Swallowing Darkness   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

"One day of being the next queen and you would be rude to your ol' granny?"

"I'm hoping to see a lot of you while I'm pregnant, but I'm not going to mess with bad will between you and my lovers. Tell me why you don't like Sholto."

The look in her lovely brown eyes was not friendly, not at all. "Did you nae wonder who struck the blow that killed your great-grandmother, my mother?"

"She died in one of the last great wars between the courts."

"Aye, but who killed her?"

I looked at Sholto. His face was its arrogant mask, but his eyes were thinking too hard. I didn't know his face as well as Rhys's or Galen's, but I was almost certain that he was thinking furiously.

"Did you kill my great-grandmother?"

"I slew many in the wars. The brownies were on the side of the Seelie Court, and I was not. I, and my people, did kill brownies and other lesser fey of the Seelie Court in the wars, but whether one of them was your blood, I do not know."

"Worse then," Gran said. "You killed her and it meant nothin' to ya."

"I killed many. It becomes difficult after a time to separate the dead one from another."

"I saw her die at his hand, Merry. He slew her and moved on, as if she were nothing." There was such pain in her voice, a raw hurt that I had never heard from my grandmother.

"Which war was this?" Doyle asked, his deep voice falling into the sudden tension like a stone thrown down a well.

"It was the third call to arms," Gran said.

"The one that started because Andais boasted that her hounds could out-hunt Taranis's," Doyle said.

"So that's why it's called the War of Dogs," I said.

He nodded.

"I do nae know why it began. The king ne'r told us why we were to fight, only that to refuse was treason and death."

"Think about why the first one is called the Marriage War," Rhys said.

"That one I know," I said. "Andais offered to marry Taranis and combine the two courts, after her king died in a duel."

"I can't remember anymore which of them took insult first," Doyle said.

"That war was more than three thousand years ago," Rhys said. "The details tend to get fuzzy after that much time."

"So all the great fey wars have been over stupid reasons?" I asked.

"Most of them," Doyle said.

"The sin of pride," Gran said.

No one argued with her. I wasn't certain that pride was a sin — we weren't Christian — but pride could be a terrible thing in a society where the rulers had absolute sway over their people. There was no way to say no, no way to say "isn't this a stupid reason to get our people killed?" Not without being imprisoned, or worse.