A Kiss of Shadows

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  I stopped her. “No, he has tasted my blood uninvited. I demand recompense for such abuse.”

  “Recompense?” Galen made it a question.

  Fflur kept her grip on the little goblin. His row of eyes flicked back and forth. “Meant nothin’ by it. Sorry, so sorry.” He had two main arms and two tiny useless-looking ones. All four arms writhed, clasping and unclasping tiny clawed fingers.

  Frost took the goblin from Fflur, raising the small figure in two hands, skyward. His hands were empty of my knife. I’d have to remember to ask for it back. But at the moment I had other business.

  “I need to bind the wounds,” Fflur said, “or you will lose more blood. I have given you some of my strength, but you did not find it pleasant and would find it less so a second time.”

  I shook my head. “Not yet.”

  “Merry,” Galen said, “let her treat your wounds.”

  I looked at his face so full of concern. He’d been raised in the court as had I. He should have known that now was not a time to tend our wounds. Now was a time for action. I looked into his face. Not at his handsome, open face, or his pale green curls, or the way his laugh made his entire face glow—I looked at him as my father must have looked at him once when he decided to give me to someone else. I didn’t have time to explain things that Galen should already have been thinking of. I searched the crowd peering down at me like gawkers at a car wreck, simply better dressed and more exotic. “Where is Doyle?”

  There was movement in the crowd to my right. Doyle stepped forward. He looked very tall from where I lay on the floor. A black-cloaked pillar to loom above me. Only the peacock-feathered earrings framing his face softened the unrelieved intimidation of his figure. The look on his face, the set of his shoulders under the cloak, all of it was the old Doyle. The queen’s Darkness stood beside me, and the colorful feathers looked out of place. He’d been dressed for a party and found himself in the middle of a fight. His expression told nothing, but the very lack of expression said he was not happy.

  I suddenly felt six again and vaguely frightened of this tall dark man who had stood at my aunt’s side. But he wasn’t at her side now. He was at mine. I settled back in Galen’s lap and found comfort in his touch, but it was Doyle I turned to for help.

  “Bring Kurag to me if he wishes to ransom this thief,” I said.

  Doyle arched a line of black eyebrow. “Thief?”

  “He drank my blood without invitation. The only greater theft among the goblins is a theft of flesh.”

  Rhys knelt on the other side of me. “I heard that goblins lose a lot of flesh during sex.”

  “Only if it’s agreed on beforehand,” I said.

  Galen leaned over me, whispering against my skin. “If you are so weakened by blood loss that you can’t bed anyone tonight . . .” He touched his lips to my face. “I don’t think I could stand to watch you in one of her sex shows. You must be well enough to bed someone tonight, Merry. Let Fflur bind your wounds.”

  His face loomed at the corner of my eye like a pale blur, his lips like a pink cloud next to my cheek. It wasn’t that he was wrong. It was that he wasn’t thinking far enough ahead. “I have better use for my blood than soaking into bandages.”

  “What are you talking about?” Galen asked.

  Doyle answered, “The goblins consider anything that comes from the body more valuable than jewels or weapons.”

  Galen stared up at him. He reached down toward my wrist. I felt his chest move against my head as he sighed. “And what does that have to do with Merry?” But there was something in his voice that said he knew the answer.

  Doyle’s dark eyes went from me to Galen. He stared at the younger guard. “You are too young to remember the goblin wars.”

  “So is Merry,” Galen said.

  Those black eyes turned back to me. “Young, but she knows her history.” He flicked his gaze back to Galen. “Do you know your history, young Raven?”

  Galen nodded. He pulled me farther into his lap, away from Fflur, away from everyone. He held me against him, holding my arms close so that my blood stained his skin. “I remember my history. I just don’t like it.”

  “I’ll be all right, Galen,” I said.

  He stared down at me, nodding, but not like he believed me. “Fetch me Kurag,” I said to Doyle.

  He looked at the waiting crowd. “Sithney, Nicca, fetch the goblin king.”

