A Lick of Frost (21 page)

I nodded back. “I appreciate that you have noticed my efforts.”

“I have noticed. It is one of the reasons I am here.”

“I fought in the goblin-sidhe wars,” Onilwyn said. “I saw the Red Caps ordered into battles that were sure death, but they never hesitated. I learned that they are oathed to never disobey the Goblin King.”

“You are correct, greenman,” Jonty said.

“They are also forbidden from competing for kingship,” Onilwyn said.

“Also correct.”

“Why are you all here?” Onilwyn asked.

I looked at Onilwyn. It wasn’t like him to worry this much over my safety. Maybe he was worried about his own.

The Red Caps looked at Jonty. He looked at me.

“Why
are
you here, Jonty? Why did so many of your people come with you?”

“You I will answer,” he said in that deep voice. He’d insulted everyone here. Ash and Holly, Onilwyn, everyone but me.

He came forward. Rhys and Frost moved a little in front of me. Some of the other guards moved out of their line behind us.

“No,” I said. “He helped me save you all. Don’t be ungrateful now.”

“We’re supposed to protect you, Merry. How can we allow that to approach you?” Rhys said.

I gave him an unfriendly glare. “He is not a ‘that,’” Rhys. He is a Red Cap. He is Jonty. He is a goblin. But he is not a ‘that.’”

My anger seemed to surprise him. He gave a small bow and moved back. “As my lady wishes.”

Normally, I would have tried to ease his hurt feelings, but tonight I had other things on my mind than juggling the emotional relationships in my life.

I stood up and the silk robe I was wearing brushed the floor with a sound that was almost alive. The high-heeled sandals with their wraparound laces made a sharp sound on the marble.

High heels had been the only thing the twins had asked me to wear. The only request. I moved the robe so they got a flash of the four-inch heels, the laces that curved around my calf. I got a sound from Holly, low in his throat. Ash controlled himself better, but his face couldn’t hold it all. They wanted my white flesh against their gold. They wanted to know sidhe flesh, and it wasn’t all about power. They, like me, knew what it was to be the outsider. To be always different from those around you.

Jonty dropped to his knees in front of me. Kneeling, he looked me in the eyes. He made me aware of how small I was.

“Jonty,” I said.

“Princess,” he said.

I studied his face. Up close the change was even more startling. His skin was smoother, a softer gray. He smiled at me, and the teeth that I remembered as a mouthful of fangs were straighter, whiter, less frightening, more like a person’s mouth than an animal’s.

“What has happened to you, Jonty?” I asked.

“You happened to me, Princess.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Your hand of blood happened to us all in that winter’s night.”

I frowned a little and tried to think of a way to ask my question. But how do you ask a question when you have no idea what to ask?

“I do not understand, Jonty.”

“Your hand of blood has brought us back into our power.”

“You have not come back into your full power,” Holly said.

Jonty turned an evil look on him. “No, as the halfling says, no. But it is more power than we have known in centuries.” He turned back to me, the anger fading from his eyes as he beheld me. There was a softness to his look that you didn’t see in most goblins’ eyes. Red Caps were known for their ferocity, not their kindness.

“Why have you all come, Jonty?”

“They want you to touch them as you touched us. They want you to bring them into their power, too.”

“Why did you not ask me sooner?”

“Would you have done it?”

“You saved us, Jonty. I know that. But more than that, my job, my task as princess, is to bring power back to faerie. All faerie. That includes you and your men.”

Jonty looked at the floor, and spoke as softly as his deep, deep voice would allow. “I knew you would not refuse us if we stood before you. I knew that your hand of blood called to us too strongly, if we were close to you, but I did not think you would simply say yes from a distance.”

He looked up and his red eyes shimmered. Red Caps did not cry, ever.

A single tear slid from his eye. A tear the color of fresh blood. I did what I knew was custom among the goblins. Tears are precious, blood more precious yet. I touched my finger to his face and captured that single tear before it could mingle with and be lost in the blood that trailed down his face.

The tear trembled on my finger like a true tear, but it was red as blood. I raised it to my mouth, and drank his tear.

CHAPTER 21

THERE ARE MOMENTS WHEN THE WORLD HOLDS ITS BREATH
. When the very air seems to pause, as if time itself has taken that last deep breath before….

The taste of salt and sweet metal slid across my tongue. The liquid seemed to grow until, when it glided down my throat, it was like a drink of cool, clear water, if it could hold the salt of oceans and the taste of blood.

