A Lick of Frost (15 page)

CHAPTER 14

EVENTUALLY THE MIRROR WAS JUST A MIRROR AGAIN. THE GOBLINS
would arrive tonight with a guard of Red Caps to make certain this was not sidhe treachery. With Doyle injured, I had to choose new guards to watch us, and frankly the ones I trusted most didn’t want the duty.

Frost would have stood with Doyle, if ordered, but he didn’t really enjoy seeing me with other men. He was okay with Doyle and himself being in the same room at the same time with me, but he didn’t share with anyone else. Rhys was more open-minded about the sharing thing, but it would have been a type of torture to ask him to watch the goblins with me. Being a prisoner of the goblins had been what had cost him one eye.

“You meant that about wanting them to hurt you, didn’t you?” Rhys asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you know how disturbing that is?”

I thought about it, then nodded. “You either get it, or you don’t.”

“I do not get it either,” Frost said.

I kept quiet because Frost actually got it more than he thought he did. He didn’t like causing me pain, but a little “tie me up, tie me down” worked just fine as foreplay for him. But since he didn’t consider bondage the same thing as causing pain, I didn’t argue with him.

“Doyle gets it,” Rhys said.

I nodded.

“You enjoy normal sex, right?” Rhys asked.

“Normal is a judgment. The kind of sex I like is just the kind of sex I like, Rhys.”

He took a deep breath and started over. “I don’t mean to sound judgmental. What I mean is, do you have less…bondage sex with the rest of us because you think we won’t do what you want? I guess I want to know that you really enjoy being with me.”

I put my arms around him, but kept us far enough apart so I could gaze up into his face. “I love being with you, all of you. But sometimes I like something rougher. I wouldn’t want to have the goblins’ idea of sex every night, but the thought does excite me.”

He shivered, and it wasn’t from pleasure. No, it was definitely fear. “I know now, thanks to you, that only my ignorance of goblin culture cost me my eye. If I hadn’t been just another arrogant sidhe, I’d have known that their culture allows even prisoners to negotiate sex. I could have forced them not to maim me. But I saw the sex as torture, and you can’t bargain with torture.”

“When a goblin tortures you, you’ll know it.”

He shuddered again.

I hugged him, trying to squeeze that haunted look from his face. “We need to decide who’s going to guard my back tonight.”

He hugged me tightly. “I’m so sorry, Merry, but I can’t. I just can’t do it.”

I whispered into his hair, “I know, and it’s all right.”

“I will do it,” Frost said.

I turned in Rhys’s arms so I could see Frost. His face was at its arrogant best, coldly handsome. What I saw was that it wasn’t his lack of enjoyment of what would be happening that would hamper his ability to guard me, but rather just how much he might secretly enjoy it. That would hamper him. He had a tendency to let his emotions cloud his judgment. Tonight would push too many of Frost’s buttons for him to guard me well. If Doyle had been there to help force him through his emotional baggage, then maybe, but Doyle wouldn’t be there tonight. Who could I ask to do this?

The mirror suddenly showed the queen’s bedroom. We had put a spell on the mirror to keep anyone else from simply peeking in, but the queen had taken that badly. So she had ready access to the mirror. It meant we had no privacy, but it kept Andais’s anger to a more manageable level.

It also meant that I’d started sleeping in some of the smaller rooms in the house. My excuse that sex exhausted us and we just fell asleep elsewhere was holding so far.

The queen was covered in blood from about mid-arm to her lower body. It was hard to tell with the black she was wearing, but the cloth seemed to be stuck to her body with the wetness of it. She held the blade in one hand, so covered in blood that I knew it must be slippery.

I didn’t want to look at the bed, but I had to. I stayed in Rhys’s arms and we both looked at the bed, in that slow-motion way you do when you both want to see and never want to see.

It had to be Crystall, but he was just a bloody form in the shape of a man. Only his shoulders and the width of his hips made me sure of the man part. He was still on his stomach, still where we’d last seen him. One arm lay half off the bed, the hand hanging in midair. The hand twitched involuntarily as if something she’d done to him had affected the nerves.

Tears simply spilled down my face. I couldn’t stop them. Rhys pushed my face against his shoulder so I wouldn’t have to see. For once, I let him. I’d seen what Andais wanted me to see, though I had no idea why she wanted me to see it. What she’d done to Crystall was usually reserved for traitors, enemies. People she meant to get information out of, or prisoners who were to be tortured for crimes. She had reduced him to a red ruin for what? For what! I wanted to scream it at her.

Rhys’s arms tightened around me, as if he had read my intent.

