Chapter 19

We lay entwined together on a bed of Doyle's hair. It was like having fur rubbing the length of my bare body. My head was cradled in the curve of his shoulder. His body was like warm muscled silk. I traced my fingers along his waist, over the curve of his hip, an idle gesture, not exactly sexual. More to know that I could touch him. We'd been quietly touching each other for several minutes. His one hand was trapped underneath my body, curved up around my back, holding me close, but not too close. He wanted room to run his free hand down my body, and he wanted to give me room to touch him. He wanted the feel of hands on his body. It was as if he wasn't merely starved for sex, but starved for touch. I knew that humans could become touch-starved. Infants will die from lack of enough touch, even if every other need is met. But I hadn't known it of the sidhe, especially the unmovable object known as the Queen's Darkness.

But he lay beside me, smiling, his fingers running over my stomach and tracing the edge of my belly button.

I caught a glimpse of the mirrored bureau behind his head. My blouse hung across the middle of the mirror, as if flung there.

He caught me looking behind him. He brought his hand up to my face, tracing the edge of my cheek. "What do you see?"

I smiled at him. "I was just wondering how we managed to get my blouse on the mirror."

He turned his head as much as he could with both his own weight and mine on his hair. He had a very wide smile when he turned back. "Have you looked for your bra?"

I gave him wide eyes and started to prop myself up to see the rest of the bureau over his body. He held me down with one gentle hand on my shoulder. "Behind you."

I fell back, still in the circle of his arm. My green lace bra, which had matched both my blouse and my panties, was hanging forlornly from the philodendron plant that sat on the black lacquered armoire in the corner. It hung like a badly chosen Christmas decoration.

I shook my head, half laughing. "I don't remember being in that much of a hurry."

He curved his free hand over my waist, down my hip, drawing closer to me as he pulled me in against his body. "I was in a hurry. I wanted to see you naked. I wanted to feel the touch of you on my bare skin." He pressed that bare skin along the length of my body. Just the strength in his arms made me shiver, but the feel of him growing larger against my body was almost an overwhelming thing.

I slid my hands over the smooth tightness of his buttocks and drew him in tighter against me. He moved his own hands down my body to cup my buttocks and pressed our bodies together until I had to wonder if it hurt him to be shoved so hard against the unyielding front of my body. As he grew, the length of him pressed into my stomach, and it was softer, more yielding. He drove himself against my flesh, and I cried out.

I felt the prickling rush of magic a second before the voice filled the room. "Well, isn't this a pretty sight?"

We both rolled over to see the Queen of Air and Darkness, Andais, my aunt, Doyle's keeper, sitting on the foot of her own bed watching us.

Chapter 20

The queen wore an elaborate black ball gown, with black satin gleaming in the candlelight, black ribbons to hold back the flounces, black satin gloves to cover her white arms, black straps over pale shoulders. Her black hair was piled atop her head with trails of curls artfully framing her face and slender neck. Her lips were the color of fresh blood, her tricolored grey eyes had been kohl-lined so that they seemed enormous in her slender face.

Seeing her dressed to the nines was nothing new. Andais was fond of parties, and any excuse would do. What was new was the fact that the bed behind her was empty. The queen never slept alone.

We stayed half-frozen, staring back at those eyes. Doyle squeezed my arm, and I spoke without really thinking. "Your Majesty, how good of you to call, though unexpected." My voice was neutral, or as neutral as I could get it. It was considered polite to make some sign first before popping in like this. You never knew what people might be doing.

"Are you criticizing me, niece?" Her voice was very cold, almost angry. I hadn't done anything to anger her, not that I knew of at least.

I settled myself a little more comfortably against Doyle's body. I wished for a robe, but knew that covering up when she'd been nothing but polite would imply that I didn't like, or trust, the Queen. The fact that it was true was a matter for my own worries, not hers.

"I meant no criticism, Aunt Andais. I was merely stating a fact. We did not expect your call tonight."

"It is not night, niece, it is morning, just not yet dawn. I see you have slept no more than I."

"I, like you, aunt, have had better things to do than sleep."

She touched the full skirt of her ball dress. "Yes, another party." She didn't look happy about it.

I wanted to ask if the party had not gone to her liking, but didn't dare. It was too personal a question to ask the queen, and she was too easily offended.

She took a deep breath that made the front of her gown shift, almost as if it wasn't tight enough around her body, a bustier without a boost. If you weren't too well endowed, you could wear those gowns that seemed to just float around your body. For me, it would have been an embarrassment waiting to happen. Nudity on purpose is very different from falling out of your dress by accident.

She turned those dramatic eyes to us. The unhappy look changed, narrowed, to one I knew all too well. Malice.

"You're bleeding, my Darkness."

