A Stroke of Midnight (Merry Gentry #4)(25)

“Doyle!” Frost came to stand near us, his hand moving toward me, as if he would take me away from the Darkness. But he let his hand fall back, because Frost, like me, wasn’t certain what Doyle would do if he tried to wrest me from him. He was behaving so unlike himself that I was afraid, and, I think, so was Frost.
Doyle threw his head back and screamed. It was a sound of such anguish, such utter loneliness. The sound ended on a howl that raised the hairs on my body. He released me abruptly, and half threw me against Frost. Frost caught me and turned me so that his broad shoulders were between me and his captain.Doyle collapsed to the floor in a pool of black leather, his braid curling like a serpent around his legs.
It took me a moment to realize that he was sobbing. Frost and I looked at each other. Neither of us had a clue as to what was happening to our stoic Darkness.
I moved toward him, but Frost held me back, and shook his head. He was right. But it made my chest tight to hear such broken sounds coming from Doyle.
Frost knelt beside him and laid a white hand on Doyle’s dark shoulder. “My captain, Doyle, what ails you?”
Doyle covered his face with his hands and hunched over until his hands were nearly flat to the ground. He curled in upon himself, and his voice came thick with tears, and thicker with anger. “I cannot do it.” He raised up on hands and knees, his head hanging down. “I cannot bear it.” He looked up, and grabbed Frost’s arm, much as he’d grabbed mine, almost pleading. “I cannot go back to what I was here. I cannot stand at her side and watch another take her. I am not that strong, or that good.”
Frost nodded, and drew the other man into his arms. He held him tight and fierce, and the face he showed to me was raw with sorrow.
I had missed something. Something important. Something had happened not just to Doyle but to Frost as well. This was not his typical moodiness; this was mourning. But what did they mourn?
“What has happened?” I asked.
Doyle shook his head, pressed into Frost’s shoulder. “She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t know what it means.”
“What?” Fear was beginning to tickle my stomach, march up my spine. My skin was cool with the beginnings of dread.
Frost looked at me, and I realized that there were unshed tears glittering in his eyes. “The ring has chosen your king, Meredith.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Mistral,” Doyle said, raising his head, so I could see his face. “The ring has chosen Mistral. And I cannot let him have you.”
I stared at him. “What are you babbling about? There is only one way for my king to be chosen, and I am not with child.”
“Are you certain of that?” Frost asked. His face was so calm, empty of the emotional turmoil I would have expected from him. It was almost as if with Doyle fallen to pieces, he had to hold himself together better than was his wont.
“Yes, I mean . . .” I thought about what he’d said. “It’s too early to be certain.”
Doyle shook his head hard enough that his heavy braid rustled against the leather. “The ring has never come to life for any of us. You have never had such sex with any of us. What else could it mean but that he is the ring’s choice?” 
“I don’t know, but . . .” In the face of his pain, I didn’t know what to say. I looked from one to the other of them. Their belief was plain on their faces. I looked at them huddled together, light and darkness entwined, and my chest was tight. It was suddenly hard to breathe. The room felt hot and close. If I was pregnant from Mistral, I would lose them, both of them. I would be bound to Mistral, and I would be monogamous to him and him alone. The sex had been good, maybe great, but it was just sex, and . . . “I don’t love him.” The moment I said it, I knew it was a child’s plea. A child’s wish.
“A queen does not marry for love.” Doyle’s deep voice held the edge of tears.
“But wait, I thought the ring found your true love, your perfect match.”
“It does,” Frost said.
“Nicca and Biddy are completely gone on each other,” I said. “They look at each other as if there is no one else in the world.”
They both nodded. Frost said, “It was always thus with the ones the ring chose.”
“But Mistral and I are not looking at each other that way.”
“You did not see his face afterwards,” Doyle said. “I did.”
“As did I,” Frost said.
I waved it away. “I was the first sex he’s had in centuries. And it was magical sex, power-driven sex. That is heady stuff. Any man would look at me that way, but it was lust, not love.”
Frost frowned at me. Doyle just stared as if his emotions had emptied him.
