The thorns bled me, spattered the white gown with blood, the snow covered in minute crimson drops. The vines moved under my hands like something more alive than a plant. I felt the boar’s breath like heat on the back of my body, and the thorny vines opened like a door. The world seemed to spin, and when I could see again, be sure of where I was again, I was standing on the other side of the thorns. The white boar hit the vines hard and fast, as if it expected to tear its way through. For a moment I thought it would do just that; then it was in the thorns, slowing. It stopped rushing forward and started slashing at the vines with its great snout and tusks. It would tear them out, trample them underfoot, but its white coat was bedecked with tiny bloody scratches. It would break through, but the thorns bled it.
I’d never owned any magic in dream, or vision, that I didn’t own in waking life. But I had magic now. I wielded the hand of blood. I put my bleeding hand out toward the boar and thought, Bleed. I made all those small scratches pour blood. But still the beast fought through the thorns. The vines ripped from the earth. I thought, More. I made a fist of my hand, and when I opened it wide, the scratches slashed wide. Hundreds of red mouths, gaping on that white hide. Blood poured down its sides, and now its squeal was not a scream of anger, or challenge. It was a squeal of pain.
The vines tightened around it of their own accord. The boar’s knees buckled, and the vines roped it to the frozen ground. It was no longer a white boar, but a red one. Red with blood.
There was a knife in my hand. It was a shining white blade that glowed like a star. I knew what I needed to do. I walked across the blood-spattered snow. The boar rolled its eyes at me, but I knew that if it could, even now, it would kill me.
I plunged the knife into its throat, and when the blade came out, blood gushed into the snow, over my gown, onto my skin. The blood was hot. A crimson fountain of heat and life.
The blood melted the snow down to rich black earth. From that earth came a tiny piglet, not white this time, but tawny and striped with gold. It was colored more like a fawn. The piglet cried, but I knew there would be no answer.
I picked it up, and it curled up in my arms like a puppy. It was so warm, so alive. I wrapped the hooded cloak I now wore around us both. My gown was black now, not black with blood, but simply black. The piglet settled into the soft warm cloth. I had boots that were lined with fur, soft and warm. The white knife was still in my hand, but it was clean, as if the blood had burned away.
I smelled roses. I turned back and found that the white boar’s body was gone. The thorny vines were covered in green leaves and flowers. The flowers were white and pink, from palest blush to dark salmon. Some of the roses were so deeply pink, they were almost purple.
The wonderful sweet scent of wild roses filled the air. The dead trees in the circle were dead no more, but began to bud and leaf as I watched. The thaw spread from the boar’s death and that spill of warm blood.
The tiny piglet was heavier. I looked down and found that it had doubled in size. I put it onto the melting snow, and as the boar had gotten bigger, so now this piglet grew. Again, I could not see the change, but like a flower unfurling undetectably, it changed all the same.
I began to walk over the snow, and the rapidly growing pig came at my side like an obedient dog. Where we stepped the snow melted, and life returned to the land. The pig lost its baby stripes, and grew black and as tall at the shoulder as my waist, and still it grew. I touched its back, and the hair was not soft, but coarse. I stroked its side, and it nestled against me. We walked the land, and where we walked, the world became green once more.We came to the crest of a small hill, where a slab of stone lay grey and cold in the growing light. Dawn had come, breaking like a crimson wound across the eastern sky. The sun returns in blood, and dies in blood.
The boar had tusks now, small curling things, but I wasn’t afraid. He nuzzled my hand, and his snout was softer, and more nimble, more like a great finger, than any pig’s snout I’d ever touched. He made a sound that was pleasant and made me smile. Then he turned and ran down the other side of the hill, with his tail straight out behind him like a flag. Everywhere his hooves touched, the earth sprang green.
A robed figure was beside me on the hill, but it was not the grey-robed figure of the crone Goddess in winter. This was a male figure taller than I, broad of shoulder, and cloaked in a hood as black as the boar that was growing small in the distance.
He held out his hands, and in them was a horn. The curved tusk of a great boar. It was white and fresh, with blood still on it, as if he had just that moment cut it from the white boar. But as I moved over toward him, the horn became clean and polished, as if with many years of use, as if many hands had touched it. The horn was no longer white, but a rich amber color that spoke of age. Just before I touched his hands, I realized the horn was set in gold, formed into a cup.
