Seduced by Moonlight

CHAPTER 9

Thirty minutes later we'd all gathered in the kitchen, including Sage. If he'd been larger than a Barbie doll he'd have been handsome, if your taste ran to the slender yellow-skinned variety, but I had to admit the yellow-and-black swallowtail wings were pretty. He could make himself nearly my height, a form of shape-shifting less surprising than those of us who could take animal form, but it was a rarer gift to change from tiny fey to human-size fey. He was what you might call an ambassador for the Unseelie demi-fey, and their queen, Niceven. I'd struck an alliance with them. They'd agreed to stop spying for my cousin Cel and his allies, and start spying for me. They still spied for my aunt, Queen Andais, but then she was supposed to be my ally, too. There were days when I wondered about that, but not tonight. Tonight we had enough problems without worrying about who Andais really wanted to be her heir.

The chalice sat in the middle of the tiled kitchen table, looking terribly out of place in the stark white modern kitchen. Doyle had brought a silk pillowcase to spread on the table, but even the bit of black silk wasn't enough to make the chalice look at home. It sat in the glow of the overhead lights looking like what it was, an ancient relic of power that just happened to be sitting on a breakfast nook table barely big enough for the four chairs that framed it. The cup needed at the very least a large dining room table, with acres of gleaming hardwood and shields and weaponry mounted on the walls. The cat clock on the wall with the moving tail and eyes didn't match the cup, but it did match the white canisters with black-and-white kittens painted on top of them. Maeve had never owned a cat, but I'd bet her decorator did.

Galen had made coffee and tea, and hot chocolate. We all sat huddled around our respective hot liquids and stared at the gleaming cup. Nobody seemed to want to break the silence. The ticking of the clock just seemed to emphasize the quiet.

«Once it was a cauldron,» Doyle said, and I wasn't the only one who spilled tea down the front of his or her robe. Galen fetched paper towels for everyone who needed one. Frost cursed softly but with feeling under his breath as he mopped at the front of his grey silk robe. We all had silk robes, monogrammed with our initial. They'd been gifts from Maeve. We'd go out to work for the day, and we'd come home to packages.

Sage didn't get presents. I think it was half that he was demi-fey, and most sidhe treated them as if they were the insects that they resembled. It was one of the reasons they made such excellent spies: No one really paid them much attention. The other was that Maeve didn't know he could make himself bigger. She was hungry enough for fey flesh that she might have thought better of him if she'd known. She might not have cared, for the Seelie are pickier about the fey they call lovers. But the fact that some of Niceven's people could shift larger was a very closely guarded secret. As far as we knew, those of us in this room were the only sidhe who were aware of it.

Sage sat on the end of the kitchen cabinet, swinging his tiny legs in the air. His wings fanned slowly behind him, as they often did when he was thinking. He lowered his tiny, handsome face carefully over the mug beside him, being careful not to get his nearly shoulder-length butter-yellow hair in the foam of the hot chocolate. All the little fey seem to have a sweet tooth. He was wearing a tiny skirt made out of what seemed to be pale blue gossamer, as if it had been sewn by spiders, so fine was the cloth. Sage didn't wear many clothes, but what he did was of finer weave than any silk.

My silk robe was crimson, but lucky me, I'd managed to pour more hot tea down my chest than on the robe. It burned, but not much, and silk once stained is ruined. My chest would clean up just fine. «What do you mean, it used to be a cauldron?» I asked.

Rhys answered me. «One day they went into the sanctuary and instead of a black cauldron that looked as ancient as it really was, there was this shiny new cup.» He hadn't bothered with a robe at all. He stood naked in the kitchen, mopping at his bare chest. He pointed toward the chalice with the coffee-stained paper towel.

Doyle sat to my right, wearing black jeans and nothing else. «The King of Light and Illusion thought the cauldron had been stolen. He nearly went to war with our court over it.» He leaned toward the table, his cup of tea still untouched in his hands. «But it hadn't been stolen. It had merely changed.»

I sipped my own tea. «You mean the way the Black Coach of the wild hunt started its existence as a chariot, then changed to a coach when no one drove chariots anymore, and now is a big black shiny limousine?»

«Yes,» he said, and finally took a drink of his own tea. His eyes never left the chalice, as if nothing else really mattered.