I glanced down at Doyle and realized he was still mostly on his side, turned toward me, which gave her a view of his back and the fingernail marks on his dark skin.

"Yes, my queen," he said in his perfectly neutral, perfectly careful voice.

"Who has harmed my Darkness?" But her eyes were already on me, and it was a very unfriendly gaze.

"I do not see it as harm, my Queen," Doyle said.

Her eyes flicked down to him, then back to me. "You've been a busy girl, Meredith."

I pushed up from Doyle, so that I was more or less sitting upright. "I thought you wished me to be a very busy girl, Aunt Andais."

"I don't know if I've seen your bare breasts before, Meredith. They are a little large for a sidhe, but very nice." Her eyes didn't hold lust, or kindness, only a dangerous light. All that she'd said so far could be mistaken for politeness. She'd never seen my breasts bare, so she should compliment them; but only if I was trying to be attractive, which I was not. I just happened to have no clothes on. I did not feel the least bit luscious around my aunt, and there was more to it than just being heterosexual, much more.

"And you, my Darkness, it's been so many centuries since I saw you nude that I can't remember. Is there some reason you have your back to me? Is there some reason you hide yourself from my sight? Is there some... aberration that I don't remember that spoils all that darkness?"

She was within her rights to compliment him, but asking if he was deformed, demanding he flaunt himself to her, that was impolite. If it had been almost anyone else, I'd have told her to go to hell.

"There is nothing spoiled here, Aunt Andais," I said, and I knew my tone wasn't neutral enough. I'd lost the knack of keeping my voice in line over the years I'd been away from the court. I was going to have to relearn, and quickly.

She gave me very cold eyes. "I was not talking to you, Princess Meredith. I was speaking to my Darkness."

She'd used my title; not niece, or just my name, but my title. It was not a good sign.

Doyle squeezed my arm again, tighter this time, as if telling me to behave. He answered Andais, but not in words. He rolled onto his back with his knees bent so his thigh hid him from her view, then he lowered the leg closest to her, slowly, like a curtain coming down.

There was heat in her eyes now, real heat, real need. "My, my, Darkness, you have been keeping secrets."

He turned and looked at her. "Nothing you couldn't have discovered at any time in the last thousand years." Now it was his voice that was not neutral. It was just a slight change in tone, a mild inflection of reproof, but I'd never heard him lose even that much control in front of Andais.

It was my turn to lay a warning hand on his stomach, just a touch to remind him who we were speaking to. I don't think my face showed the fear that was curling along my spine.

King Taranis might not hurt me for fear of Andais, but Andais might hurt me in a fit. She might regret it later, but dead is dead.

The look she gave Doyle was enough to tighten my hand against his skin, just a light digging of nails. It made his body react, and I hoped I'd done enough to remind him to tread lightly.

"Have a care, Darkness, or I will grow distracted and forget why I called."

"We await your news, Queen Andais," I said.

She looked at me then, some of the heat going from her eyes, replaced by puzzlement and, underneath, tiredness. Andais wasn't usually this easy to read, I think because she didn't have to be careful around anyone. "The Nameless is free."

Doyle spilled his legs to the floor and sat up. Suddenly it didn't matter that he was nude, nobody cared. The Nameless was the worst of both courts, Seelie and Unseelie. It was the last great spell that the two courts had cooperated on. They had stripped themselves of everything too awful, too hungry, to allow us to live in this new country. Nobody had demanded it of the sidhe, but we didn't want to be forced out of the last country that would have us, so we'd sacrificed some of what we were in order to become more... human. Some said that the Nameless was what caused us to begin to fade, but that wasn't true. The sidhe had been fading for centuries. The Nameless was just a necessary evil. So we didn't turn America into another battlefield.

"Did you set it free, my queen?" Doyle asked.

"Of course not," she said.

"Then who?" he asked.

"I could tell you a pretty story, but in the end, the answer is, simply, I don't know." It was obvious she didn't like saying it, and equally obvious that she was speaking the truth. She stripped off one of the black gloves in an abrupt movement and began to run it over and over through her hands.

"There are very few beings in faerie who could do such a thing," Doyle said.

"Don't you think I know that?" she snapped.

"What would you have us do here, my queen?"

"I don't know, but the last hint we had of it, it was traveling west."

"Do you believe it will come here?" he asked.

"It is unlikely," she said, slapping the glove against her arm. "But the Nameless is nearly unstoppable. It is everything we have given up, and that was a great deal of wielding power. If it was sent for Meredith, then you would need all the preparation time you could manage."

"Do you truly think it was loosed to hunt the princess?"

"If it had merely been set free, it would have ravaged the countryside by now. But it has not." She stood, giving us a view of the nearly naked back of the dress. She turned back to us with an abrupt gesture. "It vanished from our sight, all of our sights, very quickly. We cannot track it, which means that the thing is getting some very highly placed help."

