But this was the real thing. The air was chill, but not quite cold. The wind that trailed at our backs smelled like dried cornfields and the dark, crisp scent of dying leaves.
If I could have come home to October and seen only the people I wanted to see, I’d have enjoyed it. Fall was my favorite time of year, October my favorite month.
I stopped on the path, and the men stopped with me. Barinthus looked down at me, eyebrows raised. Galen asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said, “absolutely nothing.” I took another deep breath of the autumn air. “The air never smells like this in California.”
“You always did love October,” Barinthus said.
Galen grinned. “I took you and Keelin trick o’ treating almost every year until you got too old for it.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t get too old for it. My own glamour just got powerful enough to hide what I was. Keelin and I went alone when I was fifteen.”
“You had enough glamour at fifteen to hide Keelin from the sight of mortals?” Barinthus asked.
I looked at him, nodding. “Yes.”
He opened his mouth as if to speak, but we were interrupted. A smooth male voice said, “Well, isn’t this touching?”
The voice whirled us all around to face a spot farther down the path. Galen moved in front of me, putting me behind the shield of his body. Barinthus was searching the darkness behind us for others. The near darkness spread behind us empty, but what was in front was enough.
My cousin Cel stood in the middle of the path. He wore his midnight hair like a long straight cloak so that it was hard to tell where hair ended and his black duster coat began. He was dressed all in black except for a gleam of white shirt that shone like a star among all the blackness.
He wasn’t alone. Standing to one side of him, ready to move in front of him if the need arose was Siobhan, the captain of his guard and his favorite assassin. She was small, not much taller than me, but I’d seen her pick up a Volkswagen and crush someone with it. Her hair shone white in the dark, but I knew the hair was white and silvery grey, like spiderwebs. Her skin was a pale, dull white, not the shining white of Cel’s and mine. Her eyes were a dull grey, filmed over like the blind eyes of a dead fish. She was wearing black armor, her helmet tucked under one arm. It was a bad sign that Siobhan was in full battle armor.
“Full body armor, Siobhan,” Galen said. “What’s the occasion?”
“Preparation is all in battle, Galen.” Her voice matched the rest of her, a dry whispering sibilance.
“Are we about to do battle?” Galen asked.
Cel laughed, and it was the same laugh that had helped make my childhood hellish. “No battle tonight, Galen, just Siobhan’s paranoia. She feared that Meredith would have gained powers in her trip to the lands of the west. I see that Siobhan’s fears were groundless.”
Barinthus put his hands on my shoulders, pulling me against him. “Why are you here, Cel? The queen sent us to bring Meredith to her presence.”
Cel glided down the path, tugging on the leash that went from his hand to a small figure crouched at his feet. The figure had been hidden behind the sweep of Cel’s coat and Siobhan’s body. At first I didn’t realize who it was.
The figure unfolded from the ground to a crouch that put her head no taller than Cel’s lower chest. She was brown of skin as Gran, but the hair on her head was thick and fell in straight brown folds to her ankles. She looked human or close to it in the near dark, but I knew that in good light one would see that her skin was covered in thick, soft, downy hair. Her face was flat and featureless, like something half-formed and never finished. Her thin, delicate body held several extra arms and one extra set of legs, so that she moved in a strange rocking motion. Clothing could hide the extra appendages but not the movement of her walk.
Keelin’s father had been a durig, a goblin of a very dark sense of humor—the kind of humor that could get a human killed. Her mother had been a brownie. Keelin had been chosen as my companion almost from birth. It had been my father’s choice, and I had never had cause to complain of it. We’d been best friends growing up. Maybe it was the brownie blood that we both carried. Whatever caused it, there had been an instant connection between us. We’d been friends since the first time I looked into her brown eyes.
Seeing Keelin on the end of Cel’s leash left me wordless. There were a variety of ways to end up as Cel’s “pet.” One was to be punished by the queen and given to Cel. The other was to volunteer. It had always amazed me how many of the lesser fey women would allow Cel to abuse them in the most base manner possible, because if they got pregnant they would be members of the court. Just like my Gran.