«The wild magicks have a mind of their own,» Kitto said from where he huddled in the chair to my left. He held his mug of hot chocolate between both his hands the way a child will drink from an overly large cup. He had his knees tucked up to his chest, and the legs of his satin night shorts were just a thin strip of burgundy cloth.

«What do the goblins know of relics?» Rhys asked. There was a hint of his old hostility.

«We have our items of power,» Kitto said.

Rhys opened his mouth, and Doyle said, «Stop. We will not squabble tonight, not with one of the sidhe's greatest treasures returned.»

That shut everybody up again. I'd never seen all of them at such a loss for words. «I would think all of you would be celebrating. Instead you act as if someone has died.» I knew why I was scared. I'd been around magic all my life, but I'd never had anything follow me home from a dream before. I didn't like it. Greatest treasure or not, the idea that things in my dreams could become real and cross over to the real world was a very frightening thought.

«You still don't understand,» Doyle said. «This is the cauldron. The cauldron that can feed thousands, and never go empty. The cauldron from which the dead warriors can rise again, alive the next day, though robbed of their speech. This is a thing of elemental power for our people, Meredith. It appeared among us one day, like the Black Coach, like so many things just appeared. Then one day it vanished, and we lost our ability to feed the masses of our followers, and for the first time we watched them starve.» He rose and turned, pressing his hands against the window's dark glass, leaning his face so close to it that it looked as if he meant to kiss the darkness outside. «We were not in the country when the great famine hit, but if we had still possessed the cauldron I would have strapped it to my back and swum to Ireland.» For the first time I heard a bur of brogue in his voice. Most of the sidhe pride themselves on having no accent. I'd never heard Doyle sound like anything or anywhere in particular.

«Are you talking about the great potato famine?» I asked.

«Yes.» His voice was almost a growl.

He was mourning people who had died nearly two hundred years before I was born. But the pain was as real to him now as if it had been last week. I'd noticed that the immortals carry all the strong emotions—love, hate, grief—for longer than a human lifetime. It's as if time moves differently for them, and even sitting beside them, living with them, my time and their time weren't the same.

He spoke without turning around, as if he spoke more to the darkness outside than to us. «What do the gods do when once they could answer the prayers of their followers, then suddenly they cannot? One day they simply have to watch their people die of diseases that only weeks before they could have healed. You are too young, Meredith, and even Galen; neither of you really understands what it was like. Not your fault. Not your fault.» He spoke the last in a whisper to the glass, his face finally pressed gently to it.

I got up from my chair and went to him. He flinched when I touched his back, then moved away from the glass enough for me to slide my arms around his waist, pressing my body against his. He let me hold him, but he didn't relax against me. I tried to give comfort, but in a way, he wouldn't take it.

I spoke with my cheek pressed to the warm smoothness of his back. «I know that there was more than one cauldron. I know that there were three main ones. I know that they all changed form, and became cups. My father blamed it on all the King Arthur stories about the Holy Grail. If enough people believe something, then it can affect everything. Flesh affects spirit.» Somewhere in my matter-of-fact talking, Doyle began to relax against me. He began to let the hurt go, a little.

«Yes,» he said, «but the first cauldron given was the great cauldron that could do all that any could do. There were two lesser cauldrons. One could heal and feed, and the other held treasure, gold and such.» The way he said the last words showed clearly that he didn't think that gold and such were worth nearly as much as healing and food.

«There were more cauldrons than that,» Rhys said.

Doyle pushed away from the glass enough to turn his head and look behind him at the other men. I stayed wrapped around his back. «Not real ones,» Doyle said.

«They were real, Doyle, they just weren't given to us by the gods. Some among us had the ability to make such things.»

«They could not do what the great cauldrons could do,» Doyle said.

«No, but they didn't disappear when the gods withdrew their favor, either.»

Doyle turned, and I had to let him go so he could pace back toward Rhys. «They did not withdraw their favor. We gave up the power to work directly with them. We gave them up, they did not give us up.»

Rhys held up his hands. «I don't want to have this argument, Doyle. I don't think a few centuries will make the fight any more fun. Let's just agree to disagree. All we know for certain is that one day the great relics began to vanish. The things that the fey had made themselves, from their own magic, remained behind.»

