Mistral's Kiss

"Was their king with them?" Doyle asked.

Sholto shook his head. "He is not a king who does his own dirty work. You know that, Darkness."

"Did the king know?" Doyle said.

"They would not have done this without his knowledge," I said. "They fear him too much."

"But by not being present, he has left himself room to deny it," Sholto said. "If I could see what he hoped to gain from this, I would believe it of him. But what does this accomplish?"

"Some of your people believed that Queen Andais did this to you, allowed it to be done. Perhaps this atrocity was committed with that as the intent. You are her strongest ally, King Sholto. If you had left her side, what then?" Doyle asked.

"The only reason for the king to want our queen shorn of her allies is that he means to make war. And if any of faerie make war on another, our treaty with America is breached. We will all be cast out of the last country that would take us in. If Taranis caused that, the rest of faerie would rise up against him, and he would be destroyed."

We knew that Taranis had done something almost as bad earlier in the year. He had released the Nameless, a formless being. It had been made of the discarded power that all the fey had been forced to shed in order to be allowed to remain in America—one of the restrictions placed on us when President Jefferson allowed us to immigrate. The faerie had done two weirding spells in Europe, trying to control ourselves enough to live peaceably with the humans, but we had done one more here. I don't think any of the sidhe understood what we were giving up. I was born long after the spell, so that I knew our glorious past as stories, legends, rumors.

Taranis had released that trapped magic, tried to use it to kill Maeve Reed. Reed was the golden goddess of Hollywood—and once upon a time, the goddess of cinema. She had known his secret, that he was infertile, that the problem of his childlessness wasn't in the long string of wives that he kept replacing. It was him, and he had suspected it for a hundred years, when he cast Maeve Reed out of faerie for refusing his bed. She had done so on the grounds that the last wife he'd put aside had gotten pregnant by someone else. She'd told the king to his face that she thought he was infertile, and these many years later, he'd tried to take his revenge.

One of the things that prompted Queen Andais to call me back from exile had been her discovery from human doctors that she was infertile. The ruler of a faerie land is the land, and if they are not fertile—not healthy—the land and people die. It is a very old magic, and a true one. If Taranis had known about his infertility for a hundred years without revealing it, then he had condemned his people to death, knowingly. They killed rulers for such crimes in faerie.

"You are all entirely too quiet," Sholto said to us. "You know something. Something that I need to know."

"We are not free to discuss it, not openly," Doyle said.

"You will not be allowed to be alone with him," Agnes said. "We are not such fools as that."

"I ca

"We ca

"I would not ask that of anyone," Sholto said. He lowered his head, and a sound escaped him. It was almost a sob. I wanted to hug him, but I didn't want to anger his hags any further. Besides, they were partially right—I could touch him now without flinching. Still, I saw it for what it was, something cruelly done—an amputation. I had felt those muscular tentacles on my body—just a touch, but they had been real—and they'd had uses, which he now had lost.

Sholto spoke low. "The Seelie said they were doing me a favor. That if I healed without the deformity coming back, the lady in question would keep her word and bed me for a night."

In sympathy, I started to touch him where the bits had been, then stopped because the wound was bleeding and raw, and touching it must hurt. "But the tentacles are part of you. It is like cutting off an arm, or worse."

"Do you know how often I have dreamt of looking like them?" He motioned at the men at my back. "Agnes is right. I have dreamt of looking fully sidhe for so long, and now it is as you say, I have lost pieces of myself. I have lost arms, and more."

"The queen does not know this," Doyle said.

"Are you certain of that, Darkness? Beyond doubt?"

Doyle started to simply say yes, then stopped himself. "No, I am not certain, but she has not told us otherwise; nor have rumors to the contrary touched our court."

"Wars have begun over less than this, Darkness. Wars between the courts of faerie."

Doyle nodded. "I know."

"Agnes says that Andais had to have given Taranis her approval—even if just tacitly—or Taranis would not have risked it. Do you think my hag is right? Do you think the queen allowed this to happen?"

"The sluagh are too important to the queen, King Sholto. I ca

"I thought she must know. That she must have given permission. I agreed with the hags—I did not think even Taranis would dare to do this without Andais's knowledge."

"I ca

"Why didn't you tell me, Sholto?" I asked. "You once said to me that only the two of us understand what it is like to be almost sidhe. Almost tall enough, slender enough, almost—but not quite pure enough to be accepted."

He almost smiled, almost. "We may have had that in common, but as I told you in Los Angeles, no man had ever complained about your body; only envious women."

I smiled at him. "About my breasts, you were right." That earned me a smile in return, which, given that awful wound, made me breathe more easily. "But I am too short, too human looking for most of the sidhe, male or female, to let me forget it."

"I told you then: They were fools," Sholto said. He took my hand in his and raised it up for a kiss, but when he tried to bend over me, the pain stopped him in midmotion.

I pressed his hand to my cheek. "Sholto, oh, Sholto."

"I had hoped to hear tenderness in your voice, but not for this reason. Don't pity me, Meredith, I could not bear it."

I didn't know how to respond. I just held his hand against my face, and tried to think of anything I could say that wouldn't make him feel worse. How could I not feel pity?

"When did this happen, King Sholto?" Doyle asked.

Sholto looked past me to the other man. "Two days ago, just before your second press conference."

"The one during which two murders were committed," Rhys said.

Sholto looked at him. "You caught your murderer, though the human police don't know it yet. I hear you're trying to let him heal from the torture before showing him to the human police."

"Our queen made a mess of him," Rhys said.

"He is guilty?" Sholto made it a question.

"We believe so," Doyle said.

"But you are not certain?"

"What was done to your stomach, Queen Andais did to every inch of Lord Gwe

Sholto winced, and nodded. "One would do much to stop such pain."

"Even confess to something you did not do," Doyle said.

I looked at Doyle then. "Do you think Gwe

"No. Nor do I believe he acted completely alone. Andais was using his own intestines as a leash on him, Meredith. He would have been a fool not to confess."