Swallowing Darkness Read Online Free PDF

to faerie to be accidentally poisoned.”
    “The sidhe cannae be poisoned,” she said.
    “Not with anything occurring in nature, no, but you’ve lived in the human world for decades. You know very well that there are man-made poisons now. The sidhe are not proof against artificial creations. My father taught me that.”
    “Prince Essus was a very wise man, and for a sidhe royal, he was a great, great man.” There was a ferociousness to her words. She meant them, for she had loved my father as a son, for he, more than my mother, had loved me, and had allowed Gran to help him raise me. But the rage in those words didn’t match what she was saying, as if there were other words in her mind than those on her tongue.
    “He was, but his greatness is not what is in your mind, grandmother. I see a rage in you that frightens me. The kind of rage that all the fey seem capable of, so that they will trade their lives and the lives of those who depend on them for vengeance and pride.”
    “Do nae compare me to the lords and ladies of the court, Merry. I have a right to my anger, and my thoughts on it.”
    “Until I can trust that you are more my ally and grandmother than a revenge-seeking daughter, I cannot have you around me.”
    She looked startled. “I will be with you and the babes as I helped raise you.”
    I shook my head. “Sholto is my lover and the father of one of the children. More than that, Gran, sex with him brought back the most magic to faerie. I will not risk him to your vengeance, unless you make our most sacred oath that you will not harm him in any way.”
    She searched my face as if thinking that I must be joking. “Merry-girl, you cannae mean this. You cannae think that this monster is more to you than me.”
    “Monster,” I said softly.
    “He has used sidhe magic to hide that he is more a monster than any a’ the rest.”
    “What do you mean, ‘the rest’?” I asked.
    She motioned to Doyle. “The Darkness kills withou’ mercy. His mother was a hell hound, his father a phouka who bedded the bitch when in dog form. You could ha’ puppies inside ya. They act as if the high lords are perfect, but they are jus’ as deformed as we are. They can just hide it behind their magic better than us lesser folk.”
    I looked at the woman who had helped raise me as if she were a stranger, because in a way she was. I’d known that she resented the courts—most of the lesser fey did—but I had not known that she had this prejudice inside her.
    “Do you have a special grudge against Doyle too?” I asked.
    “When ya came to me, Merry, you had Galen with ya, and Barinthus. Them I ha’ nothin’ agin’, but I didnae dream you would go to the Darkness. Ya feared him as a child.”
    “I remember,” I said.
    “Do ya not understand, girl, that if the queen had had your father killed, who she would ha’ sent to do the deed?”
    Ah. “Doyle did not kill my father.”
    “How do ya know, Merry? Did he tell ya he did nae?”
    “Doyle would not have acted without the queen’s express orders, and Andais is not a good enough actress. She did not order my father, Andais’s brother’s, death. I saw her anger over it. It was real.”
    “She didnae love Essus.”
    “Maybe she loves only her son, but her brother meant something to her, and she did not like that he died at someone’s hand. Maybe it was anger that she had not done the ordering of it. I do not know, but I
do
know that Andais did not order the deed done, and that Doyle would not have acted without that order.”
    “But he would ha’ done it, if ordered. You do believe that,” Gran said.
    “Of course,” I said, and my voice was as calm as hers was growing strident.
    “He would ha’ killed your father at the queen’s orders. He would ha’ killed you.”
    “He was the Queen’s Darkness. I know that, Gran.”
    “How can ya sleep with him, then? Knowing the blood that must be on his hands.”
    I tried to think how to say it so she would