Swallowing Darkness - Laurell K. Hamilton [42]
My human blood made iron no more deadly to me than any other metal. I could touch the arrowhead with no harm done, but a wooden spear could have killed me, and Mistral would have ignored it.
If the arrows had been ordinary ones, it would have been bad to remove them without medical help, but the arrowheads themselves were poisoning him. Every moment they stayed inside his body was another moment of death leaching into his system. But if I drew the arrows out, they’d widen the wounds. Damnit, I didn’t know what to do. Some queen I was. I couldn’t even decide this one thing.
I laid the arrow that I’d pulled from the ground beside my knees, and put my hands on his side, laid my forehead on his shoulder, and prayed. “Goddess guide me. What do I do to save him?”
“Isn’t this touching?” a male voice said.
I jerked up, and Onilwyn was there, in the dark. He’d been one of my guards for a few months, but when last we left faerie he’d remained behind. Admittedly, he’d been helping wrestle my insane cousin Cel into submission at the time, but he hadn’t asked to return to my service. He had always been Cel’s friend, never mine, and I had found excuses not to bed him.
“The problem with the magic of the wild hunt,” he said, “is that it makes you lose track of important things, like leaving your princess alone in the night with no guards. I would never be so careless, Princess Meredith.”
He gave a low bow, sweeping his cloak aside, letting the thick waves of his hair fall forward. It was hard to see in the darkness, but his hair was a deep green, and his eyes were a grass green with a star-burst of liquid gold around the pupil. He was a little short and wide, built more like a square than the usual lithe guards, but that wasn’t what had kept him out of my bed. I simply did not like him, nor he me. He wanted to bed me only because it was the only way to ease his enforced abstinence. Oh, and a chance to be king to my queen. Mustn’t forget that. Onilwyn was far too ambitious to have forgotten it.
“I applaud your sense of duty, Onilwyn. Contact the Unseelie mound, have them send healers, and help move Mistral someplace warm.”
“Why would I do that?” he asked. He loomed over us in his thick winter cloak, a stray lock of hair blowing across his cheek, as the cold wind began to play along our skin. I looked up into his face, and the clouds parted in that wind, so that I had enough moonlight to see his face clearly, and what I saw put my pulse into my throat.
I shivered, but it wasn’t just from the cold. I saw death on Onilwyn’s face, death and deep satisfaction, almost happiness.
“Onilwyn,” I said, “do as I command.” But my voice betrayed my fear.
He laughed softly. “I think not.” He swept back the heavy cloak, his hand seeking the sword revealed at his side.
I reached into the grass for the only weapon I had, the arrow. I used Mistral’s body to shield the movement. But I had to stab Onilwyn before he drew his sword. It was one of those moments when time seems to freeze, and you have both too much time to see the disaster unfolding, and not enough time to act.
I slapped at him with my left hand, and he batted it away, almost gently. He was looking at my empty hand as I stabbed upward with the arrow. I felt the arrow cut into flesh. I shoved, and he jerked back, away from me. The arrow stayed in his leg. I had sunk it deeply enough to make him back up.
It took everything I had not to look behind me toward the glow of the hunt. The screams of the men were distant, fading, but they were miles away. They were visible in the flat farmland, but distance is hard to judge on flat land. Things can seem so much closer than they are. I could not look behind me for help.
Onilwyn jerked the arrow out of his leg. “You bitch!”
“You swore an oath to protect me, Onilwyn. Is this really