He gazed down at the silver band on my hand. His gaze came up to meet mine. “Merry, may I, please?”
I looked into his pale blue eye. “Why is it so important to you?” I wondered if the rumor had already spread about what she planned to announce tonight.
“We’re all hoping she called you back to choose another would-be consort for yourself. I’m assuming that if the ring doesn’t recognize someone, they’re out of the running.”
“That’s closer than you know,” I said.
“Then may I?” he asked.
He tried to keep the eagerness off his face, but failed. I guess I couldn’t blame him. It was going to be like this all night once word got out. No, it was going to be worse, much worse.
I nodded.
He began to bring my hand to his lips as he spoke. “You know I would never willingly hurt you, Merry.” He kissed my hand, and his lips brushed the ring. It quickened—that was the only word I had for it. It flared through me, through us both. The sensation seemed to squeeze my heart, chase it into my throat like a trapped thing.
Rhys stayed bent over my hand, but I heard him breathe out an “Oh, yes.” He raised up, and his eye looked unfocused.
It was the strongest reaction yet, and that sort of worried me. Did the strength of the reaction say something about how strong the man’s virility was, sort of a supernatural sperm count? Nothing personal to Rhys, but if I had to sleep with anyone tonight, it was probably going to be Galen. The ring could pulse away to its carved little heart. I would decide who shared my bed. Until Auntie dearest sent her spy to me, of course. I pushed that thought away—I couldn’t deal with it right now. There were sidhe in her Guard that I’d sooner kill than kiss, let alone anything more.
Rhys wrapped his fingers through mine, pressing the palm of his hand against the ring. The second pulse was stronger, bringing an involuntary gasp from my throat. It felt like things deep inside my body were being caressed. Things that no hand should ever touch—but power . . . power wasn’t constrained by the bounds of flesh.
“Oh, I like it,” Rhys said.
I pulled my hand out of his. “Don’t do that again.”
“It felt good and you know it.”
I looked into his eager face, and said, “She doesn’t just want me to find another fiancé. She wants me to have sex with several or all of the Guard that this ring recognizes. It’s a race to see who gives her an heir of the blood royal first. Cel, or me.”
He stared at me, studying my face, as if trying to read my expression. “I know you wouldn’t make a joke of this, but it seems too good to be true.”
It made me feel better that Rhys didn’t trust it either. “Exactly. Right now she’s told me the celibacy is off for little ol’ me, but I have no witnesses. I think she’s sincere, but until she announces it in full court, I’ll just pretend that sex is still taboo.”
He nodded. “What’s a few hours more of waiting after a thousand years?”
I raised eyebrows at him. “I can’t do everybody tonight, Rhys, so it’s going to be more than a few hours wait.”
“As long as I’m first in line, what does it matter?” He tried to make it a joke, but I didn’t laugh.
“I’m afraid that this is exactly how everyone else is going to feel. There’s only one of me, and what, twenty-seven of you?”
“Do you have to sleep with all of us?”
“She didn’t say so, but she is going to insist on me sleeping with her spy, whoever he turns out to be.”
“You hate some of the Guard, Merry, and they hate you back. She cannot expect you to take them to your bed. Lord and Lady, if one that you hated got you pregnant . . .” He didn’t finish the thought.
“I’d be trapped into marriage with a man I despised, and he would be king.”
Rhys blinked at me, the white eye-patch catching the light as he moved his head. “I hadn’t thought about that. Truthfully all I was seeing was the sex, but you’re right—one of us is going to be king.”
I glanced up at the grey sheet of webs. They were empty, but . . .“Should we be talking about this here with this above us?”
He looked up at the spiderwebs. “Good point.” He offered me his arm. “May I escort you to the banquet, my lady?”
I slid my hand over his arm. “With pleasure.”
He patted my hand. “I hope so, Merry, I certainly do hope so.”