“You lied about taking Rhys to your bed,” she said at last.

“No,” I said. “We just got off the mirror from the goblins.” I wiped at my eyes and turned to face my queen. How I hated her.

“You seem a little pale and uncertain for sex, niece of mine.” Her voice purred with pleasure at the effect she was having on me. Was that it, just a game to see how awful she could make me feel? Was Crystall so unimportant to her that he was just a body to use to hurt me?

“I will have Sholto fetch Rhys home. He can enchant my mirror as he enchanted yours, then he can join me, as he’s always wanted to.” She looked at Rhys then. She gave him the full look of those triple gray eyes. “You do still want me, don’t you, Rhys?”

That was a dangerous question. Rhys spoke, carefully, “Who would not want to lie with your beauty? But you wanted Merry to be with child, and I must be here to do my duty by her, as you ordered me to do.”

“And if I ordered you home?” she asked.

“You gave your oath that all the men who had come to my bed would be mine,” I said. “You swore it.”

“Except for Mistral. He I did not give to you to keep,” she said.

“Except for Mistral,” I said, voice soft and fighting to be even.

“Would it upset you more to see Rhys stretched across my bed like this?”

Again, a dangerous question. I thought of several things to say, then settled for the truth. “Yes.”

“You cannot love them all, Meredith. No woman can love them all.”

“True love, no, my queen, but love them, yes. I love them because they are my people. I was taught that you take care of those who are in your charge.”

“My brother’s words keep haunting me from your mouth.” She flung her hand up, and I think not on purpose sent blood splattering across her side of the mirror. “Sir Hugh has contacted me. There is talk that Taranis will be forced to be a sacrifice to bring life back to his people. There is talk of regicide, Meredith. Talk that the Seelie Court has suffered under his reign of madness.” There was something about the way she said that last that made my stomach clench.

Frost said, “He was quite mad this morning, my queen.”

“Yes, Killing Frost, yes, you are still there. Still by her side. The Seelie want me to know that they mean no insult by offering you their throne.”

“Is it done then?” Frost said.

“No, not quite, but you have perhaps a day and a night before Hugh’s faction either loses or gains control of enough nobles to bring our princess to their throne. Hugh told me that I still had Cel to bring to my throne. That it wasn’t as if Meredith were my first choice.”

Did Hugh have any idea how much he had endangered me? Andais was not much more stable than Taranis. I had no idea how she would react to such talk from the Seelie Court.

“You look frightened, Meredith,” she said.

“Shouldn’t I be?”

“Why are you not thrilled at the possibility of being queen of the Seelie?”

“Because my heart lies with the Unseelie Court,” I said finally.

She smiled then. “Does it, does it truly? Half my sithen is covered in white and pink and gold marble. There are flowers and vines everywhere. The Hallway of Immortality, which has stood as a place of torment for millennia, is covered in flowers. Galen’s magic dissolved the cells, and I cannot make the sithen rebuild them. I have people tear up the flowers in the hallway, but they simply regrow overnight.”

“I do not know what you want me to say, Aunt Andais.”

“I thought the only revolution I had to worry about was one of arms and politics. You have shown me that there are other ways to lose power, Meredith. Your magic is possessing my sithen even with you in Los Angeles. The changes creep farther every day, like some kind of cancer.” She laughed, but it held an edge of pain. “A cancer formed of flowers and pastel walls. If I let the Seelie have you, will my kingdom go back to what it was, or is it too late? Is that what the Seelies see, Meredith, that you will remake all of faerie in their image? You are destroying your heritage, Meredith. If I do not stop it, there will soon be no dark court left to save.”

“It was not deliberate on my part, Aunt.”

“If I give you to the Seelie, will it stop?”

I looked into those eyes. Eyes that held less sanity than they should have. “I don’t know.”

“What does the Goddess say?”

“I don’t know.”

“She speaks to you, Meredith. I know she does. But have a care. She is not some Christian deity to take care of you. She is the same power that made me.”

“I know the Goddess has many faces,” I said.

“Do you, Meredith, do you really?”

I just nodded.

“Enjoy Rhys while you can, because once you sit the Seelie throne, my guard revert to me. They guard only our noble line.”

“I have not agreed….”

She waved me to silence. “I no longer know how to save my people and our culture. I thought you were the solution, but though you may save faerie, you seem to be destroying the Unseelie way of life. Did the Goddess offer you a choice for how to bring life back to faerie?”

“Yes,” I said softly.

“She offered you blood sacrifice or sex, didn’t she?”

“Yes,” I said. I couldn’t keep the look of astonishment off my face.

