A Lick of Frost

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “Rhys, oh, god, Rhys!”

  The dim room filled with the light of our bodies, glowing like twin moons of rising power. He made my skin run with light. He dug his hand into the shining garnet of my hair and jerked my throat backward as he rode me. The roughness of it made me scream again, but he let go of my hair as his body began to fight him for rhythm. His breathing changed and I knew he was close, close, and fighting to last that little bit longer, so that I would scream underneath him for just a little bit longer.

  I was on all fours where his grip had moved me. My breasts hung down, slapping together from the fury of his sex. I screamed my pleasure. I filled the room with his name like a prayer to some angry god. Then his body made one last tremendous thrust so deep inside me that I knew it should have hurt, but there was too much pleasure for real pain.

  His body shivered above me, thrusting again deep inside me. I felt him spill himself inside me in a hot wash of seed and power.

  He’d said he would pray while he fucked me. He’d said he’d use his power to make me his. I should have been afraid, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t be afraid of Rhys.

  I collapsed underneath him with his body still buried inside me. He lay on top of me, both of us too spent to move, our breathing a ragged sound, our hearts still in our throats. The glow of our bodies began to fade as our pulses slowed.

  He finally rolled off, slowly. I lay where I was, too limp to move yet. He lay on his back, still breathing heavily. He spoke, in a voice still harsh from exertion. “The way you react to roughness urges a man on, Merry, even when you didn’t think you’d like it.”

  “You were amazing,” I whispered, my own voice a little rough from the screaming.

  He smiled at me. “You really don’t have any idea how good you are at this, do you?”

  “I’m good, or so I’m told.”

  He shook his head. “No, Merry, no joke, you are amazing in bed, and on the floor, and on a sturdy table.”

  I laughed.

  He smiled at me, and it was almost the old Rhys before he got so serious on me. Then that seriousness peeked out again. “I know that the goblins will have you tonight, and there is nothing I can do about it.” His face went from serious to angry. “But when they shove themselves inside you tonight they’ll be shoving my seed farther in.”

  “Rhys….”

  “No, it’s all right. I know you’re doing your duty as queen. We need the goblins as our allies, and this is the way to get the treaty lengthened. I know politically that it’s a good idea, a great idea.” He stared at me, and there was such pressure to that gaze that I had to fight to meet it. “But the idea of the two of them having you tonight—the way it’s planned—excites you, doesn’t it?”

  I hesitated, then told the truth. “Yes.”

  “That is not Seelie Court. That is most definitely Unseelie Court. It’s the part of you that I don’t understand. It’s the part that Doyle understands best, better even than Frost. He may be your Darkness, but he also holds your darkness as precious to him. I don’t want your darkness, Merry. I want the light of you.”

  “You can’t separate the light and the dark, Rhys. They’re both a part of me.”

  He nodded. “I know, I know.” He sat up and eased himself off the edge of the bed. “I’m going to go clean up.”

  “You were magnificent,” I said.

  “I’m already sore.”

  “I warned you, foreplay isn’t just for my body’s comfort.”

  “You did warn me.” He gathered his clothes from the floor, but made no move to put them on.

  “Enjoy your shower,” I said.

  “Want to join me?”

  I smiled. “No, I need some actual sleep before tonight, I think.”

  “I tire you out?”

  “Yes, but in a wonderful way.” I curled on my side, pulling the sheet up.

  Rhys went for the door. I heard him talking to someone outside. I heard him say, “Ask her yourself.”

  Kitto’s voice came from the door. “May I come in?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He walked inside, the door closing behind him. He must have been sitting in the hallway the entire time. “Do you want to hold me while you sleep?” he asked.

  I looked at his earnest face, so serious. He was always serious, our Kitto. “Yes,” I said.

  He smiled then, and it was a good smile. A smile that we’d only discovered he had in the last little bit. He crawled under the sheet and slid his body against the back of mine. He spooned his nakedness against my body, and it was simply comforting. I would have turned down almost any other man at the door in that moment.