«Until the second weirding magic,» Frost said. It was the longest sentence I'd gotten out of him since this afternoon. I'd tried to speak to him in the hall, and he'd been curt and avoided me. I was the one who had nearly died, but he was the one throwing the fit. Typical Frost.

«Yes,» Nicca said in his soft voice, «and then the items we'd wrought ourselves began to break, or just stopped working. It was as if the spell drained them.»

I knew that Nicca was centuries old, but I kept forgetting until he said something that forced me to remember.

«I don't think everyone would have agreed to the second weirding if they'd known what would happen to our wands, our staffs.» Nicca shook his head, sending his deep brown hair glimmering in the lights. «I wouldn't have agreed.»

«Many of us would not have agreed,» Doyle said.

«If that's true,» I said, «then how did you all agree to the weirding that made the Nameless? That was the third weirding, so you all knew what to expect. You all knew how much you could lose.»

«What choice did we have?» Rhys said. «It was either give up more of our power or be exiles without a country.»

«We could have stayed in Europe,» Frost said.

«And what,» Doyle said, «be forced out of our hollow hills to buy houses and live next door to humans? To be forced to intermarry with humans.» He looked back at me and said, «I don't mean to insult the princess, but a little mixed blood is one thing; to be forced to marry humans is something else. Those who remained behind in Europe had to sign treaties to give up their culture.» He spread his arms and hands wide. «Without their culture and belief a people do not exist.»

«That's why they did it,» Rhys said. «It was a way of destroying us that didn't smack of genocide.»

«The humans were not strong enough to kill us all,» Frost said.

«No,» Rhys said, «but they were strong enough to bring us to the treaty table and force a peace that more than half of every race of the fey thought was unfair.»

«I know the facts of what happened,» I said, «but this is the first time I've ever heard any of you talk about the exile with this much emotion.»

«We left Europe to save what was left of faerie,» Doyle said. «Now that cup sits on the table, and it will all begin again.»

«What will begin again?» I asked.

«The Goddess gave us her gifts, the Consort gave us his gifts, then one day they were gone. How can we trust that whatever gift we are given will not abandon us at our hour of need?» Pain, anger, frustration, hope, all fought across the darkness of his face.

«I think you're borrowing trouble,» I said. «I think that we should figure out if the cauldron still does what it used to do before we worry about it disappearing again.»

Rhys shook his head. «It never worked just because we wanted it to. It feeds us when we need to be fed. It heals when we need healing. The high holy relics are not sideshow entertainment. They only work if there's need.»

«It's a matter of faith,» Nicca said. «We have to have faith that it will help us when we need it.» He didn't sound happy about it when he said it.

«Faith,» Rhys said, so full of emotion that his voice was lower than normal, thick with things unsaid. «I gave that up a long time ago, Nicca. I'm not sure I can pick it back up again.»

«I think we all believed we were truly gods,» Doyle said, «equal to any. When the first lessening happened, we learned different.» He strode to the table and looked almost as if he was going to pick up the cup, but he didn't. «We learned the difference between playing gods and being gods.» He shook his head. «It is not a lesson I want to learn twice.»

«Me, either,» Rhys said.

«I was never more than I am right now,» Frost said. «I learned different lessons.» He didn't sound any happier about his lessons than the rest did about theirs.

My father had made sure I knew the cold facts of our history, but he'd never complained, never spoke of the pain I was seeing now. I'd known intellectually that the sidhe had lost much, but I hadn't really understood. I probably didn't understand even now, but I would try. Goddess help me, I would try.

«Didn't the children of Dana demand that the goblins not be gods to the humans?» Kitto asked. «Wasn't that your rule to the very first peace treaty with us? Is it that much different from what the humans have done to all of us?»

Rhys turned toward the smaller man. «How dare you compare —» He stopped in midsentence and shook his head. He rubbed his free hand across his face as if he was tired. «Kitto's right,» he said.

The surprise showed on all our faces, even Doyle's. «Did you just agree with Kitto?» Nicca asked.

Rhys nodded. «He's right. When we first landed, we were as arrogant, and as determined to break the goblins' power, as the humans are of us.»

«I'm not sure it's arrogance on the humans' part,» I said. «I think it's mostly fear that another fey-and-human war might decimate Europe.»