I saw the room in pieces, as if things were moving out of sync. A cloud of demi-fey flew into the room, though I knew they had been forbidden to come. Goblins thought them tasty. But the winged fey filled the room like a cloud of butterflies and moths, dragonflies and damselflies, and insects that had never appeared in nature. There seemed to be more of them than I knew had followed us into exile.

The air was alive with color from the fluttering of their wings, so many of them that they made a breeze that played in my hair and touched my face.

The dogs came next. Small terriers spilling around the feet of the goblins, as if the dogs did not care, and the goblins did not see them. The graceful step of the greyhounds next, picking their dainty way through the crowded room. They walked among the standing Red Caps as if they were a forest to move through instead of people. Stranger yet, the Red Caps did not react to the dogs.

The dogs went to their masters. The terriers went to Rhys. Some of the hounds went to others of the guard. My two hounds came to me. Minnie with her face half red and half white as if someone had drawn a line down her face. Mungo with his one red ear and the rest of him white as a swan wing.

They had all been waiting…for us.

Frost’s voice came from behind me. “Merry, what is this?”

It was Royal’s voice, from where he hovered above me with his moth’s wings, that answered. “It is the moment of creation, Killing Frost.”

I stared up at the diminutive man. “I don’t understand.”

He smiled at me, but there was an eagerness to him that I did not trust. There was always something sensual, even sexual, about Royal. Since he was the size of a large Barbie doll, it was unsettling to say the least.

“We wait but for one piece more.” This came from Penny, Royal’s twin sister, who hovered beside him.

I didn’t understand until the black hounds poured in like shadows with Darkness made flesh, whose eyes flashed red, green, and all the colors I’d seen in Doyle’s eyes when his magic was upon him.

Doyle came through the door, leaning on the back of what looked like a black pony, a little bigger than the dogs. But a flash of those black eyes and I knew it was no pony. It pulled its lips back to flash teeth as sharp as any goblin’s. It was a kelpie, though how it got here I had no idea. The kelpies had been hunted and destroyed in Europe before we ever came to this country.

Kelpies either lurked in water and drew their prey down like crocodiles or pretended to be ponies on land. Then when some unwary human got on, they galloped to the nearest water. They drowned their prey, or ate them as they drowned. Most of their victims were children. Children love ponies.

Frost and I both said “Doyle” together.

He managed a smile. His face was still bandaged, but he’d unbound his arm. He moved slowly, but he moved, with his hand on the back of the carnivorous pony.

“The dogs would not let me rest any longer,” Doyle said.

I held my hand out to him.

Royal said, “No, Princess, that is not the point.”

I looked up at him. “You said the last piece.”

“He is the last piece, but you don’t have to touch him. You have touched him enough for this moment to happen. You have touched them all enough to call us to you.”

“I don’t….”

“Understand,” he finished for me.

“No.”

“You will,” he said, and it was typical Royal, because he made it sound ominous.

Mungo nudged my hand. I stroked his head, and played with one silken ear. Minnie bumped my other hand as if jealous for my attention. I petted them both, feeling the warmth and solidness of them.

“There is no dog for me,” Frost said. He had moved closer to me.

“What will be, will be,” Royal said.

Then the demi-fey rose toward the high ceiling, sending light sparkling in rainbows from the crystal chandeliers. The light bounced and played off all of us. The goblins, even Ash and Holly, were still frozen out of time with us.

It was Jonty who blinked, and looked up at me. He, of all of them, who saw. His eyes went wide, then the world let out the breath it had been holding.

CHAPTER 22

THE WORLD EXPLODED, IF YOU COULD CALL LIGHT, COLOR
, music, and the perfume of flowers an explosion. I had no other word for what happened. It was like standing at ground zero on the first day that life walked on the planet, but it was also like standing in the most beautiful meadow in the world on a lovely spring day with the gentlest of breezes blowing. It was a perfect moment, and a moment of incredible violence, as if we were all gently torn apart and put together again in the blink of an eye.

Through it all, the dogs pressed close on either side. They anchored me, steadied me, kept me from breaking apart and flying into that moment. They kept me solid enough, sane enough, to survive.

I clung to their fur, the touch of them in my hand. And thought, Frost has no dog to keep him here.

I thought about screaming, then it was over. Only the sense of disorientation and the memory of pain and power, fading in the dance of light and magic, let me know that it hadn’t been some sort of dream.