  Sithney turned with a swirl of long brown hair. I didn’t see Nicca’s dark purple hair; the pale flash of his lilac skin would have been noticeable among the white and black skin of the court. But if Doyle called him, he was there.

  The crowd parted and Kurag came forward with his queen at his side. The goblins, like all of the sidhe, considered the royal consort to be a member in arms, not someone to be hidden away in safety. She had so many eyes scattered across her face that she looked like a spider done large. The wide, lipless mouth held fangs large enough to make any spider proud. Some goblins held venom in their bodies. I was betting that Kurag’s new queen was one of those. The eyes, the poison, and a nest of arms around her body like a collection of snakes, made her almost the perfection of goblin beauty, though she could only boast one set of strong bowed legs. Extra legs were the rarest beauty among the goblins. Keelin did not appreciate her good fortune.

  There was an air of contentment about the goblin queen that said here was a woman who understood her worth and had made it work for her. That nest of arms clung to Kurag’s body, stroking, caressing. One pair of arms had slid between his legs stroking both shaft and balls through his thin pants. The fact that she felt compelled to do something so overtly sexual when introduced to me was a sign that she considered me a rival.

  My father had felt it important that I know the goblin court well. We’d visited their court many times, as they had visited our home. He had said, “The goblins do most of the fighting in our wars. They are the backbone of our armies, not the sidhe.” This had been true since the last goblin war, when we’d made a treaty that had lasted between us. Kurag had been so comfortable with my father that he had asked for my hand as consort. The rest of the sidhe were mortally offended. Some talked of going to war over the insult. The goblins considered his desire for such a human-looking bride to be the height of perversity and talked behind his back of finding a new king. But other goblins saw the benefit to sidhe blood in a queen. It took some very serious diplomacy to keep us from either war or my wedding a goblin. It was soon after that that my engagement to Griffin was announced.

  Kurag loomed over me. His skin was a shade of yellow similar to Fflur’s skin. But where hers was smooth like the perfection of aged ivory, Kurag’s skin was covered in warts and lumps. Each imperfection in his skin was a beauty mark. One large lump on his right shoulder spouted an eye. A wandering eye, the goblins called it, because it wandered away from the face. I’d loved the eye when I was a child. Loved the way it moved independently of his face, the three eyes that graced his broad, strong features. The eye on his shoulder was the color of violets, with long black lashes. There was a mouth just above his right nipple that had full red lips and tiny white teeth. A thin pink tongue would lick those lips, and air breathed from that mouth. If you put a feather in front of that second mouth it would blow the feather upward, again and again. While my father and Kurag talked, I entertained myself with watching that eye, and that mouth, and the two thin arms that poked awkwardly from Kurag’s right side on either side of his ribs. We played cards, that eye, that mouth, and those arms. I thought Kurag very clever to be able to concentrate on such disparate things all at once.

  What I hadn’t known until I was a teenager was that there were two thin legs below Kurag’s belt on the right side, complete with a small but completely functional penis. A goblin’s idea of courtship was crude. Sexual prowess counted for a great deal among them. When I’d seemed unenthusiastic about Kurag’s proposal, he’d dropped his pants and shown off both his own equipment and that of his parasitic twin. I
was sixteen and I still remember the dawning horror of the realization that there was another being trapped within Kurag’s body. Another being with enough mind to play card games with a child while Kurag paid no attention. There was an entire person trapped inside there. An entire person who, if genetics had been kinder, might have matched that lovely lavender eye.

  I had never been comfortable around Kurag after that. It hadn’t been the proposal or the sight of his rather formidable manhood come to full quivering attention. It had been the sight of that second penis, large and swollen, independent of Kurag and eager for me. When I had turned them down, for “them” it was, that one lavender eye had shed a single tear.

  I had had nightmares for weeks. Extra limbs were dandy, but entire extra people in pieces trapped inside someone else . . . there were no words for that kind of horror. The second mouth could breathe, so it obviously had access to the lungs, but it lacked vocal cords. I wasn’t sure if that was a blessing or one last curse.

