I didn't think he hated my aunt specifically, but all the sidhe who had ever treated him as less. A few short weeks ago a sidhe woman had lured him to a bit of tie-me-up sex. But instead of sex, sidhe warriors had come and cut off his tentacles, skinned all the extra bits away. The woman had told Sholto that when he healed, and was free of taint, she might actually sleep with him.
The magic of the hunt changed slightly, felt... angrier. It was my turn to reach out and warn him. I'd always known that to be drafted to ride in the hunt could mean being trapped, but I hadn't realized that calling it could also trap the huntsman. The hunt wanted a permanent huntsman, or huntswoman. It wanted to be led now that it was back. And strong emotions could give it the key to your soul. I'd felt it, and now I saw Sholto begin to be incautious.
I gripped his arm until he looked at me. The blood that had left a mark so bright and fresh on Cair's face left no mark on his arm. I stared into his eyes until I saw him look back, not in anger, but with that wisdom that had let the sluagh keep their independence when most of the other lesser kingdoms had been swallowed up.
He smiled at me, that gentler version that I had only seen since he found out that he was to be a father. "Shall I show them that they did not unman me?"
I knew what he meant. I smiled back, and nodded. The smiles saved us, I think. We shared a moment that had nothing to do with the hunt's purpose. A moment of hope, of shared intimacy, of friendship as well as love.
He'd meant to show Aunt Eluned what nightmares could truly be. To show his extra bits in anger to horrify. Now he would reveal himself to prove that the nobles who had hurt him had failed to mutilate him. He was whole. More than whole, he was perfect.
One moment it was a tattoo that decorated his stomach and upper chest, the next it was the reality. Light and color played on the pale skin, gold and pale pink. Shades of pastel light shone and moved under the skin of the many moving parts. They waved like some graceful sea creature, moved by some warm tropical current. When last he'd come to this court, he'd been ashamed of this part of himself. Now he was not, and it showed.
There were screams from some of the ladies, and my aunt, though
a little pale, said, "You are a nightmare yourself, Shadowspawn."
Yolland of the black hair and vine-covered horse said, "She seeks to distract you from her daughter's guilt."
My aunt looked at him and said, in a shocked voice, "Yolland, how can you help them?"
"I did my duty to king and land, but the hunt has me now, Eluned, and I see things differently. I know that Cair used her own grandmother as a stalking horse and a trap. Why would anyone do that? Have we become so heartless that the murder of your own mother means nothing to you, Eluned?"
"She is my only child," she said, in a voice that was not so sure of itself.
"And she has killed your only mother," he said.
She turned and looked at her daughter, who was still pressed against the wall in a circle of the white mastiffs, with our horses at the front of the circle.
"Why, Cair?" Not "how could you?" but simply "why?"
Cair's face showed a different kind of fear now. It wasn't fear of the dogs pressing so closely. She looked at her mother's face, almost desperately. "Mother."
"Why?" her mother said.
"I have heard you deny her in this court day after day. You called her a useless brownie who had deserted her own court."
"That was talk for the other nobles, Cair."
"You never said differently in private with me, Mother. Aunt Besaba says the same. She is a traitor to this court for leaving, first to live with the Unseelie, then to live among the humans. I have heard you agree with such words all my life. You said you took me to visit her because it was duty. Once I was old enough to have a choice, we stopped going."
"I visited her in private, Cair."
"Why did you not tell me?"
"Because your heart is as cold as my sister's, and your ambition as hot. You would have seen my care for our mother as a weakness."
"It was a weakness," she said.
Eluned shook her head, a look of deep sorrow on her face. She stepped back from the line of dogs, back from her daughter. She looked up at us. "Did she die knowing that Cair had betrayed her?"
"Yes."
"Knowing that her own granddaughter betrayed her would have broken her heart."
"She did not have the knowledge long," I said. It was cold comfort, but it was all I had to give her. I rode with the wild hunt, and truth, harsh or kind, was the only thing I could speak this night.
"I will not stand in your way, niece."
"Mother!" Cair reached out. The dogs closed in around her, giving that low bass growl that seemed to tiptoe up the spine and hit something low in the brain. If you heard that sound, you knew that it was bad.
Cair yelled again. "Mother, please!"
Eluned yelled back, "She was my mother!"
"I'm your daughter."
Eluned moved backward in her long golden dress. "I have no daughter." She walked away, and she did not look back. The nobles who had clustered by the door moved apart to let her pass. She did not stop until the far jeweled doors closed behind her. She would not fight us for her daughter's life, but she would not watch us take it either. I could not blame her.