Swallowing Darkness_A Novel Read online

  Doyle came to my side. “Have a care, my Merry.”

  He was right to be cautious, but the feeling inside me was right, too. The scent of flowers rode the air, as if a breath of summer’s heat trickled across the cold moonlight.

  Rhys came to our side and touched Doyle’s arm. “The Goddess is near, Doyle. It will be all right.”

  I kissed Doyle first, and he had to bend down to help me do it, then I kissed Rhys. He looked at me, and there was sadness on his face. But it was not a sadness that I could fix. I could only kiss him gently on the lips, and let him know that I saw him and appreciated him, but nothing that either of us could do would make me love him the way I loved Doyle or Frost. That it pained him pained me, but not enough to change it.

  I walked the rest of the way alone. Ash and Holly stood in front of me. They tried to look arrogant or hostile—their handsome faces were made for both—but under all of it was uncertainty. I made them rethink themselves, and neither sidhe nobles nor goblin warriors are accustomed to rethinking anything. Their sense of rightness is absolute in most things. I gazed into their eyes, and wasn’t sure what was about to happen, but as the scent of roses grew stronger on the cold air, I knew the Goddess was coming. The scent of roses mingled with the rich scent of herbs and leaves, as if we stood on the edge of some forest glade.

  “Do you smell flowers?” Holly asked.

  “I smell forest,” Ash said. “A forest like nothing in this land.”

  “What are you doing to us?” Holly asked.

  “You wanted to be sidhe.” I held my hands out to them.

  “Yes,” Ash said.

  “No,” Holly said.

  I smiled at Holly. “You both want power, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Holly said, his voice a little reluctant.

  “Then each of you take my hands.”

  “What happens if we do?” Ash asked.

  I smiled, then I laughed, and the scent of roses and the sensation of summer sun on my skin was so real that it was almost dizzying to have my eyes see the winter’s dark.

  “I don’t know what will happen,” I said, and that was the truth.

  “Then why should we do it?” Ash asked.

  “Because if you let the smell of summer and autumn fade, if you miss this moment of power, you will always wonder what would have happened if you took my hands.”

  The brothers looked at each other. They had a moment between them made up of years of scheming, fighting, surviving, all come to this second, this choice.

  “She’s right,” Ash said.

  “It is a sidhe trick,” Holly said.

  “Probably,” he said, then he smiled.

  Holly grinned back at him. “This is a bad idea, brother.”

  “Yes.”

  Holly reached out, and Ash echoed him. They reached out for my hands as if they’d practiced the movement. Their fingers tingled power down my skin, and it must have felt the same for them, because Holly started to draw back.

  Ash said, “Don’t stop, Holly.”

  “This is a bad idea, brother,” he repeated.

  “This is power,” Ash said, “and I want it.”

  Holly hesitated a heartbeat longer, then his hand moved with his brother’s so that they took my hands in theirs in echoing moves. “I’ve followed you all my life,” he said. “I won’t stop now.”

  Then the field and the winter’s cold were gone, and we stood in a circle of standing stones on a wide plain under a full moon and a summer’s spill of stars.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  ASH SWUNG ME AROUND SO THAT I FACED AWAY FROM HIM, ONE hand on my throat, the other around my waist, pinning my sword to my body. Holly drew his own sword, and faced the outside of the circle. His sword gleamed like cold moonlight made solid.

  “Take us back,” Ash hissed in my ear.

  “I didn’t bring us here.”

  “Liar,” he whispered, and his fingers tightened just a little around my neck. That one flex of fingers, the firmness of his palm against my throat, made my pulse speed.

  I spoke carefully, not wanting to do anything to make his fingers tighten any more. “I cannot change winter to summer, or transport us to a different country.”

  His fingers squeezed just a little more, until swallowing was uncomfortable. “What do you mean, ‘a different country’?”

  I spoke even more carefully. “There are no standing stones in America, not like this.”