«But it's still arrogance to think that they can dictate rules of conduct to a civilization that existed millennia before their ancestors stopped living in caves,» Rhys said.

To that I could add nothing, so I didn't try. «I concede the point.»

He grinned at me. «You're not going to argue with me?»

I shrugged. «Why should I? You're right.»

«You know, you have a mighty democratic way of thinking for the heir to a throne.»

«I was raised for ten years out among the democratic American humans. I think it helps keep me humble.» I smiled at him, because I couldn't not smile. Rhys had that effect on me, sometimes.

«I hate to break up the love-fest,» Galen said, «but what are we going to do about the cauldron, chalice, whatever?»

Galen was hopeless at politics, but he was very good at being practical. «What is there to do?» I asked.

«Well,» he said, and his smile faded around the edges, «do we tell anyone?»

Everyone suddenly got even more serious. «He's right,» Doyle said. «We need to decide whom we will tell, if anyone.»

«Are you thinking of withholding this information from the queen?» Frost asked.

«Not withholding, but simply not sharing just yet.» He motioned at Kitto. «We have had a very busy day and night, Frost. Kitto has come into his hand of power. A hand of power that hasn't been seen among us since the second weirding.»

«By the way,» I asked, «what is his hand of power called? I mean, mine is the hand of flesh and the hand of blood, but what do you call the mirror thingie?»

«It is called the hand of reaching,» Doyle answered, «because it reaches between two points of communication and brings people across from one point to the other. The hand of reaching, because it reaches out to people.»

«Logical, when it's explained,» I said.

«Most things are logical when they're explained.» He sounded almost normal, but his face showed the strain of all the unanswered questions. Of questions perhaps not only unanswered, but unanswerable.

«The queen will want to know of Kitto's new power,» Frost said.

«I have told her already,» Doyle said.

«And Rhys's coming back to his godlike powers?»

Doyle nodded. «She knows.»

«When did you have time to tell her all this?»

«When you went with the princess to the main house to see Maeve.»

Frost frowned. Then something very like fear flashed through his eyes, before he gained control of it and gave a handsome blank face to Doyle. «Does she know the rest?» His voice was more uncertain than his eyes.

«That Meredith seems to have brought Maeve back into her godhead, and perhaps given you godhead for the first time? Or the part where Meredith almost died doing it? Or do you mean have I told her that the princess seems now to have the gift of magical dreaming? Or maybe you wonder if the queen knows we have the chalice. Which of those things are you wondering about, Frost?»

«He didn't mean to make you angry,» I said.

«I don't need you to defend me,» Frost said.

«What is wrong with you, Frost? You've been acting mad at me since I woke up.»

He looked down at the kitchen island in front of him. He hadn't come closer to us than that, or perhaps it was me he avoided.

«How can you ask me that? I am your guard, your Raven, sworn to protect you from all harm, and I nearly killed you today.»

I walked over to stand beside him. I reached out to touch him, and he jerked away. «I don't want to hurt you again.»

«You saw the end of what Maeve and I did together, Frost. I think I can touch your hand and be safe.»

He shook his head, using his long silver hair to hide his face and most of his body from me. His hair had always been the incredible color of Christmas tree tinsel, but tonight it seemed even shinier than normal. I reached out to touch that shining hair and found that it was damp.

He pulled back again, stepping away so that I couldn't touch him. He put his back to the kitchen cabinets and hugged himself. «When your cries woke us, I was covered in ice.» He shook his head. «No, not ice, frost. I woke up covered in a rime of frost. It melted almost immediately, but it was thicker in my hair. My hair crackled like frozen tree branches when I first moved.» He looked frightened.

I reached out to him again, and he moved away. «No, Meredith, I don't have control of these powers. It's not a matter of relearning what I knew once. These aren't my magicks.» He looked at me with wide, frightened eyes. «I don't know how to be a god, Meredith. I've never been one before.»

«We'll teach you,» Rhys said.

«What if I don't want to learn?» Frost asked.

«That is a different problem, my old friend,» Doyle said. «The Goddess gives where She will, and it is not ours to question why or where.»

The fact that Doyle had been doing that very thing a few moments ago seemed to have escaped his notice—or maybe Doyle was the only one allowed to express doubts about the Goddess. Whatever the logic, or lack of it, no one pointed it out to him.