Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson, #9)(81)

His eyes grew sad. “I’d forgotten that.” He touched the glass, and the liquid cleared. “It’s water now, cool and sweet. I give my word that water is all it is, safe for you to drink. But if you’d rather not, I will not take offense.”

I took a sip, and it tasted like water. Goreu glanced at Beauclaire, who shook his head. Neither of them had heard that story—they could get the whole tale from Uncle Mike when we were gone. I mostly trusted Uncle Mike. But as soon as no one was paying attention to me, I set the water down on the table and left it there.

“So,” I said, as the others drank their cider. “When we left off, the fae were stuck between a rock and a hard place. Let me guess—the result of the discussion that Uncle Mike is so gleeful about was the release of a few of the nasties that the Gray Lords have been keeping a choke hold on. We had a little excitement, and some werewolf friends of mine had trouble in Arizona.” I let them see what I thought about their solution. The two that I knew about both preyed upon children.

“I was unhappy with the decision,” Beauclaire said. “I was unhappier with the way it was carried out. The fae who were released were all under a death sentence. After they had caused a stir, one of us was supposed to go out and kill them. Making us heroes of sorts.”

I gave him a sour look. The years I had spent working with Zee had given me more than the know-how to rebuild an engine: I had Zee’s patented sour look down cold. “That’s not what happened.”

“No,” agreed Beauclaire. Maybe he’d hung out with Zee at some point, too, because his sour look was pretty good. “I thought it was overly optimistic. I was outvoted.” He gave Goreu a cool look.

Goreu grimaced. “I had no choice. We need someone in with the genocidal bunch. Since I’m the one with the harmless look and no reputation for stuff, it’s got to be me. We vote as a block.”

“The genocidal bunch?” I asked cautiously.

He nodded. “The majority of the Gray Lords want to deal with the humans from a point of strength: appease us, and we won’t kill you. But there is a cadre of us who look at Underhill, look at our numbers—and at the fact that our population has dropped by half since we left Europe and traveled here—and they don’t believe we can survive. They want a war, a war with the humans or a war with the werewolves that will devolve into a war with the humans. They think that if all of Faery fight, we can kill humankind and die in glory.”

I felt like someone had knocked the wind out of me.

“Are they right?” asked Adam. “Could you destroy humanity?”

Goreu shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Uncle Mike took a deep drink of his cider, and said, “The only thing that has saved us so far is that they are aware that most of the fae, the ones who are not Gray Lords, would like to live. We don’t care so much about the fae as a race, we care about ourselves and our families. And there are still enough of us that we’d have a fair chance of stopping the Gray Lords who want war. Which is why they have to make the humans or, failing that, the werewolves make war first.”

Did Bran know this? I took a deep breath. Of course he did. He’d abandoned our pack so that if we failed to negotiate with the fae, they couldn’t use that as the flash point for a war with all of the werewolves. Was it better that Bran abandoned us not just for the safety of the werewolves, but of the humans, and, probably, the fae, too? Yes.

“The Widow Queen is one of the suicidal, genocidal group?” I hazarded.

Goreu shook his head. “No. She’s part of her own small group of delusional idiots. She thinks that if the werewolves don’t come in on the humans’ side, we can actually kill all the humans who live on this continent and survive. Happily, you’ve just killed most of her followers. She thought she could use Aiden to gain control of Underhill as part of some further and complicated plot to destroy the other Gray Lords and take control. She likes to rule.”

“To be fair,” Uncle Mike said, “we watched the Europeans do a fair job of killing off the people who were originally on this continent.” He gave me a sly look. “You could ask your father’s people about that. But she doesn’t have smallpox or the black measles, so she’s trying out a few other things. The last one was a troll who was nearly mindless—there are a few of them who are quite brilliant by troll standards at least, Mercy—but who had the delightful talent of growing in strength every time he ate a human and, in the water, was impossible to kill.”

I stared at him, trying to imagine that troll being stronger.

Uncle Mike gave me a cheery smile. “Happily for our side, he was too dumb to jump in the water before your pack killed him. Had he made it to the city and started killing hundreds of people, none of us could have stopped him.” He paused. “Well, maybe Nemane or Beauclaire. But the Widow Queen forgets how much power she’s lost.”

“Our storytelling this night is at an end,” Beauclaire said softly. He got up from the table. “If you would excuse me for a few moments. Goreu will continue our conversation.”

Goreu leaned forward. “The situation with your pack has presented us with a unique opportunity. We need to negotiate with the human government—and have scared them to the point that there is no path for communication. But you killed a troll.”

He let that statement sit in the air.