Swallowing Darkness

Chapter Twelve

I expected to see one of the sluagh with the nightflyers, but it was a man. He looked human, though he had a large hump on his back. He was handsome, with short brown hair, and a smiling face. He had a black doctor's bag with him.

I looked at Sholto.

"He is human, but he has been with us too long to set foot on mortal soil."

Humans could come to faerie and never age, but if they ever went back, all the years they'd cheated would come upon them all at once. Once you stayed in faerie any length of time, you could never go back, not and be truly human.

"He was a doctor before he came, but he has studied long in faerie. He will heal your Storm Lord if anyone here can."

I realized that I'd touched Mistral's body only through his clothes for a time. I moved so I could see his face, and what I saw was not a comfort. His normally shining white skin was almost as gray as his hair. Some of the sidhe, myself included, could change their skin color with glamour, but this pasty gray was not that.

Had the Goddess distracted me with magic, only to let me lose one of my kings? Surely not.

The healer said, "King Sholto and Princess Meredith, I am honored to serve." But it was a cursory greeting. His brown eyes were already looking more at the patient than at us. That was fine with me. He felt for Mistral's pulse with one well-groomed hand. His handsome face was very serious, and his eyes had that distant listening quality.

He touched one of the partially healed wounds. "My king, some magic has healed his wounds, but he is still very ill. What made these wounds?"

"Arrows tipped with cold iron," Sholto said.

The healer pursed his lips, and ran his hands quickly over Mistral. "Let us find a room where I can tend him properly."

"We will take him to my room," Sholto said.

The healer looked startled for a moment, then simply said, "As my king wills it." He began to walk back toward the tunnel from which he'd entered.

Sholto said, "Meredith, follow the doctor."

I started to argue that I wanted to be able to see Mistral, but something in Sholto's face made me simply nod. I followed the doctor and only glanced behind to see that Sholto was following with Mistral still in his arms.

Sholto was right. There was no guarantee that I did not have enemies here in the sluagh. We thought I was safer here, but I'd had people from this faerie mound try to kill me too. It had simply been for a different motive. The hags, as in night hags, who had once been Sholto's personal guard had tried to kill me out of jealousy. They were more than just bodyguards, as were my own guards, and the hags had thought that Sholto would forget them once he had his first taste of sidhe flesh. But the hags who had meant my death were dead themselves now. Two I had killed in self-defense. One had died at Sholto's own hand, to keep me safe. There were still some among his court who feared that me being with their king would change them forever and take away what made them sluagh. That my magic would make them into a pale version of the Seelie. It was the same fear my aunt Andais, the Queen of Air and Darkness, felt among her own court.

So I walked behind the doctor with Sholto behind me. Even with Mistral's life in our hands my safety was to be worried about. Would it always be that way? Would there never be safety inside or out of faerie for me now?

I prayed to the Goddess for safety, for guidance, and for Mistral. The scent of roses came gently to me. Then the scent of herbs followed. Thyme, mint, and basil, as if we walked upon strewn herbs, but a glance down showed that the floor was bare. In fact, it was the most cavelike of all the courts, all bare stone that looked more water-carved than hand-hewn.

"I smell herbs and roses," Sholto said from behind me.

"As do I," I said.

The corridor opened wider, and there were two cloaked figures before a pair of double doors. For a moment I thought they were night hags as his guard had been once before, but then they turned and looked at us, and the figures inside the cloaks were male. They were almost as tall as Sholto himself, pale and muscular, but there was some smoothness to their faces, lipless cuts for mouths, and oval, slitted eyes that held darkness like a cave.

"My cousins," Sholto said. "Chattan and Iomhair." The last time I'd seen his guard he'd added two uncles, but both had died defending him. I wondered if these two were the sons of those lost uncles, but I did not ask. It isn't always good to remind someone that you (meaning I) were there when their fathers died. People tended to start blaming you if you were always around when people died. That one hadn't been my fault, but if you can't blame your cousin and king, I wouldn't make a bad target for blame.

I greeted them, and they said, very formally, "Princess Meredith, you honor our sithen with your presence." It was way too polite for sluagh society.