Doyle gazed at me across the back of his black dogs. He seemed to be healed, whole. He touched the kelpie, but did not lean on it. He stood straight and tall.

He reached up and pulled off the bandages to show that the burns were gone. I suppose if you’re creating reality, a little healing isn’t much.

Because reality had changed.

We were still in Maeve Reed’s ballroom/dining room, but it wasn’t the same room. It was huge, an acre of marble stretching in every direction. The far windows were a distant twinkling line.

There were demi-fey everywhere, as if too deep a breath would make you swallow one.

Ash and Holly swatted at them as if they were flies.

I said, “If you harm them, I will not be happy.”

The Red Caps did not swat at them. They did not threaten them. The huge men stood there and let the tiny things alight on them. They were covered in the fanning of butterfly wings, until you could barely see their flesh through the slow dance of color.

Jonty gazed up at me with those red eyes framed by the shining wings. The tiny hands clung to his bloody hat. They rolled in the blood, giggling, a sound like crystal chimes.

“You remake us, my queen,” Jonty said.

I don’t know what I would have said to that, but then Rhys’s voice came. “Merry!”

That one word, that note of urgency was enough. I turned and knew that whatever I would see, I would not like it.

Rhys and Galen were kneeling beside Frost. He lay crumpled on his side, terribly still.

I remembered then what I’d thought. He had had nothing to hold on to while reality remade itself. He had been alone in the terror and beauty of it.

I ran to him with my dogs at my side, trippingly close, but the magic was still here, still working, and I did not dare send the hounds away. The oldest magic that had ever belonged to the sidhe was in this room tonight. It was a magic that could be ridden, but never controlled, not completely. Creation is always a chancy thing, because you never know what it will be when all is said and done, or if it will be worth the price.

CHAPTER 23

VOICES FROM AROUND THE ROOM SAID THAT FROST WAS NOT
the only one down. Holly and Ash had collapsed to the floor. The demi-fey closed on them now that they could not resist.

But the other men who had fallen had only other guards to touch them, to try and wake them. I touched the glittering fall of Frost’s hair, drew it back from his face.

“What is wrong with him? With all of them?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” Rhys said, “but his pulse is fading.”

I looked at him over Frost’s still form. I knew my face showed the shock.

“They didn’t have the dogs,” Galen said. “They didn’t have anything to hold on to when you created more faerie land.”

Rhys nodded. His small sea of terriers sat unusually silent and solemn around his legs as he knelt.

I started to say “they are just dogs,” but Mungo bumped my shoulder with his head. Minnie leaned against my side. I looked into her eyes and there was dog in there, yes, but there was more. They were dogs formed of wild magic. They were fey creatures, and that is not simply a dog.

I stroked her ear, so velvety. I whispered, “Help me. Help them. Help Frost.”

Doyle strode farther into the room with the huge black dogs milling around him. One of the dogs broke from the pack and went to one of the other fallen. He sniffed the hair with a loud snuffling sound. Then he grew taller, bigger. The dog’s fur ran in streamers of green, chasing the black away, and the fur growing a little longer, a little shaggier.

The dog was the size of a pony when it was solid green. A green like new grass, spring leaves. It turned huge yellow-green eyes to me.

“Cu Sith,” Galen whispered.

I simply nodded.

The Cu Sith: “Hound of the sidhe” was the literal meaning of its name. Once every sidhe mound had had at least one as guard. One had been created, or reborn, on the night when the magic had returned in Illinois. Now we had a second, here and now.

It lowered its great head and sniffed at one of the fallen guards again. It licked him with a huge pink tongue. He gave a breath so big we heard it across the room. His body shuddered with the return of life, or the retreat of death.

The huge green dog moved from one to the other, and everywhere he touched, the men revived. He came to Onilwyn, still collapsed on his side. He sniffed him, then growled low and deep, like thunder contained in a rib cage. He did not lick Onilwyn back to life. The Cu Sith let him lie. Interesting that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to touch him.

The green dog came to the twins, sweeping the demi-fey ceilingward with its great head. But it sniffed them, and moved away, too. Not sidhe enough for the Cu.

Doyle’s deep voice came, but there was an echo in it of the god. I looked at Doyle, and found his face distant, as if he saw something other than this room. Vision held him, or Deity, or both.

