Swallowing Darkness (17 page)

I interrupted him. “Don’t start.”

“He’s right, Merry,” Doyle said.

“Don’t complicate this, Doyle. We did what we had to do last night to save you both.”

“It is the law,” Mistral said.

“Only if I am with his child and no one else’s, which is not true. The goddess Clothra, who got pregnant from three different lovers, wasn’t forced to marry just one of them.”

“They were her brothers,” Mistral said.

“Were they really, or is that just what legend made of them?” I was asking someone who might actually know.

Mistral and Doyle exchanged a look. Sholto wasn’t old enough to know the answer. “Clothra lived in a time when gods and goddesses were allowed to marry whom they would,” Doyle said.

“She wouldn’t have been the first goddess to marry a close relative,” Mistral said.

“But the point is, she didn’t marry any of them, and the sovereign goddesses, the ones whom humans had to marry to rule, had many lovers.”

“Are you saying that you’re a sovereign goddess, a living embodiment of the land itself?” Sholto asked with a raised eyebrow.

“No, but I
am
saying that you wouldn’t like what would happen if you tried to make me be monogamous with just you.”

Sholto’s handsome face set in petulant lines, and it was close enough to one of Frost’s favorite emotions to make my chest tight. “I know you do not love me, Princess.”

“Don’t make this about hurt feelings, Sholto. Don’t be ordinary. In the old days there were different kings, but only one goddess to marry to rule, right?”

They exchanged looks. “But they were human kings, so the goddess outlasted them,” Doyle said.

“From what I heard, the sovereign goddess didn’t give up her lovers just because she had a king,” Sholto said.

Doyle looked down at me. I couldn’t read the expression on his face. “Are you saying you will change a thousand years of tradition among us?” he asked.

“If that is what it takes, then yes.”

He looked down at me, the expressions on his face all mixed together. A frown, a half-smile, amusement in his eyes; but what I valued the most was the fear leaving them. For it had been fear when he saw the marks on Sholto and me.

“I will ask again,” Mistral said. “Where are we? I do not recognize this bower we rest in.”

“We are in my kingdom,” Sholto said.

“The sluagh have no place so fair inside their faerie mound,” Mistral said, his voice thick with certainty and sarcasm.

“How would any of the Unseelie nobles know what is inside my kingdom? Once Meredith’s father, Prince Essus, died none of you darkened my door again. We were good enough to fight for you, but not to visit.” Sholto’s voice held that anger that he’d come to me with, an anger forged of years of being told he wasn’t quite good enough to be truly Unseelie. There had been years of the sluagh being used as a weapon. And like all weapons, you use it, but you do not ask a nuclear bomb if it wants to blow things up. You simply push a button, and it does its job.

“I have been inside your mound,” Doyle said. His deep voice held an edge of something. Was it anger? Warning? Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

“Yes, and the sluagh would not follow the hound when they already had a huntsman.” The two men glared across the bed at each other.

I’d known there was bad blood between them when they first came to me in L.A., but this was the first hint I had at what might lay behind it.

“Are you saying the queen tried to put Doyle in charge of the sluagh?” I asked. I sat up in the bed, the petals spilling around, as if the blanket had fallen back to being just flower petals.

The men looked up at the trees and vines that held the canopy aloft. “Perhaps we should finish this discussion in a more solid part of faerie?” Mistral asked.

“I agree,” Doyle said.

“What do you mean ‘more solid part’?” Sholto asked, laying a hand on the tree that formed one post.

“The blanket has gone back to what it began as. Some faerie magic does that,” Doyle said.

“You mean like in the fairy tales, it only lasts a while,” I asked.

He nodded.

A voice called from a distance, “My King, Princess, it is Henry. Can you hear me?”

Sholto answered, “We hear you.”

“The opening to your new room is beginning to grow narrow, My King. Should you come away before it closes into a wall again?” He tried for neutral, but the worry was plain in his voice.

“Yes,” Doyle said. “I think we should.”

“I am king here, Darkness, and I say what we will and will not do.”

“Gentlemen,” I said, “as princess and future queen of all, I’ll break the tie. We go before the wall grows solid.”

