, Goddess?”
The answer came not in words, but in knowledge. I simply knew what needed doing. I turned the horse so we were sideways to the huge doors. I pressed my hand against them, a hand covered in the drying blood of my grandmother. I felt the pulse of the doors, almost a heartbeat. The