A Lick of Frost

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “Well, I don’t give a damn who she fucks as long as she eventually fucks me, so I’ll say it. Why in the name of the consort do you have this many Red Caps with you?” Onilwyn stepped away from the rest of my guards.

  Onilwyn was the most graceless sidhe I’d ever seen. There was something blocky about his muscular build. He was tall enough and he moved well, but he just wasn’t made as smoothly as the rest. I was never sure why, and again, could not ask. It wasn’t his roughness that made me not want to sleep with him. He was as handsome with his long green hair and lovely eyes as most of the sidhe. But if pretty is as pretty does, Onilwyn was ugly to me.

  I’d managed not to sleep with him yet because I truly didn’t like him. He had been one of Cel’s friends who had tormented me when I was a child. I truly didn’t wish to be tied to him by a child and marriage, so I’d refused him my bed. I’d given him permission to masturbate, which was more than the queen had allowed. He could entertain himself all he wanted. I just didn’t want him entertaining me.

  If I didn’t get pregnant soon, he’d promised to complain to the queen. I had until the end of this month, because that was when I could bleed away my chances for a baby this cycle. The queen would force me into his bed. First, on the chance that I could get pregnant. Second, because she knew I didn’t want to do it.

  But sometimes it’s the unpleasant person who will say what needs saying. I had not worried about how many Red Caps were in the room until Onilwyn spoke. That was wrong. I should have worried. There were enough of them that if they started a battle we might lose. Why hadn’t it worried me?

  My left hand pulsed so hard it brought a sound from me. My hand of blood liked the Red Caps. My power liked the Red Caps. Not good, or was it?

  Ash and Holly exchanged a glance.

  “The truth,” I said. “Why did you bring every Red Cap the goblins can boast?”

  “They insisted,” Ash said.

  “The Red Caps do not insist,” Onilwyn said. “They obey.”

  Ash looked at the other man. “I would not expect a sidhe to know so much of us.” He looked at me and gave a nod. “Except for the princess, who seems to make a study of all her people’s culture.”

  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 aroun
d 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.