  His hand tightened until my breath wheezed under his grip.

  “Then where are we?” he asked.

  “A place between,” a woman’s voice answered.

  Ash went very still beside me. His fingers didn’t tighten, for which I was glad, but they didn’t loosen either. My breath still wheezed out from between his fingers as he turned slowly toward that voice.

  Holly said, “Who are you?”

  The woman’s voice said, “You know who I am.”

  Ash turned so that he saw her before I could, but I knew what we would see, or what I would see. She wore a hooded cloak that hid most of her face, but for an edge of chin or a glimpse of lips. She held a staff, and her hand would be pale one moment, dark the next; old and young; slender and not. She was the Goddess. She was all that was female, all that was woman, and all at once.

  It was Ash who said, “Why have you brought us here?” Holly was still facing the figure with his sword out, as if he meant at any moment to attack.

  She wasn’t flesh and blood, I knew that. I didn’t think his sword could hurt her, but it seemed wrong to be threatening her. I might have protested except that Ash’s hand squeezed too tightly for words.

  “Take us back or your chosen one dies.”

  “Harm her and you will never have the power you seek, Ash.”

  His hand eased a little so that I could breathe without fighting for it. “So if I let her go you’ll give me power?”

  “She is the key to your power. Without her there is nothing.”

  “I do not understand.”

  Holly lunged toward the figure. A sword clanged down the length of his blade, pushing it against the grass, and a body was on the other end of that sword. He was tall and short, muscled and not, dark and light, all men and none. He had thrown off the cloak that they wore to save our minds so that you simply had to see all the many forms at once. He stood bare in all his beauty and terror, for a long, muscled body can be just for pleasure, but that same muscled weight can thrust a sword and spill blood. He was the greatest of tenderness and the greatest of destruction all at once. The potential was all there in that swirl of images, shapes, scents, and sights.

  He disarmed Holly, but he had to cut the goblin’s hand to do it. It spoke of Holly’s skill or the God’s impatience. His voice was deep and rumbling as gravel, and the next light and airy as any, all men echoed in his voice. “Who am I?”

  Holly went to his knees with the sword point at his neck. “You are the God.”

  “Who is my consort?”

  “The Goddess,” Holly answered.

  The God stepped back to the cloaked Goddess, but the moment they touched hands her cloak was gone, and they stood side by side. I don’t know what the goblins saw, but I saw a dizzying swirl of faces and bodies. They were all these beings at once, but my mind could not hold it all. I finally closed my eyes, for I could not take it all in.

  Ash began to move, and I opened my eyes as I realized that he was moving us both to kneel on the summer grass. He’d stopped choking me somewhere during the revelation. In fact, now the arm that had been choking me was around my shoulders. What had been hurting me was holding me almost tenderly now.

  “It has been long since the goblins saw the face of God,” Ash said. “And Goddess,” the Goddess said, and there was chiding in her voice. It was the voice of every mother, every big sister, every aunt, every teacher, all rolled into one echo.

  “And longer still since the goblins saw the face of the Goddess,” Ash said. If he resented the chiding,
it didn’t show in his voice.

  “Are you goblins?” the God asked.

  “Yes,” Holly answered.

  Ash was a little slower with “Yes.”

  “Are you sidhe?” the Goddess asked.

  “No,” Holly answered.

  “We have no magic,” Ash answered, as if that answered the question, and perhaps it did.

  “What would you give to possess the magic of the sidhe?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” Holly said. “I am goblin, and that is enough.”

  “She did not say we had to become sidhe, brother,” Ash said. “She spoke of the magic of the sidhe.”

  “Magic of the sidhe, but still goblin,” Holly said. “That would be worth much.”

  “Once there were many courts, even among the goblins,” the Goddess said.

  “Once,” the God said, “there was magic in every court of faerie.”

  “The sidhe stole our magic from us,” Ash said, and his hand that had been tender tightened against my shoulder. He didn’t hurt me, but his body was suddenly tense as it knelt beside me.

