Declan kept his explanation on the difference between smiling and fucking to himself and nudged Antonio with his shoulder instead.
“You were saying, about an unseelie and a human.Why must it be that combination?”
“Symbolism,” Zyr answered.“Understand, the solstice sacrifices are more than ritual.Faerie feeds on them.The turn of the courts, of the seasons, is representative of Faerie’s very nature.And tied to it.”
Declan frowned, the hand not on Antonio now tapping at his own knee.“I understand unseelie as the role of Holly.Winter, death, chaos.But why a human as the other half?They aren’t fae.”
“A question heatedly discussed for age upon age, pre-convergence,” said the beithir in a tone thatalmostsounded like he didn’t disapprove of Declan’s existence.“All that’s truly known is that the part of Summermustbe embodied by a human for the ritual to be effective.Which brings us back to your initial question.”
Zyr leaned forward, tapping at the page of the book that waited, open.Both pages were densely covered in runes that Declan only vaguely recognized from some of Aisling’s more obscure texts, and even then, not ones he could read.
“Can you give us the cliffnotes?”Antonio asked.
“If Faerie chooses humans to play Summer, then, by pre-convergence reckoning, humans are seelie.A human has never sat on the Council.But a King of Oak and Queen of Holly once took the throne, ruling over all fae.They claimed to hold the throne for both courts, as had never been done before.Of course, they were killed within a century.The start of a very bloody age.”
The world went quiet.Small.A human ruling beside an unseelie.The pair claiming to embody both courts, with Faerie’s blessing as Summer and Winter embodied.
It made sense.Too many things madesensein the most terrible way.Infants sent prematurely to the voids and stars if they took after the wrong parent.And,bloody hell, if all fae were like his family, with two of every three their mothers ilk, what did that say for families like Everil’s, a kelpie mother and nereid father, anda string of lost babes.
“How much time passed between their deaths and the convergence?”He sounded very far off, even to his own ears, his eyes a bit wide, unblinking, on the beithir.
“You see the shape of it, pup.Not long.A few hundred years and several monarchs who rose and fell in quick succession.The unseelie gained true ascendence, with Winter following Winter and no Summer in between.And humanity became a force on both sides of the veil.”
“Wild Hunts weren’t the most popular, I presume.”
He sounded bitter.Hewasbitter.After all, it was the sluagh, the hounds of that long abandoned ritual, who still carried its stain.A mindless act of indiscriminate brutality, it was whispered.And the hounds seeking the souls of any in its path.
Monsters.The things under the bed.
“Quite the opposite.”And Zyr?Grim.“Faerie grows unpredictable when Protocol is no longer respected.Though humans gained power, they were dinner as often as they were guests.”
“Shit,” Antonio murmured.Declan couldn’t help but agree.
“Would it soften the blow to know that fae, too, were on the menu?Seelie and unseelie alike of all ages.When the courts fell, the newly dubbed ‘life aligned’ argued the convergence protected humans and fae alike.No more Wild Hunts, sentient dinner platters, or unseemly honor duels.”
“Wouldn’t want to spill any blood,” Declan murmured.“Not with two ‘life aligned’ Monarchs on the throne, claiming to protect us all.”
“Precisely.”Zyr’s voice was low.Quiet.And Declan swore that the storm of his gaze had quieted, turned to mournful rain.“The Monarchs are experts at killing without ever drawing a knife.”
Distantly, he was aware of Antonio asking a question and Zyr offering an explanation.The sacrifice implicit in the Wild Hunt.The purpose of an honor duel.
Fascinating stuff, if one weren’t in the midst of stomach-churning realizations.
Aisling had the genealogies of many old fae families.She’d gifted one such to Declan’s father shortly after they married.
Declan’s great-grandmother had three siblings.Seven nieces and nephews.More cousins.Two children of her own and a third on the way, when the convergence occurred.After the blood dried and the floors were scrubbed clean, only she, and Declan’s soon-to-be-born grandfather, remained of the family.
Declan himself had two cousins, one of them the sluagh he’d spoken to Antonio of.Out of all of the whole of that tree, the only sluagh left of Declan’s ancestors were himself and Siobahn.
“Murderpunk?”
He looked to Antonio, his fierce, sunbaked rust-and-leather bond.The bond he’d choose, again and again, immortality be damned to the voids.
He wasn’t close enough to hear Antonio’s heartbeat.The pounding in his ears must have been his own.
“How infuriating it must have been, to have your whole Court deemed replaceable,” was his answer, still distant.Zyr, silent, across from them.“To know Faerie gloried in mortals and unseelie, and you, yourself, there just for the dull equinox rites.To be a pretty, soft seelie, able only to grow flowers or warm hearths, and realize you were not built with the knives your counterparts have.That the Winter Court could theoretically stand, even if the seelie were wiped clean from existence, so long as there were mortals about.”
Declan shook, his soft laughter devoid of any humor.
