"If you say it is the truth, then I will believe you," Cathbodua said.
"I will take oath on it," Rhys said.
"That won't be necessary," she said, but she glanced back at all of us, and said, "I apologize, King Sholto, but perhaps Saraid or I should tell you why we have such a hatred of the nightflyers."
"I know that Prince Cel had made friends of a sort with one of the dispossessed royal nightflyers." He pressed his face into my hair as he spoke, as if it were too awful to look straight at.
"You knew the prince was using him to torture us." Saraid's voice was outraged, and her anger translated into a flash of warmth as her magic began to rise.
"I killed him when I found out," Sholto said.
"What did you say?" Saraid asked.
"I said, when I found out, I killed the nightflyer who was helping the prince torture you. Did you not wonder why it stopped?"
"Prince Cel said he was rewarding us," Cathbodua said.
"He stopped because I killed his playmate and made of him an example so that no one else among us would be tempted to try to replace him in Cel's fantasies. He told me before he died that the prince had made for himself a spine of metal so they could tear and rape together." The slightest of tremors went through his body, as if the horror of it was still with him.
"Then we owe you a debt, King Sholto," Cathbodua said.
A sound escaped Saraid. I turned in Sholto's arms and found tears gliding down her face. "Thank Goddess, Dogmaela was not here to find out that our prince's kindness was not a softening of him, but the action of a real king." Her voice never showed the tears I could see. If you'd just heard the voice you wouldn't have known.
"It was that kindness, that promise of never doing that again to her, that helped him persuade Dogmaela to participate in a fantasy that required cooperation," Cathbodua said.
"Do not tell," Saraid said. "We swore to never tell such things. It is enough that we endured them."
"There are things the queen made us do," Rhys said, as he turned onto a side street, "that we never speak of either."
Suddenly Saraid was sobbing. She put her hands in front of her face and cried as if her heart would break. Between sobs she said, "I am so glad ... to be here ... with you, Princess ... I could not do it ... could not endure ... I had decided to let myself fade." Then she simply wept.
Uther laid an awkward hand on her shoulder, but she didn't seem to notice. I touched her hand where it lay against her face, and she turned and held my fingers with hers, still hiding her crying from our sight. Galen reached across and touched her shining hair.
She wrapped her hand more tightly around mine, and then she lowered her other hand, her eyes still closed with her weeping. She held out that weeping hand. It was a moment before Sholto and I realized what she was doing. Then, slowly, hesitatingly, he reached out and took her hand.
She grabbed onto him and held both our hands tightly as she shook and cried. It was only as the weeping began to quiet that she stared up at us, at him, with eyes shining blue and stars with tears. "Forgive me for thinking that all princes and all kings are like Cel."
"There is nothing to forgive, because the kings and princes are like that at the courts still. Look what the king did to our Merry."
"But you are not like that, and the other men are not like that."
"We have all suffered at the hands of those who were supposed to keep us safe," Sholto said.
Galen stroked her hair as if she were a child. "We've all bled for the prince and the queen."
She bit her lip, still clinging to our hands. Uther patted her shoulder. "You all make me glad that Jack-in-Irons are solitary faerie and beholden to no court."
Saraid nodded.
And then Uther said, "I'm the only one who can reach you for a hug. Will you take it from someone as ugly as me?"
Saraid turned to look at him, and Galen had to move his hand away so that she could. She looked surprised, but she looked into his eyes and saw what I'd always seen: kindness. She simply nodded.
Uther slid his big arm across her shoulders. It was as careful and gentle a hug as I'd ever seen, and Saraid let herself fold into that hug. She let him hold her, and buried her face against his wide chest.
It was Uther's turn to look surprised, and then he looked pleased. His kind might be solitary faeries, but Uther liked people, and solitaire wasn't his favorite game. He sat in the back, crammed into the tight space but he got to hold the shining, beautiful woman. He got to wrap her tears in his strong arm and hold her against a chest that was as deep, with a heart that was as big, as any I'd ever known.
He held Saraid the rest of the way home, and in a way she held him right back, because sometimes and especially for a man, being able to be someone's big strong shoulder to cry on helps you not need to cry so very much yourself.
On that drive Uther wasn't alone, and neither was Saraid. Sholto and Galen held me. Cathbodua even put a friendly hand on Rhys's shoulder. The sidhe had lost the knack of comforting each other with touch. We'd been taught that that was something for the lesser fey, a sign of their weakness and the sidhe's superiority. But I'd learned months ago that that was just a story to mask the fact that the sidhe no longer trusted each other enough to touch like that. Touch had begun to mean pain instead of comfort, but not here, not for us. We were sidhe and lesser fey, if you could call a nine-foot-tall man lesser, but in that moment we were all just simply fey and it was good.
Chapter Thirty-four
We pulled up in front of what I'd started to think of as home, but it was Maeve Reed's estate in Holmby Hills. She had assured us through e-mails and phone calls that she wanted us to stay as long as we needed to. I worried that eventually she'd grow tired of us all, but for today, and until she got back from Europe, it was home.