“But your two peoples are no longer at war, are they?” She asked. “No,” I said. Ash had gone utterly still beside me. I could feel the tension along his muscles, as if he fought himself to be still.
“If you could undo the wrong done the goblins, would you?”
“Was it wrong?” I asked.
“What do you think?” She asked.
I thought again. Had we been wrong? I had seen what the sidhe had done with their magic. They had used the fact that only we had major offensive magic to be tyrants. We had won the wars, but in the end, it was the humans with their technology who had truly won.
“I think we won a battle, but not a war, by taking the goblins’ magic.”
Ash’s hand spasmed against my shoulder.
“But was it right, the right thing to do?” the God asked.
I started to say yes, then said, “I don’t know. I was told that our magic came from You. That would mean that we stole magic from the goblins that You had both given to them. Did you agree with what we did?”
“No one asked us,” the Goddess said.
Ash startled beside me, and I just gaped at them. They had hooded themselves again, so my eyes and my mortal mind would be able to deal with them better. When had they hooded? Just now? Minutes ago? I couldn’t remember.
“Taking the goblins’ magic was the beginning of You turning from us,” I said.
“What if you, daughter, could undo that injustice?” the God asked. “You mean give magic back to the goblins,” I said. It was always good to be clear.
“Yes,” they said together.
“You mean give Holly and Ash hands of power,” I said. Ash had actually dropped his hand, as if it were all too much.
“Yes,” they answered again. Were they beginning to fade?
“They are sidhe as well as goblin,” I said.
“Would you give them their sidhe-side powers, daughter?” Now I was answering voices.
If I said no, would the Goddess retreat from me, from all my people again? I looked at Ash, and he would not look at me. I glanced in front of us at Holly. He was glaring at me. His face showed plainly that he thought I would deny them. But it wasn’t his anger that I saw, it was the reason behind the anger. Years of looking in the mirror, and seeing all that sidhe blood looking back at you, and knowing that you would forever be denied. It didn’t matter how sidhe you looked. If you had no magic, then you weren’t real to the sidhe. You were simply not one of them. I knew what that felt like, to be among them but not one of them. I looked less sidhe than the brothers did. At least they were tall, and until you saw their eyes they could have passed. I would never pass for pure-blooded sidhe, not with a thousand crowns on my head.
“Will you give them their birthright back?” the voices asked.
For politics, I should have said no. For the safety of my world, no. For the safety of everything we’d signed treaties for, no. But in the end, I gave the only answer that felt right. “I will.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
WE WERE LEFT ALONE IN THE CIRCLE OF STONES UNDER THE round, white glow of midsummer’s moon. It rose above us, unnaturally close, a harvest moon close enough that it seemed as if we had only to reach out to caress the surface of it. In that moment, I wasn’t certain whether it was illusion or reality. Could I have touched the moon? Perhaps, but the two men with me weren’t interested in celestial bodies, and they convinced me that the moon was for gazing at, and that their bodies were the world.
Their skin was as pale and perfect as that of any sidhe. Only the scars that decorated their skin said that they didn’t have enough magic to heal their wounds cleanly. But I was Unseelie, not Seelie, and scars were just another texture to run my fingers over, lick my tongue across, and worry at with my teeth.
I made Holly cry out with pleasure with my teeth around a scar on the hard, muscled expanse of his stomach. Ash’s back was crisscrossed with claw marks, white and shiny with age. I traced my fingertips across all of it, and said, “What happened?”
Ash lay on the grass in the nest we had made of our clothes. He let my fingers play across his bare back, but he drew no breath to answer me. It was Holly who answered. “Cathmore found Ash alone when we were young. Cathmore was a great warrior, but he hunted the younger warriors whom he thought might be a threat to him someday. A lot of the warriors bear scars from him.”
I traced the claw marks down and down, until I found the firm smoothness of his ass. He shivered under the gentleness of it. I didn’t know if it was the magic of this place or the fact that there were no goblins to impress, but they both showed that gentleness, and not just pain, worked for them as pleasure.
“Cathmore. I do not know the name.”
