“Let me go, Galen,” I said.
“No, Merry, no.” But he wasn’t looking at me as he said it; his eyes were all for Eamon. Tall, handsome Eamon, being turned into so much raw meat. “They’ll be all right.” His voice didn’t sound as certain as his words.
I looked at Adair. “Let me go.”
Adair shook his head. “I will not, Princess. I will stand and I will hold you, so you do not interfere.”
Brii said, “You’ll stand and hold her, because then you don’t have to help.” He moved past us in a swirl of yellow hair.
“Help do what?” I asked, and looked from Galen’s serious face, his attention all for what was happening against the wall, to Adair, who would not meet my eyes or look at the queen butchering Eamon.
Doyle was close enough to touch the queen now. His deep voice carried. “My queen, we have returned.”
It was as if she didn’t hear him, as if the world had narrowed down to the blood-soaked blade in her hand, and the body she was cutting.
“My queen.” This time Doyle reached out and laid his dark hand on the whiteness of her arm, just above where the blood had begun to run and stain her skin.
She turned on him in a movement almost too fast for the eye to follow. The blade flashed silver, and fresh blood flew in an arc from Doyle’s arm.
I said his name before I could think. The queen turned puzzled eyes out into the room, as if seeking my voice, but Doyle stepped into her line of vision, and she slashed at him again. She hit him once more before Rhys moved up a little ahead of him. I couldn’t hear what he said, but whatever it was, it was enough. She struck him. Only the twitch of his shoulders showed that it hurt, but he moved backward as if trying to escape the blow. She didn’t like that. She came for him in a wild, slashing attack, and Amatheon was suddenly in her way. She opened his arm from shoulder to hand. The blow made him stumble and turn to protect the arm. She drove the knife into his back, and he fell, dropping to his knees. His eyes were wide with pain, and something else: resignation.
“Welcome to the world of the guards, Princess,” Adair said. “Welcome to how we keep each other alive. None but the queen and her Ravens have ever witnessed this. You are most privileged.” That last held an irony, a bitterness that seemed to cut the very air, as if there were power in it.
A small sound brought my gaze to the guards still kneeling on the floor in a host of bare skin and silken hair. Hair the color of new-mown hay, hair the color of oak leaves, hair the color of dragonfly wings in the sun, hair the color of purple Easter grass, skin that glistened in the light like white metal, skin that shimmered as if sprinkled with gold dust, skin that held the richness of fur on its surface like some elaborate tattoo, skin as red as flame, as pink as bubble gum. Even stripped of their armor, their clothes, their weapons, they were all different, all so terribly unique. They were the Unseelie sidhe, and stripping them could not make them less.
I wasn’t sure who had made the noise, but one pair of eyes glared up at me through a fall of grey hair—not the grey of age, but the grey of clouds before a rain. The eyes that stared up through that long, pooling hair were a swimming green color, that greenish-yellowish, near gold, that the world looks just before the might of heaven roars down on your head. His eyes were the color of the world before it drowns in a storm. Because that was who he was, Mistral, the master of winds, bringer of storms. His eyes were as changeable as the weather, and this swimming green was a sign of high anxiety. I’d been told that once upon a time, the sky darkened when Mistral’s eyes looked like that.He caught my gaze, and held it. He told me with his eyes, his face, that I was just another useless royal. That I stood there guarded and well while they bled. Perhaps it was just my own guilt that I read in his eyes. My father had raised me to believe that being royal meant more than just having power over people. It meant in a way that people had power over you, too, because you were supposed to take care of them. I was in line to be queen, to have the power of life and death over these men, but here I was hiding. Hiding, and so afraid I could barely think. The feel of Galen’s and Adair’s hands on my arms had gone from an insult to a comfort. I wanted them to hold on to me. I wanted an excuse not to have to do anything. I was hiding behind the very people whom I was supposed to keep safe. I felt the look in Mistral’s eyes like a blow. He knelt on the floor, knelt where the queen had told him to kneel, probably with the promise that if he moved he could be chained against the wall, too. That was her usual threat. I’d once knelt on this same floor until I passed out. I was after all only mortal, and could not kneel for a day and a night. They could. And if she willed it, they would.
