That heavy mass of thorns fell inward, and into the ringing silence after the rock had stopped moving I could hear the screams of the guards underneath the painful blanket.
Fire blossomed out from the edge of the thorns rich and orange, and the heat reached us, but it was like the winter cold. I could feel it, but it did not move me. The fire spattered into wasted sparks, curling into empty air, as if the fire itself turned away rather than hit us.
We swept through rooms of colored marble, silver-and gold-edged. I had a vague memory of coming this way in Lord Hugh's arms, when he and the nobles who had wanted me to be their queen had rescued me from the king's bedchamber. Then I'd had time to see it all, admire the cold beauty of it, and think that it wasn't a place for nature deities. No matter how beautiful, the trees and flowers inside our sithens should not be formed of metal and rock. They should live.
Two lines of guards appeared ahead of us in the hallway. The last time I'd seen them, they'd been dressed in modern business suits to make the human reporters more comfortable. One of the things that Taranis had insisted on but that Andais never had was uniforms. The tunics and trousers were every color of the rainbow, with more modern colors added in, but the tabards that covered them front and back like elegant cloth sandwich boards bore a stylized flame, burning against an orange-red background. Gold thread glittered around the edge of everything. Once Taranis had been worshipped by burning people alive. Not often, but sometimes. I'd always found it interesting that Taranis chose the flame and not his lightning for his coat of arms.
They began shooting arrows, but the shafts turned away, as if some great wind had caught them, to cast them shattering on the walls long before they reached us. I saw the fear on some of their faces then, and again that fierce joy hit me.
Sholto urged his horse up beside mine, and the corridor was simply wide enough. The hounds boiled at our feet, the riderless horses seemed to push at our backs, and the formless things that pushed and writhed at the tail of our train surged forward. I felt the ceiling go away, as if there were sky above us now. Sky enough for the sluagh's shining whiteness to rise above us like a mountain of shining nightmares.
Some of the guards ran, their nerves broken. Two fell to their knees, their minds broken. The rest fired their hands of power. Silver sparkles fell far short of us. A bolt of yellow energy rolled back upon itself, like the fire before it, as if the magic simply would not touch us. Colors, shapes, illusion, reality — they threw it all at us. These were the great warriors of the Seelie Court, and they fought, but nothing could touch us. Nothing could even slow our run.
We leaped over them as if they were a fence. One of them pulled a sword that did not glow of magic. He sliced upward at the leg of a hound and got blood. Cold iron can harm all in faerie.
The wounded hound dropped away from us, and a riderless horse went with it. I might have stopped, but Sholto urged his horse forward and mine followed. When the marble of the hallway had changed to yet another color, pink with veins of gold, we had a third rider with us. The guard who had wounded the dog was now astride the horse. It had changed slightly, and its eyes were filled with yellow shine, its hooves edged in gold. Its eyes were no less yellow than its rider's hair. The gold of its hooves echoed in the gold of the Seelie's eyes. Dacey, I thought his name was, Dacey the Golden. The horse had a gold and silk bridle on it now, and a bit between its teeth. The guard was forced to join us for the crime of fighting back, but his touch had changed the horse for him. Wild magic is like water; it seeks a shape to take.
Two more guards realized that cold iron was the only thing that could harm us. They joined the hunt. One horse turned pale colors under its white skin, as if pastel rainbows moved and flowed beneath. The last horse was green, with vines laced around it as its bridle. The vines moved and waved, and began to cover the rider on its back in a suit of living green. Turloch had the pale horse, and Yolland the green.
I'd thought to find my cousin in her room, or in a back place where the poor nobles are put, those with no political power, or favor of the king. But the hounds led us to the main doors, to the main throne room. I think if we had gone anywhere else, the guards would have given up by now, but because we went for the throne room, and because the king was presumably inside, the guards thought we were here for Taranis. They might have given up for anything short of the king, but they were oath bound to protect him. When faced by the wild hunt you don't want to be an oathbreaker. You can go from defending someone else to being fresh prey if you are not careful. So I think they did not truly fight for the king, but for themselves, and their oath. But perhaps I was wrong about that. Perhaps they saw in their king things I had never seen. Things worth fighting and dying for. Perhaps.
But it wasn't the guard's abilities that stopped the hunt in the great room just outside the throne room doors. It was the room itself. Just as there was an antechamber in the Unseelie Court that held last-ditch defenses, so was there one here in the Seelie Court. The Unseelie had their living roses and thorns that would drag any unwanted visitors to their bloody death. It was a magic very similar to the wall of thorns that had tried to stop us earlier. The magic of each court is not cleanly cut, but intermingled, though both sides would deny it.
What did the Seelie have in their chamber?
A great oak spread up and up, toward a ceiling that spilled into a distant sparkle of sky, like a piece of daylight forever stored in the limbs of the great tree. You knew you were underground, but there were glimpses of blue sky and clouds forever caught in the tree's upper limbs. It was like the things you see from the corners of your eyes. If you look directly at them, they aren't there, but yet you see them. The sky was like that, almost there. The trunk of the tree was large enough that it was quite a feat to walk around it to get to the huge jeweled doors of the throne room. But it was just a tree, so what made it the last defense?
We spilled into the great chamber at a full run, the other riders at our backs, our hounds howling, the boil of not-creatures at the end of it all pushing at us like fuel, or will. It wanted to be used, the stuff that followed in our wake.
Sunlight flared down from the leaves of the tree.