  “Kurag, Goblin King, greetings. Twin of Kurag, Goblin King’s Flesh, greetings as well.” The thin arms on the side of the king’s bare chest waved at me. I had greeted both of them from the night I realized that the person with whom I’d been playing cards and stupid games like feather-blowing had actually not been Kurag at all. To my knowledge I was the only one who ever greeted both of them.

  “Meredith, Sidhe Princess, greetings from both of us.” His orange eyes stared down at me, the largest one perched like a cyclops eye slightly above and in the middle of the other two. The look he gave me was the look any man would give a woman he desired. A look so bald-faced, so obvious, that I felt Galen’s body stiffen. Rhys rose to his feet to stand beside Doyle.

  “You honor me with your attentions, King Kurag,” I said. It was an insult among the goblins if the men did not leer at your woman. It implied that she was ugly and infertile, unworthy of lust.

  The queen kept her hands on Kurag, but moved one hand to his side where I knew the other set of genitalia hung. Her maze of eyes glared at me, as her hands worked them. Kurag’s breath came out in a rush from both mouths.

  If we didn’t hurry, we’d be here when the queen brought him, them, to a climax. The goblins saw nothing wrong with public sex. It was a mark of prowess among the men to be brought many times at one banquet, and the woman that could do it was prized. Of course, the goblin male who could sustain a female’s attentions for a lengthy time was prized among the females. If a goblin had any sex problems like premature ejaculation or impotency or, for a female, frigidness, then everyone knew it. Nothing was hidden.

  Kurag’s eyes went to Frost and the small goblin in the guard’s grasp. For all the goblin king’s attention, his queen might have been in another room.

  “Why do you hold one of my men?”

  “This is not a battlefield, and I am not carrion,” I said.

  Kurag blinked. The eye on his shoulder blinked a second or two later than the three main eyes. He turned to the little goblin. “What have you done?”

  The little goblin babbled, “Nothing, nothing.”

  Kurag turned back to me. “Tell me, Merry. This one lies like he breathes.”

  “He drank my blood without my permission.”

  The eyes blinked again. “That is a grave charge.”

  “I want recompense for the stolen blood.”

  Kurag drew a large knife from his belt. “Do you want his blood?”

  “He drank from a royal princess of the high court of the sidhe. Do you really think his lowly blood is a fair trade for that?”

  Kurag looked down at me. “What would be a fair trade?” He sounded suspicious.

  “Your blood for mine,” I said.

  Kurag pushed his queen’s hands away from his body. She made a small cry, and he was forced to shove her hard enough for her to fall on her butt to the ground. He never looked at her to see how she had fallen, or if she was all right.

  “Sharing blood means something among the goblins, Princess.”

  “I know what it means,” I said.

  Kurag stared at me with his yellow eyes. “I could simply wait until you have lost enough blood to be carrion,” he said.

  His queen crowded next to him. “I could speed the process along.” She held up a knife that was longer than my forearm. The blade gleamed dully in the light.

  Kurag turned on her with a snarl. “This is not your concern!”

  “You would share blood with her, who is not a queen. It is my business!” She stabbed the knife straight up toward his body. The knife was a blur of silver, the movement almost too quick to follow with the eye.

  Kurag had time only to sweep an arm in an effort to keep the blade from his body. The blade opened his arm in a splash of crimson. His other main arm hit her full in the face. There was a sharp crunch of breaking bone, and she sat down on her butt for a second time. Her nose had exploded like a ripe tomato. Two of the teeth between her fangs had broken off. If there was blood coming from her mouth, it was lost in the blood gushing from her nose. The eye nearest the nose had spilled from its cracked socket and lay on her cheek like a balloon on a string.

  Kurag trapped her knife under his foot. He hit her again, and this time she fell over on her side and lay still. There had been more than one reason that I did not want to marry Kurag.