  Kitto knew he would not be king, so the sex wasn’t such a press to him. But more than that he valued the gentle cuddling almost more than the sex. After all, he’d had sex before, but I wasn’t certain he’d ever truly been loved just for himself. I did love him. I loved them all, but Rhys was right, I didn’t love them equally.

  The constitution of our country says that all men are created equal, but it’s a lie. I’ll never be able to make a jump shot like Magic Johnson, or drive a car like Mario Andretti, or paint like Picasso. We are not created equal in talent. But the place where we are least equal is the heart. You can work at a talent, take lessons, but love, love either works or it doesn’t. You love someone or you don’t. You can’t change it. You can’t undo it.

  I lay there drifting on the warm edge of sleep with the wonderful edge of good sex coating my body. Kitto’s warmth and clinging shape held me as I drifted off. I felt safe, loved, and content. I wished Rhys would feel as good about this afternoon as I did, but I knew that that was a wish that wouldn’t come true.

  I was a faerie princess, but there were no faerie godmothers. There were only mothers and grandmothers, and there was no magic wand to wave over a person’s heart and make it all better. The fairy tales lied. Rhys knew that. I knew that. The man who was breathing at my back as he began to fall deeper to sleep knew that.

  Fucking Brothers Grimm.

  CHAPTER 20

  WHILE MAEVE REED WAS OFF IN EUROPE STAYING OUT OF TARANIS’S reach, she’d given us full use of her house. She said it was a small price to pay for us saving her life and helping her become pregnant before her human husband had died of cancer. So for once good deeds had been rewarded. We had a mansion on a huge plot of land in Holmby Hills, with a guesthouse, a pool house, and a smaller cottage near the gate for the caretaker-gardener.

  I still slept in the master bedroom of the guesthouse, but there were now enough of us to fill the bedrooms of both houses. The men were having to double up in some of the bedrooms.

  Kitto had gotten a room to himself because it was too small a room to share with anyone much above my, and Rhys’s size. Which meant no one.

  We’d planned on using the main house’s dining room for the initial meeting with the goblins. It was a huge room that had begun life as a ballroom. So it was light and airy and full of marble. It looked like something out of a human fairy tale. The Seelie Court would have approved, but then Maeve was exiled from there, so maybe the ballroom/dining room was a piece of home for her.

  Most of my bodyguards looked as at home here in the brightness as the glittering chandeliers above us. The guards whom Ash and Holly had brought didn’t look at home at all.

  The Red Caps towered over everyone else in the room. Seven feet of goblin was a lot of goblin. But that was short for a Red Cap. Most were closer to the twelve-foot mark. The average height was eight to ten feet. Their skins were shades of yellow, gray, and sickly green. I’d known that the goblins were bringing Red Caps as guards. Kurag, the Goblin King, had felt that if he sent Ash and Holly without guards to us and something happened to them, it would be seen as a plot between him and me to rid himself of the brothers. Since the only way for him to step down as king and them to step up was for him to be dead at their hands, their deaths would be very convenient for him.

  So why was he offering them to me to make the
m even more powerful? Because Kurag knew how his kingship would end, as all goblin kings ended. He wanted to ensure that his people were strong even after he died. He did not resent the brothers for their ambition. He just wanted to hold it off a little longer.

  If the twins died by our hands, even by accident, without goblins around them, then it could be misconstrued. If the goblins thought that Kurag had had the brothers assassinated, his life was forfeit. All challenges were personal challenges. There were goblins who were assassins as a sideline, but they never took “jobs” where the victim was another goblin. They’d kill sidhe, or lesser folk, but never another goblin.

  The only exception was if the goblin was one of the “kept,” as Kitto had been. If you had a problem with one of them, their “masters” fought you. Because to be what Kitto was among them was an admission that he was not fighter enough to be part of the larger goblin culture.

