Mistrals Kiss   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

Holly didn’t argue; he just abandoned the topic for the time being. “The archers will cut them for you, but you have to weaken them enough to bring them down,” he said to me.

“I know what you want me to do.”

“You don’t sound certain.”

I didn’t voice my doubts, but this was a wild hunt. A true wild hunt, which meant it was the essence of faerie. The creatures could bleed, but how do you kill something that is formed of pure magic? This was ancient magic, chaos magic, primeval and horrible. How do you kill such things? Even if I bled them enough to bring them to earth, could they be truly slain by blade and ax? I had never heard of anyone fighting and winning against such a hunt.

Of course, I had never heard that the spectral hunts could bleed if cut. Sholto had called this one into being, using magic that he and I had raised as a couple. Was it my mortal blood that had made the hunt vulnerable to bleeding? Was my mortality truly contagious, as some of my enemies claimed?

Following this idea to its logical extension meant that if I sat on the throne of our court, it would condemn all of the sidhe to age and die. But at this moment if my mortal flesh had made this hunt mortal in turn, I was grateful for it. It meant they could bleed and die, and I needed them to die. We needed to win this battle. I would not spread my mortality through all of faerie, but to have shared it with these creatures — well, that would be a blessing.



CHAPTER 21

THE ARROWS CUT THE NIGHT SKY LIKE BLACK WOUNDS ACROSS the stars, vanishing into the boiling black silk of the clouds. We waited in the winter night for screams to let us know the bolts had found their mark, but there was nothing but silence.

I stood on the ground, pulling the borrowed trench coat around me. I stood on Holly’s cloak, which he had thrown on the ground to keep my bare feet from the rough ground and the cold. “The cloak gets in the way of my ax,” he’d said, as if he were afraid that I might think he was being gentlemanly. Then he moved forward to be with his brother and the other warriors.

Only Jonty and one other Red Cap stayed back with me, though every Red Cap who had come out tonight — a dozen of them — had touched me before they went to take their place in the ranks. They had laid their mouths, in a strange sort of kiss, against my shoulder where the coat hung heavy with blood from Jonty’s cap. One had caught the coat in his pointed teeth and torn it before Jonty had slapped him away.