I answered automatically in a formal tone. Years of being at court had made it habit. "It is I who is honored to be among the sluagh, for you are the strong left hand of the Unseelie Court."

They exchanged a look as we went through the doors. One of them, and they looked so alike I couldn't be sure which, said, "It has been long since that title was given to the sluagh by an Unseelie royal."

Sholto carried Mistral to the large bed on the far side of the room. I turned to answer the guard. "Then it has been too long since the sluagh were given their due by the Unseelie Court. I come here tonight seeking shelter and safety among the sluagh, not among the Unseelie or the Seelie. I come with your king's unborn child in my body, and I seek safety here among his people."

"Then the rumor is true? You bear Sholto's child?"

"I do," I said.

"Leave them, Chattan," said the other guard, Iomhair. "They have wounded to tend."

Chattan bowed, and closed the doors, but he watched me as he did it, as if it were important. I stood there and held his gaze, because there was weight to it. There were moments when I could feel not just magic, but also fate weave around me. I knew that Chattan was important, or that the small conversation we'd just had was. I could feel it, and it wasn't until the doors closed that I felt free to go to the bed to see to Mistral.

Sholto and the doctor were stripping him of the last of his clothes. I remembered him as so strong, so very alive. He lay on the bed as immovable as the dead. His chest rose and fell, but his breaths were shallow. His skin still had that unhealthy gray pallor to it. Without the clothes in the way you could see how many wounds marred his body. I counted seven separate ones before Sholto came to me. He grabbed my arm and turned me from the bed.

"You look pale, My Princess. Sit down."

I shook my head. "It's Mistral who's hurt."

Sholto took both my hands in his, and looked into my face. He seemed to be studying me. He let go of one hand so he could touch my forehead. "You feel cool to the touch."

"I've been out in the winter cold, Sholto." I tried to see around his body to the bed.

"Meredith, if it comes to a choice between having the healer look at you and the babes you carry or saving Mistral, I will choose you and the babies. So sit down and prove to me that you are not going back into shock. Riding with the wild hunt is not often an occupation for women, and I have never heard of a pregnant woman or goddess doing it at all."

I heard his words, but all I could think of was that Mistral might be dying.

He squeezed my hand hard. The pain was enough to make me frown up at him and try to pull away. "You're hurting me," I said.

"I would shake you, but I don't know what that would do to the babies. Meredith, I need you to take care of yourself so we can take care of Mistral. Do you understand that?"

He let go of my hand, and led me gently by the elbow to a chair that must have been there all along. It was as if I hadn't seen the room until that moment, as if all I could see was Mistral, Sholto, and, vaguely, the healer. Was I in shock? Had I gone back into shock as the magic receded? Or were all the events of the evening simply catching up with me?

The chair Sholto sat me in was large. The arms under my hands were carved wood, smooth from years of other hands caressing it. The cushions underneath me were soft, and the draperies that were curled over the back of the chair were silk, a deep purple like ripe grapes or the darker color of wine. I looked around the room and found that most of the room was done in shades of purple and burgundy. I think I'd expected black and gray the way the Queen's room was done. Sholto spent so much time in the Unseelie Court trying to be as good as, and fit in with, the Unseelie nobles that I'd just assumed that the black he wore at court was what he would have done his home in, but now I was here, and it was nothing like I'd imagined.

Among the burgundy and purple there were hints of red and lavender, gold and yellow here and there, interwoven with the darker colors. My apartment in Los Angeles had been mostly burgundy and pink. It hadn't occurred to me until that moment that whoever I married would have a say in the decor of our home. I was pregnant with their children, but I didn't really know their favorite colors, except for Galen. I'd known that Galen liked green since I was small. But the rest of the men, even Doyle and my lost Frost, hadn't had time to tell me their likes and dislikes of small things. Colors, cushions, rugs, or bare wood; what did they prefer? I had no idea. We'd gone from emergency to emergency for so long, or been working to make ends meet, that there hadn't been time to worry about the typical things couples discuss.

I'd spent my early life with my father out among the humans, American humans, so I knew how to be a couple, but I had the same problem that all royals had. We could try to be ordinary, but in the end, it wasn't truly possible. What we were would always overwhelm who we were.

