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among us one day, like the Black Coach, like so many things just appeared. Then one day it vanished,
and we lost our ability to feed the masses of our followers, and for the first time we watched them
starve." He rose and turned, pressing his hands against the window's dark glass, leaning his face so close
to it that it looked as if he meant to kiss the darkness outside. "We were not in the country when the great
famine hit, but if we had still possessed the cauldron I would have strapped it to my back and swum to
Ireland." For the first time I heard a bur of brogue in his voice. Most of the sidhe pride themselves on
having no accent. I'd never heard Doyle sound like anything or anywhere in particular.
"Are you talking about the great potato famine?" I asked.
"Yes." His voice was almost a growl.
He was mourning people who had died nearly two hundred years before I was born. But the pain was
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as real to him now as if it had been last week. I'd noticed that the immortals carry all the strong
emotions love, hate, grief for longer than a human lifetime. It's as if time moves differently for them,
and even sitting beside them, living with them, my time and their time weren't the same.
He spoke without turning around, as if he spoke more to the darkness outside than to us. "What do the
gods do when once they could answer the prayers of their followers, then suddenly they cannot? One
day they simply have to watch their people die of diseases that only weeks before they could have
healed. You are too young, Meredith, and even Galen; neither of you really understands what it was like.
Not your fault. Not your fault." He spoke the last in a whisper to the glass, his face finally pressed gently
to it.
I got up from my chair and went to him. He flinched when I touched his back, then moved away from
the glass enough for me to slide my arms around his waist, pressing my body against his. He let me hold
him, but he didn't relax against me. I tried to give comfort, but in a way, he wouldn't take it.
I spoke with my cheek pressed to the warm smoothness of his back. "I know that there was more than
one cauldron. I know that there were three main ones. I know that they all changed form, and became
cups. My father blamed it on all the King Arthur stories about the Holy Grail. If enough people believe
something, then it can affect everything. Flesh affects spirit." Somewhere in my matter-of-fact talking,
Doyle began to relax against me. He began to let the hurt go, a little.
"Yes," he said, "but the first cauldron given was the great cauldron that could do all that any could do.
There were two lesser cauldrons. One could heal and feed, and the other held treasure, gold and such."
The way he said the last words showed clearly that he didn't think that gold and such were worth nearly
as much as healing and food.
"There were more cauldrons than that," Rhys said.
Doyle pushed away from the glass enough to turn his head and look behind him at the other men. I
stayed wrapped around his back. "Not real ones," Doyle said.
"They were real, Doyle, they just weren't given to us by the gods. Some among us had the ability to
make such things."
"They could not do what the great cauldrons could do," Doyle said.
"No, but they didn't disappear when the gods withdrew their favor, either."
Doyle turned, and I had to let him go so he could pace back toward Rhys. "They did not withdraw their
favor. We gave up the power to work directly with them. We gave them up, they did not give us up."
Rhys held up his hands. "I don't want to have this argument, Doyle. I don't think a few centuries will
make the fight any more fun. Let's just agree to disagree. All we know for certain is that one day the
great relics began to vanish. The things that the fey had made themselves, from their own magic, remained
behind."
"Until the second weirding magic," Frost said. It was the longest sentence I'd gotten out of him since this
afternoon. I'd tried to speak to him in the hall, and he'd been curt and avoided me. I was the one who
had nearly died, but he was the one throwing the fit. Typical Frost.
"Yes," Nicca said in his soft voice, "and then the items we'd wrought ourselves began to break, or just
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stopped working. It was as if the spell drained them."
I knew that Nicca was centuries old, but I kept forgetting until he said something that forced me to
remember.
"I don't think everyone would have agreed to the second weirding if they'd known what would happen
to our wands, our staffs." Nicca shook his head, sending his deep brown hair glimmering in the lights. "I
wouldn't have agreed."
"Many of us would not have agreed," Doyle said.
"If that's true," I said, "then how did you all agree to the weirding that made the Nameless? That was the
third weirding, so you all knew what to expect. You all knew how much you could lose."
"What choice did we have?" Rhys said. "It was either give up more of our power or be exiles without a
country."
"We could have stayed in Europe," Frost said.
"And what," Doyle said, "be forced out of our hollow hills to buy houses and live next door to humans?
To be forced to intermarry with humans." He looked back at me and said, "I don't mean to insult the
princess, but a little mixed blood is one thing; to be forced to marry humans is something else. Those who
remained behind in Europe had to sign treaties to give up their culture." He spread his arms and hands
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