What I hadn't known until I was a teenager was that there were two thin legs below Kurag's belt on the right side, complete with a small but completely functional penis. A goblin's idea of courtship was crude. Sexual prowess counted for a great deal among them. When I'd seemed unenthusiastic about Kurag's proposal, he'd dropped his pants and shown off both his own equipment and that of his parasitic twin. I was sixteen and I still remember the dawning horror of the realization that there was another being trapped within Kurag's body. Another being with enough mind to play card games with a child while Kurag paid no attention. There was an entire person trapped inside there. An entire person who, if genetics had been kinder, might have matched that lovely lavender eye.
I had never been comfortable around Kurag after that. It hadn't been the proposal or the sight of his rather formidable manhood come to full quivering attention. It had been the sight of that second penis, large and swollen, independent of Kurag and eager for me. When I had turned them down, for “them” it was, that one lavender eye had shed a single tear.
I had had nightmares for weeks. Extra limbs were dandy, but entire extra people in pieces trapped inside someone else . . . there were no words for that kind of horror. The second mouth could breathe, so it obviously had access to the lungs, but it lacked vocal cords. I wasn't sure if that was a blessing or one last curse.
“Kurag, Goblin King, greetings. Twin of Kurag, Goblin King's Flesh, greetings as well.” The thin arms on the side of the king's bare chest waved at me. I had greeted both of them from the night I realized that the person with whom I'd been playing cards and stupid games like feather-blowing had actually not been Kurag at all. To my knowledge I was the only one who ever greeted both of them.
“Meredith, Sidhe Princess, greetings from both of us.” His orange eyes stared down at me, the largest one perched like a cyclops eye slightly above and in the middle of the other two. The look he gave me was the look any man would give a woman he desired. A look so bald-faced, so obvious, that I felt Galen's body stiffen. Rhys rose to his feet to stand beside Doyle.
“You honor me with your attentions, King Kurag,” I said. It was an insult among the goblins if the men did not leer at your woman. It implied that she was ugly and infertile, unworthy of lust.
The queen kept her hands on Kurag, but moved one hand to his side where I knew the other set of genitalia hung. Her maze of eyes glared at me, as her hands worked them. Kurag's breath came out in a rush from both mouths.
If we didn't hurry, we'd be here when the queen brought him, them, to a climax. The goblins saw nothing wrong with public sex. It was a mark of prowess among the men to be brought many times at one banquet, and the woman that could do it was prized. Of course, the goblin male who could sustain a female's attentions for a lengthy time was prized among the females. If a goblin had any sex problems like premature ejaculation or impotency or, for a female, frigidness, then everyone knew it. Nothing was hidden.
Kurag's eyes went to Frost and the small goblin in the guard's grasp. For all the goblin king's attention, his queen might have been in another room.
“Why do you hold one of my men?”
“This is not a battlefield, and I am not carrion,” I said.
Kurag blinked. The eye on his shoulder blinked a second or two later than the three main eyes. He turned to the little goblin. “What have you done?”
The little goblin babbled, “Nothing, nothing.”
Kurag turned back to me. “Tell me, Merry. This one lies like he breathes.”
“He drank my blood without my permission.”
The eyes blinked again. “That is a grave charge.”
“I want recompense for the stolen blood.”
Kurag drew a large knife from his belt. “Do you want his blood?”
“He drank from a royal princess of the high court of the sidhe. Do you really think his lowly blood is a fair trade for that?”
Kurag looked down at me. “What would be a fair trade?” He sounded suspicious.
“Your blood for mine,” I said.
Kurag pushed his queen's hands away from his body. She made a small cry, and he was forced to shove her hard enough for her to fall on her butt to the ground. He never looked at her to see how she had fallen, or if she was all right.
“Sharing blood means something among the goblins, Princess.”
“I know what it means,” I said.
Kurag stared at me with his yellow eyes. “I could simply wait until you have lost enough blood to be carrion,” he said.
His queen crowded next to him. “I could speed the process along.” She held up a knife that was longer than my forearm. The blade gleamed dully in the light.
Kurag turned on her with a snarl. “This is not your concern!”