"But the Nameless is a part of the courts, a part of who you were. You should be able to track it as you would track your own shadow." The moment I finished, I knew I should have kept quiet.

All the anger flowed into her face, her posture, her hands where they gripped her elbows. She shivered with rage. I think for a second she was too angry to speak.

Doyle stood, putting himself in front of me. "Have you told the Seelie Court?"

"You do not need to hide her away, Darkness. I am working too hard to keep her alive to kill her myself. And, yes, the Seelie know what has happened."

"Will the two courts come together to hunt the Nameless?" he asked. He hadn't moved from in front of me, which left me peeking around his body like a child. That wasn't exactly the way to be a strong presence. I moved so I could see the mirror, but they both ignored me.

"No."

"But it is to each one's benefit, surely."

"Taranis is being difficult. He's acting as if the Nameless is made up of only Unseelie energy. Pretending that all his light has no taint." She looked like she'd tasted something sour. "He will not claim its parentage, so he will give no aid, for to give aid is to admit his part in its making."

"That is foolishness."

She nodded. "He was always one more interested in the illusion of purity than in purity itself."

"What can stand against the Nameless?" he asked, voice soft, almost as if he were thinking aloud.

"We do not know, for we bound it without testing it. But it is full of old, old magicks, things we no longer tolerate among even the Unseelie." She sat down on the end of the bed, almost jerkily. "Whoever released it, and hid it from our sight... if they can truly control it, it is a powerful weapon."

"What do you need of me, my queen?"

She looked up at that, and the look was not unfriendly. "What if I said come home, come home and protect me? What if I said I don't feel safe without you and Frost at my side?"

He dropped to one knee. His face was lost in a wave of his own hair. "I am still captain of the Queen's Ravens."

"You would come?" she asked, voice soft.

"If you commanded it."

I sat on the bed and tried to keep my face neutral. I hugged my knees to my chest and tried to not look anything, nothing. If I could just not think, it wouldn't show on my face.

"You say you are still the captain of my Ravens, but are you still my Darkness, or do you belong to another now?"

He kept his head down and stayed silent. I kept trying to think of nothing. She gave me a very unfriendly look. "You have stolen my Darkness from me, Meredith."

"What do you want me to say, Aunt Andais?"

"It's good to remind me that you are my blood. Seeing his back sliced up makes me hope you are more mine than I knew."

Nothing, nothing, I would think nothing. I imagined emptiness like looking through a pane of glass into another pane and another and another. Clear, nothing.

"The Nameless was loosed for a reason, Darkness. Until I know what that reason is, I'm covering my assets. The fair Meredith is one of those assets. I still hope to get a child out of her."

She looked at me, and it was not a friendly look. "Is he as magnificent as he looks?"

I fought for a neutral voice to match the face. "Yes."

The queen sighed. "A pity, but I didn't want to give birth to puppies, now did I?"

"Puppies?" I said.

"Didn't he tell you? Doyle has two aunts whose true forms are dogs. His grandmother was one of the hounds of the great hunt. Hellhounds, humans call them now, though you know we have nothing to do with hell. A different religious system altogether."

I remembered the baying and the look of hunger in Doyle's eyes. "I was aware that Doyle wasn't pure sidhe."

"His grandfather was a phouka so evil that he bred in dog form with the wild hunt itself and lived to tell the tale." She smiled, and it was sweetly malicious.

"Doyle's as mixed a bag of genetics as I am then." The voice was still neutral; yeah for me.

"But did you know he was part dog before you took him to your bed?"

Doyle stayed kneeling through all this, his hair hiding his face.

"I knew he owed his bloodline in part to the wild hunt before he came inside me."

"Really?" She made it sound like she didn't believe me.

"I've heard the belling of the hounds come out of his mouth." I moved my hair so she could see the bite mark on my shoulder, very near my neck. "I knew that he dreamed of my flesh in more than one way before I allowed him to satisfy either hunger."

Her eyes grew hard again. "You surprise me, Meredith. I never thought you had the stomach for violence."

"I do not enjoy hurting people. Violence in the bedroom when all agree is different."

"I've never found it different," she said.

"I know," I said.

"How do you do that?" she asked.

"How do I do what, my queen?"

"How do you sound so neutral, utterly neutral, yet somehow you manage to say 'go to hell' with a smile and a neutral word."

"It's not deliberate, Aunt Andais, believe me."

"At least you didn't try to deny it."

"We do not lie to each other," I said, and this time my voice was tired.

"Arise, Darkness, and show your queen your ravaged back."

He stood without a word, gave his back to the mirror, and swept his hair to one side.

Andais came close to the mirror, reaching out with one gloved hand, so that for a second I thought her hand would keep traveling and come out like a 3-D image. "I had taken you for a dominant, Doyle, and I don't enjoy being dominated."

