“What has happened to you, Jonty?” I asked.
“You happened to me, Princess.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Your hand of blood happened to us all in that winter’s night.”
I frowned a little and tried to think of a way to ask my question. But how do you ask a question when you have no idea what to ask?
“I do not understand, Jonty.”
“Your hand of blood has brought us back into our power.”
“You have not come back into your full power,” Holly said.
Jonty turned an evil look on him. “No, as the halfling says, no. But it is more power than we have known in centuries.” He turned back to me, the anger fading from his eyes as he beheld me. There was a softness to his look that you didn’t see in most goblins’ eyes. Red Caps were known for their ferocity, not their kindness.“Why have you all come, Jonty?”
“They want you to touch them as you touched us. They want you to bring them into their power, too.”
“Why did you not ask me sooner?”
“Would you have done it?”
“You saved us, Jonty. I know that. But more than that, my job, my task as princess, is to bring power back to faerie. All faerie. That includes you and your men.”
Jonty looked at the floor, and spoke as softly as his deep, deep voice would allow. “I knew you would not refuse us if we stood before you. I knew that your hand of blood called to us too strongly, if we were close to you, but I did not think you would simply say yes from a distance.”
He looked up and his red eyes shimmered. Red Caps did not cry, ever.
A single tear slid from his eye. A tear the color of fresh blood. I did what I knew was custom among the goblins. Tears are precious, blood more precious yet. I touched my finger to his face and captured that single tear before it could mingle with and be lost in the blood that trailed down his face.
The tear trembled on my finger like a true tear, but it was red as blood. I raised it to my mouth, and drank his tear.
CHAPTER 21
THERE ARE MOMENTS WHEN THE WORLD HOLDS ITS BREATH. When the very air seems to pause, as if time itself has taken that last deep breath before….
The taste of salt and sweet metal slid across my tongue. The liquid seemed to grow until, when it glided down my throat, it was like a drink of cool, clear water, if it could hold the salt of oceans and the taste of blood.
I saw the room in pieces, as if things were moving out of sync. A cloud of demi-fey flew into the room, though I knew they had been forbidden to come. Goblins thought them tasty. But the winged fey filled the room like a cloud of butterflies and moths, dragonflies and damselflies, and insects that had never appeared in nature. There seemed to be more of them than I knew had followed us into exile.
The air was alive with color from the fluttering of their wings, so many of them that they made a breeze that played in my hair and touched my face.
The dogs came next. Small terriers spilling around the feet of the goblins, as if the dogs did not care, and the goblins did not see them. The graceful step of the greyhounds next, picking their dainty way through the crowded room. They walked among the standing Red Caps as if they were a forest to move through instead of people. Stranger yet, the Red Caps did not react to the dogs.
The dogs went to their masters. The terriers went to Rhys. Some of the hounds went to others of the guard. My two hounds came to me. Minnie with her face half red and half white as if someone had drawn a line down her face. Mungo with his one red ear and the rest of him white as a swan wing.
They had all been waiting…for us.
Frost’s voice came from behind me. “Merry, what is this?”
It was Royal’s voice, from where he hovered above me with his moth’s wings, that answered. “It is the moment of creation, Killing Frost.”
I stared up at the diminutive man. “I don’t understand.”
He smiled at me, but there was an eagerness to him that I did not trust. There was always something sensual, even sexual, about Royal. Since he was the size of a large Barbie doll, it was unsettling to say the least.
“We wait but for one piece more.” This came from Penny, Royal’s twin sister, who hovered beside him.
I didn’t understand until the black hounds poured in like shadows with Darkness made flesh, whose eyes flashed red, green, and all the colors I’d seen in Doyle’s eyes when his magic was upon him.
Doyle came through the door, leaning on the back of what looked like a black pony, a little bigger than the dogs. But a flash of those black eyes and I knew it was no pony. It pulled its lips back to flash teeth as sharp as any goblin’s. It was a kelpie, though how it got here I had no idea. The kelpies had been hunted and destroyed in Europe before we ever came to this country.
Kelpies either lurked in water and drew their prey down like crocodiles or pretended to be ponies on land. Then when some unwary human got on, they galloped to the nearest water. They drowned their prey, or ate them as they drowned. Most of their victims were children. Children love ponies.
Frost and I both said “Doyle” together.
He managed a smile. His face was still bandaged, but he’d unbound his arm. He moved slowly, but he moved, with his hand on the back of the carnivorous pony.
“The dogs would not let me rest any longer,” Doyle said.
I held my hand out to him.
Royal said, “No, Princess, that is not the point.”
I looked up at him. “You said the last piece.”
“He is the last piece, but you don’t have to touch him. You have touched him enough for this moment to happen. You have touched them all enough to call us to you.”
“I don’t….”
“Understand,” he finished for me.
“No.”
“You will,” he said, and it was typical Royal, because he made it sound ominous.
Mungo nudged my hand. I stroked his head, and played with one silken ear. Minnie bumped my other hand as if jealous for my attention. I petted them both, feeling the warmth and solidness of them.
“There is no dog for me,” Frost said. He had moved closer to me.
“What will be, will be,” Royal said.
Then the demi-fey rose toward the high ceiling, sending light sparkling in rainbows from the crystal chandeliers. The light bounced and played off all of us. The goblins, even Ash and Holly, were still frozen out of time with us.
It was Jonty who blinked, and looked up at me. He, of all of them, who saw. His eyes went wide, then the world let out the breath it had been holding.
CHAPTER 22
THE WORLD EXPLODED, IF YOU COULD CALL LIGHT, COLOR, music, and the perfume of flowers an explosion. I had no other word for what happened. It was like standing at ground zero on the first day that life walked on the planet, but it was also like standing in the most beautiful meadow in the world on a lovely spring day with the gentlest of breezes blowing. It was a perfect moment, and a moment of incredible violence, as if we were all gently torn apart and put together again in the blink of an eye.
Through it all, the dogs pressed close on either side. They anchored me, steadied me, kept me from breaking apart and flying into that moment. They kept me solid enough, sane enough, to survive.I clung to their fur, the touch of them in my hand. And thought, Frost has no dog to keep him here.
I thought about screaming, then it was over. Only the sense of disorientation and the memory of pain and power, fading in the dance of light and magic, let me know that it hadn’t been some sort of dream.
Doyle gazed at me across the back of his black dogs. He seemed to be healed, whole. He touched the kelpie, but did not lean on it. He stood straight and tall.
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.