Frost and Rhys were white shadows in the dimness, and Doyle a darker presence by their side. “Doyle, where are the others?”
It was Rhys who answered. “The garden took them.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. I took a step toward them, but Mistral held me back.
“Until we find out what is happening, we cannot risk you, Princess.”
“He is right,” Doyle said. He walked toward us, gliding graceful and nude, but there was something in the way he moved that said the fight wasn’t over. He moved as if he expected the ground itself to open up and attack. Just watching him move like that scared me. Something was horribly wrong.
“Stay with Mistral and Abe. Frost with Merry. Rhys with me.”
I thought someone would argue with him, but they didn’t. They followed him as they had followed him for a thousand years. My pulse was thudding in my throat, and I didn’t understand what was happening, but I was almost certain in that moment that the men would never obey me as they obeyed him. I understood, as he stalked over the softening ground—with Rhys like a small, pale shadow at his side—why my aunt Andais had never made love to Doyle. Never given him a chance to fill her belly with child. She did not share power, and Doyle was a man whom other men followed. He had the stuff of kings in him. I had known that, but I hadn’t been certain until this second that the other men knew it, too. Maybe not in the front of their heads, but in the very bones of their bodies, they understood what he was, what he could be.
He and Rhys moved toward a fringe of tall trees, their branches stark and dead against the soft, rainy twilight. Doyle was looking up into the trees, as if he saw something in the empty branches.
“What is that?” Mistral asked.
“I don’t see…,” Abe began; then I heard his breath draw in sharp.
“What, what is it?” I asked.
“Aisling, I think,” Frost whispered.
I glanced at Frost. I could remember some of the other men who had been touching the trees. Adair, for example, had climbed a tree. I remembered seeing him up in the branches in the middle of all the sex and magic. But I didn’t remember seeing Aisling after the magic hit us.
“I saw Adair climbing a tree, but I don’t remember Aisling,” I said.
“He vanished once we entered the garden,” Frost said.
“I thought he had been left behind in the room with Barinthus and the others,” I said.
“No, he was not left behind,” Mistral said.
“I can’t see what Doyle is looking at.”
“You may not wish to,” Abe said. “I know I don’t.”
“Don’t treat me like a child. What do you see? What’s happened to Aisling?” I pulled away from Mistral. But he and Abe were still between me and the line of trees. “Move aside,” I said.
They glanced at each other, but didn’t move. They would not obey me as they obeyed Doyle.
“I am Princess Meredith NicEssus, wielder of the hand of flesh and blood. You are royal guards, but not royal. Don’t let the sex go to your heads, gentlemen—move!”
“Do as she says,” Frost said.
They glanced at each other, but then parted so I could see. Unlike Frost, Doyle would have known not to help me, because now they weren’t obeying me. They were obeying Frost. But that was a problem for another night. This night, this night, I wanted to see what everyone else had already seen.
There was a pale shape hanging from the tallest branch of the tallest tree. I thought at first that Aisling was hanging by his hands, dangling from the branch on purpose; then I realized that his hands were by his sides. He was dangling from the branch, yes, but not by his hands. The rain started to fall harder. “The branch…,” I whispered, “it’s pierced his chest.”
“Yes,” Mistral said.
I swallowed hard enough that it hurt. There weren’t many things that could bring death to the high court of faerie. There were tales of the immortal sidhe standing up after a beheading, still alive. But there were no stories about living on after your heart was gone.
Some of the other guards hadn’t wanted Aisling to sleep in the bedroom with us, feeling he was too dangerous. To look upon his face had once been to fall instantly, hopelessly in love with him. Even goddesses and some gods had fallen to his power, once, or so the old stories said. So he had voluntarily kept most of his clothes on, including the gauzy veil that he wore wrapped around his face. Only his eyes were left bare.
