A Shiver of Light
Page 25

Cathbodua moved toward the mirror in a rustle of feathers, her raven cloak spreading out around her like the feathers it had once become. She still couldn’t transform into full bird guise, but she could communicate with ravens and crows and a few other birds to help spy out the land and look for danger. Her hair was as black as the feathers, so that it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended. Her skin was moonlight skin like mine, like Frost’s, like Rhys’s, but somehow when you looked at her you thought bone white, not moonlight. She was beautiful as all the sidhe were beautiful, but there was a coldness to her beauty that did not appeal to me. But then I wasn’t dating her; as a guard she was excellent, and that was all I required of her.
She touched the side of the mirror, and I heard the distant cawing of crows, like hearing your own phone ringing in your ear, knowing it’s louder on the other end.
We had all bet that Andais would keep us waiting, but we were wrong. The mirror fogged as if some invisible giant breathed along the glass, and when it cleared there she sat.
She sat on the edge of her huge black-silk-and-fur-draped bed. It was rich and sensual, and a little threatening, as if there would be pressure to live up to such a bed, and the price for failing expectations might be harsh, or maybe that was just me knowing my aunt far too well.
She was wearing a black silk robe so that her ankle-length black hair mingled with the robe and the sheets, until it was as if her hair was formed out of all that silk and dark fur. Her skin was whiter than white, framed by all that raven darkness, except for one spill of honey-and-white fur to her left that spoiled the effect and showed her hair black and almost normal across it. It wasn’t like her to not notice that one bit of pale that spoiled the intimidating effect of her visual.
Her face was almost free of makeup, and without the black eyeliner she usually wore her triple-gray irises weren’t as striking, again leaving her eyes almost ordinary. Her beauty didn’t need makeup, though without it she was a cold, distant beauty as if carved of ice and raven’s wings. That was a strange thought, with Cathbodua standing beside the mirror in her raven wing cloak, but though both women might have begun as similar battle goddesses, where they had gone from their beginnings had made all the difference. It had made one a queen for a millennium and left the other to diminish until she was barely more than human. It is not where you begin, or what gifts you begin with, but what you do with them that matters in the end.
“Greetings, Aunt Andais, Queen of Air and Darkness, sister of my father, ruler of the Unseelie host.”
“Greetings, niece Meredith, Princess of Flesh and Blood, daughter of my beloved younger brother, mother of his grandchildren, and conqueror of hearts.”
I had chosen my words carefully to remind her that I was her niece and she might value my bloodline if not the rest of me, but she had given an answer as careful as my own, and as nonthreatening. It wasn’t like her.
“Aunt Andais, I’m not quite sure what to say next.” She was too far off script for me, and when in doubt truth is not a bad fallback plan.
She smiled, and she seemed tired. “I grow tired of torturing people, my niece.”
I fought to keep my face blank, and felt Doyle’s hand tense on my shoulder where I touched him. I forced my breathing even, and spoke in a normal voice. “May I be so bold as to say, Aunt Andais, that both surprises and pleases me.”
“You may, since you already have, Meredith, and you are not surprised that torture no longer pleases me, you are shocked, are you not?”
“Yes, aunt, quite so.”
She laughed then, head back, face shining with it, but it was the kind of laugh that slithered down your spine and tickled goose bumps from every inch of your skin. I’d heard that laugh as she cut people’s skin with a blade while they screamed.
I swallowed past my suddenly thudding pulse, and knew in that moment that I never wanted her around my babies. I never wanted them to hear that laughter, not ever.
“I see that look upon your face, Meredith. I know that look.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Aunt Andais.”
“Determination, decision, and not in my favor, am I right?”
“In your moments of clarity, aunt, you see much.”
“Yes,” she said, face growing somber, “in my moments of clarity, when I do not let my bloodlust have full rein, and carve my unhappiness and lust from the bodies of my courtiers.”
“Yes, Aunt Andais, when you’re not doing that,” I said.
She held her hand out to someone out of sight of the mirror. Eamon, her favorite lover for the last hundred years or so, came to take her hand. He was as pale of skin, as black of hair, as she; a little taller, broader through the shoulders, six-plus feet of sidhe warrior, but the face he turned to the mirror held that calm, even a kindness, that had often been all that stood between Andais and her worst instincts. He’d grown out a thin, neat Vandyke mustache and goatee, but it was still more facial hair than I’d ever seen my aunt allow at our court. Beards and such were for Taranis and his golden throng. Andais preferred her men clean shaven; many of the men couldn’t even grow facial hair.
Eamon sat on the bed beside her, putting his arm across her shoulders, and she leaned into him, as if she needed the reassurance of the touching. It was a show of weakness that I never thought she would allow me to see.
“Greetings, Princess Meredith, wielder of the hands of flesh and blood, niece of my beloved,” Eamon said.
In all the years that he had stood by her side in mirror calls to others, I had never heard him greet, or be greeted, by anyone. He had been an extension of Andais, nothing more.
“Greetings, Eamon, wielder of the hand of corrupting flame, consort of my Aunt Andais, holder of her heart.”
He smiled at me, and it was a good smile, a real one. “I have never heard myself called that last before, Princess Meredith; I thank you for it.”
“It was a title I suspected you deserved long ago, but I had never known for certain until today.”
He hugged Andais, and she seemed somehow diminished, smaller, or I just had never appreciated how big a man Eamon was, or perhaps a bit of both.
Eamon raised his eyes a little and spoke. “Greetings, Doyle, wielder of the painful flame, Baron Sweet-Tongue, the Queen’s Darkness, consort of Princess Meredith.”
“And to you, Eamon, all graces and titles deserved and earned to you, as well.”
He smiled. “Now, I do not know whom to greet next, Princess Meredith. Do I give formal acknowledgment to Lord Sholto, who is a king in his own right, or to the Killing Frost, who is dearest to you and the Darkness, or to Rhys, who has regained his own sithen again, and no offense to Galen the Green Knight, but our protocols have nothing to cover so many consorts or princes.”
“If it is a formal greeting for all of us, then Sholto should be next,” Frost said.
I reached out to touch his hand where it sat on the pommel of the sword at his waist. He always touched his weapons when he was nervous. He rewarded me with a smile, and that was enough.
“I will waive such niceties,” Sholto said. “For my fellow consorts to acknowledge my title is enough.” He gave a small bow from his neck toward Frost, who acknowledged with a bow as low as Sholto’s but no lower. There had been a time when you had to know just how low to bow to each level of noble, and to get it wrong was an insult. I was glad such things were in the past. How had anyone gotten anything done?