Sholto appeared in front of me with a cup in his hand. Steam rose from it, and it smelled thick, warm, sweet. I could identify some of the spices in it, but not all.

"Mulled wine, but I can't drink, not while I'm pregnant."

The healer spoke from the bed. "Did you see the servant bring in the wine?"

I blinked at him, past Sholto's shoulder. "No," I said.

"You must have something to help you, Princess Meredith. I believe you are going into shock again, and how many shocks can you take in one night while pregnant with twins? It's a hard thing on a body, and although the fact that you are descended from fertility deities is a help to you, you are also part human, and part brownie. Neither of them is free from complications."

"What do you know of brownies?" I asked, as Sholto wrapped my hands around the cup. I needed both hands for the smooth wood.

"Henry has treated many of the lesser fey while he has been with us," Sholto said. "One of the reasons he came to our court was his curiosity about our many forms. He thought he could learn more here."

"So you've helped brownies birth babies?" I asked.

Sholto used one hand to start the cup toward my mouth. My hands stayed around the cup, but didn't help him. I felt strangely passive, as if nothing mattered that much. They were right. I needed something.

"I have," the doctor said, "and I promise you, Princess, that one cup of mulled wine will not harm you or your children. It will help you think more clearly, and warm you from the terrible things you have seen this night." He sounded very kind, and his brown eyes were full of sincerity.

"You're a witch," I said.

"A good one, I promise, but I did train as a doctor, and I am a healer. But, yes, I am what the humans call a psychic now. Back in my mortal day I was a witch, and that, along with the hump on my back, put me in grave danger of being killed for dealing with the devil."

"The old king of the sluagh," I said.

He nodded. "I was seen with some of the sluagh one night, and that sealed my fate among the humans. Now drink. Drink and be well." There was more to his words than just kindness. There was power. Drink and be well. I knew there was magic and will in his words, and more than just spices in the wine.

Sholto helped me drink it, and from the first touch of the warm, spicy liquid on my tongue I felt a little more alert. Swallowing it spread warmth through my entire body, in a rush of comfort. It was like being wrapped in a favorite blanket on a winter's night, with a cup of hot tea in one hand, a favorite book in the other, and your beloved lying with his head in your lap. It was all that in one cup of warm wine.

I drank, and by the end of the cup Sholto was no longer having to guide my hands.

"Better?" the doctor asked.

"Much," I said.

Sholto took the cup from me, and put it on a tray on the small table beside the chair. There was even a lamp beside the chair, curved up over the back of it. It was a modern lamp, which meant that this room at least was wired for electricity. As much as I had missed faerie in my exile on the West Coast, seeing the lamp, and knowing that I could turn it on with the flip of a switch, was very comforting. There were moments lately when magic seemed so plentiful that a little technology was not at all a bad thing.

"Do you feel well enough to join us at the bed?" the doctor asked.

I thought about it before answering, then nodded. "Yes, I do."

"Bring her, My King, for I need your help."

Sholto helped me stand. I had a moment of dizziness. His hand was very solid in mine, his other hand on my waist. The room stopped moving, and I wasn't certain if that was because of the wine, the magic in the wine, the night, or something about carrying two lives inside my body. I knew that if I was human, truly human, twins were supposed to be hard on the body. But it was very early in the pregnancy, wasn't it?

Sholto led me to the bed, and there was a ramp up to it so that it was on a dais, but with no steps. I wondered if the last king of the sluagh hadn't found steps to his liking. The pure-blooded nightflyers didn't have feet to use steps, so a ramp would work better. Of course, they could fly, so maybe the ramp had been meant for some even older king.

Someone snapped their fingers in my face. It startled me, made me see the doctor's face close to mine. "The wine should have taken care of this distraction. I am not certain she is well enough to help us, My King." The doctor, Henry, looked worried, and I could feel his concern. I realized that he could project his emotions. If he could choose what emotions to share with his patients, it must have made his bedside manner amazing.

"What do you need us to do, Henry?" Sholto asked.

