Swallowing Darkness   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

I knelt in the strangely warm grass, warmed by the spill of Mistral's life, melting the hard frost. There was a shaft in the ground. I pulled it from the winter-hardened ground carefully, because I didn't want it to break off in the ground. The shaft was wood, so the archers could handle them safely, but when I could finally see the arrowhead, my worst fears were confirmed. They hadn't even used modern metal. It was cold forged iron — the very worst thing you could use on faerie folk.

My human blood made iron no more deadly to me than any other metal. I could touch the arrowhead with no harm done, but a wooden spear could have killed me, and Mistral would have ignored it.

If the arrows had been ordinary ones, it would have been bad to remove them without medical help, but the arrowheads themselves were poisoning him. Every moment they stayed inside his body was another moment of death leaching into his system. But if I drew the arrows out, they'd widen the wounds. Damnit, I didn't know what to do. Some queen I was. I couldn't even decide this one thing.

I laid the arrow that I'd pulled from the ground beside my knees, and put my hands on his side, laid my forehead on his shoulder, and prayed. "Goddess guide me. What do I do to save him?"

"Isn't this touching?" a male voice said.

I jerked up, and Onilwyn was there, in the dark. He'd been one of my guards for a few months, but when last we left faerie he'd remained behind. Admittedly, he'd been helping wrestle my insane cousin Cel into submission at the time, but he hadn't asked to return to my service. He had always been Cel's friend, never mine, and I had found excuses not to bed him.

"The problem with the magic of the wild hunt," he said, "is that it makes you lose track of important things, like leaving your princess alone in the night with no guards. I would never be so careless, Princess Meredith."

He gave a low bow, sweeping his cloak aside, letting the thick waves of his hair fall forward. It was hard to see in the darkness, but his hair was a deep green, and his eyes were a grass green with a star-burst of liquid gold around the pupil. He was a little short and wide, built more like a square than the usual lithe guards, but that wasn't what had kept him out of my bed. I simply did not like him, nor he me. He wanted to bed me only because it was the only way to ease his enforced abstinence. Oh, and a chance to be king to my queen. Mustn't forget that. Onilwyn was far too ambitious to have forgotten it.

"I applaud your sense of duty, Onilwyn. Contact the Unseelie mound, have them send healers, and help move Mistral someplace warm.