“You would share blood with her, who is not a queen. It is my business!” She stabbed the knife straight up toward his body. The knife was a blur of silver, the movement almost too quick to follow with the eye.
Kurag had time only to sweep an arm in an effort to keep the blade from his body. The blade opened his arm in a splash of crimson. His other main arm hit her full in the face. There was a sharp crunch of breaking bone, and she sat down on her butt for a second time. Her nose had exploded like a ripe tomato. Two of the teeth between her fangs had broken off. If there was blood coming from her mouth, it was lost in the blood gushing from her nose. The eye nearest the nose had spilled from its cracked socket and lay on her cheek like a balloon on a string.
Kurag trapped her knife under his foot. He hit her again, and this time she fell over on her side and lay still. There had been more than one reason that I did not want to marry Kurag.
He bent over the fallen queen. His thick fingers checked to see that she was still breathing, that her heart still beat. He nodded to himself and scooped her up in his arms. He cradled her gently, tenderly. He barked out an order, and a huge goblin squeezed through the crowd.
“Take her back to our hill. See her wounds are tended. If she dies, I will have your head on a pike.”
The goblin's eyes flashed up to the king's face, then down. But there had been that one moment of pure fear on the goblin's face. The king had beaten the queen, nearly killed her, but it would be the goblin guard's fault if she died. That way the king would be blameless and would be able to find a new queen all the quicker. If he had outright killed her in front of so many royal witnesses, he could have been forced to give up either his throne or his life. But she had been very much alive when he'd lifted her tenderly into the arms of the redcap. The king's hands were metaphorically clean if she died now.
Though it was doubtful the goblin queen would die. Goblins were a tough lot.
A second goblin guard, shorter and more barrel-chested than the first, took the queen's knife from Kurag and followed the first goblin guard back through the crowd. Kurag would be within his rights to have both of them killed if the queen died. One of the things that most royals learn early is how to spread the blame. Spread the blame and keep your head. It was like a complicated game with the Red Queen from
Alice in Wonderland
. Say the wrong thing, don't say the right thing, and it could be off with your head. Metaphorically speaking, or not so metaphorically speaking.
Kurag turned back to me. “My queen has saved us the trouble of opening my vein.”
“Then let's get on with it. I'm wasting blood,” I said.
Galen still had his hands over my wrists, and I realized he was holding pressure on my wounds.
I looked up at him. “Galen, it's all right.” He kept his hands tight around my wrists. “Galen, please, let me go.”
He stared down at me, opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it and slowly moved his hands back from my wrists. His hands came away stained with my blood. But the pressure he'd applied had slowed the bleeding, or maybe it was just Galen's touch. Maybe it wasn't just my imagination that made his hands a cool, soothing presence.
He helped me to my feet. I had to push his hands away so I could stand alone. I spread my legs to get as good a balance on the heels as I could, and faced Kurag.
Standing, I came almost up to his sternum. His shoulders were nearly as wide as I was tall. Most of the sidhe were tall, but the larger goblins were truly bulky.
Fflur had moved to one side of me to join Galen, Doyle, and Rhys at my back. Frost stood to one side, with the little goblin dangling from his hands. There was a press of bodies all around us: sidhe, goblin, and others. But I had eyes only for the goblin king.
“Though I do offer you my apologies for my man's rudeness,” Kurag said, “I cannot offer you my blood without gaining in return.”
I held my right hand out to him, and my left hand to the red mouth on his chest. “Drink then, Kurag, Goblin King.” I raised my right wrist as close to his main mouth as I could reach. Reaching so far above my head left me faintly dizzy. I pressed my left wrist to the open mouth on his chest, and it was those lips that closed around my wrist first, that tongue that worked over the wound to get it to bleed afresh. The tongue in that mouth felt soft and human, not at all like the little goblin's harsh cat tongue.
Kurag bowed his head over my wrist, careful not to use his hands to hold the wound close to him. To use his hands would have been rude and taken as a sexual overture. His tongue was rough like sandpaper, even rougher than the little goblin's had been. It abraded the wound and brought a soft gasp from my throat. The mouth in his chest had already formed a seal over the wounds, sucking like a baby with a bottle. Kurag's tongue lingered until the blood flowed fresh and easy. When he wrapped his lips around my wound, his mouth took in almost all of my wrist. His teeth pressed against my flesh painfully as the suction grew. The smaller mouth in his chest was much more polite.
