Лорел Гамильтон - A Stroke Of Midnight

A pulse of power shot from the chalice along my skin. It raised the hair on my body, and collapsed me to my knees. Frost and Hawthorne kept everyone else from touching me.

“What is wrong with the princess?” Dogmaela said.

“And why do you not want us touching her?” This from Aisling, who was still hiding behind his hood and muffler so that only the spirals of his eyes showed. He’d been one of the queen’s men, and never mine before or even now. His eyes were not the three rings of color common among the sidhe, but a spiral painted in lines of color, with his pupil at the heart of the design. As a child I’d once asked him how he could see out of them, and he had smiled and replied that he did not know.

Frost, Hawthorne, and I exchanged glances. All the other guards looked at me where I knelt and waited. Waited for me to make up my mind.

The sweet scent of apple blossoms filled the air, and that sense of peace that could come when you worshipped filled me. I wasn’t certain it was a good idea but I got to my feet and flung my cloak back, revealing the chalice in my hands.

“That isn’t…” Dogmaela began.

“It cannot be,” Aisling said.

“But it is.” Ivi looked at me with a seriousness that the laughter did not touch. He shook his head. “You’ve had it since you arrived back at the courts, haven’t you?”

I nodded.

“How?” Dogmaela asked. “How?”

“It came to me in a dream, and when I woke it was real.”

Several of them were shaking their heads.

Ivi grinned suddenly. “You fell to your knees when I said we should be trying to make you queen, instead of playing copper.”

The chalice pulsed between my hands, and my body reacted to it. For an instant my skin glowed white, my hair was a crimson halo around me, and my eyes glowed green and gold, so that for a heartbeat I saw the color out of the edges of my vision. The power vanished as instantly as it had come, leaving my pulse thudding in my throat.

“Hmm, that was fun,” Ivi said.

“You just want to fuck her,” Dogmaela said, and she made it sound like a dirty thing. An unusual attitude among any fey.

“Yes,” Ivi said, “but that doesn’t make me wrong.”

“The police will return soon,” I said, my voice still a little breathy from the power rush.

“And once they return, the investigation will take all your attention,” Frost said. “Whatever we are to discuss, it must be now.”

I looked up at his face, so carefully arrogant. “Are you saying I should take time out of solving a double homicide to have sex?”

Hawthorne’s quiet voice came. “I am sorry that Beatrice and the reporter are dead, but Ivi is correct in one way. My life and the lives of my fellow guards will not change if these murders go unsolved. Prince Cel becoming king will change a great many things.” He removed his helmet, exposing his wavy hair, held back by braids, and the green, pink, and red of his eyes. He was lovely, but all the sidhe were lovely. I’d never really thought of how he compared to the other men. It was as if I’d never really seen him before, never noticed that he was fair of face, broad of shoulder, even by sidhe standards.

Frost made a motion that caught my eye. “Meredith, are you well?” His hand hovered just over my shoulder, as if he wanted to touch me but was afraid to.

I dragged my gaze from Hawthorne, and I was suddenly dizzy. “Is it the chalice?”

“Hawthorne,” Frost said, and the one word was enough.

“I did not try to bespell her, I merely thought about how much I desire to have what Mistral had in the hallway. Not just the taste I had.”

“I cannot blame you,” Frost said, with a sigh. “But the fact that your desire turned into magic so easily means you gained more from the hallway than just a taste of pleasure.”

“As much as I desire an end to my celibacy,” Aisling said, “the chalice sits before us. How can you talk of anything else?”

“Your needs must be paler things than mine,” Hawthorne said.

Amatheon finally spoke as if to himself. “The chalice returned to Meredith’s hand. How can this be?”

I looked up at him, watched the struggle in his flower-petal eyes. “You mean that the chalice would never return to the hand of some mongrel half-breed like me.”

He swallowed so hard it looked as if he were choking on years of prejudice. “Yes,” he said in a voice that was a harsh whisper. He fell to his knees as if some great force had knocked him down, or he had lost the strength in his legs.

He gazed up at me, and the many colors of his eyes glittered in the light, not with magic, but with tears. “Forgive me,” he said in that same harsh whisper, as if the words were being torn from his throat, “forgive me.” I didn’t think it was me he was begging forgiveness of.

The chalice moved toward him, my hands held it, but it was not my will that moved it.

He buried his face in his hands. “I cannot.” His broad shoulders began to shake, and I knew he was crying. I let go of the chalice with one hand, so I could touch his shoulder. He sobbed, and threw his arms around my waist, clutching me so hard and sudden that I half collapsed against him. The chalice touched the back of his hair, and that was all it took.

I stood in the middle of a huge, barren plain. Amatheon was still pressed to my waist, his head buried against my body. I wasn’t certain that he knew anything had changed.

I smelled apple blossoms again, and I turned toward the scent. The hill that I had seen over and over again in vision stood in the distance. I could see the tree on top of it. The tree that Mistral and I had stood beside while lightning struck the ground. I had seen the plain, but never stood upon it.

Amatheon raised his head from my body so that he could look up at me. The movement of his head brushed the lip of the cup along his bound hair. When he felt the hard metal of it, he pressed himself against it, the way you would lean into the caress of a hand. Only then did he seem to see the plain.

He was very careful not to move from between my body and the touch of the chalice, but he reached down with one hand to touch the earth. His hand came up with grey dirt so dry that it trickled from between his fingers like sand.

He looked up at me again, eyes glittering with the tears he either refused to shed, or could not shed. “It was not like this once.” He pressed his head back against the metal of the chalice, as if seeking solace from the touch. “Nothing will grow in this.” He opened his hand wide and let the wind take the dirt. “There is no life here.”

He raised the hand that was coated in the dry, dead earth up to me like a child that has a boo-boo, as if I could fix it.

I opened my lips to say something soothing, but what came out wasn’t my voice and wasn’t soothing at all. “Amatheon, you kept your name, though you have forgotten who you are, what you are,” the voice said, deeper than my normal voice, rounder vowels.

“The land has died,” he said, and the tears finally flowed.

“Do I look dead?”

He frowned, then shook his head. Again the chalice rubbed against his hair, but this time I felt the silken caress of his hair across my skin, down my body. It made me shiver.

“Goddess?”

I touched his cheek. “Has it been so long, Amatheon, that you do not know me?”

He nodded, and the first tear fell from the edge of his jaw. That single drop of moisture fell onto the grey earth, leaving a tiny black print. But it was as if the earth underneath us sighed.

“We need you, Amatheon,” and I agreed with the Goddess. The land needed him, I needed him, we needed him.

“I am yours,” he whispered. He drew the sword at his belt, and held it up in his hands like an offering. Then he put his head back, so that his throat stretched tight. His eyes were closed, as if for a kiss, but it wasn’t a kiss he was waiting for. I understood then that if one tear felt so good to the land, then other body fluids would feel even better.