"Who is the cup for?" Doyle asked.
"One who needs healing, though she knows it not." My voice held an echo of the glow in the cup.
"I ask you again, who is the cup for?"
I didn't answer him, because he knew. They all knew. The cup was meant for the Queen of Air and Darkness. The cup would cleanse her, heal her, change her. I knew the cup was meant for her, but I did not know if she would drink it.
Chapter 28
Andais stood in the center of the chamber carved of moonlight and darkness. Her white skin shone as if she'd captured the full moon inside her skin and all its soft radiance spilled out of her. Her hair was a fall of blackest night, except that if I looked at her from the corner of my eye there were pale points of light in her hair, like scattered stars, but when I turned to face her directly, there was only a shimmering blackness, unrelieved by any light, the heart of deepest, emptiest space. The kind of empty darkness that held no warmth, no life.
The triple grey of her eyes glowed, but it was subdued as if lit only by reflected light. Her eyes were light grey storm clouds lit by distant lighting, with no light of their own. That last thick ring of charcoal was like the sky before it fell upon the earth and poured its rage upon us all.
The look in her eyes alone would have stopped me at the door. Her power filled her like some stroke of fate waiting for its victim, making me want to turn around and run. I was still touched by the magic that had revived the spring. The magic that Adair and I, merely touching, had awoken. But that bright, healing spell faded to ashes in my heart with a look from Andais's power-mad eyes. There was nothing sane in them.
I stood barely inside the door, afraid to move, afraid to attract her attention. All the new power, all the new self-discovery, all the newfound joy and love; and I was suddenly back to being a child again. A frightened rabbit huddling in the grass hoping the fox will pass me by. When I swallowed, it hurt, as if my fear meant to choke me. But I wasn't the rabbit that this particular fox was hunting.
Eamon stood on the small platform at the end of the room, the one that was usually curtained off. He was tall and pale, with his fall of ankle-length black hair the only thing that shielded his body from our view. Eamon was one of those who did casual nudity around the court. I'd seen him nude before and, if he survived the night, would again. No, it wasn't Eamon's beauty that sped my pulse. It wasn't even the implements of torture and death that hung on the wall behind him, framing his body like a collage. It was the queen's words, and his answer to them.
"Do you defy me, Eamon, my consort?" Her voice was calm when she asked it, too calm. It matched nothing in the room, not even the expression on her face.
"I do not defy you, my queen, my love, but I beg you. You will kill him if you do not stop this."
A voice called from behind Eamon, "Don't stop, please, don't stop."
"He does not wish to stop," Andais said, and she moved one hand, negligently, bringing my attention to the whip in it. It had been lost against the blackness of her long skirt, so that until she moved it, I had seen nothing. It was like some well-camouflaged snake, hidden until it would strike. The whip made a heavy slithering sound against the floor, as she moved it back and forth. An idle gesture that raised the hair on the back of my neck.
"You told me once that you valued him because he could take so much pain. If you kill him, you will not have him to play with, my queen." I realized that Eamon was standing in front of the alcove in the center of the wall. He was blocking the view of the place where I knew there were chains bolted into the wall. Whoever it was, he was shorter than Eamon's six feet, and could be killed by a mere whip. Most of the fey could be decapitated, pick up their heads under one arm, and strike back at their enemy. They were not easily killed or injured. Who would need to be shielded like this? Who would Eamon risk himself for? No name came to my mind.
There were other guards in the room. They were all nude. Clothes, armor, weapons lay in a heap at the foot of her bed, as if she'd lain among the silk and fur, and ordered them all to strip. Which she may have done, but seeing a dozen of the sidhe, kneeling, heads bowed, their hair loose and covering their nudity like robes of many colors, was both a lovely sight and a disturbing one.
What had happened? What had changed since Barinthus and the others left the mound and came to fetch me? Barinthus had said she was getting better; this was as bad as I'd ever seen her.
I was afraid to speak, afraid to make any noise, for fear that all that anger would turn in my direction. I wasn't the only one perplexed about how to proceed, for Doyle stood in front of me, and a little to one side, as motionless as I was, as motionless as we all were. Our entrance through the door had turned her eyes to us, but now that we'd stopped moving, she had turned all that attention back to Eamon. None of us seemed willing to risk sharing that attention with him.
She drew the whip out behind her, and there was room among the kneeling men, room, as if this wasn't the first time the whip had come snaking back along the floor. Not the first time that night, nor the twelfth, nor the twentieth. The men stayed like a strange garden of beautiful statues, so very still, as the whip whispered back along the floor. The queen sent the whip forward, using her whole arm, shoulder, back, and finally lower body. She threw the whip the way you throw a good punch. Her wrist flicked at the last moment and gave it that added curl that would make it crack.
It made the sound of a tornado rushing past, and I knew from hard experience that on the receiving end of that lash, the sound was even more overwhelming, like standing on the railroad tracks while the train thunders down toward you, and you can't move out of the way. Not because you don't want to, but because you're chained in place.