Though Gran would have put an iron spike through my grandfather’s heart before she let him treat her like an abused dog.
I stepped away from Barinthus until his hands fell away and I stood alone on the path. Galen and Barinthus stood behind me, one to either side like good royal guards. “Keelin,” I said, “what are you doing . . . here?” It wasn’t exactly the question I wanted to ask. My voice sounded calm, reasonable, ordinary. What I wanted to do was shout—scream.
Cel drew her to him, stroking her hair, pressing her face against his chest. His hand slid down her shoulder, lower and lower, until he cupped one of her breasts, kneading it.
Keelin turned her head so her hair hid her face from me. The sun was almost down, true dark only minutes away; she was just a thicker shadow against Cel’s darkness.
“Keelin, Keelin, talk to me.”
“She wants to be part of the court,” Cel said. “My pleasure in her makes her part of all the festivities.” He pulled her closer into his body, his hand sliding out of sight down the round neck of her dress. “If she gets with child, she will be a princess, and her babe heir to the throne. Her child could push you back to fourth from the throne instead of third,” he said, voice smooth and even as he reached farther and farther down her body.
I took a step forward, hand half reaching. “Keelin . . .”
“Merry,” she said, turning to face me for a moment, her voice the same small sweet sound it had always been.
“No, no, my pet,” Cel said. “Don’t speak. I will speak for us.”
Keelin fell silent, hiding her face again.
I stood there, and until Barinthus touched my shoulder and made me jump, I didn’t realize my hands were in tight fists. I was shaking again, but not from fear, from anger.
“The queen put a geas on us all not to tell you, Merry. I should have warned you anyway,” Galen said, moving up on the other side. It was almost as if the two of them expected to have to grab me and keep me from doing something foolish. But I wasn’t going to be foolish—that’s what Cel wanted. He’d come here to show off Keelin, to enrage me, with Siobhan at his back to kill me. I’m sure he could have concocted some story about me attacking him and his guard having to defend him. The queen had believed thinner stories than that over the years. He had every reason to be confident where the queen was concerned. I could be calm, because I could do nothing here and now but die. Cel, I might have considered taking on. He was one of the few people that I would use the hand of flesh on, and not lose sleep over it. But Siobhan, she was different. She would kill me.
“How long has Keelin been with him?” I asked.
Cel started to answer, and I raised a hand. “No, don’t speak, cousin. I asked the question of Galen.”
Cel smiled at me, a flash of white in the moonlit dark. Strangely, he stayed silent. I hadn’t really expected him to, but I also knew that if I had to hear his voice one more time, I was going to start screaming just to drown out his voice.
“Answer me, Galen.”
“Almost since you left.”
My chest was tight, eyes hot. This was my punishment. My punishment for escaping the court. Even though I hadn’t told Keelin that I was leaving, even though she was innocent, they’d hurt her to hurt me. Cel had kept her as a pet for nearly three years waiting for
me to come home. Enjoying himself no doubt, and if there was a child, all the better. But it wasn’t a desire for children that had motivated the choice of Keelin. I looked into Cel’s smug face, and even by moonlight I could read his expression. She’d been chosen out of revenge to punish me. And I’d been thousands of miles away, unknowing.
Cel and my aunt had waited patiently to show me their surprise. Three years of Keelin’s torment and no one told me. My aunt knew me better than I’d thought, because the knowledge that Keelin had suffered the entire time I’d been gone would eat at me. And if she held out Keelin’s freedom to me as a prize for whatever it was she wanted from me, she might have me. I needed to speak with Keelin alone.
As much as I hated Cel, this was one of the very few ways that Keelin could enter the court. She’d been one of my ladies in waiting—my companion. But being my friend and my servant had allowed her to see the inner workings of the court. I’d known she had a great hunger to be accepted in that darkling throng, hunger enough, maybe, to endure Cel and resent if I put a stop to it. Just because I saw it as a rescue didn’t mean Keelin would. Until I knew exactly how she felt, I could do nothing.
