Page 168 of Cathmoir's Sons

The look Mordeh shoots her mother blackens the grass in a circle around the two demonesses and causes a fresh fall of yellow leaves.

“Charbydis,” she spits. “That’s where you hid them? With that poor, trapped creature? Did you do it to taunt her because she’s been childless all these centuries?”

Licyssa smiles and the blood in my veins turns gelid.

“I do most things for more than one reason, as you should recall.” She holds out her taloned hand. “Those belong to me.”

Mordeh clutches the tin to her chest.

“No, Lady of Bile,” the Mother says. “I have no power to condemn you, but I can judge a deal struck and fulfilled. You have no further claim over Cythoe’s bones, nor the bodies, living or dead, of any of your daughter’s children.”

Licyssa folds her arms and taps her talons on her upper arm with a rat-tat-tat of bone on leather. “Very well. I’ll accept this for now. But I’ll remember it when you next come crawling to my door, faithless one.”

“I’m not the faithless one here, mother. Which you’d know if you believed your flesh and blood instead of listening to the bileyoupoured into another’s ear flowing back to you.”

Licyssa scoffs. “Black Empyreans cannot lie. You, however, can.”

“While I don’t wish to come become embroiled in the dispute between you two esteemed ladies,” Callan interrupts. “Black Empyreans can lie. When they’re compromised by love. I have four children and a broken heart as proof. If the Black Empyrean you speak of is Sariel, and he’s the father of that poor babe.” Callan dips his bright head at the tin Mordeh’s still clutching. “Then I swear to you that falsehood was well-within his capabilities.”

More blood-tears run down Mordeh’s cheeks but neither she nor Licyssa respond to the Thistle Regent.

“If tonight goes some small way to rectifying such an old wrong, then I am pleased with the outcome, whatever else occurs,” the Mother says. “Lady of Bile, you’ve named my high king liar, oath-breaker, rapist, and murderer. Do you attest to these crimes?”

The demoness slants a cruel smile at the shivering tree trunk of the Oak King. “Except for the rape, I have witnessed them firsthand. But I think we can all smell him on that sad bag of spent flesh.” She nods at the cyhraeth’s body, still lying at the feet of one of the druadh. He’s flicked the hem of his black robes over her, as though to hide her from sight. As if those assembled didn’t have other means of sensing her death.

“She was willing!” The druadh protests. “She offered herself to the king!”

“That’s a lie!” One of my distant cousins screams, her voice drawing a flurry of snow down out of the clear sky. “Not one of us would offer ourselves to that monster. We all fear being split on his stump. We came to you at mid-winter and begged for aid in finding our missing sisters and you stood on the ground where you’d spilt their blood and lied! How many have you sacrificed to your uncaring god?”

“Silence!” Emnyre bellows at the banshee. “You will not speak in the court of the high king, washerwoman. Nor will you question the high king’s druadh. If he says it is so, it is so. Your sister gave her life that our king’s strength might return. There is no more noble end. Go back to your streams. Go back to your woods. Go back to your bogs and fens, all of you. You are not fit to stand before the king.”

A few of the wild fae slink away in face of the Darkswerd’s fury. But to my right, the Cait rumble. To my left, Kathu’s wolves growl. Sharp caws sound out of the trees where, unnoticed while all eyes were riveted on the Mother, hundreds of crows have gathered.

“We will not be silent any longer,” I tell the high fae. “Not in life. Not in death. Her shade can answer the question of whether or not she was willing.” I raise my hand, still clasped in Luca’s, toward the cyhraeth’s body.

The druadh snatches the limp form off the ground and wraps it in his robes as though that would stop me from summoning her shade. “Necromancer! Stop her before she does dark magic on the king!”

Blades and bows are suddenly in everyone’s hands but mine.

Chapter 47

The Sound of Vengeance

LAW

Afight starts with a snarl, escalates to a scream, and ends with a whimper.

A battle has no symmetry. Battles are marked by strange silences. What starts with shouting breaks for a breath before a charge. What’s risen to a roar dies to a hush after heavy percussion. Battles are uneven, lacking syncopation, with too many moving parts and too much uncertainty.

This is my fourth real battle. The long moment of silence after everyone draws their weapons still rattles me.

The stillness is broken by a scream. The little banshee who bravely accused the Oak King’s vizier of lying blasts the grove with the kind of scream that Kellan used on the demon spiders. I know it’s not a weapon most banshees can wield at will. It’s the passing of her sister that draws it out of the small fae now.

The king’s druadh don’t explode like the spiders, more’s the pity, but blood explodes from their cowls. Several fall to their knees. While they’re reeling, the banshee charges across the grove, a black dagger clenched in each fist.

She dies with a flaming arrow through her chest before she’s even half-way to the circle of druadh.

But she’s not alone. Dozens of her sisters run after her, daggers raised, their combined screams making the air ring so profoundly that hot wetness seeps frommyears. Flaming arrows tear through them, lifting their thin bodies off their feet and hurtling them over the heads of the red-caps who have run after them, to land lifeless in the grass. Stag men and nymphs, blurring in my sight as they weave in and out of the World Wood, follow in a thundering rush, only to be met by the enchantments of the druadh which twist their bodies into unrecognizable shapes before they collapse into black ash.

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