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His voice was a deep, menacing rumble and I couldn’t help feeling a shiver run down my spine. Was his Court really so dangerous that he had to threaten them all to keep them from attacking me? What kind of snake pit had I married into? Also, what did he mean when he said I had “Unseelie blood in my veins?” I had no such lineage that I knew of. Was he lying about me in order to get his people to accept me?
There was a murmur of ascent from all those assembled which seemed to satisfy Liath. He nodded his head.
“Good. May I encourage you to come up and pay your respects to your new Princess—my new bride. Please be respectful and remember she is unused to our ways.”
Then he led me up onto the dais. He sat in the middle of the long table and put me at his right hand—a place of honor reserved for the person who was closest to the ruler. I had never been given that seat beside my father—I was lucky if he even let me dine at the Royal table. Even then, I was usually squeezed in on the end as an afterthought. But Liath treated me like his queen.
“Hello, my dear,” said a soft, cracked voice beside me.
I turned and saw a little old lady—almost bent double with age. I thought she must be ancient, since the Fae age much more slowly than mortals do. Her face was a mask of wrinkles and her hair was gray, but she gave me a kindly smile and a little wave. She was wearing fingerless gloves, I saw, and though her fingers were crooked, she went back to knitting something rapidly after she waved.
“Oh, hello,” I said awkwardly. “I’m, uh, Alira.”
“So I heard.” She nodded graciously. “I am Liath’s great, great Aunt Acosta.”
“I was about to introduce you two, Aunt Acosta,” Liath rumbled from my other side. “Alira, meet my great, great Aunt. She’s been at the Winter Court almost since it came to be in the first place.”
“That I have.” The ancient lady nodded and smiled at me again. She had very white, obviously fake teeth the likes of which I had never seen before. She also had tiny, curling horns on the sides of her head—much smaller than Liath’s and almost hidden in her salt and pepper hair.
“I got them from a doe,” she said to me, still knitting.
“Pardon?” I frowned. “Got what?”
“My teeth, dear—I saw you admiring them.” She tapped her white, even teeth with one of her knitting needles. “Brought it down myself—by magic of course. I can still hunt, you know.”
“You…can?” I looked at her blankly. My father’s Court rode out to hunt every now and then but I hadn’t known the denizens of the Unseelie Court did as well. After all, all their lands were cold and barren—what was there to hunt?
Well, deer apparently.
“I certainly can.” Great Aunt Acosta lifted her chin proudly. “I killed it and pulled the teeth and used a binding spell to fix them together. Used a whitening spell too.” She grinned again, that white grin of hers. “And then do you know what I did?”
“Er…no. What did you do?” I asked politely.
“Why, the cooks made venison stew that night and I used that doe’s own teeth to eat her up!” She cackled with laughter and repeated, “Ate her up—with her own teeth!”
“How…nice,” I said, unsure what else to say.
“Don’t mind Aunt Acosta,” Liath leaned down to rumble in my ear. “She’s a little mad. Harmless, though.”
I simply nodded, not knowing what else to say.
“Liath has certainly got you all fixed up, doesn’t he, dearie?” the old lady said. She nodded at all the moonstone jewelry I was wearing. “You’ve got on Queen Mab’s entire regalia, you know. I wonder how she’d feel about a Seelie girl wearing her things?”
“Now, Aunt Acosta, Alira has Unseelie blood too,” Liath protested.
“She does, does she?” The old lady frowned at me. “Where’s her horns then? Or her wings? A tail?” She peered at me closely. “Are you hiding a tail under that pretty dress, my dear?”
“Oh, I…I’m afraid not. Sorry to disappoint you,” I said politely, though it had never occurred to me I might have to apologize to anyone for not having a tail or any other animal-type abnormality. But maybe here in the Unseelie Court, it was normal.
“Ssspeaking of her pretty dresss, I am the one to thank for that.”
The hissing voice came from the front of the dais. I looked up and had to school my face not to display shock.
There in front of the Royal table was a spider woman. That is to say, her bottom half was that of a large spider—and when I say “large” I mean a spider the size of a horse. Her torso began where the spider’s head would have been and she had four long arms that had two elbows apiece. The top half of her was clothed in brilliant, poison green, which matched the green stripes on her black spider’s body. Her face was mostly human, except for the cluster of extra eyes on her forehead.