"You never asked what I enjoyed, my Queen." He was still facing away from the mirror, his back to it.

"I also never thought you'd be so blessed down below." She sounded wistful now, like a child who hadn't gotten what she wanted for her birthday. "I mean, you are descended from dogs and phoukas, and they are not much in that way."

"Most phoukas have more than one shape, my Queen."

"Dog and horse, sometimes eagle, yes, I know all about that. What does that have to do..." She stopped in midsentence, and a smile crooked at the edges of her lipsticked mouth. "Are you saying that your grandfather could turn into a horse as well as a dog?"

He spoke softly. "Yes, my Queen."

"You're hung like a horse." She started to laugh.

He said nothing, only shrugged his broad shoulders. I was too startled at her laughter to join it. It wasn't always a good thing to amuse the Queen.

"My Darkness, it is wondrous, but a horse you are not."

"The phoukas are shape-shifters, my queen."

The laughter faded around the edges, then she said in a voice still light with it, "Are you implying that you can change the size?"

"Would I imply something like that?" he asked in his neutral voice.

I watched emotions flow across her face too fast to catch: disbelief, curiosity, and finally a hard-edged wanting. She stared at him the way misers stare at gold, a covetous, clinging, selfish want.

"When all this is over, Darkness, if you have not fathered a child with the princess, we will make you live up to this boast."

I think I failed at the neutral face, but I tried to hang on to it.

"I do not boast, my queen," Doyle said, almost in a whisper.

"I don't know what to wish for now, my Darkness. If you make babies with Meredith, I will never know the joy of you. And I still believe what I have always believed, and what has truly kept you out of my bed."

"Dare I ask what that is?" he said.

"You may dare. I may even answer."

Silence stretched for a second or two, then Doyle said, "What do you believe that has kept me out of your bed all these years?" He turned his head enough to see her face when he asked.

"That you would be king in truth, not merely in name. And I will not share my power." She looked past him to me. I fought to keep a blank face, and knew I was losing. "What of you, Meredith? How do you feel about having a true king, one who will demand a share of your power, and a share of more than your bed?"

I thought of several answers, discarded them all, and tried, very carefully to tell the truth. "I share better than you do, Aunt Andais."

She stared at me, a look in her eyes that I couldn't read. I met that gaze with one of my own, letting the sincerity of what I'd said show in my eyes.

"You share better than me, you share better than me. What does that mean, when I do not share at all?"

"It is the truth, Aunt Andais. It means exactly what it says, nothing more, nothing less."

She stared at me for a long, long moment. "Taranis does not share his power either."

"I know," I said.

"You cannot be a dictator if you do not dictate."

"I am learning that a queen must rule those around her, truly rule them, but I am not learning that a queen must dictate to all around her. I am finding that the counsel of my guards, who you so wisely sent with me, is worth listening to."

"I have counselors," she said, and it sounded almost defensive.

"So does Taranis," I said.

Andais sat back against one of the bedposts. She seemed almost to slump, the one bare hand playing along the black ribbons on her dress. "But neither of us listens to anyone. The emperor has no clothes."

The last comment caught me off guard. It must have showed, because she said, "You look surprised, niece of mine."

"I didn't expect you to know the story."

"I had a human lover some time ago who was fond of children's stories. He read to me when I could not sleep." There was a dreamy wistfulness to her voice now, a true note of regret.

She continued in a more normal tone. "The Nameless has been freed. It was last seen headed west. I doubt it will get as far as the Western Sea, but I thought you should know, all the same." With that, she made a gesture and the mirror went blank.

My eyes were very wide in the glass. "Can you make the mirror so that no one can get through without signaling to us first?"

"Yes," he said.

"Do it."

"The queen may take that ill."

I nodded, looking at my scared face in the mirror, because now that I didn't have to pretend, I could look as scared as I felt. "Just do it, Doyle, just do it. I don't want any more surprises tonight."

He went to the mirror and made small gestures at its edges. I felt the spell prickle along my skin as I climbed back into the bed.

Doyle turned from the mirror and hesitated by the edge of the bed. "Do you still want company?"

I held out my arms to him. "Come to bed, and hold me while we sleep."

He smiled and slipped under the sheet. He spooned his body against mine until I lay cupped in his arms, his chest, his stomach, his groin, his thighs. He encircled me and I pulled the warm silken hardness of him around me.

He spoke softly as I began to drift off to sleep. "You do not mind that my grandmother was a hound of the wild hunt and my grandfather a phouka?"

"No." My voice was thick with sleep. Then I asked, "Could I really end up having puppies?"

"It is unlikely."

"Okay." I was almost asleep, when I felt him hold me tighter, as if I was his security blanket instead of the other way around.

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