He spoke in a dialect I did not understand, and one of the black dogs moved forward. It went to the twins, and sniffed their hair. The black fur ran with a white that glowed and shimmered. The white fur was thicker, longer than the black, even longer and shaggier than the Cu Sith’s green.

The dog was as large as the Cu Sith, maybe even a little larger. The fur wasn’t so much long like a sled dog’s as just unkempt. It turned eyes the size of saucers to me, huge and out of proportion to its doggie face. But then the look in its eyes wasn’t exactly the look a dog gives you either. It was a look somewhere between a wild animal and a person. There was too much wisdom in those eyes.

Rhys said softly, “It’s a Gally-trot.”

“A ghost dog,” I said. It was supposed to be a phantom that haunted lonely roads and scared travelers.

“Not exactly,” he said. “Remember, some humans believe that all the fey are the spirits of the dead.”

The Gally-trot leaned its huge white head over the twins, and licked them with a tongue that was as black as the fur it had started with.

Holly stirred, blinking bloodred eyes at the room. Ash made a sound that was almost pain as the Gally-trot licked him back to life.

I waited for the Cu Sith to come to Frost, or even the Gally-trot, but they didn’t. The Cu Sith moved among my guards, receiving pets and strokes. It smiled in that way that dogs do, with its tongue out.

The twins seemed unsure what to make of the white dog’s attention. It was Holly who reached up and touched it first. The dog bumped him so hard he almost fell over. It made Holly laugh, a pleased masculine sound. Ash touched the dog, too, and they communed with the huge beast.

The demi-fey were beginning to leave the Red Caps. The faces revealed were gentler, as if the clay of their bodies had been remade into something more sidhe, more human. Jonty’s words came back to me, “You are remaking us.”

I hadn’t meant to.

But there were a lot of things I hadn’t meant to do.

I stared down at Frost, and saw a gleam of blue at his neck. His tie had already been loosened by someone. I snapped off buttons in my haste to see, and found blue glowing on his skin.

Rhys and Galen put him on his back, and helped me tear his shirt open. There was a tattoo on his chest that glowed blue. It was a stag head with a crown in its antlers. It was a mark of kingship, but it was also a mark of the sacrificial king. The white stag was what he had made with his touch that night in the winter dark. The white stag is a thing to be hunted and to lead the hero to his destiny.

I stared at Rhys’s face because he looked as horrified as I felt.

“What does it mean?” Galen asked.

“Once all new creation came with sacrifice,” Doyle’s voice intoned, but it wasn’t his voice.

“No,” I said. “No, I didn’t agree to this.”

“He did,” the voice said. The look in Doyle’s eyes was not him either.

“Why? Why him?”

“He is the stag.”

“No!”
I stood up, stumbling on the hem of my robe. I went toward the black dogs and this stranger in Doyle’s body.

“Merry,” Rhys said.

“No!”
I screamed it again.

One of the black dogs growled at me. My power washed over me, burst across my skin. I glowed like I’d swallowed the moon. Shadows of crimson light fell around my face from my hair. I saw green and gold light, and knew my eyes glowed.

“Would you challenge me?” Doyle’s mouth said, but it wasn’t Doyle who I would challenge if I said yes.

“Merry, don’t,” Rhys said.

“Merry,” Galen said. “Please, Frost wouldn’t want this.”

My hounds bumped my hand, and my thigh. I looked down at them, and they glowed. Minnie’s red half of her face glowed like my hair, and her skin gave white light around my hand as I petted her. Our glows mingled. Mungo, with his red ear and white coat, looked as if he were carved of jewels.

The queen’s ring pulsed on my hand. It, like so many things, had more power inside faerie, and that was where we stood now.

I saw phantom puppies dancing around my hounds. I knew in that moment that Minnie was already pregnant. The first faerie hounds to be born in five hundred years, maybe more?

Minnie bumped my hip, made me look down at myself. Two small phantoms of my own, hovering around me. But I knew they were real. No wonder I’d been tired today. Twins, like my mother and her sister. Twins. And faint, like a thought that wasn’t quite real, was a third. It wasn’t real yet, just a promise of possibilities. It meant that the twins would not be all. There would be at least a third child for me with someone.

I realized as soon as I thought it that the ring had other powers. I wanted to know who the father was, and I could know here with the ring, inside faerie. I turned and looked at Doyle, and found the answer I most wanted. The ring pulsed, and the scent of roses rode the air.

