Merry Gentry 03 - Seduced by Moonlight (39 page)

It took him two attempts to whisper, "Princess."

The power breathed and writhed between us, as if our two magicks were a line of air, one hot, one cold, so that as they mixed, storms would rise. I steadied myself, against the stones and slowly, slowly, began to lean into that warmth.

It was like bathing in power, and I mourned that I wore clothes and could not feel what this was like on my bare skin. But I would not have stopped now, not even to undress. I would not lose an inch of closeness to the trembling heat. A second before my body touched his, Adair said, "The ring . . ."

Our bodies touched, and the magic thrust through us both, tearing a cry from our throats, stripping us of our shields and most of our control. We filled the hallway with shadows. My skin glowed like the moon on the brightest of nights. Adair glowed as if the sun in his eyes had spilled over his skin. It wasn't that he was formed of light, but as if his skin lay just over the light, like a film of water over a fire.

But it wasn't hot, this fire, it was warm. A warmth to keep you safe on a winter's night. A warmth to bring your fields back to life after the long cold. A warmth to drive desire through your body, and all other thoughts from your mind. It was the only excuse I had for forgetting that I had not touched him with the ring. All that had gone before was without the touch of that magic.

I raised my hands to caress the sides of his body, and the ring brushed against him, the lightest of touches, and the world trembled around us, as if the air itself had drawn a breath. Adair began to fall backward. He put one arm around my waist, and the other had a sword naked in it, before his back hit something solid.

We were half standing, half leaning inside a stone alcove. Adair shoved me behind him, so that his tall body blocked most of the opening, and hid me from sight. I stumbled in a small hole and fell back against the limbs of a small dead tree that covered the back of the alcove. The light in our skins had not died away, so that it bounced shadows on the crumbling stone and the rock-strewn hole at my feet. I knew this alcove, but it was floors lower, and had never been near my aunt's rooms.

Doyle's voice came: "You are safe. This is no attack."

"Then what is it?" Adair said, and his voice held a tension that was only a little reassured by Doyle's words.

"The queen's doors moved through the stone as if the stones were water," Barinthus said, "and the alcove appeared behind you."

"You know that the sithen rearranges itself," Doyle said.

"Not this suddenly," Adair said.

Now that I knew I wasn't in imminent danger, I moved my feet, carefully, out of the empty pool. Once it had been a bubbling spring. The story was that the spring had a fruit tree behind it, so that from the outside the tree was small like an apple tree espaliered against the stones, but if you knelt at the spring to drink or lay offerings, then the tree rose above you and there was a glimpse of meadows behind it. Once there had been entire worlds below ground for the fey to live in. Our hollow hills had hidden other suns and moons, and meadows, and pools, and lakes, from the sight of the humans. But all that had been long gone before I was born. I had seen a few rooms full of dead trees, dead grass, long dead and covered with the dust of centuries.

I touched the tree at my back, for the wall ended within my arm's length. The tree was small and pinned against it. The wood was dry and felt lifeless, but a few crumbling leaves clung here and there, and the trunk seemed thick for a tree that was barely taller than I.

There was hardly room for me to stand with a foot on either side of the dry pebbled basin. Adair's back took up almost all the opening, save for a small space above his head. Barinthus would have been too tall to stand inside the stone arch.

The light was pulling back from Adair's body, leaving a wash of red, as if the sun were setting across his lower back and buttocks. The white in my own skin was fading as well, but it was merely the dying of the light. Adair's body held a wash of colors, like the sky itself.

Adair moved out of the alcove, only a step. He was still close enough for me to touch his lower back. The moment I did, the color flushed deep crimson under his skin, and he let out a strangled cry. That one touch seemed to stagger him, because he groped for the stone wall.

He looked back at me, his eyes swimming down to three golden circles of color, still brighter than they had begun, but they no longer shone like small individual suns. He managed to gasp out, "What did you do to me?"

I could feel his power on my fingertips where I'd traced his skin. Could feel it, heavy and thick upon my fingers, like the heavy blood of trees, but there was nothing to see on my hand, only that sensation of thick liquid. I didn't know what I'd done to him, so what could I say?