“Don’t look so shocked, Meredith. I was not always queen. Once no one ruled here who was not chosen by the Goddess. I chose death and blood to cement my tie to the land. I chose the Unseelie way. What did you choose, child of my brother?”

There was a look in her eyes that made me afraid to tell the truth, but I could not lie, not about this. “Life. I chose life.”

“You chose the way of the Seelie.”

“If there is a way to bring power that does not kill, why is it wrong to choose it?”

“Whose life did you spare?”

I licked suddenly dry lips. “Do not ask.”

“Doyle?”

“No,” I said.

“Then who!” She screamed it at me.

“Amatheon,” I said.

“Amatheon. He is one of your newest lovers. He helped Cel torment you as a child. Why?”

“I don’t understand, Aunt.”

“Why?”

“Why what?” I asked.

“Why save him? Why not kill him to bring life back to the land? He was a willing sacrifice.”

“Why kill him if I didn’t have to?” I asked.

She shook her head sadly. “That is not an Unseelie answer, Meredith.”

“My father, your brother, would have said the same thing.”

“No, my brother was Unseelie.”

“My father taught me that all in faerie from lowest to highest have value.”

“No,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I thought of you while I cut Crystall up, Meredith. The only hesitation I have about giving you to the Seelies is that if I do, I cannot kill you without starting a war. I don’t want to lose the option of torturing you to death, Meredith. I think once you are dead your magic will fade and the traitorous Goddess that comes to you will fade with it.”

“Would you condemn all of faerie to death because it is not the faerie you wish it to be?” Frost asked it, his face astonished.

“No and yes.” With that the mirror went blank again. We were left staring at our own reflections. We all looked pale and shocked. Today no good news seemed to go unpunished.

CHAPTER 15

I WAS READY TO LIE DOWN AND GET SOME REST AND RELAXATION
. It promised to be a long night. But I wasn’t allowed to be alone. Not even just to sleep. Between Taranis’s treachery and Queen Andais being able to see in the mirror at will, Rhys and Frost were just not willing to risk me being alone. I couldn’t argue with them, so I didn’t even try. I just started undressing so I could climb between the covers.

If it had been Doyle and Frost, they would both have stayed and we might have slept or we might have done something more active. But Rhys and Frost had never shared me, not even for sleep. There had been a moment of awkwardness as I undressed and they looked at each other.

It was Rhys who finally said, “I want sex with you before the goblins tonight, but I’ve seen that look on Frost’s face before.”

“What look?” Frost asked, but I didn’t ask because I could see it, and I’d seen it before. Frost’s need and uncertainty were plain in his eyes, in the lines of his mouth.

“I want sex,” Rhys said, “but you need reassurance, and that takes longer to get.”

“I do not know what you mean,” Frost said in a cold voice. His face was at its arrogant best again, that moment of uncertainty hidden behind years of courtly living.

Rhys smiled. “It’s all right, Frost. I understand, really I do.”

“There is nothing to understand,” Frost said.

I slipped naked under the covers, almost too tired to care who won the conversation. I settled against the pillows and waited for one of them to climb into bed with me. I was so tired, so overwhelmed with all of the day’s events that it didn’t seem to matter who slept next to me, as long as someone did.

“Doyle isn’t just your captain, Frost. You’ve been each other’s right hands for centuries. You’re feeling the lack of him.”

“We are all feeling the lack of him healthy at our sides,” Frost said.

Rhys nodded. “Yes, but only you and Merry feel his loss this deeply.”

“I do not understand you,” Frost said.

“That’s okay,” Rhys said. He looked at me. The look asked me, did I understand? I thought I did.

“Come to bed, Frost. Sleep with me.” I patted the bed.

“Doyle told me to take care of you until he is able.”

I smiled at the face that was trying for blankness and failing around the edges. “Then come to bed and take care of me, Frost.”

“You promised me sex, and I am going to hold you to it,” Rhys said.

Frost hesitated by the bed. “We have never shared the princess.”

“And we aren’t going to now,” Rhys said. “I’ll share sometimes with the newer men because Merry likes me better than she likes them.” He smiled, and I returned the smile. Then his face sobered, and there was something far too serious in his face. “But I could not bear to share her with you and see how she feels about you. I know she loves you more, you and Doyle, but I do not wish the fact rubbed into my body like salt into a wound.”

“Rhys,” I said.

He shook his head, and pushed a hand toward me. “Don’t try to save my ego. You’d have to lie to do it, and the sidhe don’t lie.”

It was Frost who said, “Rhys, I do not mean to cause you pain.”