  I sat in a large chair that had been set up as a sort of temporary throne. The big table had been moved back against the wall, along with most of the chairs. Frost was at my back. Doyle was still closeted in his bedroom with the black dogs. Taranis had nearly killed my Darkness. If we’d been inside faerie proper, he might have been healed already. None of our magics were as strong here. It was one of the reasons that exile was so feared by most, because you were never as powerful outside of faerie.

  “We have brought you inside so the human reporters cannot bandy it about in the press,” Frost said in a voice as cold as his namesake. “But for the press I would not have allowed you inside our wards with such an army at your back.”

  I couldn’t really argue with him, but I was strangely unworried. In fact, I felt better than I’d felt in hours.

  “It is done, Frost,” I said.

  “Why are you not more worried about this?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “If they were not goblins, I would say they had bespelled you,” Rhys said.

  Ash and Holly were impressed with all of the show, which set them apart from the other goblins and made them so much more sidhe.

  “Greetings, Ash and Holly, goblin warriors. Greetings also to the Red Caps of the Goblin Court. Who leads here?”

  “We do,” Ash said, as he and his brother stepped up to stand before my chair. They were wearing the court clothes that they’d worn before, Ash in green to match his eyes, Holly in red to match his. The clothes were satin, and the height of fashion if the year happened to be between 1500 and 1600.

  Their short yellow hair brushed their ears as they bowed. They’d started to let their hair grow, though it wasn’t long enough to get them in trouble with the queen—it had to touch their collars for that.

  “You’ve let your hair grow in the month since I saw you,” I said.

  They exchanged a glance, then Ash said, “We do it in anticipation of your magic bringing us into our sidhe-side powers.”

  “That’s very confident of you,” I said.

  “We have every confidence in your powers, Princess,” Ash said.

  I looked at Holly. There was no confidence in his eyes, just eagerness. He got to bed me tonight; all else was just pretense. Holly would give me what the brothers truly felt. Ash was nearly as good at playing courtier as sidhe lord. I didn’t trust either of them, but Ash could lie with his eyes and face; Holly couldn’t. Good to know.

  I looked past them to the Red Caps. I recognized some of them from the fight weeks before. They had stood by me, not the brothers, or Kurag their king. The Red Caps had obeyed me beyond what was required of them by treaty. I had not explored that strange obedience, so unlike the usual Red Cap attitude toward sidhe or female, because I wasn’t sure how Kurag would take it. I did not want to be seen as trying to seduce, even politically, the most powerful warriors of the goblin race to my service.

  Kurag desperately wanted out of the treaty with me. He feared that civil war was coming either within the Unseelie themselves or between both courts. He wanted no part of the coming battles, yet his treaty with me held him to me. I would not give him an excuse to pull out. We needed him too much. So I had not probed further into the Red Caps motivations for their loyalty to me.

  Now they stood before me, more of them than I’d ever seen in one place at one time. They were like a living wall of flesh and muscle. They all wore little round skullcaps. Most were covered in dry blood so that the wool was shades of brown and black. But about a third of them had blood running from their caps to trickle down their faces and stain the shoulders and chest of their clothes.

  Once to be war leader among them you had to be able to make the blood on your cap stay fresh. The alternative was to kill a foe often enough to keep your hat red. This little cultural habit had made them some of the most bloodthirsty warriors in all of faerie.

  I’d only met one Red Cap who could make his hat stay fresh and bright red: Jonty. He stood among them, in the front near the center. He was about ten feet tall, with gray skin and eyes the color of fresh blood. All the Red Caps had red eyes, but there are shades of red, and Jonty’s were as bright as his cap.

  When I’d met him his skin had reminded me of the gray of dust, but his skin didn’t look dry or harsh now. He looked…like he’d had a good deep moisturizer used on all the skin I could see. Since goblins didn’t go to spas, I didn’t understand the change in his skin tone.

  There were other changes as well. His hat bled in thick runlets of blood so that his entire upper body was soaked in it. The blood had trickled down his clothes, and dripped off the ends of his thick fingers as he stood there, making a delicate pattern of blood on the marble floor.

