Swallowing Darkness - Laurell K. Hamilton [96]
He bowed again. “I thank you for finding a way out of our dilemma, Queen Meredith. I had not heard that you played politics well.”
“I have my moments,” I said.
He smiled, bowed once more, and said, “We will leave you to be rescued by the humans then.”
“We aren’t going to leave her with the sluagh,” my mother said, as if horrified at her daughter’s fate.
“Give it a rest, Mother,” I said, and blanked the mirror.
She was still arguing with Lord Hugh, as if she believed what Taranis had told her. It was clear that Lord Hugh did not. But then if I went back as Taranis’s queen, Besaba wouldn’t be the mother of the new queen of the Seelie. She had more to gain politically, if Taranis was telling the truth.
Sholto kissed my hand, smiling. “That was very well done, My Queen.”
I grinned at him. “It helps when faerie itself crowns you, and major relics keep popping up.”
“No, Meredith,” Doyle said, “that was well played. Your father would have been very proud.”
“Indeed,” Mistral said.
And in that moment, holding a weapon that only myself and my father could have safely wielded, covered in faerie’s blessing, and knowing that my father would have been proud of me meant more than all the rest. I guess in the end you never outgrow wanting to please your parents. Since I’d never please my mother, my father was all I had left. He always had been. He and Gran.
My parents were dead now, both of them. The woman in the mirror was just the person whose body spit me out. It takes much more than that to be a mother. I prayed that I would be a good mother, and for help to keep all of us safe. There was a shower of white rose petals from nowhere, coming down like perfumed snow. I guess that was answer enough. The Goddess was with me. As help went, it didn’t get much better than that. As the Christians said, if God is with me, who can be against me? The answer, unfortunately, was almost everyone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
WE BUCKLED ON OUR NEW WEAPONS. I WAS VERY SERIOUS about putting the lock loops on my sword. As long as it was sheathed, someone could bump it without harm. If it was unsheathed, even a little, there was a chance that it would turn some poor soldier’s arm inside out.
Doyle had put the horn of madness across his body on its leather strap.
“Shouldn’t you put that in a sack or something?” Sholto asked.
“As long as I wear the horn across my body, it will not react to anyone bumping against it. It is only out of my hands that it becomes a danger.”
“How do I carry the spear so that the Seelie do not see what it is?” Mistral asked.
“I don’t think even Taranis will attack you for the spear today, in front of the humans,” I said.
“But there will be other days,” Mistral said. “He came to the Western Lands to find you, Meredith. I think for one of his items of power he might travel again.” He hefted the spear as he talked, as if judging the weight of it. It was a slender weapon, longer than Sholto’s spear of bone that I’d used to slay Cair. I realized that Mistral’s spear was almost too slender to stab or thrust with.
“Is it meant to be an actual spear, or is it like some huge lightning rod?”
Mistral gazed up at the shining spear, then smiled down at me. “You are correct. It is not meant to hack at men’s bodies. It is more a great magic wand, or staff. With this in my hand, and a little practice, I could call lightning from a clear sky miles away to strike down an enemy.”
“You mean you could use it as a tool of assassination?”
He seemed to think about it, then nodded.
“Let go of that thought,” Sholto said.
Mistral and I looked at him. “What thought?” I asked.
He smiled and shook his head. “Don’t be coy, Meredith. I see your faces. You’re thinking you could use the lightning to rid us of a few enemies and no one would know. But it is too late for secrecy.”
“Why?” I asked, then realized. “Oh, the entire sluagh saw.”
“And some of them are as old as the oldest of the sidhe. They will have seen the spear in the hand of a king before, and they will know what it can do. My people are loyal, and would not betray us