I turned toward Frost. A child sat beside him, quiet, and too solemn. No, Goddess, no, not like this. Even the wonder of a child, of twins, could not make Frost’s loss a fair trade. I did not know these phantom children yet. I had not held them. I did not know their smiles. I did not know how soft their hair was, or how sweet their skin smelled. They were not real yet. Frost was real. Frost was mine, and we had made a child.

“Goddess, please,” I whispered.

Rhys moved through my edge of vision, and the child reached up for him. It passed a phantom hand through his. He reacted to it, trying to see what had touched him. That wasn’t right. I held two children inside me, not three. I was one father over the line.

But not for long, unless…I went to Frost. Galen caught me in his arms, and the ring pulsed hard enough to make me stagger. Four fathers for two babies. It made no sense. I hadn’t had intercourse with Galen for more than a month, because we all agreed he’d make a bad king. He and Kitto had been the only ones who had let me indulge my penchant for oral sex to my heart’s content. But you couldn’t get pregnant from that.

The scent of roses was stronger. That usually meant a yes. Not possible, I thought.

“I am Goddess, and you are forgetting your history.”

“What history are you forgetting?” Galen asked.

I looked up at him. “You heard that?”

He nodded.

“The story of Ceridwen.”

He frowned at me. “I don’t understand….” Then comprehension slipped across his face. My Galen with his thoughts so easy to follow on his handsome face. “You mean….”

I nodded.

He frowned. “I thought Ceridwen getting pregnant from eating a grain of wheat and Etain being born because someone swallowed her as a butterfly were both myths. You can’t get pregnant from swallowing anything.”

“You heard what She said.”

He touched my stomach through the silk of the robe. A smile spread across his face. He glowed with joy, but I could not join him.

“Frost is a father, too,” I said.

Galen’s joy dimmed like a candle put behind dark glass. “Oh, Merry, I’m sorry.”

I shook my head, and drew away from him. I went to kneel beside Frost. Rhys was on the other side of him. “Did I hear you right? Frost would have been your king?”

“One of them,” I said. I didn’t feel like explaining that Rhys had also, somehow, hit the jackpot. It was too confusing. Too overwhelming.

Rhys put his fingers against the side of Frost’s neck. He pressed against his skin. His head dropped, so his hair was a curtain to hide his face. One shining tear fell onto Frost’s chest.

The blue of the stag mark blinked brighter, as if the tear had made the magic flare more brightly. I touched the mark, and that made it brighter, too. I laid my hand on his chest. His skin was still warm. The mark of the stag flared into blue flame around my hand.

I prayed. “Please, Goddess, don’t take him from me, not now. Let him know his child, please. If I have ever held your grace, bring him back to me.”

The blue flames flared bright and brighter. They did not burn, but felt more like electricity, stinging and biting, but just short of pain. The glow was so bright I could no longer see his body. I could feel the smooth muscles of his chest, but I could not see anything but the blue of the flames.

I felt fur under my hand. Fur? Then I was not touching Frost. Something else was inside that blue glow. Something with fur and not man-shaped.

The shape stood, and moved high enough that I could not touch it. Doyle was behind me, folding me in his arms, picking me up off the ground. The blue fire died down, and a huge white stag stood in front of us. It looked at me with gray and silver eyes.

“Frost,” I said, and reached out, but it ran. It ran for the far windows over the acre of marble. It ran as if the surface wasn’t slick for hooves. It ran as if it weighed nothing. I thought it would crash into the glass, but French doors that had never been there before opened so that the great stag could run out into the new land beyond.

The doors closed behind him, but the doors did not go away. Apparently, the room was flexible still.

I turned in Doyle’s arms so I could see his face. It was him looking out of his eyes now, not the consort. “Is Frost….”

“He is the stag,” Doyle said.

“But does that mean he’s gone as our Frost?”

The look on his dark face was enough.

“He’s gone,” I said.

“He is not gone, but he is changed. Whether he will change back to the man we knew, only Deity knows.”

He wasn’t dead, exactly. But he was lost to me. Lost to us. He would not be a father to the child we had made. He would never be in my bed again.

What had I prayed? That he would come back to me. If I had worded it differently would he still have transformed into an animal? Had my words been the wrong ones?

“Do not blame yourself,” Doyle said. “Where there is life of any kind there is always hope.”

Hope. It was an important word. A good word. But in that moment, it didn’t seem enough.