He was a man so beautiful that all who saw him, loved him. I had ordered him to use that power on one of our enemies. She had tried to kill Galen, and almost succeeded. But I hadn’t understood what I asked of him, or what I condemned her to see. She had given us information, but she had also clawed out her own eyes so she would no longer be under his power.
He had been afraid to even take off his shirt in front of me, for fear that I was too mortal to look upon his flesh, let alone his face. I hadn’t been bespelled, but staring at the pale form, hanging lifeless, lost to twilight and rain, I remembered him. I remembered his skin, golden, golden as if someone had shaken gold dust across his pale, perfect body. He had sparkled in the light, not just with magic, but the way a jewel catches the light. He had glittered with the beauty of what he was. Now he hung in the rain, dead or dying. And I had no idea why.
CHAPTER 8
THE GROUND WAS SOFT UNDER OUR FEET AS WE WALKED toward Aisling’s body. The sharp, dry vegetation had melted into the softening earth. Much more of this downpour and it would be mud. I had to shield my eyes with my hand to gaze up at the body in the tree.
Body, just a body. I was already distancing myself from him. Already I was making that mental switch that had allowed me to work murder cases in Los Angeles. Body, it, not he, and absolutely not Aisling. The it hung there, with a black branch thicker than my arm sticking out through the chest. There had to be two feet worth of branch on this side of the body. Such force it would have taken to pierce the chest of any man like that, a warrior of the Unseelie Court. A nearly immortal being, once worshipped as a god. Such beings do not die easily. He hadn’t even cried out…or had he? Had he cried his death on the air, and I been deaf to it? Had my screams of pleasure drowned out his cries of despair?
No, no, I had to stop thinking like that, or I would run screaming.
“Is he…,” Abe began.
None of the men answered him or finished his sentence. We all stared up, wordless, as if by not saying it, we’d keep it from being true. He hung so limp, like a broken puppet, but thick, and meaty, and more real than any doll. He was utterly still and limp in that heavy-limbed way that not even the deepest sleep can duplicate.
I spoke into that rain-soaked silence. “Dead.” And that one word seemed louder than it actually was.
“How? Why?” Abe asked.
“The how is pretty apparent,” Rhys said. “The why is a mystery.”
I looked away from what hung in the tree, out into the twilight of the gardens. I wasn’t looking away from Aisling, but rather looking for the others. I tried to ignore the tightness of my throat, the speeding of my pulse. I tried not to finish the thought that had made me turn and search the dimness. Were there other men dead, or dying, in the dimness? Who else was pierced through by some magical tree?
There was nothing to see but the dead branches stretching naked toward the clouds—none of the other trees held a gruesome trophy. The tightness in my chest eased when I was sure that all the trees were empty except this one.
I barely knew Aisling. He had never been my lover, and had only been one of my guards for a day. I was sorry for the loss of him, but there were others among my guards that I cared about more, and they were still missing. I was happy they weren’t decorating the trees, but that left me wondering what else might have become of them. Where were they?
Doyle spoke so close to me that I jumped. “I do not see any of the others in the trees.”
I shook my head. “No, no.” I looked for Frost. He stood close, but not
close enough to hold me. I wanted to be comforted by one of them, but it was a child’s wish. A child’s wish for lies in the dark, that the monster isn’t under the bed. I had grown up in a world where the monsters were very real.
“You were holding Galen, and Nicca was with you,” I said. “What happened to them?”
Frost brushed his sodden hair from his face, the silver looking as grey as Mistral’s in the dim light. “Galen was swallowed up by the ground.” His eyes showed pain. “I could not hold on to him. It was as if some great force wrenched him away.”
I was suddenly cold, and the warm rain wasn’t enough to keep it at bay. I said, “When Amatheon did the same thing in my vision, he went willingly. He just sank into the mud. There was no wrenching force.”
“I can only report what happened, Princess.” His voice had gone sullen. If he thought I’d criticized him, then so be it; I didn’t have time to hold his hand.
“That was vision,” Mistral said. “Sometimes on this side of the veil, it’s not so gentle.”