I could still hear the sounds from across the room, but I stared at Mistral as if his face were the only thing in the world because if I looked away, I would have to see what was happening. I didn’t want to see. I was tired of seeing horrors. But no matter how hard I tried, I could still hear.
Small gasps, the sound of ripping cloth, and that thick, meaty sound that is flesh parting under a blade. It has to be a truly deep wound for that sound, a wound to the heaviest, most vital parts of the body. Finally a sound like spraying water, as if someone had turned on a hose, made me look.
I turned toward that noise, slowly, the way you turn in nightmares. Galen tried to move in front of me. But it was as if he, too, were moving too slowly. I saw Onilwyn’s face wide-eyed with surprise. Blood fountained from his neck, spraying out and around like crimson rain. I caught a glimpse of pale spine before Galen’s broad shoulders blocked my view.
I looked up at him, saw the pain in those pale green eyes. My voice was a hoarse whisper: “Move, Galen, let me see.”
He shook his head, his hair drying into haphazard curls as the ice had melted. “You don’t want to see.”
“If I am princess here, then you must move. If I am not princess here, then what in the name of all that grows and lives are we doing here?”
It was enough. He moved and I could see what the queen had done to her Ravens, to her men, and to mine.
Chapter 29
She was hacking at Frost. His dove-grey shirt was black with blood. He turned as he fell, and the lower half of his long silver hair clung to his body, scarlet with blood. He fell to all fours, head down. She raised the knife for a two-handed heart strike, and Doyle’s arm was there, sweeping her arms away from Frost’s exposed back, bringing her murderous attention to himself. His skin and clothing were so dark that it was harder to see the blood that was already on him, but bone glinted white and red on his side, where she’d nearly cleaved him to the heart.
I spoke his name, soft, a whisper. “Doyle.”
Andais began to slash at him, and he guarded his body with his arms. Blood flew from him as her blade tried to find bone, tried to find something to kill. It was as if by not allowing her to slash at the main meat of his body, he offended her. Even in her madness, this was not allowed. You did not fight the queen and live. In truth, she could not kill him, but she drove him to his knees with the fury of her blows. The knife was red with blood, the hilt slick with it, so Andais had to change her grip as she drove the point downward. It looked as if all her force was committed to plunging the knife into his chest. He moved his hands to block it, and she moved, like dark lightning, a blur of black and red, and plunged the blade into his face.
The force of the blow spun him around, and I watched his face split from chin to the top of his cheekbone. She could not kill him with the knife she wielded, but she could maim him.
Something inside me changed in that moment. I was still afraid, so afraid that it sat like something stale and metal on my tongue, but they say that hatred grows out of fear. Well, sometimes so does rage. The fear that had been a small, cringing thing rose inside me, and found it had wings, and teeth, and claws. Hatred, not of Andais, but of the terrible waste of it all. This was wrong. Even if I had not loved these men, it would still have been wrong.
Rhys darted in, took a blow that spurted blood from his arm, but it was as if she had grown tired of playing. These were the best warriors the sidhe could boast, but I watched her move like something liquid, faster than Rhys could follow, as she’d been too fast for Doyle. I realized in that moment that they weren’t entirely playing; she was simply better than they were. She was the Queen of Air and Darkness, the dark goddess of battle.
If the Ravens could not stand against her, then what could I do? The men were all faster, stronger, better than I was. There was no weapon here that would aid me, except in getting myself killed. But I could not stand and watch, and do nothing. The anger translated into power, and I could not stop my skin from beginning to glow. The beginnings of power that would be as nothing to Andais.
Galen and Adair looked at me. Galen shook his head, “There is nothing you can do, Merry.” His grip tightened almost painfully on my arm. “They won’t die.”
“No,” Adair said in his bitter voice, “we will heal, as we have healed before.”
“Not this bad,” and it was Mistral’s voice, soft, but purring with thunder, so that it called goose bumps up and down my body, and something about it made my skin glow brighter. His strange, drowning deep eyes met mine, and he said, “She’s never slaughtered us like this. Something’s wrong.”