“I certainly don’t feel that way about Mistral.”
Frost looked positively suspicious. “You do not, truly?”
I shook my head. “If the ring had chosen him, then I’d be in love with him, right?”
Frost nodded.
“I do not feel that way about Mistral.”
“How can you not want what we saw in the hallway?” Doyle asked, in a voice that had gone almost empty of emotion, as if it had all been too much for him.
“It was great, but has it occurred to either of you that maybe the sex was that magical because it is the first time I have had sex inside faerie while wearing the ring?”
Doyle blinked and tried to focus. I watched him fighting off the despair that was trying to numb him. Frost spoke for them both. “You have had sex inside faerie with one of us, surely.”
I shook my head. “I do not believe so, and if I have, I wasn’t wearing the ring. Even in Los Angeles, I often didn’t wear the ring during sex.”
“Because the power was too unpredictable,” Doyle said. He looked up at me. “Were we fools to lock it away?”
The ring on my finger pulsed once, as if squeezing my hand. I swallowed hard and nodded. “The ring thinks so.”
Doyle rubbed at the tear tracks on his skin. “You truly do not love Mistral?”
“No.”
“You could still be pregnant,” he said.
“The ring does fertility, but it does more than that,” Frost said. “If Meredith does not love Mistral, then perhaps he is not the match for her.”
“Does he think he is?”
I watched Doyle collect himself, gathering all that dark reserve. “Most likely.”
“I know that Rhys does, for he said so,” Frost said.
“Does Galen?”
“He was much besotted with the ring’s power. The men that were besotted will most likely not be thinking that clearly.”
“Only you, Rhys, Doyle, and Mistral himself did not seem drunk with power.”
“Mistral was a part of the magic. Rhys did not appear in time.”
“But why the two of you?”
They looked at each other, and it was Frost who spoke, and Doyle who would not look at me. “The ring has no power over you if you are already in love.”“If it is true love,” Doyle said, and then he did look at me, and I almost wished he had not. His eyes held the pain that he had let me glimpse. The pain that must have begun to grow when none of them had made me pregnant in Los Angeles.
I looked at the two of them, and for the first time I realized that if it was a choice between the throne or losing these two men, I wasn’t certain what I would choose. I wasn’t certain I was queen enough to sacrifice that much. But as long as Cel lived, he would see me dead. And I could not give the rest of faerie to him, even if he swore to leave me and the ones I loved alive. I could not give my people over to him. He made Andais look sane, and kindhearted. I could not give us over to Cel’s sadism. I was too much my father’s daughter to do it. But I stood there and felt the world sink down to nothing at the thought of losing Doyle and Frost.
I thought of something, and said, “So the fact that Galen was besotted means that he is not in love, not true love?”
They looked startled, glanced at each other, then both nodded. “I think the youngling would argue,” Frost said, “but yes, that is what it means.”
I tried the thought that my sweet, gentle Galen would be in someone else’s arms, and the thought did not fill me with regret. In fact, it filled me with a certain peace to know that somewhere out there the ring would find him someone so that he would not mourn me.
I smiled.
“Why do you smile?” Doyle asked.
“Because the thought does not hurt.” I went to them, and touched fingertips to both their faces. “The thought of losing the two of you . . . that is like a wound through my heart.” I cupped their cheeks but was careful not to touch Frost’s face with the ring. I wanted to touch them without the magic interfering. Doyle’s skin was actually warmer than normal for humans, had been since the night he’d rediscovered he could shapeshift into animal form. Frost’s skin was a little cooler than normal for humans. It wasn’t always so, but often he felt cool to the touch. I’d first noticed it in Los Angeles after he, too, had found some of his godhead through the chalice’s power.
I held them, hot and cold, light and dark, and wondered if there truly was a man in faerie who would make me forget them, and turn love-blinded eyes to someone else. I valued this love that we had built slowly over weeks and months. It had taken effort and trust, and I knew that even if all the magic in the world died, I would still love them. And after what they had shown me tonight, I thought they would still love me as well.