  “Jonty, it is good to see you again.” I meant it. He had saved us. He had forced the twins to join our fight. The Red Caps had followed him, not Ash and Holly.

  “And you, Princess Meredith,” he said in that voice that was so low it was like gravel rumbling.

  “Should we have greeted the Killing Frost and Rhys?” Ash asked. “I am not completely clear on the rules of sidhe etiquette.”

  “You may greet them or not. I greet Jonty because he stood beside me in battle. I greet Jonty and his Red Caps because they helped me and mine. I greet the Red Caps as true allies.”

  “The goblins are your allies,” Ash said.

  “The goblins are my allies because Kurag cannot get out of our bargain. You would have let my men die that night in the dark.”

  “Are you going to go back on your bargain to bed us, Princess?” Ash asked.

  “No, but seeing Jonty and his men reminds me, that is all.” Actually, I was angry. Ash and Holly had been like all goblins, and most sidhe. It wasn’t their fight, and they didn’t want to die defending sidhe warriors who wouldn’t have given a damn for them. I shouldn’t blame them, but I did anyway.

  Jonty had picked me up in his huge arms and run through the winter night toward the fight. Where he went, the other Red Caps had gone. Because the Red Caps went, the other goblins had to go. To avoid the fight would have branded them as weaker and more cowardly than the Red Caps. I’d known it was a point of pride, but Kitto had explained that it was more than that. It would have opened the other goblins to being challenged in single combat by the Red Caps who fought beside me. No goblin would have willingly invited such a challenge.

  I knew what I owed Jonty and his men, but not why they had done it. Why had they risked everything for me? If I could have figured out a way to ask that wouldn’t have insulted them, Ash and Holly, or even their king, I would have asked. But goblin culture was a maze that I did not have a map for yet. It had no room for asking why of a warrior. Why were you brave? Because I was a goblin. Why did you help me? Because no goblin turns from a good fight. Neither was completely true. But it was popularly true, and to say otherwise would bring into question Ash and Holly’s lack of enthusiasm.

  Frost touched my shoulder, just a light touch. If Doyle had been there, he’d have touched me sooner. Frost didn’t like why the goblins were here tonight. He didn’
t like me being with them, but he knew we needed them as allies.

  Rhys spoke softly, “Merry.”

  I looked up at him, startled. “Did I miss something?”

  “Yes.” He motioned with his gaze at the twins.

  I turned to them. “I am so sorry, but so much has happened today that I find worry overriding my duty.”

  “So the Darkness is still too injured to be by your side,” Ash said.

  “He will not be here tonight. I told you that earlier.”

  “Will Rhys and the Killing Frost be your guards tonight?” Holly asked.

  “No.”

  Rhys couldn’t do it. Frost I’d ordered not to. He could not hide his feelings well enough. I feared he would insult Holly with a look or a sound tonight. The middle of sex could be very like the middle of bloodlust in battle for a goblin. I didn’t want to have Frost start a fight by accident.

  “Amatheon and Adair will guard me.” At the mention of their names, they stepped forward from the line of guards behind me. Amatheon was copper-haired, and Adair was crowned with a dark gold that had once been closer to just brown, before we’d had sex inside faerie and he had come back into some of his power. Amatheon had been a deity of agriculture. Adair was the oak grove, but also once a solar deity. I wasn’t sure if he’d been solar, then downgraded to oak, or if he’d been both simultaneously. It was considered the height of rudeness to ask a fallen deity what their old powers once were. It was like rubbing their noses in their lost status.

  “Is it true that fucking them is what turned Andais’s garden of pain into the meadow it is now?” Holly asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Rhys said, “I wish Doyle were here, I really do. I hate goblins, everyone knows that, so I don’t trust my judgment with you.”

  “Rhys,” I said, “what…”

  “Is no one going to ask why they have brought every Red Cap the goblins have at their command?”

  “I, too,” Frost said, “do not wish Merry to do this. It colors my judgment as well.”