“What’s not so gentle?” I asked.
“Being consumed by your power,” he said.
I shook my head, wiping impatiently at the rain on my face. I was beginning to be irritated. The miracle of it raining in the dead gardens wasn’t enough to calm the cold fear. “I wish this rain would let up,” I said without thinking. Angry and afraid, and the rain was something I could be angry at without hurting its feelings.
The rain slackened. It went from a downpour to a light drizzle. My pulse was in my throat again, but not for the same reason. It was a miracle that there was rain here, and I hadn’t meant to make it go away.
Doyle touched my mouth with a callused fingertip. “Hush, Meredith—do not destroy the blessing of this rain.”
I nodded to let him know I understood. He took his finger away, slowly. “I forgot that the sithen listens to everything I say.” I swallowed hard enough that it hurt. “I don’t want the rain to stop.”
We stood there, everyone tense, waiting. Yes, Aisling was dead, and many more missing, but the dead gardens had been the heart of our faerie mound once, and were more important than any one life. They had been the heart of our power. When this place had died, our power had begun to die.
I saw with relief that the warm spring drizzle kept falling. Slowly, we all let out a breath. “Be careful what you say, Princess,” Mistral whispered.
I just nodded.
“Nicca stood up, staring at his hands,” Frost said, as if I’d asked. “He reached out to me, but before I could touch him he vanished.”
“Vanished how?” Abe asked.
“Just vanished, as if he became air.”
“He was taken by his sphere of influence,” Mistral said.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Air, earth.”
I shook my hands at him, as if waving away smoke between us. “I don’t understand.”
“Hawthorne was engulfed by the trunk of that tree over there,” Rhys said. He pointed to a large greyish-barked tree. “He didn’t fight it. He went smiling. I’d bet almost anything that if we could identity it, it would be a hawthorn tree.”
“Galen and Nicca did not go smiling,” Frost said.
“They have never been worshipped as deities,” Doyle said, “so they do not know to relax into the power. If you fight it, it will fight back. If you let it take you, then it is more gentle.”
“I know that once upon a time, some of the sidhe could travel through ground, trees, the air. But forgive me, guys, that was a thousand years before I was born. A thousand years before Galen was born. Nicca is older, but he was always too weak to be a god.”
“That may have changed,” Abe said.
“Just as Abe’s power returned,” Doyle said.
Abe nodded. “Once, so long ago that I don’t want to remember, I didn’t just make queens. I made goddesses.”
“What are you saying?” I asked.
He brought the horn cup in front of him. “The Greeks believed in it, too, Princess. That the drink of the gods could make you immortal; could make you a god.”
“But they didn’t drink from it.”
“The drinking is—” He seemed to search for a word. “—more metaphorical, at times. It was my power, and Medb’s, that gave the gods and goddesses of our pantheon their marks of power. The colored lines, Princess, they paint the skin.”
Rhys looked down at his arm, where there had been that one faint fish. Now there were two, one swimming down, another swimming upward. It formed a circle, like a fish version of yin and yang. The blue lines weren’t faint now—they were bright, clear blue, deeper than a summer sky. Rhys’s curls had been plastered flat by the rain, so the face he turned to us seemed startled and unfinished.
“You bear both marks now,” Doyle said. With his hair in a tight braid, he looked as he always looked. He stood in the middle of all the disarray like some dark rock I might cling to.
Rhys looked up at him. “It can’t be that easy.”
“Try,” he said.
“Try what?” I asked.
The men were all exchanging some knowledge from look to look. I didn’t understand.
“Rhys was a deity of death,” Frost said.
“I know that; he was Cromm Cruach.”
“Don’t you remember the story he told you?” Doyle asked.
In that moment I couldn’t remember. All I could think was that Galen and Nicca might be dead, or hurting, and it was somehow my fault.
“Once I brought more than just death, Merry,” Rhys said, still gazing down at his arm with its new mark.