“You can’t help being who you are, and she can’t seem to help loving you. I tried to hate you for it, but I can’t. If you get her pregnant, and I end up back with Andais, then I’ll hate you, but until then, I’ll try to share with some grace.”

I wanted to say something to make it better, but what could I say? Rhys was right; any comforting words would have had to be lies.

“I do not slight you on purpose, my white knight,” I said.

Rhys smiled. “We are both equally pale, my princess. We knew going into this that only one man can be king. Even I think that Doyle and Frost together make a good ruling pair for you. Too bad that even among the Darkness and the Killing Frost there will be a winner and a loser.”

With that, Rhys left, closing the door behind us. I heard him speak to the dogs, who must have been waiting outside the door. We did not let the dogs in when we spoke to Andais because she had touched the black dogs and they had not transformed into special dogs for her. The magic had not known her, and she resented it. Frost feared that the lack of a dog meant he was not sidhe enough. Andais simply hated the fact that the returning power didn’t seem to know her. She was queen, and all the power of her court should have been hers, but it didn’t seem to be working that way.

I almost called to Rhys to let the dogs in but didn’t, because it would be a reminder to Frost of what he lacked. The door closed softly, but firmly, and I was left looking up at the man who had stayed.

Frost took off his suit jacket, and the moment he did I could see all the weapons he was carrying. There were many guns and blades, but he was always armed for war. I counted four handguns and two blades in the front of the leather. There would be more, because there were always more weapons than met the eye with the Killing Frost.

“You smile. Why?” he asked softly. He began to undo the buckles that held the leather in place.

“I would ask what army you had planned to fight today with so many weapons, but I know what you feared.”

He removed the weapons carefully and laid them across the bedside table. The armament on the wood was heavy with the potential for destruction.

“Where did you put your gun?” Frost asked.

“It’s in the drawer of the bedside table.”

“You took it off as soon as you entered this room, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

He went to the closet and hung the jacket on a hanger. He started unbuttoning his shirt with his back still to me. “I do not understand why you would do that.”

“One, a gun is not truly comfortable. Two, if I had needed my gun in this bedroom, it would mean that all of you were dead. If that happened, Frost, one gun in my hands would not save me.”

He turned with the shirt unbuttoned to his waist. He pulled it the rest of the way out of his pants. And tired as I was, seeing him tug the shirt out of his pants, watching him undo the last few buttons, made my pulse speed just a little.

His skin was a strip of whiteness against the lesser whiteness of the cloth. He slid the shirt over his shoulders, exposing his muscled strength in inches. He’d learned that sometimes watching him slowly undress helped whet my appetite for him.

He hung his shirt on an empty hanger, even buttoning the collar so it would hang right and not wrinkle. But in doing so, he let me see the long line of his back and shoulders. He’d even swung all that silver hair over one shoulder so that the muscled smoothness of his back was an unobstructed show.

There were times when watching him hang up his clothes drove me nearly mad and had me making small eager noises before he was ready to come to bed. Today would not be one of those days. The view was lovely as always, but I was tired, and did not feel completely well. Part of it was grief and shock, but also the nagging knowledge that I was coming down with a cold or a virus. Frost had never had a cold. He had never had so much as the sniffles.

He turned to face me, his hands sliding around the top of his pants. He’d had to undo the belt earlier to take off the rig of weapons. I had to be more tired than I knew to have missed him unbuckling his belt.

He started with the button at the top of his pants, and I rolled over. I rolled so my face was buried in the pillow and I could not watch. He was too beautiful to be real. Too amazing to be mine.

I felt the bed move, and knew he was on the bed with me. “Merry, what is wrong? I thought you enjoyed watching me.”

“I do,” I said, still not looking at him. How did I explain that I was having one of those rare moments when my mortality seemed too real and his immortality too large a reminder.

“Am I not enough to please you without Doyle by my side?”

That made me turn and look at him. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, one leg bent at the knee toward me. His pants gapped where he’d undone the buttons but not the zipper, his belt framing the undone work. He was slumping a little so that the fine muscles and lines of his stomach bunched. I had a choice of looking down to his lap and what I knew was still covered by his pants, or up to the beauty of his chest and shoulders and that face. In a different mood I would have gone down, but sometimes a man needs you to pay attention to things above the waist before you move below.

I sat up, keeping the cover in front of my breasts, because with me nude sometimes Frost forgot to listen, and I wanted him to hear me.

He sat there with his hair pooling like silver fire around his bare skin. He would not look at me, even though I knew he could feel the bed move as I inched close enough to touch his arm.

