Swallowing Darkness - Laurell K. Hamilton [77]
“You know our ways; that is good. You are your father’s daughter.”
“Everywhere I go outside the Unseelie Court I find people who respected my father. I am beginning to wish that he was a tenth less likeable and a tenth more ruthless.”
Tarlach moved what would have passed for shoulders if he’d had more of them, but I knew from my nightflyer tutor, Bhátar, that it was their nod.
“You think it would have kept him alive?” Tarlach asked.
“I plan to find out.”
“You plan to be more ruthless than your father?” Chattan asked.
I looked at the taller sluagh and nodded. “Take me to the office so that I can make a phone call, and I will try to be both practical and surprising.”
“What help is there from a phone against the Seelie?” Tarlach asked, in his wind and storm voice. Not all the nightflyers had such voices. It was a mark of royal blood among them, but more than that, it was a mark of great power. Even among the royal not all had the voice of storm.
“I will call the police and tell them that my uncle seeks to kidnap me again. They will come and rescue me, and once I am gone the Seelie danger to you all will go with me.”
“If the sluagh cannot stand against the Seelie, then the humans cannot,” Chattan said.
“But if the Seelie dare to attack human police, it is a breach of the treaty they signed when they first came to this country. It is war on American soil, and war on humans. They can be exiled from this country for that.”
“You seek not to fight, but to make it impossible for them to fight,” Tarlach said.
“Exactly.”
His slit of a mouth smiled enough that it crinkled his lidless eyes into happy smiles, or that’s how I’d always thought of it as a child when I’d made Bhátar smile that broadly. “We will take you to the office, but our king and nephew is fighting a different fight, which the human police cannot help with.”
“Let us walk as you explain,” Mistral said.
Tarlach looked up and gave the tall sidhe a look that was not friendly, though I wasn’t certain that Mistral would be able to read it. I’d grown up staring into the face of a nightflyer, so I could.
“The sidhe do not rule here.” Then he looked at Doyle.
“Once the queen ordered me to come and try to be your king, but you rejected me, and the sluagh’s vote is final. I did as I was ordered, nothing more.”
“It left a bad taste on our skin,” Tarlach said.
“The queen orders, and the ravens obey,” Doyle said, an old saying among the Unseelie that I hadn’t heard in a long time.
“Some say the princess is only a puppet for the Darkness, but you have remained silent.”
“The princess does well enough on her own.”
“Yes, she does.” Tarlach seemed to decide something, because he began to walk down the hallway. As graceful as they are in the air, they are less so on the ground.
“We heard that the sluagh had voted a new proxy king because they feared Sholto would not wake in time to deal with the Seelie,” I said as I fell in step beside him. Mistral and Doyle came in behind me, much as they would have for the queen herself. Chattan brought up the rear.
“It was more than that, Princess Meredith. The bower you had created was terribly Seelie, though the bone gate was a nice touch.”
“It was made of magic from Sholto and myself.”
“But it was mostly flowers and sunshine. That is not very Unseelie, and most definitely not very sluagh.”
“I cannot always choose how the magic will come.”
“It is wild magic, and it chooses its own way like water finding a cleft in a rock,” he said.
I simply agreed. “Is there a chance that they will try to dispossess Sholto?”
“Some fear that in joining with you he will destroy the sluagh. They have chosen a full-blooded nightflyer in his place as proxy. Only the fact that Sholto has been the best and fairest