My mind started working finally. “Celtic death deities are also healing deities, according to legend,” I said.
“According to legend,” Rhys said. He gazed up at Aisling.
“Try,” Doyle said to Rhys, again.
I looked at Rhys. “Are you saying you can bring him back from the dead?”
“The last time I had both symbols on my arm, I could.” He looked at me, and there was such pain on his face. I remembered what he had told me now. Once his followers had worshipped him by cutting and hurting themselves, sacrificing their blood and pain, but he had been able to heal them. Then he lost the ability to heal, and his followers thought he was displeased. They decided he wanted the deaths of others, and they began the sacrifices. He had slaughtered them all to stop the atrocities. Slain his own people to save the rest.
He had never lost the ability to kill small creatures with a touch. In Los Angeles he’d recovered the ability to kill other faerie creatures with a touch and a word. He’d killed a goblin that way, at least.
Rhys gazed up at Aisling’s still form. “I’ll try.” He handed his weapons to Doyle and Frost, then touched the tree. He seemed to wait a moment, to see what the tree would do. For the first time I realized that he was wondering if the tree would kill him, too—that hadn’t occurred to me.
“Is it safe for Rhys to do this?” I asked.
Rhys looked back at me. He grinned. “If I were taller, I wouldn’t have to climb.”
“I mean it, Rhys. I don’t want to trade you for Aisling. And I really don’t want two of you hanging up there.”
“If I really thought you loved me, I might not chance it.”
“Rhys…”
“It’s all right, Merry, I know where I stand.” He turned to the tree and started climbing.
Doyle touched my shoulder. “You cannot love us all equally. There is no dishonor in that.”
I nodded, and believed him, but it still hurt my heart.
Rhys looked like some white phantom against the blackness of the tree. He was right underneath where Aisling hung. He was just about to reach out toward him when magic crawled across my skin, stopped my breath in my throat.
Doyle felt it, too, and yelled, “Wait! Don’t touch him!”
Rhys started climbing back down the tree, sliding on the rain-slicked bark.
“Rhys! Hurry!” I screamed.
The air around Aisling’s body shimmered, like a heat haze, then exploded. Not in a rain of flesh and blood and bone, but in a cloud of birds. Tiny birds, smaller, more delicate than sparrows. Dozens of songbirds flew over our heads. We all fell to the ground, guarding our heads. Frost put his body over mine, protecting me from the fluttering, twittering mob. The birds looked charming, but looks can be deceiving.
When Frost raised up enough for me to see clearly again, the birds had vanished into the dimness of the trees. I stretched upward, trying to see. “Is the cavern wall farther away than it was?” I asked.
“Yes,” Doyle said.
“The forest stretches for miles now,” Mistral said, and his voice held awe.
“They call it the dead gardens, not the dead forest,” I said.
“It was both once,” Doyle said, softly.
Rhys explained, “This was a world at one time, Merry, a whole underground world. There were forests and streams, and lakes, and wonders to behold. But it whittled down, as our power was whittled away. Until, at the end, it was just what you saw when we entered—a bare patch where a flower garden once grew, surrounded by a fringe of dead trees.” He motioned toward the spreading trees. “The last time I saw anything like this inside any faerie mound was centuries ago.”
Abe hugged me from behind. It startled me, and I tensed. He started to pull away from me, but I patted his arm and said, “You startled me, that’s all.”
He hesitated, then hugged me close. “You’ve done this, Princess.”
I turned enough to see his face. He was smiling. “I think you helped, too,” I said.
“And Mistral,” Doyle added. His deep voice tried for neutral and almost made it, as much as it hurt him to say those words. He’d been convinced that the queen’s ring, which now sat on my hand, had chosen Mistral for my king. Only later had I been able to convince him it wasn’t so much Mistral as the fact that he was simply the first sex I’d had inside faerie while wearing the ring. Doyle had accepted that, but now he seemed to be wondering again.
[Merry Gentry 05] - Mistral's Kiss Page 8