I laughed, and the sound echoed strangely in the hallway, making the cobwebs drift and float. It was almost as if the ceiling stretched far, far overhead into some vast darkness that only the spiderwebs hid from our view. My laughter faded, long before we stepped out from under the webs.
“Thank you, Rhys, for understanding why I’m afraid, instead of just concentrating on the fact that you may be about to end several hundred years of celibacy.”
He pressed my left hand to his lips. “I live only to serve under you, or above you, or any way you want me.”
I punched him in the shoulder. “Stop it.”
He grinned.
“Rhys isn’t the name of any known death god. I researched you in college, and you weren’t there.”
He was suddenly very busy staring down the ever-narrowing hallway. “Rhys is my name now, Merry. It doesn’t matter who I was before.”
“Of course it matters,” I said.
“Why?” he asked, and suddenly he was all serious, asking a very grown-up question.
Watching him glow white and shining in the grey light, I didn’t feel grownup. I felt tired. But there was a weight to his gaze, a demand in his face, that I had to answer.
“I just want to know who I’m dealing with, Rhys.”
“You’ve known me all your life, Merry.”
“Then tell me,” I said.
“I don’t want to talk about the long-ago days, Merry.”
“What if I invited you into my bed? Would you tell me all your secrets then?”
He studied my face. “You’re teasing me.”
I touched the scarred edge of his face, tracing with my fingers from the roughened skin to pass a fingertip over the full softness of his lips. “No teasing, Rhys. You’re beautiful. You’ve been a friend to me for years. You protected me when I was younger. It would be poor repayment if I left you celibate when I could put an end to it—besides the fact that running my mouth down that washboard stomach of yours has been a recurring sexual fantasy.”
“Funny, I’ve had the same fantasy,” he said. He wiggled his eyebrows at me and did a miserably bad Groucho Marx impression. “Maybe you can come up to my place and look at my etchings.”
I smiled and shook my head. “Don’t you watch any movies made after color came into the cinema?”
“Not often.” He held out his hand, and I took it. We walked down the hallway hand in hand, and it was companionable. Of all the guards I liked, I’d have thought Rhys would have been the most obnoxious about the possibility of sex. But he’d been the perfect gentlemen. Proof once again that I didn’t really understand men.
Chapter 29
THE DOORS AT THE END OF THE HALLWAY WERE SMALL TONIGHT: MAN height. Sometimes the doors were big enough for an elephant to pass through. They were a pale grey with gold edgings, very Louis the something. I didn’t bother asking Rhys if the queen had redecorated. The sithen, like the Black Coach, did its own redecorating.
Rhys opened the elegant double doors, but we never got to step into the room beyond because Frost stopped us. It wasn’t that he was physically blocking the door—though he was. He’d changed into the queen’s outfit, and the sight of him in it stopped me cold. I think Rhys stopped moving because I did.
The shirt was completely see-through, to the point where I wasn’t sure if the cloth was actually white, or if it was clear and it was his skin that made it look white. The shirt was cut like a second skin to his chest, but the sleeves had a large puff of diaphanous material, cut tight just above the bend of his elbow by a broad appliqué of glittering silver. The rest of t
he sleeves fell in a long full tube like a crystal morning glory. The thread that kept the shirt together was silver and gleamed at every seam. The pants were silver satin cut so low around the waist that his hip bones showed through the cloth of his shirt. If he’d tried to wear underwear they would have shown at the waist of the pants. The only thing that kept the pants up was that they were unbelievably tight. A series of white strings over the groin, like the ties on the back of a merry widow, took the place of a zipper.
His hair had been divided into three sections. The upper part was pulled up through a white carved piece of bone so that the silver hair fell like the water of some fountain around his head. The second section of hair was simply pulled back on either side and held in place with bone barrettes. The lower section hung loose and free, but so little was left that it was like a thin silver veil emphasizing his body instead of hiding it.
“Frost, you’re almost too beautiful to be real.”
“She treats us like dolls to be dressed at her whim.” It was the closest thing to an overt critisim of the queen that I’d ever heard him say.