I started to reach out to him, to offer the power on my fingers back to him, but something stopped me. Suddenly I knew what I needed to do. I moved to the front of the alcove and knelt inside it, in front of the dry spring bed. There, to the side, hidden in the dry leaves, was a small wooden cup. It was cracked on one side. Cracked with age and disuse.

"Come, Meredith, let us see the queen." It was Barinthus's voice.

Doyle said, "Not yet, Barinthus, wait a moment."

"You opened the door while I was distracted," Adair said, and his voice held anger again. "It was a trick!"

I held the dirty cup in my two hands, for it had no handle, and my hands were too small to hold it comfortably one-handed. I held it toward the place in the rock where the water had once bubbled forth. I knew exactly where the water should have flowed from. I knew it even though I had never seen it. I touched the cup to the rock, just below the opening.

"There is no water to be had from this place, Princess," Adair said.

I ignored him and held the cup against the rock. I sent the power on my fingers into that small dark opening, spread it on the crack like invisible jam, so thick, so rich. I knew in that instant that it had been meant for another more real liquid to be spread upon it. But this would do; this, too, was part of Adair's essence. Part of his power, his maleness. Male energy to touch the opening in the rock, like the opening of a woman. Male and female to bring forth life.

I called my power, let my skin dance with silver and white light, and the moment my power touched his where it lay against the rock, water trickled from the opening, filling the cracked cup.

Someone said, "The queen is coming."

Adair touched my arm, grabbed it. "You have tricked me!" He jerked me to my feet, spun me around to face him, and as he did water spilled out of the cup, into his surprised face, across his naked chest. The water dripped down his body in clear, shining lines. He let go of me, eyes wide.

The cup in my hands was formed of white wood, polished until it gleamed. Images of fruit and flowers covered the wood, and peeking out of that lovely tangle of vines and leaves were the faces of men. Not just one green man, but many, like hidden images in a children's puzzle. A woman's image graced the other side of the cup, hair flowing like a cloak down her body. There was a dog on one side of her, and a tree heavy with fruit on the other. She smiled at me from the wooden cup. It was a knowing smile, as if she knew everything I would ever want to know.

Doyle said, voice uncertain, "The queen awaits us inside, Meredith. Are you ready?"

I knelt back at the alcove and found the water trickling clear and sweet into the basin. The dried leaves and debris of years that had filled it were gone. The basin was a roughly round depression full of water-smoothed pebbles and rocks. I held the cup underneath the water, and it gave a small gurgle, flowing faster, as if eager to fill the cup. When the water overflowed the cup, running down my hands, in cool fingers, only then did I stand.

I stood with the cup filled to the brim, more water overflowing down my arms, trailing underneath the sleeves of my jacket. There was energy in the water, a quiet, humming power. With that inner eye, I could see the glow of power in that water, and the wooden cup was like a white star inside my head.

"Who is the cup for?" Doyle asked.

"One who needs healing, though she knows it not." My voice held an echo of the glow in the cup.

"I ask you again, who is the cup for?"

I didn't answer him, because he knew. They all knew. The cup was meant for the Queen of Air and Darkness. The cup would cleanse her, heal her, change her. I knew the cup was meant for her, but I did not know if she would drink it.

Andais stood in the center of the chamber carved of moonlight and darkness. Her white skin shone as if she'd captured the full moon inside her skin and all its soft radiance spilled out of her. Her hair was a fall of blackest night, except that if I looked at her from the corner of my eye there were pale points of light in her hair, like scattered stars, but when I turned to face her directly, there was only a shimmering blackness, unrelieved by any light, the heart of deepest, emptiest space. The kind of empty darkness that held no warmth, no life.

The triple grey of her eyes glowed, but it was subdued as if lit only by reflected light. Her eyes were light grey storm clouds lit by distant lighting, with no light of their own. That last thick ring of charcoal was like the sky before it fell upon the earth and poured its rage upon us all.

The look in her eyes alone would have stopped me at the door. Her power filled her like some stroke of fate waiting for its victim, making me want to turn around and run. I was still touched by the magic that had revived the spring. The magic that Adair and I, merely touching, had awoken. But that bright, healing spell faded to ashes in my heart with a look from Andais's power-mad eyes. There was nothing sane in them.