Holly gazed at me across his brother’s body, then he touched the scars and smiled. A close, tight smile. “When Ash was healed, we hunted Cathmore down. We killed him and took his head so everyone would know that we had slain him.”
He showed me the arm that lay across his brother’s back, flexing the muscle to show a curve of hard white scar tissue. The scar looked as if his arm had nearly been cut off. “Cathmore did that, with his sword, Cathmore’s Arm.” I knew it was not unusual for a goblin to name his sword after himself. I’d always found it a little odd, but it wasn’t my custom, it was theirs.
I touched the scar, tracing my fingertips down the line of it. “A fearsome wound,” I said.
He grinned at me. “Ash carries his sword.”
“Because he gave the killing blow,” I said.
That made Ash rise enough to gaze over his shoulder at me. “How did you know that?”
“It’s goblin law. The one who strikes the killing blow gets first pick of the weapons.”
“I had forgotten that your father used to bring you to visit the goblins,” Ash said, propping himself up on his elbows.
“The goblins are the foot soldiers of the faerie court. No war has been won since the goblins joined us that would not have been lost without you.”
“Now that we are forbidden to make war, the nobles of both courts forget that,” Ash said. “We are an embarrassment even to the Unseelie.”
“We don’t clean up well enough for the press to please the queen,” Holly said. He was sitting up now, his knees drawn to his chest, his arms encircling them. It made him seem younger, more vulnerable. I had a moment of seeing what he might have been when he was young enough for Cathmore to think them prey.I crawled over the clothes and the movement of the grass underneath until I was in front of Holly. His gaze did not even pretend to look away from my breasts. It didn’t bother me. We were naked, and I wanted them to want me.
I rose, coming off of all fours, letting his gaze stay on the heavy roundness of my breasts. “I think you look amazing.”
He looked at my face then, and there was anger in the crimson of his eyes. I hesitated in the midst of the kiss I’d been seeking, not understanding the anger.
“Good enough to fuck, but not to be seen in public with,” he said.
I leaned back on my heels. “I don’t understand.”
Ash sat up, one knee bent, the other leg out straight so he framed his swell nicely. Neither of them had anything to be ashamed of in that area. I had trouble raising my gaze from between his legs to his face.
He laughed, and it was that masculine sound, pleased and sure of itself. “You’re not the first sidhe woman to want to sample forbidden fruit.”
“You’ve said that I was.”
“In public,” he said. “In front of the other goblins, yes. If a goblin lays with a sidhe, then they must show marks of violence. To do less in our kingdom is to be seen as weak. To be seen as weak is to invite challengers. We are already half sidhe, Meredith. If the goblins knew we could take our sex gentle and enjoy it, we would be challenged until even we were killed.”
Holly traced my shoulder with the edge of his hand. “Gentleness has no reward for goblins, only punishment.”
I glanced at Holly, then back to Ash as he said, “We have lived by that rule. We have punished others who were gentle. Your own pet goblin, Kitto, suffered at our hands.”
“Did you enjoy his suffering?” I asked.
He smiled. “No one but you would ask that, blunt as a goblin, with that pretty sidhe face.”
“Human too,” I said.
He nodded, but reached out to touch my cheek. “And brownie in there somewhere, though it does not show.”
I looked away from his face, out into the night. “My cousin, Cair, hated her brownie looks enough to kill our grandmother in a bid for power.”
“We heard you hunted her down with the wild hunt. Named her kinslayer.”
I nodded. “Yes.”
Holly wrapped his arms around me, all that scarred muscled strength so gentle. He held me, and whispered in my hair, “When we are alone we can say how terrible for you. That we’re sorry for the loss of your grandmother.”
Ash moved closer to us, moving my face with his fingers so he’d be sure of my gaze being on his face. “But in the world, in front of anyone, Meredith, and I mean anyone else, we are goblins. We will have to behave as goblins.”
“I understand,” I said.
“The other is not an act, Meredith. It is us, too.”
Holly pressed his face into my hair. “You smell clean and sweet, like everything good. Good enough to eat.”