Swallowing Darkness - Laurell K. Hamilton [81]
She knelt beside the fallen nightflyer and covered him with the cloak. She stood, and walked slowly back to join the others in their silent, waiting line.
For a moment I thought that he was too far gone to be helped by any legendary item, then he moved underneath the feathers. He staggered to his feet with the feathered cloak fastened around him. For a moment he stood there, the blood shining on the white of his belly where he’d been hurt. Then he launched himself skyward, and he was a goose. The other nightflyers launched skyward too, and suddenly the huge domed ceiling was full of geese, calling out. Then they landed on the sand, by the dozens, and were nightflyers when they touched ground.
Tarlach said, “We will not need the glamour of the king to hide us when we hunt. We can hide ourselves.” He bowed in his liquid way, and the other nightflyers followed him. They knelt like a hundred giant manta rays kneeling without knees, but somehow all the more graceful for it.
There was movement in the benches around us, then I realized that everyone was bowing. They were dropping to their knees, or their equivalent, in a mass of devotion.
Tarlach began it. “King Sholto. Queen Meredith!” The other throats took it up, until we stood in the midst of the sound of it. “King Sholto, Queen Meredith!”
I stood in the only kingdom in all of faerie where you could be voted queen, and the sluagh had spoken. I was queen in faerie at last, just not the kingdom I’d planned on running.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
SHOLTO’S OFFICE WAS FULL OF RICH, POLISHED WOOD, STAINED as dark a brown as it was possible to do and not ruin the wood. The walls were even paneled wood. There was a wall hanging behind the main desk. It was faded, but the threads still showed a scene of the sky boiling with clouds that held tentacles and sights best left to horror movies. There were tiny figures on the ground of people running in terror. One figure, a woman with long yellow hair, gazed up at the clouds while everyone else ran or hid their eyes. As a child I had gazed at the hanging while my father and Sholto did business. I knew from asking that the hanging was almost as old as the Bayeux tapestry, and that the blond woman was Glenna the Mad. She had made a series of tapestries of what she’d seen when the wild hunt had come through her countryside. The tapestries gradually became more bizarre as her senses left her.
I’d stared into what had driven Glenna insane, and I hadn’t flinched. Had it been shock? Had it been the blessing of the God and Goddesses? Or had all the losses finally caught up with me?
Doyle was standing behind me, his arms around my waist, holding me against the front of his body. The weight and reality of him were like a lifeline. I was fleeing faerie for good reasons, the right reasons, but I could admit in my head that one of the main reasons was this man. Maybe it was Gran’s death, but I think I’d decided that for Doyle and the children inside me I’d trade a throne.
A man’s voice on the other end of the phone made me jump. I’d been waiting on hold for a long time. I think they hadn’t believed that I was who I said I was.
Doyle hugged me a little more tightly, while my pulse calmed a little.
“This is Major Walters. Is that really you, Princess?”
“It’s me.”
“They’re telling me you need a police escort out of faerie.” A tendril of the roses in my crown curled downward to touch the phone receiver.
“I do.”
“You do know that the walls of your hospital room melted. Witnesses say you and King Sholto flew out of the room on flying horses, but somehow the Mobile Reserve Team that was watching the outside of your room didn’t see any of this until you were far enough away, then the holes in the walls