only levering himself up after Fionh appeared in the doorway.
'They will see you now,' she said.
'Where's Blackbird?' I asked her.
'She is being cared for, don't worry.'
'If she is harmed…' I told them.
Garvin interrupted. 'She won't be harmed while she's pregnant.'
'How did you know about that?' I asked him.
He shrugged, a seismic movement. 'I make it my business to know about the people I have to deal with.'
Fionh led the way while Garvin and Tate fell in behind. We went back into the house, which was clearly a substantial property. We passed room after room, some with dust covers over the furniture as if they hadn't been used in years. We came at the end to a set of double doors facing us. Fionh opened one of the doors toward her, stepping to the side to allow me to enter.
'Garvin will go in with you,' she said.
Inside, the room was dimly lit. I stepped through the doorway into a room buzzing with power. Outside there had been no trace of it, but within the room it was like walking through a cloud of static.
There was a large domed ceiling with a mural painted on it, like the ones you see in churches, except the angels had far too many teeth and the wrong sort of wings.
The room could originally have been a ballroom. There was a gallery at the far end where the musicians might have sat. In the centre of the floor was a pool of light within which there was a huge seven-pointed star.
'Come forward, Alshirian, called Dogstar, also called Niall Petersen, so that we may see you.'
Arrayed in a semi-circle around the star were seven chairs, large enough to be called thrones and set back so they were in shadow. Six of the chairs were occupied, illuminated dimly by some unseen light source. The empty chair was dark.
Whether it was some distortion caused by the power in the room or a quality of the light, the figures in the chairs were isolated, picked out against the dark.
Some of the occupants had features I recognised. The strikingly beautiful blue-eyed lady wrapped in the deep blue cloak had hair that wound around the finials on the top of her chair of its own volition and was just as disturbing as Fionh's had been. The short fellow with the broad nose and the grumpy expression reminded me of Marshdock and Fellstamp. They shared common features in the way a son inherits his father's ears.
A delicate figure with finely boned limbs ending in long spindly fingers sat to my right. Her skin was pale as moonlight and her ears came sharply to a point. She had a small pert nose and a mouth wider than a human mouth would be. Her eyes were slightly elongated and shone green in the dark as she turned a yellow gold band on her left wrist. Next to her was a huge woman, her face broad and flat, her forearms the size of hams. Ivory teeth protruded from her bottom jaw, reminding me of Gramawl, but she was largely hairless and as pale skinned as her neighbour. Heavy silver rings dangled from each ear and she had a broad leather belt around her waist, pulled over a loose shirt with a great silver ram's-head buckle.
Next to her was a man who I would have not looked twice at if I had met him elsewhere. Dressed in a red silk shirt, he had a feral look about him that spoke of something predatory. He regarded me with cold malice.
For a moment, I thought the figure next to him was Slimgrin, the warder who had been waiting in the room downstairs, but the fur on his head had been caught into a topknot and he had a groomed, more cultured look about him. He also had a heavy silver chain around his neck that sat bright against the dark lustre of his fur.
They were clearly waiting for me, so I stepped forward into the circle of light and stood at the centre of the star. Garvin moved in behind me. The light caught the bright edge of a bare blade in his hand. His staff had transformed into a long slim blade and scabbard. I hadn't heard him draw it.
'Is that necessary?' I asked him.
'Not my decision.' He shrugged lightly.
I turned back to the dimly lit figures in the seats.
'Is that it? Have you brought me here to slaughter me?'
I was greeted with silence. The power in the room was making my ears buzz.
'If not for that, then why am I here?'
'That's a better question,' said the lady in the blue cloak in a light contralto voice. 'I am Kimlesh. I speak for the Nymphine Court, the undines and the greyne. That's one of the things we are here to consider. Why you are here.'
'You summoned me.'
'I meant why you, a wraith, un-bound of the Seventh Court and part-human, are here.'
'That, I don't know,' I said honestly.
'Blackbird has told you, I'm sure, that the Seventh Court are not known for associating with humans.'
'The fact I'm here means someone has been playing away from home, though, doesn't it?'
'Not necessarily.'
'How else do you explain it?'
'There was a time, long ago, when the Feyre were not as you see us today. Each of us here holds a strand of that thread. Teoth, there, holds the office of High Maker, held only by the luchorpan and the nixies. Mellion is the Hordemaster, ruler of all the goblins and gnolls of the Goblin Court. These boundaries were made, though. They did not appear by accident.'
'What does that have to do with me?'
'We, in this room, made a decision some time ago, to allow our bloodlines to mix with those of humanity and repair the damage that was done. We allowed, and in some cases even encouraged, a liaison between the races.'
'I know. That's why the Seventh Court rebelled.'
'The Feyre has become more and more specialised as certain traits only manifest themselves inside a single court. It has made us fragile.'
'You don't appear fragile to me.'
'I don't mean fragile as individuals. I mean as a race. We have lost the ability to reproduce because parts of our makeup have become unstable.'
'But breeding with humans fixes that?'
'We took a calculated risk. We have known for a long time that the union between Feyre and Human was fertile and had the potential to restore the fertility lost to us. Humans spread like moss on a damp tree. If we could acquire some of their fecundity then we would be restored. That was a prize worth the taking. Human blood has the missing pieces, as far as we are concerned. You are a demonstration of that. You already have a daughter and there's another child on the way.'
'Blackbird told you?'
'We already knew. The prospect of a birth is important news amongst the courts of the Feyre.'
'Then you asked me here to congratulate me?'
The answer was not a warm one. 'The nature of the babe is uncertain.'
'You mean it could turn out like me, wraithkin, rather than like Blackbird.'
'It's more complicated than that. When we mixed our bloodlines with humanity, the capacity to have children was not the only thing altered. It was the risk we took when we allowed it.'
'What else changed?'
'The Feyre are defined by physical form. Fey'ree are small and delicate like Yonna here,' she gestured to the pale, slim figure with the green eyes, 'whereas ogres like Barthia are much larger and stronger.' She gestured to the huge woman, who accepted the complement with a nod.
I looked back at Yonna. I could see now the resemblance from when Blackbird had transformed herself in the room above the inn, when we were in Shropshire. The pale skin and the way the eyes were elongated. 'I am Fey'ree,' she'd told me. 'A creature of Fire and Air.'
Kimlesh continued. 'Humans, though, do not inherit the full form of the Feyre. They can acquire aspects of it, of course, and some are more Fey than others, but none are quite like us.'
'Is that a problem?'