  “Daughter,” the Goddess said, “what say you to this?”

  “The sidhe stripped the goblins of their magic to win the last Great War between our peoples.”

  “Do you think this was well done?” She asked.

  I thought before I answered, because I could feel the magic beginning to gather around us. You would think that in the presence of Deities there would be no room for magic to build, that their presence would mask everything, but whatever was building in this summer night in this place between pressed against the air like the weight of invisible rock, as if a mountain were building above us one thought at a time.

  Ash’s arm across my shoulders was almost trembling with tension. I had a moment to glance up at him, and he was staring as hard as he could straight ahead. I think he was afraid of what I might see in his eyes.

  “I’ve been told that if we hadn’t taken the magic from the goblins they would have won the war.”

  “But your two peoples are no longer at war, are they?” She asked. “No,” I said. Ash had gone utterly still beside me. I could feel the tension along his muscles, as if he fought himself to be still.

  “If you could undo the wrong done the goblins, would you?”

  “Was it wrong?” I asked.

  “What do you think?” She asked.

  I thought again. Had we been wrong? I had seen what the sidhe had done with their magic. They had used the fact that only we had major offensive magic to be tyrants. We had won the wars, but in the end, it was the humans with their technology who had truly won.

  “I think we won a battle, but not a war, by taking the goblins’ magic.”

  Ash’s hand spasmed against my shoulder.

  “But was it right, the right thing to do?” the God asked.

  I started to say yes, then said, “I don’t know. I was told that our magic came from You. That would mean that we stole magic from the goblins that You had both given to them. Did you agree with what we did?”

  “No one asked us,” the Goddess said.

  Ash startled beside me, and I just gaped at them. They had hooded themselves again, so my eyes and my mortal mind would be able to deal with them better. When had they hooded? Just now? Minutes ago? I couldn’t remember.

  “Taking the goblins’ magic was the beginning of You turning from us,” I said.

  “What if you, daughter, could undo that injustice?” the God asked. “You mean give magic back to the goblins,” I said. It was always good to be clear.

  “Yes,” they said together.

  “You mean give Holly and Ash hands of power,” I said. Ash had actually dropped his hand, as if it were all too much.

  “Yes,” they answered again. Were they beginning to fade?

  “They are sidhe as well as goblin,” I said.

  “Would you give them their sidhe-side powers, daughter?” Now I was answering voices.

  If I said no, would the Goddess retreat from me, from all my people again? I looked at Ash, and he would not look at me. I glanced in front of us at Holly. He was glaring at me. His face showed plainly that he thought I would deny them. But it wasn’t his anger that I saw, it was the reason behind the anger. Years of looking in the mirror, and seeing all that sidhe blood looking back at you, and knowing that you would forever be denied. It didn’t matter how sidhe you looked. If you had no magic, then you weren’t real to the sidhe. You were simply not one of them. I knew what that felt like, to be among them but not one of them. I looked less sidhe than the brothers did. At least they were tall, and until you saw their eyes they could have passed. I would never pass for pure-blooded sidhe, not with a thousand crowns on my head.

  “Will you give them their birthright back?” the voices asked.

  For politics, I should have said no. For the safety of my world, no. For the safety of everything we’d signed treaties for, no. But in the end, I gave the only answer that felt right. “I will.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  WE WERE LEFT ALONE IN THE CIRCLE OF STONES UNDER THE round, white glow of midsummer’s moon. It rose above us, unnaturally close, a harvest moon close enough that it seemed as if we had only to reach out to caress the surface of it. In that moment, I wasn’t certain whether it was illusion or reality. Could I have touched the moon? Perhaps, but the two men with me weren’t interested in celestial bodies, and they convinced me that the moon was for gazing at, and that their bodies were the world.

