Swallowing Darkness - Laurell K. Hamilton [40]
She reached out to someone behind me. “Grandfather, help me!”
His voice came, and he said what I thought he’d say, “The wild hunt cannot be stopped. And I have no time for weaklings.”
Cair turned back to me. “Look what she did to you and me, Meredith! She made us into things that could never be accepted by our own people.”
“The wild hunt comes to my vengeance, the Goddess moves through me, the Consort comes to me in visions; I am sidhe!” I used both hands to plunge the spear downward through her thin chest. I felt the tip grate on bone, and pushed that last inch to feel the tip break out of her body, and hit empty air on her other side. With more meat on her bones it would have been harder, but there wasn’t enough to her to stop that weapon and the strength of my sorrow.
Cair stared up at me, her hands grabbing at the spear, but she couldn’t seem to make her hands work quite right. Her brown eyes stared up at me, as if she couldn’t quite believe what was happening. I looked into those eyes, a mirror of Gran’s eyes, and watched the fear fade, to leave puzzlement. Blood trickled from her lipless mouth. She tried to speak, but no words came. Her hands fell to her side. I watched her eyes begin to fade. People say that it’s light that fades when humans die, but it’s not; it’s them. The look in their eyes that makes them who they are, that is what fades.
I jerked the spear backward, twisting it, not to cause more damage, but simply to loosen it from its sheath of flesh and bone. When the spear had come far enough back through her body, she began to fall to the floor. I just had to hold on, and the weight of her body and gravity pulled her free of it.
I looked at the bloody spear and tried to feel something, anything. I used the hem of my gown to clean the blood away, then I handed the spear back to Sholto. I would need both hands to ride.
He took the spear from me, but leaned in and gave me a gentle kiss, the tentacles brushing me gently, like hands trying to comfort me. I could not afford that comfort yet. There was work to do, and the night would fade.
I drew back from all the comfort he offered and said, “We ride.”
“To save your Storm Lord,” he said.
“To save the future of faerie.” I turned the mare, and this time she came easily to my hand. I set my heels in her flanks, and she bounded forward in a flare of green flame and smoke. The others spilled behind me, and the glow was as white and pure as the full moon, but here and there the gold of the Seelie banquet room seemed to have absorbed into the white, so we kept that silver and gold glow. My grandfather saluted me as I rode past. I did not return the gesture. The jeweled doors opened for us.
I whispered, “Goddess, Consort, help me, help us be in time.”
We rode past the great oak, and again there was that sensation of movement, but there was no summer meadow, no illusion. One moment we rode on stone, in the halls of the Seelie, the next our horses were on grass, in the night outside the faerie mounds.
Lightning cut the darkness ahead of us. Lightning not from the sky to the ground, but from the ground to the sky. I called, “Mistral!”
We rode toward the fight, rising above the grass, gaining the sky, and rushing like wind and stars toward my Storm Lord.
CHAPTER NINE
LIGHTNING CUT ALONG THE GROUND, ILLUMINATING THE DARK scene below. It was like seeing the fight through strobe flashes—bits and pieces, frozen, but nothing whole.
Mistral on his knees, one hand outstretched; arrows flying, their heads glinting dully in the hot, white light. Dark figures in the trees. Something smaller moving on the ground behind Mistral.
I tracked the flight of arrows not by sight but by the reaction of Mistral’s body as they hit him. He staggered, if you could stagger when you were already on your knees. His body hunched forward, then fell to one side, only his arm keeping him from the ground. He shot another bolt of lightning from his other hand, but it fell far from the trees, scorching the ground but not reaching his attackers.