A Lick of Frost(77)

He reached up and pulled off the bandages to show that the burns were gone. I suppose if you're creating reality, a little healing isn't much.

Because reality had changed.

We were still in Maeve Reed's ballroom-dining room, but it wasn't the same room. It was huge, an acre of marble stretching in every direction. The far windows were a distant twinkling line. There were demi-fey everywhere, as if too deep a breath would make you swallow one.

Ash and Holly swatted at them as if they were flies.

I said, "If you harm them, I will not be happy."

The Red Caps did not swat at them. They did not threaten them. The huge men stood there and let the tiny things alight on them. They were covered in the fanning of butterfly wings, until you could barely see their flesh through the slow dance of color.

Jonty gazed up at me with those red eyes framed by the shining wings. The tiny hands clung to his bloody hat, They rolled in the blood, giggling, a sound like crystal chimes.

"You remake us, my queen," Jonty said.

I don't know what I would have said to that, but then Rhys's voice came. "Merry!"

That one word, that note of urgency was enough. I turned and knew that whatever I would see, I would not like it.

Rhys and Galen were kneeling beside Frost. He lay crumpled on his side, terribly still.

I remembered then what I'd thought. He had had nothing to hold on to while reality remade itself. He had been alone in the terror and beauty of it.

I ran to him with my dogs at my side, trippingly close, but the magic was still here, still working, and I did not dare send the hounds away. The oldest magic that had ever belonged to the sidhe was in this room tonight. It was a magic that could be ridden, but never controlled, not completely. Creation is always a chancy thing, because you never know what it will be when all is said and done, or if it will be worth the price.





CHAPTER 23





VOICES FROM AROUND THE ROOM SAID THAT FROST WAS NOT the only one down. Holly and Ash had collapsed to the floor. The demi-fey closed on them now that they could not resist.

But the other men who had fallen had only other guards to touch them, to try and wake them. I touched the glittering fall of Frost's hair, drew it back from his face.

"What is wrong with him? With all of them?" I asked.

"I'm not sure," Rhys said, "but his pulse is fading."

I looked at him over Frost's still form. I knew my face showed the shock.

"They didn't have the dogs," Galen said. "They didn't have anything to hold on to when you created more faerie land."

Rhys nodded. His small sea of terriers sat unusually silent and solemn around his legs as he knelt.

I started to say "they are just dogs," but Mungo bumped my shoulder with his head. Minnie leaned against my side. I looked into her eyes and there was dog in there, yes, but there was more. They were dogs formed of wild magic. They were fey creatures, and that is not simply a dog.

I stroked her ear, so velvety. I whispered, "Help me. Help them. Help Frost."

Doyle strode farther into the room with the huge black dogs milling around him. One of the dogs broke from the pack and went to one of the other fallen. He sniffed the hair with a loud snuffling sound. Then he grew taller, bigger. The dog's fur ran in streamers of green, chasing the black away, and the fur growing a little longer, a little shaggier.

The dog was the size of a pony when it was solid green. A green like new grass, spring leaves. It turned huge yellow-green eyes to me.

"Cu Sith," Galen whispered.

I simply nodded.

The Cu Sith: "Hound of the sidhe" was the literal meaning of its name. Once every sidhe mound had had at least one as guard. One had been created, or reborn, on the night when the magic had returned in Illinois. Now we had a second, here and now.

It lowered its great head and sniffed at one of the fallen guards again. It licked him with a huge pink tongue. He gave a breath so big we heard it across the room. His body shuddered with the return of life, or the retreat of death.

The huge green dog moved from one to the other, and everywhere he touched, the men revived. He came to Onilwyn, still collapsed on his side. He sniffed him, then growled low and deep, like thunder contained in a rib cage. He did not lick Onilwyn back to life. The Cu Sith let him lie. Interesting that I wasn't the only one who didn't want to touch him.

The green dog came to the twins, sweeping the demi-fey ceilingward with its great head. But it sniffed them, and moved away, too. Not sidhe enough for the Cu.

Doyle's deep voice came, but there was an echo in it of the god. I looked at Doyle, and found his face distant, as if he saw something other than this room. Vision held him, or Deity, or both.

He spoke in a dialect I did not understand, and one of the black dogs moved forward. It went to the twins, and sniffed their hair. The black fur ran with a white that glowed and shimmered. The white fur was thicker, longer than the black, even longer and shaggier than the Cu Sith's green.