Mistrals Kiss   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

“Why did you leave my side, Mistral?” She touched his chin with long pointed nails, raised his face so he had to look at her.

“I sought guidance,” he said in a voice that both was low and seemed to carry in the growing dark. Now that Abeloec and I had stopped having sex, all the light was fading, all the flow on everyone’s skin was dying away. Soon we would stand in a darkness so absolute that you could touch your own eyeball without first blinking. A cat would be blind in here; even a cat’s eyes need some light.

“Guidance for what, Mistral?” She made of his name an evil whine that held the threat of pain, as a smell on the wind can promise rain.

He tried to bow his head, but she kept her fingertips under his chin. “You sought guidance from my Darkness?”

Abeloec helped me to my feet and held me close, not for romance, but the way all the fey do when they’re nervous. We touch one another, huddling in the dark, as if the touch of another’s hand will keep the great bad thing from happening.

“Yes,” Mistral said.

“Liar,” the queen said, and the last thing I saw before the darkness swallowed the world was the gleam of a blade in her other hand. It flashed from her robe, where she’d hidden it.

I spoke before I could think: “No!”

Her voice crawled out of the darkness and seemed to creep along my skin. “Meredith, niece, do you actually forbid me from punishing one of my own guards? Not one of your guards, but mine, mine!”

The darkness was heavier, thicker, and it took more effort to breathe. I knew she could make the very air so heavy that it would crush the life out of me. She could make the air so thick that my mortal lungs couldn’t draw it in. She’d nearly killed me just yesterday, when I interfered in one of her “entertainments.”

“There was wind in the dead gardens.” Doyle’s deep voice came so low, so deep, that it seemed to vibrate along my spine. “You felt the wind. You remarked upon the wind.”

“Yes, I did, but now it is gone. Now the gardens are dead, dead as they will always be.”

A pale green light sprang from the darkness. Doyle holding a cup of sickly greenish flames in his hands. It was one of his hands of power. I’d seen the touch of that fire crawl over other sidhe and make them wish for death. But as so many things in faerie, it had other uses. It was a welcome light in the dark.

The light showed that it was no longer her fingertips that held Mistral’s chin upward, but the edge of a blade. Her blade, Mortal Dread. One of the few things left that could bring true death to the immortal sidhe.

“What if the gardens could live again?” Doyle asked. “As the roses outside the throne room live again.”

She smiled most unpleasantly. “Do you propose to spill more of Meredith’s precious blood? That was the price for the roses’ renewal.”

“There are ways to give life that do not require blood,” he said.

“You think you can fuck the gardens back to life?” she asked. She used the edge of the blade to raise Mistral up high on his knees.

Doyle said, “Yes.”

“This, I would like to see,” she said.

“I don’t think it will work if you are here,” Rhys said. A pale white light appeared over his head. Small, round, a gentle whiteness that illumined where he walked. It was the light that most of the sidhe, and many of the lesser fey, could make at will; a small magic that most possessed. If I wanted light in the dark, I had to find a flashlight or a match.

Rhys moved, in his soft circle of light, slowly, toward the queen.

She spoke: “A little fucking after a few centuries of celibacy makes you bold, one-eye.”

“The fucking makes me happy,” he said. “This makes me bold.” He raised his right arm, showing her the underside of it. The light was not strong enough, and the angle not right, for me to see what was so interesting.

She frowned; then, as he moved closer, her eyes widened. “What is that?” But her hand had lowered enough that Mistral was no longer trying to raise himself up on his knees to keep from being cut.

“It is exactly what you think it is, my queen,” Doyle said. He began to move closer to her, as well.

“Close enough, both of you.” She emphasized her words by forcing Mistral back high on his knees.

“We mean you no harm, my queen,” Doyle said.

“Perhaps I mean you harm, Darkness.”

“That is your privilege,” he said.

I opened my mouth to correct him, because he was my captain of the guard now. She wasn’t allowed to simply hurt him for the hell of it, not anymore.

Abeloec tightened his hand on my arm. He whispered against my hair, “Not yet, Princess. The Darkness does not need your help yet.”

I wanted to argue, but his reasoning was sound, as far as it went. I opened my mouth to argue, but as I looked up into his face, the argument fell away from me. His suggestion just seemed so reasonable.

Something bumped my hip, and I realized he was holding the horn cup. He was the cup, and the cup was him, in some mystical way, but when he touched it, he became more. More…reasonable. Or rather his suggestions did.

I wasn’t sure I liked that he could do that to me, but I let it go. We had enough problems without getting sidetracked. I whispered, “What is on Rhys’s arm?”

But Abeloec and I stood in the dark, and the Queen of Air and Darkness could hear anything that was spoken into the air in the dark. She answered me, “Show her, Rhys. Show her what has made you bold.”

Rhys didn’t turn his back on her, but moved sort of sideways toward us. The soft, white sourceless light moved with him, outlining his upper body. In a battle it would have been worse than useless; it would have made him a target. But the immortal don’t sweat things like that — if you can’t die, I guess you can make as obvious a target of yourself as you like.

The light touched us first, like that first white breath of dawn that slides across the sky, so white, so pure, when dawn is nothing more than the fading of darkness. As Rhys got closer to us, the white light seemed to expand, sliding down his body, showing that he was still nude.

He held his arm out toward me. There was a pale blue outline of a fish that stretched from just above his wrist almost to his elbow. The fish was head-down toward his hand and seemed oddly curved, like a half circle waiting for its other half.

Abeloec touched it much as the queen had done, lightly, with just his fingertips. “I have not seen that on your arm since I stopped being a pub keeper.”

“I know Rhys’s body,” I said. “It’s never been there before.”

“Not in your lifetime,” Abeloec said.

I glanced from him to Rhys.