Swallowing Darkness - Laurell K. Hamilton [47]
I offered the cup with its flower petals to the lords, and they drank from it. Their lips came away touched with a different color of liquid each time. One smelled of ale, another of beer. Turloch knelt at last, tears shining on his face.
“Goddess save us.”
“She’s trying to,” I said, and let him drink.
The scent of something sweet and unknown to me flowed up.
The petals had begun to sprout small thorny vines, roses growing in the winter cold. We knelt surrounded by the beginnings of a thicket, as green and real as any summer day, as snow began to fall from the cold sky.
“Go back to the sidhe and tell them the wild rose has returned.”
Lord Yolland said, “I would bear your mark, my goddess.”
“So be it,” I said.
A thin vine wrapped around one of his wrists. He flinched, and I knew the thorns cut him, then the living vine was a tattoo around his wrist, as perfect and delicate as the tendril it had been but a moment before. Yolland stared at the mark, wiping away the blood that was still on his white skin.
“The king will not be pleased,” Turloch said.
“I have a mark of power from one of our royals,” Yolland said. “Turloch, don’t you understand what that means?”
“It means the king will see her dead.”
“He thinks I bear his children,” I said. “He will want me alive.”
“How can that be?”
I held the chalice above my head, and let it go. It hovered for a moment, then vanished in a shower of roses and vines. “Magic,” I said.
“Is the chalice gone?” Dacey asked, fear in his voice.
“No,” I said, and Lord Yolland echoed me. “No, once it simply belonged to its chosen bearer. It has chosen Meredith, and that is good enough for me, Dacey.” He touched his new tattoo. “I am yours when you need me. Only call and I will answer.”
“You will have no choice but to answer now,” Turloch said.
“That you did not ask for a mark is to your shame,” Yolland said. “I want to live,” Turloch said.
“I want to serve,” Yolland said.
“Go, tell what you have seen. It is time to stop hiding. The Goddess has returned to us, and her power is abroad once more,” Yolland said.
“They will not believe us,” Dacey said.
“They will believe this.” Yolland held up his tattoo.
“The king will kill you,” Dacey said.
“If he tries, then I will knock upon the sluaghs’ gates and join King Sholto and his queen,” Yolland said.
“You would ride with the sluagh?” Dacey asked.
“Oh, yes,” Yolland said.
Sholto picked Mistral up in his arms. “Dawn approaches. Go back to your courts, and tell them what the Goddess bids. We will tend the Storm Lord.”
I laid one hand on Sholto’s bare arm, and put my other hand on Mistral’s leg. The chalice had helped heal his wounds, but cold iron could be like poison to us. Just because you closed the wounds didn’t mean that the poison had stopped doing its deadly work.
Sholto echoed my thoughts, leaning in close to me and whispering, “You have done a miracle with the chalice and stopped his blood loss, but cold iron is a tricky thing, Meredith.”
“We must get him to your healers,” I said.
“I can get inside my kingdom almost instantly, but I do not know if you are strong enough for the way I would choose.”
I felt the strength in Mistral’s body under my hand; even unconscious, there was muscle and strength. “Save him, Sholto.”
“I am the King of the sluagh, the King of That Which Passes Between. Part of the wild hunt has not chosen its form. I can use it to simply step into the sluaghs’ mound.”
“Do it,” I said.
“You are no longer part of the magic of the hunt, Meredith.”
I looked back at what was left of the hunt in the meadow. The Seelie had gotten their horses and ridden away toward their faerie mound. The mare that I had ridden and Sholto’s many-legged steed were nowhere to be seen. What remained was the writhing tail of the comet we had traveled on. What was there was white