Kurag's mouth worked at my wrist, lips in a tight seal. Just as I grew accustomed to his sucking, his teeth grazed the wound, his tongue flicking in a sharp painful movement. He was staying at the wound a long time. It was sort of like a beer-chugging contest: you took as much in at a time as you could manage without throwing up.
But finally, finally, Kurag drew his head back from my wrist. I drew my left hand from his chest. The lips placed a light kiss against my wrist as I pulled away.
Kurag stretched his thin lips in a smile, showing the yellowed teeth stained with blood. “Do better if you can, Princess, though I've always found the sidhe a little too prissy for good tongue action.”
“You must be entertaining the wrong sidhe, Kurag. I've found them all . . .” I lowered my voice to a husky whisper and put a look in my eyes to match. “. . . Orally talented.”
Kurag chuckled, low and evil, but appreciative.
I swayed slightly, but I kept my feet and that was all that was required. But I was going to need to sit down soon, before I fell down. “My turn,” I said.
Kurag's grin widened. “Suck me, sweet Merry, suck me hard.”
I'd have shaken my head if I hadn't been convinced that it would make the dizziness worse. “You never change, Kurag,” I said.
“Why should I?” he said. “No female I've bedded in over eight hundred years has ever gone away wanting.”
“Just bleeding,” I said.
He blinked, then laughed again. “If there ain't blood, what's the point?”
I tried not to smile and failed. “Big talk for a goblin who hasn't offered up his blood yet.”
He held his arm out to me. Blood flowed down it in a thick red wash. The wound he offered in front of my face was deeper than it had looked, a red gaping thing like a third mouth.
“Your queen meant to kill you,” I said.
He looked down at the wound, still grinning. “Aye, she did.”
“You sound pleased,” I said.
“And you, Princess, sound like you're delaying the moment when you must place that clean white mouth on my body.”
“Sidhe blood may be sweet,” Galen said, “but goblin blood is bitter.” It was an old saying among us. It was also untrue.
“As long as the blood is red, it all tastes pretty much the same,” I said. I lowered my mouth to the open wound. I couldn't come close to wrapping my mouth around Kurag's arm, as he had mine. But the taking of his blood had to be more than a mere kiss of my lips. To treat the blood-taking as less than the passionate sharing it was meant to be, the honor it was meant to be, was an insult.
There's an art to sucking blood from a wound that's bleeding this deeply. You have to start slowly, work into it. I licked the skin near the shallowest end of the wound with long sure strokes of my tongue. One of the tricks to drinking a lot of blood is to swallow often. The other trick is to concentrate on each task separately. I concentrated on how rough Kurag's skin was, on the large roughened lump that edged the wound like a knot in the skin. I paid attention to that knot, rolling it around in my mouth for a second, which was more than I had to do, but I was working my courage up for the wound. I like a little blood, a little pain, but this wound was deep and fresh and a little too much of a good thing.
I gave two more quick licks to the shallow end of the wound and then locked my mouth over it. The blood flowed too quickly and I was forced to swallow convulsively, breathing through my nose, and still there was too much of the sweet metallic liquid. Too much to breathe around, too much to swallow. I fought the urge to gag and tried to concentrate on something else, anything else. The edges of the wound were very clean and smooth. By that alone I knew how sharp the knife had been. It would have helped if I could have touched my hands to him, had some other sensory input. I was aware that my hands were straining in the air as if trying to find something to hold on to. But I couldn't help it. I had to do something.
A hand brushed my fingertips, and I grabbed that hand tight in my own, squeezing it. My other hand swept the air until it, too, was taken. I thought it was Galen, for the smooth perfection of the tops of his hands, but the palm and fingers were calloused from sword and shieldâtoo rough for Galen's. These were hands that had been training in weaponry for longer than Galen had been alive. Those hands held mine, responding to my pressure, squeezing as I clung to the feel of them.