Eileen Wilks - Night Season

"I was sent here," Kai said, "because the realms have shifted. With that shift, the needs of the medallion changed. It's searching for a new holder. I'm supposed to help it find the right one."

"You?" Theil's left eyebrow arched slightly in subtlest scorn. "Your are human."

"The realms have shifted, liege Theil. And I am sent by the Winter Queen. Perhaps she sees something in me you do not."

Did she realize she'd offered insult and challenge as subtle as any sidhe might conjure? Cullen's mount shifted. His saddle creaked. "I'm following Cynna's trail," Cullen said abruptly, turning his horse's head in the direction of those tracks. "Feel free to join me when you're through chatting."

All at once Theil laughed. The sound was silver and wind, and he had a sudden image of a hawk stooping on its prey. " Ki rel abathium !" she cried—which meant, he thought, something along the lines of why the hell not ? "We ride, Rohen!"

Her horse spun and leaped into a gallup. Within a single heartbeat, so had the rest.

Leerahan Court was stone and it was forest grove. It was both garden and sculpture, structure and meadow and quiet little brook. The fluting edge of one wall rose above the trees on Cullen's left like a giant bird's wing. On his right, twenty feet away, was a staircase. Between wall and staircase was grass—thick, lush, and brilliantly green. Never mind that elsewhere grass was winter-dead. Cullen walked down the wide swath of greensward that was the Leerahan great hall with Rohen's liege, twenty of Rohen's sidhe, a hellhound who looked exactly like a man, and two women. One of those women was not quite a telepath.

There had been time to talk some on the way here. Not as much as might be expected, because Theil had spoken the truth when she said her people could move quickly when they wished. It was damned hard to hold much of a conversation at full gallop. But he'd learned what Kai Tallman's Gift was, and why she was here.

It was the hellhound who'd gained them entrance to the court. Without him, Aduello might have allowed Theil and her half sister to enter, but not with so many of her people. Certainly not with Cullen. But no one was willing to tell the hellhound no.

Not because Nathan Hunter was—or had been?—a hellhound. Because he was Winter's hound. Said in a certain tone, "winter" meant only one thing—the Winter Queen, one of the pair of immortals who ruled all Faerie. The queens didn't rule in Edge, but if Winter's hound wished to visit Leerahan alongside two human women, twenty sidhe from Rohen, their liege, and a bedraggled lupus sorcerer from Earth, no one was of a mind to turn him away.

At the end of the greensward was a stone dais thirty feet wide. Not carved stone, and not precisely a dais, for it was platform and furnishings in one. It looked as if bedrock had been bidden to rise and fold itself into shapes comfortable for sitting, standing, or sprawling, depending on the whims of those who waited there. Cushions were strewn casually among the dips and benches, cupped seats and steps.

Aduello lounged on a stony bench cushioned by thick white fur. He was a tall, languorous sidhe of predictably inhuman beauty—black hair striped with silver falling like rain to his waist. He wore a pair of low-slung black pants that were silk and snug with a loose, flowing shirt and a cropped vest, heavily embroidered. Three of his court stood nearby—two men and a woman, all wearing swords. As did most of the sidhe assembled along the sides of the greensward, watching.

Beside him sat Cynna. In a dress.

That gown—long, gossamer, the color of the Hershey's Kisses Gan liked so much—shook Cullen. It made him doubt. She's playing the bastard , he told himself. She'd let him dress her to please himself because she was pretending to be trapped, enraptured by the glamour he cast.

She was a knockout in it. A thin crimson scarf crossed between her breasts and wrapped her waist, showing off her Amazon's figure. A slit up one side gave a long glimpse of leg. He wanted to lick his way up that leg.

Aduello stroked Cynna's arm casually, as one might pet a cat. She didn't move. She didn't even look at Cullen. Her expression was blank, dull. "Theil," Aduello said with a polite nod, "it is good to see you, of course, but you come in strange company. Or perhaps I should say, in strangely numerous company. And you, sir"—another nod, this one for Hunter—"I am unsure what to call you."

Hunter stepped forward. "My most recent name is Hunter, That will do. Thank you for allowing us entry, liege Aduello."

"I'm told…"—another lingering caress of Cynna's arm—"that you are not here hunting breakers of the queens' law."

"I am not on a hunt, sir. But I am here at my queen's behest. My purpose is to escort one she has sent questing. I present to you Kai Tallman."

The tall, broad-shouldered woman stepped forward and bowed her head briefly. "Liege Aduello, I understand the woman beside you is not the only one you rescued from the Ahk."

"That is true."

"I would like you to have the others brought here."

"Would you?" He'd possessed himself of Cynna's hand and toyed with her fingers. This touch seemed to call her back to herself. She cocked her head, giving Aduello a heavy-lidded smile. "And yet I feel no need to do so."

Cynna spoke suddenly. "They're all right." She was still smiling like a fool, but at least she looked at them now instead of the man playing with her. "They're fine. Aduello gave them the rose quartz suite—that's what I call it, anyway. You should see it. It's gorgeous. But…" She looked at the sidhe beside her. "Aduello, they'd like to see Cullen. Can't they come see him? In fact…" She frowned slightly, as if puzzled. "They may want to return with Cullen and these people. They aren't as happy here as I am."

"Ah, well." He patted her hand, all indulgence. "Why not, if you wish it? Ertho, you'll see to it?" He gave the edge of his smile to one of the men on the dais with him. The man left, using an artfully concealed crevice in the stone wall behind them.

"Liege Aduello," Kai Tallman said clearly, "I must ask you not to mindspeak your people. Give them their instructions out loud, please."

He froze for a second. There was no trace of a smile on his face when he looked at her—looked much more closely than he had before. "I have never met a human who could use mindspeech, much less overhear it when another did so. I suspect you are imagining things."

"I do not use mindspeech. I know when it is used, however. I also know when lies are spoken."

Aduello's eyebrows went up. "That would not make you comfortable company at most gatherings," he said with polite disbelief. "But what am I thinking? I have offered you no refreshment." He looked around as if he might have misplaced a servant among the cushions.

"Aduello." Theil smiled at him. "You know why we are here, and it is not for refreshment."

His eyebrows rose. "To collect the humans I collected? And that other one… something like a gnome, yet not."

"We are here about the medallion."

There was blunt speaking. For a sidhe, shockingly blunt.

Aduello's lazy smile didn't falter. "Of course you are. You tried for my lovely Cynna yourself, didn't you? Tried to kill her, that is. And with obab." He shook his head. "Such a messy way to operate, my dear. You must have felt quite desperate. It's not like you to abandon subtlety so thoroughly."

"That," Kai said coolly, "was a lie."

Aduello's eyebrows lifted slightly. "You grow tedious."

"Which leads me to suspect you were the one who tried to kill her. Otherwise, how would you have known about the obab?"

"But Cynna tells me everything." He stroked her cheek. "Don't you, sweetheart?"