Swallowing Darkness (Merry Gentry #7)(60)

I kissed Doyle first, and he had to bend down to help me do it, then I kissed Rhys. He looked at me, and there was sadness on his face. But it was not a sadness that I could fix. I could only kiss him gently on the lips, and let him know that I saw him and appreciated him, but nothing that either of us could do would make me love him the way I loved Doyle or Frost. That it pained him pained me, but not enough to change it.
I walked the rest of the way alone. Ash and Holly stood in front of me. They tried to look arrogant or hostile—their handsome faces were made for both—but under all of it was uncertainty. I made them rethink themselves, and neither sidhe nobles nor goblin warriors are accustomed to rethinking anything. Their sense of rightness is absolute in most things. I gazed into their eyes, and wasn’t sure what was about to happen, but as the scent of roses grew stronger on the cold air, I knew the Goddess was coming. The scent of roses mingled with the rich scent of herbs and leaves, as if we stood on the edge of some forest glade.
“Do you smell flowers?” Holly asked.
“I smell forest,” Ash said. “A forest like nothing in this land.”
“What are you doing to us?” Holly asked.
“You wanted to be sidhe.” I held my hands out to them.
“Yes,” Ash said.
“No,” Holly said.
I smiled at Holly. “You both want power, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Holly said, his voice a little reluctant.
“Then each of you take my hands.”
“What happens if we do?” Ash asked.
I smiled, then I laughed, and the scent of roses and the sensation of summer sun on my skin was so real that it was almost dizzying to have my eyes see the winter’s dark.
“I don’t know what will happen,” I said, and that was the truth.
“Then why should we do it?” Ash asked.
“Because if you let the smell of summer and autumn fade, if you miss this moment of power, you will always wonder what would have happened if you took my hands.”
The brothers looked at each other. They had a moment between them made up of years of scheming, fighting, surviving, all come to this second, this choice.
“She’s right,” Ash said.
“It is a sidhe trick,” Holly said.
“Probably,” he said, then he smiled.
Holly grinned back at him. “This is a bad idea, brother.”
“Yes.”
Holly reached out, and Ash echoed him. They reached out for my hands as if they’d practiced the movement. Their fingers tingled power down my skin, and it must have felt the same for them, because Holly started to draw back.
Ash said, “Don’t stop, Holly.”
“This is a bad idea, brother,” he repeated.
“This is power,” Ash said, “and I want it.”
Holly hesitated a heartbeat longer, then his hand moved with his brother’s so that they took my hands in theirs in echoing moves. “I’ve followed you all my life,” he said. “I won’t stop now.”
Then the field and the winter’s cold were gone, and we stood in a circle of standing stones on a wide plain under a full moon and a summer’s spill of stars.CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
ASH SWUNG ME AROUND SO THAT I FACED AWAY FROM HIM, ONE hand on my throat, the other around my waist, pinning my sword to my body. Holly drew his own sword, and faced the outside of the circle. His sword gleamed like cold moonlight made solid.
“Take us back,” Ash hissed in my ear.
“I didn’t bring us here.”
“Liar,” he whispered, and his fingers tightened just a little around my neck. That one flex of fingers, the firmness of his palm against my throat, made my pulse speed.
I spoke carefully, not wanting to do anything to make his fingers tighten any more. “I cannot change winter to summer, or transport us to a different country.”
His fingers squeezed just a little more, until swallowing was uncomfortable. “What do you mean, ‘a different country’?”
I spoke even more carefully. “There are no standing stones in America, not like this.”
His hand tightened until my breath wheezed under his grip.
“Then where are we?” he asked.
“A place between,” a woman’s voice answered.
Ash went very still beside me. His fingers didn’t tighten, for which I was glad, but they didn’t loosen either. My breath still wheezed out from between his fingers as he turned slowly toward that voice.
Holly said, “Who are you?”
The woman’s voice said, “You know who I am.”
Ash turned so that he saw her before I could, but I knew what we would see, or what I would see. She wore a hooded cloak that hid most of her face, but for an edge of chin or a glimpse of lips. She held a staff, and her hand would be pale one moment, dark the next; old and young; slender and not. She was the Goddess. She was all that was female, all that was woman, and all at once.