I stood barely inside the door, afraid to move, afraid to attract her attention. All the new power, all the new self-discovery, all the newfound joy and love; and I was suddenly back to being a child again. A frightened rabbit huddling in the grass hoping the fox will pass me by. When I swallowed, it hurt, as if my fear meant to choke me. But I wasn't the rabbit that this particular fox was hunting.

Eamon stood on the small platform at the end of the room, the one that was usually curtained off. He was tall and pale, with his fall of ankle-length black hair the only thing that shielded his body from our view. Eamon was one of those who did casual nudity around the court. I'd seen him nude before and, if he survived the night, would again. No, it wasn't Eamon's beauty that sped my pulse. It wasn't even the implements of torture and death that hung on the wall behind him, framing his body like a collage. It was the queen's words, and his answer to them.

"Do you defy me, Eamon, my consort?" Her voice was calm when she asked it, too calm. It matched nothing in the room, not even the expression on her face.

"I do not defy you, my queen, my love, but I beg you. You will kill him if you do not stop this."

A voice called from behind Eamon, "Don't stop, please, don't stop."

"He does not wish to stop," Andais said, and she moved one hand, negligently, bringing my attention to the whip in it. It had been lost against the blackness of her long skirt, so that until she moved it, I had seen nothing. It was like some well-camouflaged snake, hidden until it would strike. The whip made a heavy slithering sound against the floor, as she moved it back and forth. An idle gesture that raised the hair on the back of my neck.

"You told me once that you valued him because he could take so much pain. If you kill him, you will not have him to play with, my queen." I realized that Eamon was standing in front of the alcove in the center of the wall. He was blocking the view of the place where I knew there were chains bolted into the wall. Whoever it was, he was shorter than Eamon's six feet, and could be killed by a mere whip. Most of the fey could be decapitated, pick up their heads under one arm, and strike back at their enemy. They were not easily killed or injured. Who would need to be shielded like this? Who would Eamon risk himself for? No name came to my mind.

There were other guards in the room. They were all nude. Clothes, armor, weapons lay in a heap at the foot of her bed, as if she'd lain among the silk and fur, and ordered them all to strip. Which she may have done, but seeing a dozen of the sidhe, kneeling, heads bowed, their hair loose and covering their nudity like robes of many colors, was both a lovely sight and a disturbing one.

What had happened? What had changed since Barinthus and the others left the mound and came to fetch me? Barinthus had said she was getting better; this was as bad as I'd ever seen her.

I was afraid to speak, afraid to make any noise, for fear that all that anger would turn in my direction. I wasn't the only one perplexed about how to proceed, for Doyle stood in front of me, and a little to one side, as motionless as I was, as motionless as we all were. Our entrance through the door had turned her eyes to us, but now that we'd stopped moving, she had turned all that attention back to Eamon. None of us seemed willing to risk sharing that attention with him.

She drew the whip out behind her, and there was room among the kneeling men, room, as if this wasn't the first time the whip had come snaking back along the floor. Not the first time that night, nor the twelfth, nor the twentieth. The men stayed like a strange garden of beautiful statues, so very still, as the whip whispered back along the floor. The queen sent the whip forward, using her whole arm, shoulder, back, and finally lower body. She threw the whip the way you throw a good punch. Her wrist flicked at the last moment and gave it that added curl that would make it crack.

It made the sound of a tornado rushing past, and I knew from hard experience that on the receiving end of that lash, the sound was even more overwhelming, like standing on the railroad tracks while the train thunders down toward you, and you can't move out of the way. Not because you don't want to, but because you're chained in place.

Eamon could have moved, but he did not. He stood there, and used that tall, commanding body as a shield for whoever lay behind him. The bullwhip struck him full across the chest with a near-explosive crack that overwhelmed the sound of it hitting his flesh. With a small whip you'd have heard the meaty slap of it. But this was her largest whip, the one that looked like a melanistic anaconda, something long enough and thick enough to crush your life out. I feared that particular whip, because I was mortal, and though Eamon's flesh reddened, it did not bleed. I would have bled.