“I like it, Frost,” Rhys said. “It’s you.”
He scowled at Rhys. “It is not me.”
I’d never seen the tall guard so angry about something so small. “It’s just clothes, Frost. It won’t hurt you to wear them with grace. Showing your displeasure in them could hurt you, very much.”
“I have obeyed my queen.”
“If she knows how much you hate the clothes she’ll order more of the same for you. You know that.”
The scowl deepened until he managed to put lines across that perfect face. Then a scream came from the room behind him. Even wordless, I recognized that voice. It was Galen.
I stepped forward. Frost stood his ground.
“Get out of my way, Frost,” I said.
“The prince has ordered this punishment, but has graciously allowed privacy. No one may enter until it is complete.”
I stared up at Frost. I couldn’t fight my way past him, and I wasn’t going to kill him. It used up my options.
“Merry is being named coheir tonight,” Rhys said.
Frost’s eyes flicked from one to the other of us. “I do not believe it.”
Galen screamed again, and the sound raised the flesh on my arms, clenched my hands into fists. “I will be coheir tonight, Frost.”
He shook his head. “That changes nothing.”
“What if she told you that our celibacy will be lifted for Merry, and Merry alone?” Rhys asked.
Frost managed to look arrogant and disbelieving. “‘What if’ is not a game I will play with you.”
Galen gave another sharp scream. The queen’s Ravens do not scream easily. I moved toward Frost, and he tensed. I think he was expecting a fight.
I ran my fingers lightly over the front of his shirt. He jumped as if I’d hurt him. “The queen will announce tonight that I am to have my pick of the Guards. She’s ordered me to sleep with one of you tonight, or tomorrow I will have a starring role in one of her little orgies.” I wrapped my arms around his waist, pressing myself lightly against his body. “Trust me, Frost, I will have one of you tonight, and tomorrow, and the night after that. It would be a shame if you were not among those I bedded.”
The arrogance was gone, replaced by something eager and afraid. I didn’t understand the fear, but the eagerness, that I understood. He looked to Rhys. “Your oath that this is true.”
“You have it,” Rhys said. “Let her pass, Frost.”
He stared down at me. He still hadn’t touched me back—my caress had been like a kiss against unresponsive lips—but he moved out of the way, sliding from the circle of my arms. He watched me like you’d watch a coiled rattlesnake, no sudden movements, and no trust that it wouldn’t bite you anyway. He was afraid of what was happening in that room.
I walked past him. I felt Rhys at my back, but all I could see was what lay in the center of the room. There was a small water garden in the center of the room, with a large decorative rock in the center of it. Stepping-stones led to the rock, in which were embedded permanent chains. Galen was chained to the rock. His body was almost lost to sight under the slowly fanning butterfly wings of the demi-fey. They looked like true butterflies on the edge of a puddle, sipping liquid, wings moving slowly to the rhythm of their feeding. But they weren’t sipping water, they were drinking his blood.
He screamed again, and it sent me rushing forward. Doyle was suddenly in front of me. He must have been guarding the other doors. “You cannot stop them once they have begun to feed.”
“Why is he screaming? It shouldn’t hurt that much.” I tried to get past him, and he grabbed my arm.
“No, Meredith, no.”
Galen shrieked long and loud, his body arching against the chains. The movement dislodged some of the demi-fey, and I glimpsed why he was screaming. His groin was a bloody mess. They were taking flesh as well as blood.
Rhys hissed, “Bloody beasts.”
Doyle tightened his grip on my arm.
“They’re mutilating him,” I protested.
“He will heal.”
I tried to pull away but his fingers were like something welded to my skin. “Doyle, please?”
“I am sorry, Princess.”
Galen shrieked, and the rock strained under the pull of his body, but the chains held. “This is excessive and you know it.”
“The prince is within his rights to punish Galen for disobeying him.” He tried to pull me farther away, as if that would make it better.
