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.”