“I will agree with our princess,” Mistral said. He crossed to us and held his hand out to me.

I took the offered hand. He smiled at that one touch, wrapping his much larger hand around my small one, but the smile was full of something softer than anything I’d seen before. He started leading me down the path toward the bone gate. The herbs on the path were no longer trying to touch me. In fact, the stones that had been held together by the herbs were a little lose underfoot, as if whatever had formed them was letting go. We left Doyle and Sholto kneeling on the bed still glaring at each other. When we were back in Sholto’s original bedroom, I would ask more questions about their mutual dislike.

The bone gate collapsed at Mistral’s touch so that it was only a pile of debris. “Whatever held this place together is failing,” he called back to them. “We need to get the princess to safety before it collapses completely.”

Mistral picked me up, and carried me through the wreck of bones. Beyond the gate we could glimpse Sholto’s bedroom, and Henry’s worried face peering at us. The wall that had been as large as a cavern mouth was much smaller. I could actually see the stones knitting together like something alive, remaking themselves. They were strangely fluid; it was like watching flowers bloom, if you could catch them at it.

Mistral carried me through the opening, and we were back in Sholto’s wine and purple bedroom. Henry bowed to us, then went back to peering behind us for his king. The opening continued to grow smaller, and neither of them was hurrying. Was it some kind of ego contest? All I knew was that with all that had happened my nerves couldn’t stand watching them stroll toward the rapidly diminishing opening.

I called after them, “I will be really cross if you both get trapped behind the wall. We leave for Los Angeles tonight.”

The two men exchanged a glance, then they began to jog toward us. Under other circumstances I might have enjoyed the view of both of them running toward me, nude, but the wall was closing. If it closed completely, I wasn’t certain that we could reopen it. There were hands of power among the sidhe that could blast through stone, but neither Sholto nor Doyle possessed such a hand.

I called, “Hurry!”

Doyle broke into a run, spilling forward like some black, sleek animal, as if running were the purpose all that muscle and flesh had been designed for. I didn’t get to see him from a distance much. He was always at my side. Now, I was reminded that without my human movement to hold him back, he could simply move. Like wind, rain, something elemental and more than flesh. I had a moment such as I had not had in months. A moment to watch him and marvel that all that potential would love me. I was, in the end, so terribly human.

Sholto followed behind him like a pale shadow. For a moment I could only see my Frost. He was the one who was supposed to be at Doyle’s side. My light and dark; my men. Sholto was handsome and moved well at Doyle’s side, but he couldn’t keep up. He was a little behind, a little…more human.

Mistral said, “Ask the wall to stay open.”

“What?” I asked, and was almost startled to find myself still in his arms, still in Sholto’s bedroom.

He sat me down on the floor. “Stop staring at Doyle like a lovesick girl and tell the wall to stop closing.”

I wasn’t certain that the sluagh’s sithen would obey me, but I had nothing to lose. “Wall, please stop closing.”

The wall seemed to hesitate, as if thinking about obeying, then it went back to closing the opening. It was slower, but it had not stopped.

Doyle dived through the opening, doing a wonderful roll across the carpet, ending on his feet in a whirl of black hair and dark muscle.

Sholto dived through too, but ended up flat on the carpet in a spill of pale hair and breathlessness. Doyle was breathing heavily too, but he seemed ready to find a weapon and defend. Sholto seemed content to lie on the carpet for a time.

He gasped out, “Did the path get longer as we ran?”

Doyle nodded. “Yes.”

“Why would it get longer?” I asked.

Sholto got to his feet, and looked up at the ceiling of his bedroom. I gazed upward, but saw nothing but the stone.

“Someone, or something, is here.” He went to a wardrobe on the far side of the room, and got out a robe. It was gold and white, and didn’t match the room at all, but it did match his eyes and hair to perfection. He suddenly looked all Seelie Court, and if not for one bit of genetics that had given him those extra bits he’d have been terribly welcome at the Unseelie Court. In the far past, even the Seelie Court would have been happy to have him. But Sholto, like me, could not hide his mixed blood. There was no illusion deep enough to make us one of them.

Doyle gazed up and around. Did he see something too? What was I not sensing? “What is it?”

