“Don’t say that name,” the Wild Hunt’s leader said softly. “Not yet.”
Phelan’s mouth tasted like ashes. He swallowed hard, nodding slightly as Seamus turned and beckoned to another of the riders, a waif-slender figure on a solid chestnut mare. Was it really Seamus, or was he imagining his cousin’s face attached to the leader of the Hunt? Was this some kind of cruel trick?
They said he was alive. They said he was dead. Is this what they meant? His heart stutter-stepped and for a second, the world spun dizzily around him. Thom’s hand closed around his shoulder.
“Phelan?”
He waved away the question, staring transfixed as the slender figure leaned down to catch murmured instructions from the Hunt’s lead rider for the span of a few seconds, then straightened in his saddle. Seamus turned away from his rider and walked directly to Phelan, taking him roughly but not unkindly by the arm
“Walk with me, Wanderer.”
It was a tone that brooked no argument, but Thom seemed poised to make one on his behalf.
“I’m not sure—”
“It’s fine,” Phelan said, glancing at his friend. “Bring out a few bottles of whiskey and bourbon and wait for me here.”
“Are you sure?” J.T. asked.
“He is,” Thordin told them, eyes never leaving Seamus’s face. “Come on, we’d better do as he says. This lot is likely to get ornery if we don’t.”
Phelan caught Thom’s shudder out of the corner of his eye as he turned away to walk with Seamus. An errant wind teased the hems of their cloaks as they walked toward the river, parallel to the settlement’s walls. Both men were silent for a few dozen steps before Seamus turned his face toward the starlit sky.
“I see you’re no longer a stranger to command,” he said, his voice soft. It sounded different than it once had, a strange, jagged edge marring its once-musical cadence.
“I don’t command them,” Phelan said, then shook his head hard. “How are you here? How are you with them? We were told you were dead.”
“I very nearly was.” Silence dropped over them like a cloak and Phelan momentarily feared that he’d asked the wrong question too soon, that he’d never know the answers to all of the questions that swirled through his head like a maelstrom.
“Truth be known,” Seamus continued after a few long moments, “I’m hardly the man I was once upon a time. Betrayal does that.”
“Within the Hunt?”
Seamus snorted softly. “To the Hunt.”
Ice shot through Phelan’s veins. “How? Who?”
A bitter, wry smile twisted the former Taliesin’s lips. “My wife.”
Phelan stopped dead, heart thundering. “Leinth?”
Seamus startled, twisting back toward Phelan, the muscles of his shoulders, neck, and jaw taut. “Leinth was my lover and would that I had married her instead of her sister.”
Phelan stumbled back a step and sat down in the snow. Seamus gave him a strange, curious look.
“What do you know of mo ghrá daor, Phelan?”
“Déithe agus arrachtaigh, why the hell didn’t you see fit to tell us then?” Phelan’s staff lay next to him in the snow as he raked both hands through his hair, suddenly sweating. “You could have—there was so much—”
“Father never would have accepted it.”
“Pox on your bloody father,” Phelan snarled. “He was dead soon enough! You could have told us.”
“I was sold to the Hunt the day I left home,” Seamus said, eyes gleaming in the darkness. “You would have had me plunge all of you into danger and uncertainty? I did what I had to do.”
“Don’t use that line on me, Seamus, I practically invented it.” Phelan swallowed against the anger and sickness that rolled together into a lump in his throat. “Part of us died the day that rider came. You don’t know what it did to us. If we’d—do you have any—”
“I can only hope she eventually forgave me,” Seamus whispered. “Before they killed her, I hope that she was able to find a way to forgive me.”
“Killed her?” Phelan pushed to his feet, fingers closing around the warm wood of the staff. “Leinth’s alive.”
“Alive?”
“She’s here.” The two men stared at each other as they stood in the snow. “What’s happened to you, Seamus?”
“I lead the Wild Hunt,” his cousin whispered. “Isn’t that explanation enough?”
“No,” Phelan said flatly. “Not by a long shot.”
He took Seamus’s arm and marched him toward the bridge.