It was Ash who said, “Why have you brought us here?” Holly was still facing the figure with his sword out, as if he meant at any moment to attack.
She wasn’t flesh and blood, I knew that. I didn’t think his sword could hurt her, but it seemed wrong to be threatening her. I might have protested except that Ash’s hand squeezed too tightly for words.
“Take us back or your chosen one dies.”
“Harm her and you will never have the power you seek, Ash.”
His hand eased a little so that I could breathe without fighting for it. “So if I let her go you’ll give me power?”
“She is the key to your power. Without her there is nothing.”
“I do not understand.”
Holly lunged toward the figure. A sword clanged down the length of his blade, pushing it against the grass, and a body was on the other end of that sword. He was tall and short, muscled and not, dark and light, all men and none. He had thrown off the cloak that they wore to save our minds so that you simply had to see all the many forms at once. He stood bare in all his beauty and terror, for a long, muscled body can be just for pleasure, but that same muscled weight can thrust a sword and spill blood. He was the greatest of tenderness and the greatest of destruction all at once. The potential was all there in that swirl of images, shapes, scents, and sights. 
He disarmed Holly, but he had to cut the goblin’s hand to do it. It spoke of Holly’s skill or the God’s impatience. His voice was deep and rumbling as gravel, and the next light and airy as any, all men echoed in his voice. “Who am I?”
Holly went to his knees with the sword point at his neck. “You are the God.”
“Who is my consort?”
“The Goddess,” Holly answered.
The God stepped back to the cloaked Goddess, but the moment they touched hands her cloak was gone, and they stood side by side. I don’t know what the goblins saw, but I saw a dizzying swirl of faces and bodies. They were all these beings at once, but my mind could not hold it all. I finally closed my eyes, for I could not take it all in.
Ash began to move, and I opened my eyes as I realized that he was moving us both to kneel on the summer grass. He’d stopped choking me somewhere during the revelation. In fact, now the arm that had been choking me was around my shoulders. What had been hurting me was holding me almost tenderly now.
“It has been long since the goblins saw the face of God,” Ash said. “And Goddess,” the Goddess said, and there was chiding in her voice. It was the voice of every mother, every big sister, every aunt, every teacher, all rolled into one echo.
“And longer still since the goblins saw the face of the Goddess,” Ash said. If he resented the chiding, it didn’t show in his voice.
“Are you goblins?” the God asked.
“Yes,” Holly answered.
Ash was a little slower with “Yes.”
“Are you sidhe?” the Goddess asked.
“No,” Holly answered.
“We have no magic,” Ash answered, as if that answered the question, and perhaps it did.
“What would you give to possess the magic of the sidhe?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Holly said. “I am goblin, and that is enough.”
“She did not say we had to become sidhe, brother,” Ash said. “She spoke of the magic of the sidhe.”
“Magic of the sidhe, but still goblin,” Holly said. “That would be worth much.”
“Once there were many courts, even among the goblins,” the Goddess said.
“Once,” the God said, “there was magic in every court of faerie.”
“The sidhe stole our magic from us,” Ash said, and his hand that had been tender tightened against my shoulder. He didn’t hurt me, but his body was suddenly tense as it knelt beside me.
“Daughter,” the Goddess said, “what say you to this?”
“The sidhe stripped the goblins of their magic to win the last Great War between our peoples.”
“Do you think this was well done?” She asked.
I thought before I answered, because I could feel the magic beginning to gather around us. You would think that in the presence of Deities there would be no room for magic to build, that their presence would mask everything, but whatever was building in this summer night in this place between pressed against the air like the weight of invisible rock, as if a mountain were building above us one thought at a time.
Ash’s arm across my shoulders was almost trembling with tension. I had a moment to glance up at him, and he was staring as hard as he could straight ahead. I think he was afraid of what I might see in his eyes.“I’ve been told that if we hadn’t taken the magic from the goblins they would have won the war.”