"I have put a poultice on each wound, and it will draw some of the poison out, but all the denizens of faerie are magic. They need it to survive the way humans need air or water. I've long maintained that the reason cold iron is so deadly to faerie is that it negates magic. In effect, the iron in his body is destroying the magic that makes him live. We need to give him other magic to replace it."

"How do we do that?" Sholto asked.

"This is magic of a higher order than I have in my poor repertoire. It needs the magic of the sidhe, and I will never be that." There was a taste of regret to his words, but no bitterness. He had made peace with who and what he was long ago.

"I am not a healer," Sholto said.

The smell of roses and herbs returned. "It isn't healers who are needed, Sholto," I said. "Your doctor is a great healer."

Henry bowed to me. His twisted spine made it a shallow bow, but it was as graceful as any I'd been given. "You are most generous with your praise, Princess Meredith."

"I am honest." The perfume of roses was growing stronger. It was not the heavy, cloying scent of modern roses, but the light, sweet scent of the wild. The herbs added a warm, thick undertone to the scent, as if we were standing in the middle of an herb garden with a hedge of wild roses around it to guard it and keep it safe.

The wall beside the large bed stretched inward, like the skin of some great beast being pushed farther away. When the Seelie or Unseelie sithen moved, it was almost invisible. One moment this size, the next bigger or smaller, or just different. But this was the sluagh sithen, and apparently here we'd get to see the process.

The dark stone stretched like rubber into a darkness more complete than any night. It was cave darkness, but more than that, it was the darkness at the beginning of time before the word and the light had found it, before there was anything else but the dark. People forget that the darkness came first, not the light, not the word of Deity, but the dark. Perfect, complete, needing nothing, asking nothing, simply all there was was the dark.

The scent of roses and herbs was so real that I could taste it on my tongue, like drinking in a summer's day.

Dawn broke in the darkness. A sun that had nothing to do with the sky outside the sithen rose in the distant curve of sky, and as the soft light brightened, it revealed a garden. I would have said it was a knot garden, that time-consuming art of grooming herbs into clean, curved, Victorian lines, but my eyes couldn't quite make out the herbs' shape. It was almost as if the longer you tried to see the plants, and the stone walkway between them, the more your eye couldn't make sense of them. It was like a knot garden based on non-euclidean geometry. The kind of shapes that are impossible with physics the way it's supposed to work, but then there was a sun underground, and a garden that hadn't been there moments before. What was a little nonstandard geometry compared to that?

A hedge bordered the entire garden. Had it been there a second before? I could neither remember it; nor not remember it. It simply was. It was the circle of wild roses, like the one I'd seen in a vision once. That had been a mixed vision, part wonderment and part near-death experience. I fought not to remember the great boar that had nearly killed me before I'd spattered its blood on the snow, because with creation magic what you thought could become all too real.

I thought about healing Mistral. I thought about my babies. I thought about the man standing beside me. I reached for Sholto's hand. He actually startled, looking at me with eyes too wide, but he smiled when I smiled.

"Let us take him to the garden," I said.

Sholto nodded, and bent to pick up the still-unconscious Mistral. I looked back at the doctor. "Are you coming, Henry?"

He shook his head. "This magic is not for me. Take him, save him. I will explain where you are."

Sholto said, "I think the garden will remain here, Henry."

"We'll see, won't we?" Henry said with a smile, but there was regret in his eyes. I'd seen that look in other humans inside faerie. That look that says that no matter how long they stay, they know they can never truly be one of us. We can prolong their life, their youth, but they are still human in a land where no one else is.

I knew what it was to be mortal in a land of immortals. I knew what it was to know that I was aging and the others were not. I was part human, and it was moments like this that made me remember what that meant. Even with the most powerful magic in all of faerie coming to my hand, I still knew regret and mortality.

I went on tiptoe and laid a gentle kiss on Henry's cheek. He looked surprised, then pleased. "Thank you, Henry."

"It is my honor to serve the royals of this court," he said, in a voice that almost held tears. He touched where I had kissed him as I moved away, as if he could feel it still.

I went to Sholto, who stood there holding Mistral as if he weighed nothing and he could have held him all night. I took Sholto's arm, laid my other hand on Mistral's bare skin, and we walked into the garden.