  Their skin was as pale and perfect as that of any sidhe. Only the scars that decorated their skin said that they didn’t have enough magic to heal their wounds cleanly. But I was Unseelie, not Seelie, and scars were just another texture to run my fingers over, lick my tongue across, and worry at with my teeth.

  I made Holly cry out with pleasure with my teeth around a scar on the hard, muscled expanse of his stomach. Ash’s back was crisscrossed with claw marks, white and shiny with age. I traced my fingertips across all of it, and said, “What happened?”

  Ash lay on the grass in the nest we had made of our clothes. He let my fingers play across his bare back, but he drew no breath to answer me. It was Holly who answered. “Cathmore found Ash alone when we were young. Cathmore was a great warrior, but he hunted the younger warriors whom he thought might be a threat to him someday. A lot of the warriors bear scars from him.”

  I traced the claw marks down and down, until I found the firm smoothness of his ass. He shivered under the gentleness of it. I didn’t know if it was the magic of this place or the fact that there were no goblins to impress, but they both showed that gentleness, and not just pain, worked for them as pleasure.

  “Cathmore. I do not know the name.”

  Holly gazed at me across his brother’s body, then he touched the scars and smiled. A close, tight smile. “When Ash was healed, we hunted Cathmore down. We killed him and took his head so everyone would know that we had slain him.”

  He showed me the arm that lay across his brother’s back, flexing the muscle to show a curve of hard white scar tissue. The scar looked as if his arm had nearly been cut off. “Cathmore did that, with his sword, Cathmore’s Arm.” I knew it was not unusual for a goblin to name his sword after himself. I’d always found it a little odd, but it wasn’t my custom, it was theirs.

  I touched the scar, tracing my fingertips down the line of it. “A fearsome wound,” I said.

  He grinned at me. “Ash carries his sword.”

  “Because he gave the killing blow,” I said.

  That made Ash rise enough to gaze over his shoulder at me. “How did you know that?”

  “It’s goblin law. The one who strikes the killing blow gets first pick of the weapons.”

  “I had forgotten that your father used to bring you to visit the goblins,” Ash said, propping himself up on his elbows.

  “The goblins are the foot soldiers of the faerie court. No war has been won since the goblins joined us that would not hav
e been lost without you.”

  “Now that we are forbidden to make war, the nobles of both courts forget that,” Ash said. “We are an embarrassment even to the Unseelie.”

  “We don’t clean up well enough for the press to please the queen,” Holly said. He was sitting up now, his knees drawn to his chest, his arms encircling them. It made him seem younger, more vulnerable. I had a moment of seeing what he might have been when he was young enough for Cathmore to think them prey.

  I crawled over the clothes and the movement of the grass underneath until I was in front of Holly. His gaze did not even pretend to look away from my breasts. It didn’t bother me. We were naked, and I wanted them to want me.

  I rose, coming off of all fours, letting his gaze stay on the heavy roundness of my breasts. “I think you look amazing.”

  He looked at my face then, and there was anger in the crimson of his eyes. I hesitated in the midst of the kiss I’d been seeking, not understanding the anger.

  “Good enough to fuck, but not to be seen in public with,” he said.

  I leaned back on my heels. “I don’t understand.”

  Ash sat up, one knee bent, the other leg out straight so he framed his swell nicely. Neither of them had anything to be ashamed of in that area. I had trouble raising my gaze from between his legs to his face.

  He laughed, and it was that masculine sound, pleased and sure of itself. “You’re not the first sidhe woman to want to sample forbidden fruit.”

  “You’ve said that I was.”

  “In public,” he said. “In front of the other goblins, yes. If a goblin lays with a sidhe, then they must show marks of violence. To do less in our kingdom is to be seen as weak. To be seen as weak is to invite challengers. We are already half sidhe, Meredith. If the goblins knew we could take our sex gentle and enjoy it, we would be challenged until even we were killed.”

  Holly traced my shoulder with the edge of his hand. “Gentleness has no reward for goblins, only punishment.”