Mistral shook his head. “I did terrible things back then. I had no mercy, and my queen, my love, had less mercy than I did. We were…We killed.” He shook his head. “It began in magic and love, but she fell in love with our creations in every sense of the word.”
“You are he, then,” Sholto said.
Mistral gave him a look of utter despair. “I would beg you to tell no one, King Sholto.”
“It’s not every night that a man meets his creator,” Sholto said. He was watching the other man with an edge of anger on his face, or maybe defiance.
“I am not that. The being who acted in such arrogance was punished for it, and is no more. Whatever I was once, the true Gods took it from me.”
“But our dark goddess,” Sholto said. “It is said that the gods tore her to pieces and fed her to us.”
Mistral nodded. “She would not give up control over you. She would not give you the independence to be your own people. She wanted to keep you as…pets and lovers.”
Perhaps I looked surprised, because he spoke to me. “Yes, Princess, I know well that there are many uses for all those parts. She who was once my love and I fashioned them for pleasure as well as terror.”
“You kept your secret well,” Doyle said.
“When the gods themselves humble you, Darkness, wouldn’t you hide yourself in shame?”
“But your magic calls to mine,” Sholto said.
“I never dreamed that the return of magic to faerie would waken that in me.” Mistral looked frightened.
“This is a legend so old my father never told it to me,” I said.
“It is part of our lost creation myths,” Doyle said, “before the Christians came and sanitized them.”
Mistral crawled off the bed. He was shaking his head. “I cannot afford to be near when Sholto glows.”
“Don’t you want to know what would happen?” Sholto asked.
“No,” Mistral said. “I don’t.”
“Leave him,” Doyle said. “Nothing we do with Meredith is about force. We will not force Mistral now.”
Sholto looked at Doyle, and there was that moment of arrogance that was all sidhe, and no amount of tentacled extras could disguise where it came from. I watched the thought cross his face and travel all the way through his eyes that he wanted to try. He wanted to know what would happen if he and Mistral joined their magic.
“No,” I said, and touched Sholto’s face. I brought him down to meet my gaze.
That arrogant defiance stayed for a second, then he blinked and was simply arrogant. “As my queen wills it.”
I smiled at him because even I didn’t believe it. He would remember this moment, and he would not forget the feel of power. Sholto was a very nice guy for a king, but in the end all kings seek power; it is the nature of who they are, and this king would not forget that the “god” who created his race was awake again.
I did the only thing I could think of to break the terribly serious atmosphere. I looked down at Doyle and said, “All my good work is undone with this serious talk. I’ll have to start all over again.”
He smiled at me. “How could I forget that nothing dissuades you from your goal?”
I put into my eyes all that I felt for him. “When my goal is such as this, why would anything dissuade me?”
He came to me, with Sholto still wrapped loosely around me. But when he touched the other side of us, there was no jump of power. For Doyle, Sholto, and me, it was just flesh and the magic of any sidhe when pleasure is in the air. Mistral found a seat on the edge of the garden that surrounded us, and did his best to ignore us. I hated for him to feel left out or sad, but it seemed important for us to make love in this place. It needed love, and so did I.
Mistral’s deep voice said, “I was dying in the field. How did I get here, and where in faerie is here?”
“They rescued me from the hospital,” Doyle said, then he frowned. “You were crowned and…” He raised my left hand, and for a moment it didn’t look like my hand. There was a new tattoo on it, one of thorny vines and blooming roses.
He rose to his knees, but he wasn’t looking at me now. He reached across to Sholto.
The other man hesitated, then offered him his right hand. Doyle held the paler hand in his black one, and the same tattoo curled around Sholto’s hand and wrist.Mistral walked back to us, and we saw that the marks of the arrows seemed to have vanished as had Doyle’s burns. Neither of them looked happy to be healed, but instead were very serious.
Doyle drew our hands together so the tattoos were touching. “I did not dream it, then. You were handfasted and crowned by faerie itself.”
“By the Goddess,” Sholto said, and he sounded way too satisfied. The three men were acting oddly, and I had one of those moments when I knew I was missing something. That happened sometimes when you are barely more than thirty and everyone else in your bed is hundreds of years old. Everyone was young once, but sometimes I wished I had a cheat sheet so I wouldn’t need all the explanations.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Sholto said, again all too smug.