“Magic, sluagh magic, but not…mine,” Sholto said. He started for the door.

“My King,” Henry said, and we all looked at him. It wasn’t that I had forgotten he was there, but I guess in a way I had. “You were locked in the magical sleep for several days. There are those among the sluagh who feared you might be enchanted for centuries.”

“Like Sleeping Beauty, you mean,” I said.

Henry nodded. His handsome face was very worried, and I didn’t know him long enough to read him that well. “They came and saw the garden, and it was very Seelie, my lord. More than that, none of us could pass its gate or walls. It held us back, and protected you from all who would come close.”

“What has happened while we slept, Henry?” Sholto asked. He went to the man, gripping his shoulder.

“My King, the Seelie are encamped outside our sithen. They asked for parlay, and we had no king to speak for us. You know the rules—without a ruler, we cease to be sluagh, cease to be free people. We would be absorbed into the Unseelie Court, but before that happens, we would have to deal with the Seelie on our own without a king.”

“They’ve chosen another king,” Sholto said.

“A proxy ruler only.”

“But it has divided the power of kingship, and whoever has part of the power did not want us—me—to escape the wall.”

“Why are the Seelie outside?” Doyle asked.

Henry looked to Sholto, who nodded. “They say that the sluagh have stolen Princess Meredith away, and are holding her against her will.”

“I am not their princess. Why should they be at the gates to rescue me?”

“They want both you and the chalice. They say both have been stolen,” Henry said.

Ah, I thought. “They want my magic, not me. But under what right do they make siege upon the sluagh?”

“By right of kinship, your mother came to demand the return of her sweet daughter, and the grandchildren that she carries.” Henry looked even more uncomfortable.

“One of the children I carry is Sholto’s own. The right of the father supersedes that of a grandmother.”

“The Seelie claim that the children belong to King Taranis.”

Sholto went for the door. “Wait here. I must talk to my people before we confront the insanity of the Seelie.”

“Might I suggest that you wear something else, Sholto?” I called.

He hesitated, then frowned at me. “Why?”

“You look too Seelie in the robe, and one of the things that seems to panic your people is the idea that you and I together will change them from the dark and terrible sluagh to a light and airy beauty.”

He looked as if he would argue, then he went back to the wardrobe. He drew out black pants and boots, but he didn’t bother with a shirt. And with a wavering of air in front of him, the tentacles came to life again.

“I will remind them that I am part nightflyer and not just sidhe.”

“Would me by your side hurt you or help you?” I asked.

“Hurt, I think. I will talk to my people, then return for you all. Taranis has gone mad to besiege us.”

“Why has not the Unseelie Court aided the sluagh?” Doyle asked. “I will find out,” Sholto said, and had his hand on the door when Mistral called out.

“My congratulations to you, King Sholto, on being king to Meredith’s queen.” His voice was almost neutral when he said it—almost.

“Congratulations to you, too, Storm Lord, though with so many kings around, I am not certain what kingdom you will share.” With that Sholto was gone, with Henry at his side.

“What did he mean, wishing me congratulations?” Mistral asked. “I know that the princess carries Sholto’s child and yours, Doyle. I heard that from the conversation in the bed when we woke.”

“Mistral, didn’t the queen tell you?” I asked.

“I was told that you had finally gotten with child by some of the others. I have had little news of anything but pain.” He would not look at me as he said the next. “She was so angry when you left, Princess. Your green knight destroyed her hall of torture, so she took me as a guest to her room to be chained against her wall. There I have been at her mercy since you left.”

I touched his arm, but he pulled away.

“I feared she would hurt you for being with me,” I said. “I am so sorry.”

“I knew it was the price I would pay.” He almost looked at me, but finally let his long gray hair fall between us like a curtain to hide behind. “I was content to pay, because I had hoped…” he shook his head. “I hoped too late.” He turned to Doyle and held out his hand. “I envy you, Captain.”

Doyle came to take his hand, dark to light, clasping forearms together. “I cannot believe the queen did not tell her court the truth.”

“I have only been released from the chains this night, so whatever she told her court, I do not know. I am too far out of favor to be told anything. I was released and lured to my death by one of our own. Onilwyn needs killing, my captain.”