“And you’re here to inform me about…?” I asked her.
“My husband,” Efridís said simply. “I discovered that he was not trying to unite all Faerie merely for dynastic reasons. He is what I believe you would call a religious…zealot?” She tipped her head charmingly. “Is that the word?”
“It’s a word. I didn’t know you had religion in Faerie.”
“We do not anymore.”
“But you did once.”
“Yes. That is why the war was fought. The old gods were banished from both Earth and Faerie thousands of your years ago, by a spell maintained by your Silver Circle of mages. My husband wishes to destroy it.”
“And thereby to bring his gods back.”
She nodded. “He was trying to invade Earth at the time of the war in order to attack your Circle, which was much more vulnerable then, but Caedmon opposed him. The two sides were almost equally matched and the battle was therefore—”
“Wait. Caedmon opposed him? Why?”
Æsubrand said that thing that might be a curse word again and glared at me. “Do you know nothing?”
“About this? Yeah. Nothing is pretty much what I know.”
Efridís sent him a let-me-handle-this glance, which surprisingly had Junior backing down. It was a little surreal, seeing the titan of the fey abruptly close his mouth when his tiny mama told him to, but that’s exactly what happened. Then she looked at me, smiled, and tried again.
“It is…complicated. Too much to go into now. All you need to understand is that a generation of fey warriors died for their faith on one side, and for the right to live free of it on the other.”
“And you’re telling me this because?”
“Because the war you are currently fighting did not start recently. It started thousands of years ago, on that battlefield.”
“It started before that, in the war between the gods them—” Æsubrand broke off at another glance from mama.
“Let us keep this simple, shall we?” she asked, with a brittle smile. She looked at me. “The two sides only ceased fighting out of utter exhaustion. Afterward, the pathways between Earth and Faerie were closed, the easy commute of the old days gone forever. And a truce was established, sealed by my marriage, between the two great houses. But truce is all it was. Peace was impossible. For both sides still believed they were in the right. And now, the war is about to be reignited.”
“Why now?” I demanded. “What’s changed?”
“The number of available warriors. It is what stymied my husband’s plans all along. As I have said, the two sides were very closely matched, and try as they might, neither could gain the upper hand. And Caedmon made it clear that if my husband wished to invade Earth in the future, he would have to do it through a Blarestri army.”
“Which he’d just proven he couldn’t do.”
“Yes.”
“That’s why my father was willing to settle the matter—temporarily—in exchange for a royal Blarestri bride,” Æsubrand put in, more calmly. “He assumed that any child that resulted from the union would be able to claim both thrones one day, thus uniting the two most powerful fey armies under Svarestri control. And giving him the numbers he needed to combat your Circle.”
“Only that hasn’t been working out so well,” I pointed out.
“That remains to be seen. But Caedmon’s successful attempt to gain an heir raised the possibility of an unbroken line of opposition. And even had it not, my father was beginning to doubt the depth of my devotion to his dogma.”
“You’re not a true believer?”
That got a flash from those strange eyes. “I am a king, or will be shortly. Not a lackey to a group of beings who could be banished by a human spell!”
Okay, that I could believe. A moral objection I’d have laughed at, since I was pretty sure Æsubrand didn’t have any morals. But being king of all Faerie didn’t mean much if he still had to bow and scrape and kiss godly butts all the time.
“Okay, say I believe you. Say you’re suddenly on our side. Then what the hell were you doing at Slava’s?”
“Trying to warn you.”
“Warn me? You almost killed me!”