Cel’s hand finally slid back into sight. Seeing his pale hand on Keelin’s shoulder instead of deep in her dress made it easier to just stand and watch. “The queen has sent me to escort my fair cousin to her private chambers. The two of you have an appointment at the throne room.”
“I am aware of what I am expected to do,” Barinthus said.
“How can we trust you not to harm her?” Galen asked.
“Me? Harm my fair cousin?” Cel laughed again.
“We shall not leave.” Barinthus’s voice was very low and steady. You had to know his voice well to hear the anger in it.
“You fear that I will harm her, too, Barinthus?”
“No,” Barinthus said. “I am afraid she will harm you, Prince Cel. The life of her only heir means a great deal to our queen.”
Cel laughed loud and long. He laughed until either tears actually crept from his eyes, or he merely pretended to wipe them away. “You mean, Barinthus, that you’re afraid she will try to harm me, and I will put her in her place.”
Barinthus leaned over me and whispered, “You cannot afford to appear weak before Cel. I did not expect him to meet us. It is a bold move. If you have gained power in the lands to the west, show it now, Meredith.”
I turned, staring up into his face. He was so close to me that his hair trailed against my cheek, smelling of the ocean and something herbal and clean. I whispered back to him, “If I show him my powers now, it will take away all element of surprise later on.”
His voice was the soft murmur of water over round stones. He was using his own power to quietly make sure that Cel could not overhear us. “If Cel insists that we leave and we refuse, it will go badly for us.”
“Since when has the Queen’s Guard answered to her son?” I asked.
“Since the queen has decreed it so.”
Cel called to us, “I order you, Barinthus, and you, Galen, to go to your overdue appointment. We will escort my cousin to the queen’s presence.”
“Make him afraid of you, Meredith,” Barinthus said. “Make him wish for us to remain. Cel would have access to his mother’s ring.”
I stared up at him. I didn’t bother to ask if Barinthus really thought that Cel had tried to kill me in the car. If he didn’t believe it possible, he wouldn’t have said it.
“I gave you both a direct order,” Cel said. His voice rose, riding on the growing wind.
The wind picked up, rushing through the men’s long coats, whispering in the dried leaves of the trees at the edge of the field to our left. I turned to those whispering trees. I could almost understand the wind and the trees, almost hear the trees sighing of winter’s coming and the long cold wait ahead. The wind rushed and hurried, sending a small herd of newly fallen leaves skittering down the rock path past Cel and his women, to brush up against my feet and legs. The wind picked the leaves up in a swirl like tiny hands playing against my legs. The leaves were carried up and past us in a sudden burst of sweet autumn wind. I closed my eyes and breathed in that wind.
I stepped away from the men at my back, a few steps closer to Cel, but it wasn’t him I was moving toward. It was the call of the land. The land was happy that I was back, and in a way that it had never done before, the power in that land welcomed me.
I spread my arms to either side and opened myself to the night. I felt the wind blow not against my body but through it, as if I were the trees above, not an obstacle to the wind but part of it. I felt the movement of the night, the rushing, hurrying, pulse of it all. Underneath my feet the ground went down and down below me to unimaginable depths, and I could feel them all, and for a moment I felt the world turning under my feet. I felt that slow, ponderous swing around the sun. I stood with my feet planted solidly like the roots of a tree going down and down to cool living earth. But that was all that was solid about me. The wind swept through me as if I were not there, and I knew I could have wrapped the night around me and walked invisible among the mortals. But it wasn’t mortals I was dealing with.
I opened my eyes with a smile. The anger, the confusion, it was all gone, washed away in the wind that smelled like dried leaves and somehow spicy, as if I could smell things on the wind that were only half remembered or half dreamed. It was a wild night, and there was wild magic to be had from it, if you could ken to it. Earth magic can be ripped from the world by someone powerful enough to do it, but the Earth is a stubborn thing and resents being used. You always pay for force against the elements. But on some nights, or even days, the Earth offers herself up like a woman willing her lover to come to her arms.
