I tried to hug him without hurting the front of his body. Segna reached around and shoved me away.
"Do not touch her again," Sholto snapped at Segna, and his voice was full of a choking anger.
"Now she'll cuddle you," Segna whined, "now she'll touch you, because the icky bits are gone. Now she wants you, just like the other sidhe bitch."
"She would have touched me that night in Los Angeles if you had left us alone," he said.
Agnes reached to the other hag and drew her back. "He is right, Segna. We bear blame in this atrocity, too."
A tear trailed down out of the sickly yellow of Agnes's eye. She turned away so I wouldn't see. Most of faerie cried when we cried, and displayed any emotion out in the open. It was only when we got close to a throne that we learned to hide what we felt. We were meant to be a freer people than this.
"Lady Clarisse," Sholto continued, "took me inside the Seelie sithen. She led me cloaked through back ways to her room. Then she told me that although the tentacles fascinated her, she also feared them. She said she could not bear to have the tentacles touch her while we made love. Here I was truly a fool - I let her tie me up, so I would not accidentally brush her with the parts she feared, and said she craved." He wouldn't meet anyone's eyes again. I watched his face redden even through the strands of his white hair. He burned with embarrassment. "When I was helpless, other sidhe slipped into the room. They did to me what you see."
"Was their king with them?" Doyle asked.
Sholto shook his head. "He is not a king who does his own dirty work. You know that, Darkness."
"Did the king know?" Doyle said.
"They would not have done this without his knowledge," I said. "They fear him too much."
"But by not being present, he has left himself room to deny it," Sholto said. "If I could see what he hoped to gain from this, I would believe it of him. But what does this accomplish?"
"Some of your people believed that Queen Andais did this to you, allowed it to be done. Perhaps this atrocity was committed with that as the intent. You are her strongest ally, King Sholto. If you had left her side, what then?" Doyle asked.
"The only reason for the king to want our queen shorn of her allies is that he means to make war. And if any of faerie make war on another, our treaty with America is breached. We will all be cast out of the last country that would take us in. If Taranis caused that, the rest of faerie would rise up against him, and he would be destroyed."
We knew that Taranis had done something almost as bad earlier in the year. He had released the Nameless, a formless being. It had been made of the discarded power that all the fey had been forced to shed in order to be allowed to remain in America - one of the restrictions placed on us when President Jefferson allowed us to immigrate. The faerie had done two weirding spells in Europe, trying to control ourselves enough to live peaceably with the humans, but we had done one more here. I don't think any of the sidhe understood what we were giving up. I was born long after the spell, so that I knew our glorious past as stories, legends, rumors.
Taranis had released that trapped magic, tried to use it to kill Maeve Reed. Reed was the golden goddess of Hollywood - and once upon a time, the goddess of cinema. She had known his secret, that he was infertile, that the problem of his childlessness wasn't in the long string of wives that he kept replacing. It was him, and he had suspected it for a hundred years, when he cast Maeve Reed out of faerie for refusing his bed. She had done so on the grounds that the last wife he'd put aside had gotten pregnant by someone else. She'd told the king to his face that she thought he was infertile, and these many years later, he'd tried to take his revenge.
One of the things that prompted Queen Andais to call me back from exile had been her discovery from human doctors that she was infertile. The ruler of a faerie land is the land, and if they are not fertile - not healthy - the land and people die. It is a very old magic, and a true one. If Taranis had known about his infertility for a hundred years without revealing it, then he had condemned his people to death, knowingly. They killed rulers for such crimes in faerie.
"You are all entirely too quiet," Sholto said to us. "You know something. Something that I need to know."
"We are not free to discuss it, not openly," Doyle said.
"You will not be allowed to be alone with him," Agnes said. "We are not such fools as that."
"I cannot argue with Agnes on this," Sholto said. Again he made that gesture as if he would stroke the missing bits. "I have put myself at the mercy of the sidhe once too often of late."
"We cannot tell this tale without our queen's permission," Doyle said. "It would earn us, at the very least, a trip to the Hallway of Mortality."
"I would not ask that of anyone," Sholto said. He lowered his head, and a sound escaped him. It was almost a sob. I wanted to hug him, but I didn't want to anger his hags any further. Besides, they were partially right - I could touch him now without flinching. Still, I saw it for what it was, something cruelly done - an amputation. I had felt those muscular tentacles on my body - just a touch, but they had been real - and they'd had uses, which he now had lost.
Sholto spoke low. "The Seelie said they were doing me a favor. That if I healed without the deformity coming back, the lady in question would keep her word and bed me for a night."
In sympathy, I started to touch him where the bits had been, then stopped because the wound was bleeding and raw, and touching it must hurt. "But the tentacles are part of you. It is like cutting off an arm, or worse."