“Frost, I love you.”

His gray eyes rose once, then went back to staring at his big hands where they lay in his lap. “Do you love me alone without Doyle’s body beside me?”

My hand tightened on his arm while I tried to think what to say. This was certainly a conversation I hadn’t expected to be having. I did love Frost, but I did not always love his moods. “I find you as desirable now as I did that first night.”

He rewarded me with a small smile. “That was a very good night, but you avoided answering my question.” He gave me the full force of his eyes then. “Which is answer enough.” He started to get up, and I pressed my hand on his arm, not to force him, but to try to keep him where he was. He let me keep him sitting on the bed though he was stronger than I would ever be. There, that note of regret again.

I sighed, and tried to cut through his mood and mine to get to something better. “Is it because I turned away and did not watch you undress?”

He nodded.

“I don’t feel well. I think I am coming down with a cold.”

He looked at me uncomprehendingly.

“Remember that some of you thought that what happened inside faerie had made me immortal like the rest of you?”

He nodded again.

“If I’m coming down with a cold then it is not so. I am still mortal.”

He put his hand over mine where it lay against his arm. “Why would that make you look away from me?”

“I love you, Frost, but loving you means that I will have to watch you stay young and handsome and perfect while I age. This body that you love will not remain. I will grow old and I will know death, and I will be forced to look at you every day and know that you do not understand. When I am very old, you will still take off your clothes and be as beautiful as you are now.”

“You will always be our princess,” he said, and his face showed that he was trying to understand.

I took my hand away and lay back on the bed, staring up at that impossibly lovely face. Tears burned at the back of my eyes and tightened my throat so that I could choke on regret. With everything that had happened today, all that had gone wrong, all the danger around us, I was ready to cry because the men I loved would always remain as beautiful as they were today but I would not. It wasn’t death I feared, really, it was the slow decay. How had Maeve Reed’s husband borne watching her remain while he grew old? How do love and sanity survive such a thing?

Frost leaned over me, and his shoulders were so broad that his hair fanned out around me like some shining tent, a waterfall caught in mid-motion to glitter in the dim light of my room. “You are young and you are beautiful this night. Why do you borrow such sorrows when they are far away, and I am right here?” He whispered the last words above my lips, and ended with a kiss.

I let him kiss me, but didn’t kiss him back. Did he not understand? Well, of course he didn’t. How could he? Or…or….

I pushed a hand against his chest and got enough space to look into his face. “Have you loved someone and watched her grow old?”

He sat back abruptly and would not look at me. I wrapped my hand around as much of his wrist as I could. It was too big for me to encircle it. “You have, haven’t you?” I asked.

He would not look at me, but finally he nodded.

“Who, when?” I asked.

“I saw her through a pane of glass when I was not the Killing Frost but just Frost. I was just the hoarfrost made into something alive by the belief of the people and the magic of faerie.” He looked at me, and there was uncertainty in that look. “You saw me in a vision once, what I began as.”

I nodded. I remembered. “You came to her window as Jack Frost,” I said.

“Yes.”

“What was her name?”

“Rose. She had golden curls and eyes like a winter sky. She saw me at the window, saw me and tried to tell her mother that there was a face at the window.”

“She had second sight,” I said.

He nodded.

I almost let it go, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. “What happened?”

“She was always alone. The other children seemed to sense that she was different. She made the mistake of telling them the things she could see. They named her witch, and her mother with her. She had no father. From the talk among the other villagers she had never had a father. I heard them as I painted frost on their houses whispering that Rose was begotten by no man, but the devil. They were so poor, and I was just another part of the winter cold that hurt them the most. I wanted so to help her.” He raised his big hands, as if he were seeing different hands, smaller and less powerful. “I needed to be more.”

“Did you ask for help?” I asked.

He looked at me, startled. “Do you mean, did I ask the Goddess and consort to help me?”

I nodded.

He smiled and it lightened his face, made a joy shine through that he hid most of the time. “I did.”

I smiled back at him. “And you were answered.”

“Yes,” he said, still smiling. “I went to sleep, and when I woke, I was taller, stronger. I found them fuel for their fire, all that long winter. I found them food.” Then the joy fled from his face. “I took the food from the other villagers, and they accused her mother of stealing. Rose told them that her friend left it, her shining friend.”

I took his hand in mine. “They accused her of witchcraft,” I said softly.

“Yes and theft. I tried to help, but I didn’t understand what it was to be human, or even fey. I was so new, Merry, so new to being anything but ice and cold. I was a thought made into a being. I did not know how to be alive, or what it meant.”