  He bent over the fallen queen. His thick fingers checked to see that she was still breathing, that her heart still beat. He nodded to himself and scooped her up in his arms. He cradled her gently, tenderly. He barked out an order, and a huge goblin squeezed through the crowd.

  “Take her back to our hill. See her wounds are tended. If she dies, I will have your head on a pike.”

  The goblin’s eyes flashed up to the king’s face, then down. But there had been that one moment of pure fear on the goblin’s face. The king had beaten the queen, nearly killed her, but it would be the goblin guard’s fault if she died. That way the king would be blameless and would be able to find a new queen all the quicker. If he had outright killed her in front of so many royal witnesses, he could have been forced to give up either his throne or his life. But she had been very much alive when he’d lifted her tenderly into the arms of the redcap. The king’s hands were metaphorically clean if she died now.

  Though it was doubtful the goblin queen would die. Goblins were a tough lot.

  A second goblin guard, shorter and more barrel-chested than the first, took the queen’s knife from Kurag and followed the first goblin guard back through the crowd. Kurag would be within his rights to have both of them killed if the queen died. One of the things that most royals learn early is how to spread the blame. Spread the blame and keep your head. It was like a complicated game with the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland. Say the wrong thing, don’t say the right thing, and it could be off with your head. Metaphorically speaking, or not so metaphorically speaking.

  Kurag turned back to me. “My queen has saved us the trouble of opening my vein.”

  “Then let’s get on with it. I’m wasting blood,” I said.

  Galen still had his hands over my wrists, and I realized he was holding pressure on my wounds.

  I looked up at him. “Galen, it’s all right.” He kept his hands tight around my wrists. “Galen, please, let me go.”

  He stared down at me, opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it and slowly moved his hands back from my wrists. His hands came away stained with my blood. But the pressure he’d applied had slowed the bleeding, or maybe it was just Galen’s touch. Maybe it wasn’t just my imagination that made his hands a cool, soothing presence.

  He helped me to my feet. I had to push his hands away so I could stand alone. I spread my legs to get as good a balance on the heels as I could, and faced Kurag.

  Standing, I came almost up to his sternum. His shoulders were nearly as wide as I was tall. Most of the sidhe were tall, but the larger goblins were truly bulky.

  Fflur had moved to one side of me to join Galen, Doyle, and Rhys
at my back. Frost stood to one side, with the little goblin dangling from his hands. There was a press of bodies all around us: sidhe, goblin, and others. But I had eyes only for the goblin king.

  “Though I do offer you my apologies for my man’s rudeness,” Kurag said, “I cannot offer you my blood without gaining in return.”

  I held my right hand out to him, and my left hand to the red mouth on his chest. “Drink then, Kurag, Goblin King.” I raised my right wrist as close to his main mouth as I could reach. Reaching so far above my head left me faintly dizzy. I pressed my left wrist to the open mouth on his chest, and it was those lips that closed around my wrist first, that tongue that worked over the wound to get it to bleed afresh. The tongue in that mouth felt soft and human, not at all like the little goblin’s harsh cat tongue.

  Kurag bowed his head over my wrist, careful not to use his hands to hold the wound close to him. To use his hands would have been rude and taken as a sexual overture. His tongue was rough like sandpaper, even rougher than the little goblin’s had been. It abraded the wound and brought a soft gasp from my throat. The mouth in his chest had already formed a seal over the wounds, sucking like a baby with a bottle. Kurag’s tongue lingered until the blood flowed fresh and easy. When he wrapped his lips around my wound, his mouth took in almost all of my wrist. His teeth pressed against my flesh painfully as the suction grew. The smaller mouth in his chest was much more polite.

  Kurag’s mouth worked at my wrist, lips in a tight seal. Just as I grew accustomed to his sucking, his teeth grazed the wound, his tongue flicking in a sharp painful movement. He was staying at the wound a long time. It was sort of like a beer-chugging contest: you took as much in at a time as you could manage without throwing up.

  But finally, finally, Kurag drew his head back from my wrist. I drew my left hand from his chest. The lips placed a light kiss against my wrist as I pulled away.