A Stroke of Midnight (Merry Gentry #4)(33)

He swallowed so hard it looked as if he were choking on years of prejudice. “Yes,” he said in a voice that was a harsh whisper. He fell to his knees as if some great force had knocked him down, or he had lost the strength in his legs.
He gazed up at me, and the many colors of his eyes glittered in the light, not with magic, but with tears. “Forgive me,” he said in that same harsh whisper, as if the words were being torn from his throat, “forgive me.” I didn’t think it was me he was begging forgiveness of.
The chalice moved toward him, my hands held it, but it was not my will that moved it.
He buried his face in his hands. “I cannot.” His broad shoulders began to shake, and I knew he was crying. I let go of the chalice with one hand, so I could touch his shoulder. He sobbed, and threw his arms around my waist, clutching me so hard and sudden that I half collapsed against him. The chalice touched the back of his hair, and that was all it took.
I stood in the middle of a huge, barren plain. Amatheon was still pressed to my waist, his head buried against my body. I wasn’t certain that he knew anything had changed.
I smelled apple blossoms again, and I turned toward the scent. The hill that I had seen over and over again in vision stood in the distance. I could see the tree on top of it. The tree that Mistral and I had stood beside while lightning struck the ground. I had seen the plain, but never stood upon it.
Amatheon raised his head from my body so that he could look up at me. The movement of his head brushed the lip of the cup along his bound hair. When he felt the hard metal of it, he pressed himself against it, the way you would lean into the caress of a hand. Only then did he seem to see the plain.
He was very careful not to move from between my body and the touch of the chalice, but he reached down with one hand to touch the earth. His hand came up with grey dirt so dry that it trickled from between his fingers like sand.
He looked up at me again, eyes glittering with the tears he either refused to shed, or could not shed. “It was not like this once.” He pressed his head back against the metal of the chalice, as if seeking solace from the touch. “Nothing will grow in this.” He opened his hand wide and let the wind take the dirt. “There is no life here.”He raised the hand that was coated in the dry, dead earth up to me like a child that has a boo-boo, as if I could fix it.
I opened my lips to say something soothing, but what came out wasn’t my voice and wasn’t soothing at all. “Amatheon, you kept your name, though you have forgotten who you are, what you are,” the voice said, deeper than my normal voice, rounder vowels.
“The land has died,” he said, and the tears finally flowed.
“Do I look dead?”
He frowned, then shook his head. Again the chalice rubbed against his hair, but this time I felt the silken caress of his hair across my skin, down my body. It made me shiver.
“Goddess?”
I touched his cheek. “Has it been so long, Amatheon, that you do not know me?”
He nodded, and the first tear fell from the edge of his jaw. That single drop of moisture fell onto the grey earth, leaving a tiny black print. But it was as if the earth underneath us sighed.
“We need you, Amatheon,” and I agreed with the Goddess. The land needed him, I needed him, we needed him.
“I am yours,” he whispered. He drew the sword at his belt, and held it up in his hands like an offering. Then he put his head back, so that his throat stretched tight. His eyes were closed, as if for a kiss, but it wasn’t a kiss he was waiting for. I understood then that if one tear felt so good to the land, then other body fluids would feel even better.
I understood then what he was offering, and with the Goddess riding me, I knew that his blood would return life to the land. He was Amatheon, a god of agriculture, but he was more than that. He was the spark, the quickening, that let the seed grow in the earth. He was that magic bridge between dormant seed, dark earth, and life. His “death” would bring that back to the land.
I shook my head. “I just saved his life, I will not take it now.”
Her voice came from my lips again. “He will not die as men die, but as the corn dies. To rise again, and feed his people.”
“I do not doubt that,” I said, “and if that is your will, so be it, but not by my hand. I work too hard to keep my people alive to start slaughtering them.”
“But this is not real death. This is vision and dream. It is not real flesh and blood that Amatheon offers you.”
Amatheon had opened his eyes and lowered his head and his sword. “The Goddess is right, Princess. This is not a real place, nor are we truly here. My death here would not be true death.”
