I felt my mare's muscles bunch under me, and I had time to shift my weight forward and get a better grip on her mane before she leaped the wide table in one powerful jump.
The mare danced on the stones, her hooves raising green sparks, little licks of green and red flame coming with the smoke from her nostrils. The red glow in her eyes became small red flames that licked the edges of her eye sockets.
The dogs had trapped my cousin against the stone wall. She pressed that tall, thin sidhe frame as tightly as she could, as if the stone would give way and she would be able to escape that way. Her orange dress was very bright against the white marble wall. There would be nothing that easy for her this night. Again, that spurt of rage and deeply satisfying vengeance came to me. Her face was lovely and pale, and if she had only had a nose and enough skin to cover her mouth with lips, she'd have been as attractive as any in court. There had been a time when I had thought Cair truly beautiful, because I had not seen what she lacked as a mark of ugliness. I loved Gran's face, so her face combined with the face of a sidhe, who were all so lovely, well, Cair could be nothing but beautiful to me. But she had not felt that way, and she had let me know with the back of her hand when no one was looking, with small petty cruelties, that she hated me. I realized as I grew older that the reason was that she would have traded her tall, lithe body for my face. She made me think that being short and curved was a crime, but my face with its more-sidhe features was what she wanted. As a child, I had simply thought that I was ugly.
Now I saw her pressed against the wall, the brown eyes of our grandmother in her face, with its so-similar bone structure, and I wanted her to be afraid. I wanted her to know what she'd done and regret it, then I wanted her to die in terror. Was that petty? Did I care? No, I did not.
Cair looked up at me with my grandmother's eyes eyes filled with terror, and behind the fear, knowledge. She knew why we were here.
I urged my horse forward, through the growling pack of hounds. I reached out to her with the dried blood on my hands.
She screamed and tried to move, but the huge white and red dogs moved closer. The threat was there in the bass rumble of their growls, the drawn lips showing fangs that were meant for rending flesh.
She closed her eyes, and I leaned forward, my hand reaching for that perfect white cheek. My hand touched her, gently. She winced as if I'd struck her. One moment the blood was dried and beginning to cake on my skin, the next it was wet and fresh. I left a crimson print of
my small hand against her perfect bone structure. All the blood on my hands and gown was liquid and running again. The old wives' tale that a murder victim will bleed afresh if its murderer lays hands on it is based on truth.
I held my bloody hand up so the sidhe could see it, and cried out, "Kin slayer I name her. By the blood of her victim, she is accused."
It was my Aunt Eluned, Cair's mother, who came to the edge of the dogs, and held her white hands out to me. "Niece, Meredith, I am your mother's sister, and Cair is my daughter. What kin did she slay to bring you here like this?"
I turned to look at her, so lovely. She was my mother's twin, but they weren't identical. Eluned was just a little more sidhe than my mother, a little less human. She wore gold from head to toe. Her red hair like my own and her father's sparkled against her dress. Her eyes were the many-petaled eyes of Taranis, except that my aunt's were shades of gold and green intermingled. I stared into those eyes and had a memory so sharp that it stabbed through me from stomach to head. I saw eyes like these except only shades of green Taranis's eyes above me, as if in a dream, but I knew it wasn't a dream.
Sholto touched my arm, lightly this time. "Meredith."
I shook my head at him, then held my bloody hand out toward my aunt. "This is your mother's blood, our grandmother's blood, Hettie's blood."
"Are you saying that... our mother is dead?"
"She died in my arms."
"But how?"
I pointed at my cousin. "She used a spell to make Gran into her instrument, to give her Cair's hand of power. She forced Gran to attack us with fire. My Darkness is still in the hospital with injuries that Gran gave him with a hand of power she never owned."
"You lie," my cousin said.
The dogs growled.
"If I lied I could not have called the hunt, and pronounced you kin slayer. The hunt will not come if the vengeance is not righteous."
"The blood of her victim marks her," Sholto said.
Aunt Eluned drew herself up to her full sidhe height and said, "You have no voice here, Shadowspawn."
"I am a king, and you are not," he said, in a voice as haughty and arrogant as her own.
"King of nightmares," Eluned said.
Sholto laughed. His laughter made light play in his hair, as if laughter could be yellow light to spill in the whiteness of his hair. "Let me show you nightmares," he said, and his voice held that anger that has passed heat and become a cold thing. Heated anger is about passion; cold anger is about hate.