Doyle pulled Sholto’s hand down so I could see our two hands together. “You see the mark?”
“The tattoo, yes,” I said. “It’s a shadow of the roses that bound our hands.”
“You have been handfasted with Sholto, Merry,” Doyle said, and he said each word slowly, carefully, giving me the intensity of those dark eyes.
“Handfasted. You mean…” I frowned at him. “You mean married?” “Yes,” he said, and there was rage in that one word.
“It took both our magics to save you, Doyle.”
“The sidhe do not marry more than one spouse, Meredith.”
“I bear children by all of you, so by our laws you are all my kings, or will be.”
Sholto raised his hand, gazing at it. “I’m too young to remember when faerie married us to each other. Was it always like this?”
“The roses are more a Seelie mark,” Doyle said, “but yes, handfasted and marked as a couple.”
I stared at the pretty roses on my skin and was suddenly afraid.
“Am I within my rights to refuse to share Meredith?” Sholto asked.
I gave him a look. “I would be careful what you say, King of the sluagh.”
“Faerie has married us, Meredith.”
I shook my head. “It helped us save Doyle.”
“We are marked as a couple.” He held his hand out to me.
“When the Goddess makes me choose, she lets me know ahead of time. There was no choice offered, no warning of loss.”
“By our laws—” Sholto started to say.
I interrupted him. “Don’t start.”
“He’s right, Merry,” Doyle said.
“Don’t complicate this, Doyle. We did what we had to do last night to save you both.”
“It is the law,” Mistral said.
“Only if I am with his child and no one else’s, which is not true. The goddess Clothra, who got pregnant from three different lovers, wasn’t forced to marry just one of them.”
“They were her brothers,” Mistral said.
“Were they really, or is that just what legend made of them?” I was asking someone who might actually know.
Mistral and Doyle exchanged a look. Sholto wasn’t old enough to know the answer. “Clothra lived in a time when gods and goddesses were allowed to marry whom they would,” Doyle said.
“She wouldn’t have been the first goddess to marry a close relative,” Mistral said.
“But the point is, she didn’t marry any of them, and the sovereign goddesses, the ones whom humans had to marry to rule, had many lovers.”
“Are you saying that you’re a sovereign goddess, a living embodiment of the land itself?” Sholto asked with a raised eyebrow.
“No, but I am saying that you wouldn’t like what would happen if you tried to make me be monogamous with just you.”
Sholto’s handsome face set in petulant lines, and it was close enough to one of Frost’s favorite emotions to make my chest tight. “I know you do not love me, Princess.”
“Don’t make this about hurt feelings, Sholto. Don’t be ordinary. In the old days there were different kings, but only one goddess to marry to rule, right?”
They exchanged looks. “But they were human kings, so the goddess outlasted them,” Doyle said.
“From what I heard, the sovereign goddess didn’t give up her lovers just because she had a king,” Sholto said.
Doyle looked down at me. I couldn’t read the expression on his face. “Are you saying you will change a thousand years of tradition among us?” he asked.
“If that is what it takes, then yes.”
He looked down at me, the expressions on his face all mixed together. A frown, a half-smile, amusement in his eyes; but what I valued the most was the fear leaving them. For it had been fear when he saw the marks on Sholto and me.
“I will ask again,” Mistral said. “Where are we? I do not recognize this bower we rest in.”
“We are in my kingdom,” Sholto said.
“The sluagh have no place so fair inside their faerie mound,” Mistral said, his voice thick with certainty and sarcasm.
“How would any of the Unseelie nobles know what is inside my kingdom? Once Meredith’s father, Prince Essus, died none of you darkened my door again. We were good enough to fight for you, but not to visit.” Sholto’s voice held that anger that he’d come to me with, an anger forged of years of being told he wasn’t quite good enough to be truly Unseelie. There had been years of the sluagh being used as a weapon. And like all weapons, you use it, but you do not ask a nuclear bomb if it wants to blow things up. You simply push a button, and it does its job.