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She was hungry enough for fey flesh that she might have thought better of him
if she'd known. She might not have cared, for the Seelie are pickier about the
fey they call lovers. But the fact that some of
Niceven's people could shift larger was a very closely guarded secret. As far
as we knew, those of us in this room were the only sidhe who were aware of it.
Sage sat on the end of the kitchen cabinet, swinging his tiny legs in the air.
His wings fanned slowly behind him, as they often did when he was thinking. He
lowered his tiny, handsome face carefully over the mug beside him, being
careful not to get his nearly shoulder-length butter-yellow hair in the foam
of the hot chocolate. All the little fey seem to have a sweet tooth. He was
wearing a tiny skirt made out of what seemed to be pale blue gossamer, as if
it had been sewn by spiders, so fine was the cloth. Sage didn't wear many
clothes, but what he did was of finer weave than any silk.
My silk robe was crimson, but lucky me, I'd managed to pour more hot tea down
my chest than on the robe. It burned, but not much, and silk once stained is
ruined. My chest would clean up just fine. "What do you mean, it used to be a
cauldron?" I asked.
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Rhys answered me. "One day they went into the sanctuary and instead of a black
cauldron that looked as ancient as it really was, there was this shiny new
cup." He hadn't bothered with a robe at all. He stood naked in the kitchen,
mopping at his bare chest. He pointed toward the chalice with the
coffee-stained paper towel.
Doyle sat to my right, wearing black jeans and nothing else. "The King of
Light and Illusion thought the cauldron had been stolen. He nearly went to war
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with our court over it." He leaned toward the table, his cup of tea still
untouched in his hands. "But it hadn't been stolen. It had merely changed."
I sipped my own tea. "You mean the way the Black Coach of the wild hunt
started its existence as a chariot, then changed to a coach when no one drove
chariots anymore, and now is a big black shiny limousine?"
"Yes," he said, and finally took a drink of his own tea. His eyes never left
the chalice, as if nothing else really mattered.
"The wild magicks have a mind of their own," Kitto said from where he huddled
in the chair to my left.
He held his mug of hot chocolate between both his hands the way a child will
drink from an overly large cup. He had his knees tucked up to his chest, and
the legs of his satin night shorts were just a thin strip of burgundy cloth.
"What do the goblins know of relics?" Rhys asked. There was a hint of his old
hostility.
"We have our items of power," Kitto said.
Rhys opened his mouth, and Doyle said, "Stop. We will not squabble tonight,
not with one of the sidhe's greatest treasures returned."
That shut everybody up again. I'd never seen all of them at such a loss for
words. "I would think all of you would be celebrating. Instead you act as if
someone has died." I knew why I was scared. I'd been around magic all my life,
but I'd never had anything follow me home from a dream before. I didn't like
it.
Greatest treasure or not, the idea that things in my dreams could become real
and cross over to the real world was a very frightening thought.
"You still don't understand," Doyle said. "This is the cauldron.
The cauldron that can feed thousands, and never go empty. The cauldron from
which the dead warriors can rise again, alive the next day, though robbed of
their speech. This is a thing of elemental power for our people, Meredith. It
appeared among us one day, like the Black Coach, like so many things just
appeared. Then one day it vanished, and we lost our ability to feed the masses
of our followers, and for the first time we watched them starve." He rose and
turned, pressing his hands against the window's dark glass, leaning his face
so close to it that it looked as if he meant to kiss the darkness outside. "We
were not in the country when the great famine hit, but if we had still
possessed the cauldron I would have strapped it to my back and swum to
Ireland." For the first time I heard a bur of brogue in his voice. Most of the
sidhe pride themselves on having no accent. I'd never heard Doyle sound like
anything or anywhere in particular.
"Are you talking about the great potato famine?" I asked.
"Yes." His voice was almost a growl.
He was mourning people who had died nearly two hundred years before I was
born. But the pain was
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as real to him now as if it had been last week. I'd noticed that the immortals
carry all the strong emotions love, hate, grief for longer than a human
lifetime. It's as if time moves differently for them, and even sitting beside
them, living with them, my time and their time weren't the same.
He spoke without turning around, as if he spoke more to the darkness outside
than to us. "What do the gods do when once they could answer the prayers of
their followers, then suddenly they cannot? One day they simply have to watch
their people die of diseases that only weeks before they could have healed.
You are too young, Meredith, and even Galen; neither of you really understands
what it was like.
Not your fault. Not your fault." He spoke the last in a whisper to the glass,
his face finally pressed gently to it.
I got up from my chair and went to him. He flinched when I touched his back,
then moved away from the glass enough for me to slide my arms around his
waist, pressing my body against his. He let me hold him, but he didn't relax
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against me. I tried to give comfort, but in a way, he wouldn't take it.
I spoke with my cheek pressed to the warm smoothness of his back. "I know that
there was more than one cauldron. I know that there were three main ones. I
know that they all changed form, and became cups. My father blamed it on all
the King Arthur stories about the Holy Grail. If enough people believe
something, then it can affect everything. Flesh affects spirit." Somewhere in
my matter-of-fact talking, Doyle began to relax against me. He began to let
the hurt go, a little.
"Yes," he said, "but the first cauldron given was the great cauldron that
could do all that any could do.
There were two lesser cauldrons. One could heal and feed, and the other held
treasure, gold and such."
The way he said the last words showed clearly that he didn't think that gold
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