I accepted her invitation. I left my barriers down and felt the wind blow little bits of me like dust upon the night, but for every bit that left more was pouring in. I gave of myself to the night and the night filled me, the earth beneath my feet embraced me, sliding up through the soles of my feet, up, up like a tree is fed, deep and quiet and cool.
For a moment I wasn’t sure if I wanted to move my feet enough to walk, afraid to break that contact. The wind swirled around me, chasing my hair across my face, bringing the scent of burned leaves, and I laughed. I walked down the stone path and with each slap of my heels the Earth moved with me. I moved through the night as if I were swimming, swimming on currents of power. I walked toward my cousin, smiling.
Siobhan stepped in front of him. Her cobweb hair vanished under the unrelieved black of her helmet. Only her white hands showed like ghosts floating in the dark. She could injure or kill with a touch of that pallid skin.
Barinthus came up behind me. I knew without seeing that he reached for me—I could feel him moving through the power at my back. I could almost see him standing there as if I had other eyes. All the magic I’d ever possessed had been very personal. This was not personal. I felt how tiny I was, how vast the world, but it wasn’t a lonely feeling. I felt for that moment embraced, whole. Wanted.
Barinthus’s hand fell back without touching me. His voice hissed and slurred like water over sand. “If I’d known you could do this, I would not have feared for you.”
I laughed, and the sound was joyous, free. I opened further, like a door thrown wide open. No, as if the door, the wall it sat on, and the house it was held inside of, melted into the power.
Barinthus caught his breath sharply. “By the Earth’s grace, what have you done, Merry?” He never used my nickname.
“Sharing,” I whispered.
Galen came up to us, and the power opened to him without any thought from me. The three of us stood there filled with the night. It was a generous power, a laughing, welcoming presence.
The power moved outward from me, or maybe I moved forward through something that was always there, but tonight I could sense it. Siobhan moved forward, and the power did not fill her. The power rejected her. Siobhan’s magic was an insult to the Earth and that slow cycle of
life because Siobhan stole that life, rushed death to the door of someone or something before their time. For the first time I understood that somehow Siobhan stood outside the cycle—that she was a thing of death that still moved as if it lived, but the Earth did not know her.
The power would have welcomed Cel, but he thought that first brush was my doing and he guarded himself against it. I felt his shields crash into place, holding him behind the metaphysical walls, safe and unable to share in the bounty offered.
But Keelin did not close herself away from it. Perhaps she didn’t have shields enough to build her walls, or perhaps she didn’t wish to. But I felt her in the power, felt her open to it, and heard her voice spill out in a sigh that mingled with the wind.
Keelin walked to the end of her leash, raising each of her four arms wide to the welcoming night.
Cel jerked her back by the leather leash. She stumbled, and I felt her spirit crumble.
I reached a hand toward her, and the power, though it wasn’t mine to control, spilled outward, surrounded Keelin. It pushed at Cel like water pushes at a rock in the center of a stream, something to go around, to ignore. The push made him stumble back, the leash fell from his hand. His pale face raised to the rising moon, and stark terror showed on that handsome face.
The sight pleased me, and it was a petty pleasure. The generous run of power flexed around me like a mother’s hand tugging on the arm of a naughty child. There was no place for pettiness in the midst of such . . . life.
Keelin stood in the center of the path, arms wide, head thrown back so that the moonlight shone full upon her half-formed face. It was a rare and treasured moment for Keelin to show her face clearly in any light.
Siobhan came for me in a dark flash of white hands and the dark gleam of armor. I reacted without thought, pushing my hand forward as if that great sluggish power would respond to my gesture. But it did.
Siobhan stopped as if she’d come against a wall. Her white hands glowed with a pale flame that was not flame at all. Her power flared against something that not even I could see. But I felt her coldness trying to eat the warm, moving night, and she had no power here. If she had been among the truly living, if her touch had brought ordinary death, the Earth would not have stopped her. The power was more neutral than that. It loved me in a way, welcomed me back, but it would welcome my decaying body to its warm, worm-filled embrace just as readily. It would take my spirit on the wind and send it elsewhere.
A Kiss of Shadows Page 29