I laid my hands on either side of his and found that his hands were as dark as his cloak, but I knew this was not my Doyle, my Darkness. This was the God. I looked up into his hood and saw for an instant the boar’s head; then I saw a human mouth that smiled at me. His face, like the face of the Goddess, was covered in shadow—for the face of deity was ever a mystery.
He wrapped my hands around the smooth horn of the cup, the carved gold almost soft under my fingers. He pressed my hands to the cup. I wondered, where had the white knife gone?
A deep voice that was no man’s voice and every man’s voice said, “Where it belongs.” The knife appeared in the cup, blade-down, and it was shining again, as if a star had fallen into that cup of horn and gold. “Drink and be merry.” He laughed then at his own pun. He raised the shining cup to my lips and vanished to the warm sound of his own laughter.
I drank from the horn and found it full of the sweetest mead I had ever drunk, thick with honey, and warm as if the heat of the summer itself slipped across my tongue, caressed my throat. I swallowed and it was more intoxicating than any mere drink.
Power is the most intoxicating drink of all.
CHAPTER 2
I WOKE SURROUNDED BY A CIRCLE OF FACES, IN A BED THAT WAS not mine. Faces the color of darkest night, whitest snow, the pale green of new leaves, the gold of summer sunshine, the brown of leaves trodden underfoot destined to be rich earth. But there was no pale skin that held all the colors of a brilliant crystal, like a diamond carved into flesh. I blinked up at all of them, and wondered—remembering my dream—where were the cookies?
Doyle’s voice, deep and thick, as if it came from a great distance, said, “Princess Meredith, are you well?”
I sat up, nude in the bed with black silk sheets, cold against my skin. The queen had loaned us her room for the night. Real fur, soft and nearly alive, pressed against my hip. The fur covering moved, and Kitto’s face blinked up at me. His huge blue eyes dominated his pale face and held no white in all that color. The color was Seelie sidhe, but the eyes themselves were goblin. He had been a child of the last great goblin–sidhe war. His pale perfect body was barely four feet tall, a delicate man, the only one of my men who was shorter than I was. He looked child-like cuddled down in the fur, his face framed like some cherub for a Valentine’s Day card. He had been more than a thousand years old before Christianity was a word. He’d been part of my treaty with the goblins. They were my allies because he shared my bed.
His hand found my arm and stroked up and down my skin, seeking comfort as we all did when we were nervous. He didn’t like me staring at him without saying anything. He had been curled up close to me, and the power of the Goddess and the God in my dream must have slipped across his skin. The faces of the fifteen men standing in their circle around the bed showed clearly that they had felt something, too.
Doyle repeated his question: “Princess Meredith, are you well?”
I looked at my captain of the guard, my lover, his face as black as the cloak I had worn in vision, or the fur of the boar that had run out into the snow and brought spring back to the land. I had to close my eyes and breathe deeply, trying to break free of the last vestiges of vision and dream. Trying to be in the here and now.
I raised my hands from the tangle of sheets. In my right hand was a cup formed of horn, the horn ancient and yellowed, held in gold that bore symbols that few outside faerie could read now. In my left hand I expected to find the white knife, but it was not there. My left hand was empty. I stared at it for a moment, then raised the cup with both hands.
“My God,” Rhys whispered, though the whisper was strangely loud.
“Yes,” Doyle said, “that is exactly what it is.”
“What did he say when he gave you the cup of horn?” It was Abe who asked. Abe with his hair striped in shades of pale grey, dark grey, black, and white, perfect strands of color. His eyes were a few shades darker grey than most human eyes, but not otherworldly, not really. If you dressed him like a modern Goth, he’d be the hit of any club scene.
His eyes were strangely solemn. He’d been the drunk and joke of the court for more years than I could remember. But now there was a different person looking out from his face, a glimpse of what he might once have been. Someone who thought before he spoke, someone who had other preoccupations than getting drunk as quickly and as often as he could.
Abe swallowed hard and asked again, “What did he say?”