“You have not seen the visions that I have seen, Amatheon. I dreamt of the chalice and woke with it solid and very real in my bed. I would not slay you here, and find your bleeding corpse in the hallway.”
“Will you leave the land barren?” the voice said, out of my mouth. Having both sides of the conversation coming out of my mouth was a little too psychotic for comfort. And this energy, this Goddess, felt heavier, not just a comforting presence. 
“Why are you not happy with me?”
“I am very happy with you, Meredith, happier than I have been with anyone in a very long time.”
“I hear your words, but I feel your . . . impatience. You are impatient with me, and not about this.”
She thought her response, but I was mortal, and female, and I had to say it out loud. “You think I waste your gifts by trying to solve the murders.”
“You have your human police. Even now Cromm Cruach has them using their science for you.”
It took me a second to realize she was referring to Rhys, his original name.
“Not his real name,” she said with my mouth, “but the last true name he owned.”
“Rhys had a name older even than Cromm Cruach?”
“Once, though few remember.”
I started to ask the name, but I could feel her smile, and she said, “You are distracted by trivialities, Meredith.”
“Forgive me,” I said.
“I do not mean Cromm Cruach’s true name, I mean these deaths. They will be reborn, Child. Why do you mourn them so? Even true death is not an ending. Others can find your murderers and clues, but there are duties that only you can perform, Meredith, only you..”
“And what exactly would those duties be?”
She motioned at Amatheon. “Make my land live.”
Amatheon offered his sword up to me again, and closed his eyes. He put his neck back at an angle where I could have a clean strike.
“You’ve done this before,” I said.
He opened his eyes just enough to look at me. “In vision, and for truth.”
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Yes.” Then he closed his eyes, and lifted the sword up higher, as if that would make me take it sooner.
“He is a willing sacrifice, Meredith. There is no evil here.”
I shook my head. “How is that you, who have all eternity, are so impatient, and I, who have only a few decades, want to take the longer road?”
In that moment I felt her sigh, and her happiness at the same time. It had been a test of sorts, not of good versus evil, but of the direction this revival of power would take. She had offered me a quicker, more violent way to bring faerie back to its power. I knew with a knowledge as solid as the foundations of the world that Amatheon would die. It would be true death. The fact that he would rise from that grave, and be reborn to his “life,” did not change the fact that it would be my hand that slit his throat. My hand that spilled his blood hot across the earth, across my skin. I gazed down at him as he knelt, eyes closed, face peaceful.
I took the sword by the hilt, and lifted it from his hands. Those hands went to his sides, limp, only a slight tension in the fingers letting me know that he was fighting the impulse to guard himself from the blow.
He had gone from hating me for my mongrel blood to offering me up his pure sidhe flesh, and letting me spill that same pure blood in a hot wash across the ground.
I leaned over him and pressed my mouth to his. His eyes opened, wide and startled. I think the kiss surprised him more than any blow could have. I smiled down at him. “There are other ways to make the grass grow, Amatheon.”
He stared up at me, uncomprehending for a moment. Then the shadow of a smile caressed his lips. “You would refuse the call of the Goddess?”
I shook my head. “Never, but the Goddess comes in many guises. Why choose pain and death when you can have pleasure and life?”
The smile widened just a bit. He unbent his neck from its almost painful offering position, then looked from the sword in one hand to the chalice in the other. “What would you have of me, Princess, Goddess?”“Oh, no,” she said, and this time it wasn’t my lips. There was a hooded figure not far from us, her feet not touching the bare soil. In fact she was misty, and try as I might, I could not see her clearly. The hand that held the hood close was neither old nor young nor in between. She was all women and no woman. She was the Goddess. “Oh, no, Amatheon, she has made her choice. I will leave her to that decision. She does not need me to finish this task.” She gave a small chuckle that held something of the dryness of an old woman’s voice, the rich melodious sound of a woman in her prime, and the lightness of a girl. “I do not often agree with Andais, but in this I might. Bloody fertility goddesses.” But she laughed again.