“No, Doyle, if Galen has to endure it, I won’t look away. Now let go of me.”
“You promise not to do anything rash?”
“My word,” I said.
He released me, and when I touched his shoulder, he moved to one side so my view was unobstructed. The wings were every color of the rainbow, and some that the rainbow could only dream of—huge wings bigger than my hands flexing slowly in and out above brief glimpses of Galen’s nearly nude body. His pants were down around his ankles, and there was no other clothing that I could see. There was a terrible beauty to the scene, like a very pretty slice of hell.
One set of wings was larger than the others, like huge pale swallow-tailed kites. It was Queen Niceven herself feasting just above his groin. I had an idea. “Queen Niceven,” I said, “it does not become a queen to do the dirty work of a prince.”
She raised her small pale face and hissed at me, her lips and chin red with Galen’s blood, the front of her white gown splattered with crimson.
I held up the hand with the ring on it. “I am to be named coheir tonight.”
“What is that to me?” Her voice was like evil bells, sweet and disturbing.
“A queen deserves better than the blood of a sidhe lord.”
She watched me with tiny pale eyes. She was all leprous in her paleness, like a tiny ghost. “What do you offer that is more tender than this?”
“Not more tender, but more powerful. The blood of a sidhe princess for the queen of the demi-fey.”
She stared at me, one dainty hand wiping at the blood on her mouth. She rose on huge luna-moth wings to fly toward me. The others continued to feed. Niceven hovered in front of my face, her wings making a small current of air against my skin. “You would take his place?”
Doyle said, “No, Princess.”
I silenced him with a gesture. “I offer Queen Niceven of the demi-fey my blood. The blood of a sidhe princess is too fine a prize to be shared.”
Frost and Rhys moved up beside Doyle. They watched us as if they’d never seen such a show before.
Niceven licked her lips with a tiny tongue like the petal of a flower. “You would let me take blood from you?”
I held up a finger to her. “Let him go, and you may pierce my skin and drink.”
“Prince Cel petitioned that we ruin this one’s manhood.”
“As Doyle said, it will heal. Why would the prince ask a favor of the demi-fey for som
ething that is not permanent damage?”
She hovered near my finger for all the world like a butterfly inspecting a flower. “That, you have to ask Prince Cel.” She turned her gaze from my finger to my face. “You should have heard what he wanted us to do at first. Wanted us to ruin him for life, but the queen does not allow her lovers to be damaged goods.” Niceven hovered close to my face, her tiny hand touching the tip of my nose. “Prince Cel reminded me that he will be king someday.” She touched my lips lightly with those diminutive fingers. “I reminded him that he does not rule here yet, and that I would not risk Queen Andais’s anger for him.”
“What did he say to that?”
“He took the compromise. We taste royal blood and flesh, both precious, and for tonight this one will be useless in the queen’s bed.” She frowned, arms crossing over her tiny chest. “I do not know why he is jealous of this one and not the others.”
“It is not the queen’s bed he was trying to keep Galen out of,” I said.
She cocked her head to one side, long spiderweb hair trailing around her. “You?”
I waggled the ring at her. “I have been ordered to sleep with a guard tonight.”
“And this one would have been your choice?”
I nodded.
Niceven smiled. “Cel is jealous of you.”
“Not in the way you mean, Queen Niceven. Do we have a bargain, my blood for your sweet mouth, and Galen goes free?”
She stayed hovering near my face for a few seconds more, then nodded. “We have a bargain. Extend your arm and give me a place to land.”
“Free Galen first, then by all means feed.”
“As you like.” She flew back to the others, and whatever she said to them scattered them ceilingward in a bright colored cloud. Galen’s pale, pale green skin was covered in tiny red bites; thin lines of blood began to trail across his skin like an invisible red pen trying to connect the dots.
“Unchain him and see to his wounds,” I said. Rhys and Frost moved to obey me. Only Doyle stayed nearby as if he didn’t trust one of us, or any of us.
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