“You wanted to help,” I said.
He nodded. “My help cost them everything. They were jailed and condemned to death. The first time I called cold to my hands, a cold so deep that it could shatter metal, was for Rose and her mother. I broke their bars and rescued them.”
“But that’s wonderful.” Yet his hand convulsed around mine, and I knew the story didn’t end there.
“Can you imagine what the villagers thought when they found the metal bars shattered and the two women gone? Can you imagine what they thought about Rose and her mother?”
“Nothing they hadn’t already believed,” I said softly.
“Perhaps, but I was a piece of winter. I could not build them a shelter. I could not keep them warm. I could do nothing but take them out into the dead of winter with every human within reach turned against them.”
I sat up and tried to hold him, but he wouldn’t let me. He turned away and finished his story. “They were dying because where I went, winter followed. I was still too much an elemental thing to understand my own magic. When all was lost, I prayed. The consort came to me and he asked me if I would give up all that I was to save them. I hadn’t been alive very long, Merry, and I remembered what it had been like before. I didn’t want to go back to that, but Rose lay so still in the snow, her hair fading into the whiteness, that I said yes. I would give up all that I was if it would save them. It seemed a suitable sacrifice, since my meddling, no matter how well intentioned, had brought about their misery.”
He stopped talking for so long that I came to him and wrapped my arms around him from behind. This time he let me do it. He even leaned back against the pull of my body so that I cradled his upper body against my kneeling one.
I whispered, “What happened?”
“There was music in the snow, and Taranis, Lord of Light and Illusion, came riding on a horse made of moonlight. You have no idea how amazing a golden court could be when they rode out in those days, Merry. It wasn’t just Taranis who could make a steed out of light or shadow or leaves. It was truly magical. He and his men lifted them out of the snow and began to ride away toward the faerie mound. I was content to lose her if it meant she lived. I waited to be blasted back to nothingness and I was content. I had saved them, and my existence for theirs seemed right. I won’t say my life for theirs because I wasn’t alive yet then, not as I am now.”
I hugged him close, and he gave me more of his weight, so that I leaned back against the foot of the bed, and cradled him. I kept one hand on his chest so I could feel his words rumbling up through his body.
“She woke, held in the lap of one of the shining court. My little Rose woke. She cried out for her Jackie, for her Jackie Frost. I came to her as I had from that first moment. I came to her because I could do nothing else. She pushed herself from the arms of that shining lord of the sidhe and came to me. I was not as I am now, Merry. I was young and childlike. The goddess gave me a body that could do more. But I was not one of the shining court. I was a lesser fey in every way. I suppose to human eyes I might have appeared as a boy of perhaps fourteen or younger. I looked a good match for my Rose.”
He lay still in my arms.
“What happened to her mother?” I asked.
“She is still a cook at the golden court.”
I kissed his forehead, then asked, “What happened to Rose?”
“We found shelter, and I used my magic to carry her far away from her village. People didn’t travel then as they do now, and twenty miles was enough distance that we never saw any of the others again. She taught me how to be real, and I grew with her.”
“What do you mean, you grew with her?”
“I looked like a boy of fourteen, as she was a girl of fifteen. As she grew, so did I. It was not sword and shield that I first learned with these arms, it was axe and any other work a strong back could do to help take care of his family.”
“You had children,” I whispered.
“No. I thought it was because I wasn’t real enough. Now, since you remain without child I wonder if it is simply not my fate to have children.”
“But you were a couple,” I said.
“Yes, and a priest who was more friendly than Christian even married us. But we could not stay in any one village for long, because I did not age. I grew with my Rose until I am as you see me now. Then I stopped, but she did not. I watched her hair turn from yellow to white, her eyes fade from the blue of winter to the gray of snowy skies.”
He looked up at me then, and there was fierceness in his face. “I watched her fade, but I loved her always. Because it was her love that made me real, Merry. Not faerie, not wild magic, but the magic of love. I thought I was giving up what life I had to save Rose, but the consort had asked if I would give up everything I was, and I did. I became what she needed me to be. When I realized that I would not age with her I wept, because I could not imagine being without her.”
He came to his knees and put his hands on my arms, and stared down into my face. “I will love you always. When this red hair is white, I will still love you. When the smooth softness of youth is replaced by the delicate softness of age, I will still want to touch your skin. When your face is full of the lines of every smile you have ever smiled, of every surprise I have seen flash through your eyes, when every tear you have ever cried has left its mark upon your face, I will treasure you all the more, because I was there to see it all. I will share your life with you, Meredith, and I will love you until the last breath leaves your body or mine.”
He leaned down and kissed me, and this time I kissed him back. This time I melted into his arms, his body, because I could do nothing else.
CHAPTER 16
WE ENDED WITH HIM ABOVE ME. HIS HAIR HAD COME UNBOUND
and fell around us like silver rain, if rain could be soft as silk and warm as your lover’s body. Our skin glowed as if we’d swallowed the moon, and it was shining out of every inch of our skin. I knew my hair was a mass of red shining fire, because I could see the light of it from the edges of my eyes. His hair began to spark and shine as he moved above me, catching the light the way snow glitters in moonlight. I’d had other lovers who brought the sun to bed with them, but Frost was a winter’s night with all that meant of beauty and harshness.
He was too tall, or I was too short, for him to lie down on top of me. It was neither enjoyable for me nor easy to breathe, so he held his upper body above me with the shining strength of pale, muscled arms. Gazing down the length of our bodies, watching him slide in and out of me, made me cry out, made me look away as if the sight of it was too wonderful and I had to find something else for my eyes to meet. What I met were his eyes. His eyes were gray like a winter’s sky, but now with his power riding him they were more than just gray.
In the gray of his eyes was a glimpse of a snow-covered hill with a bare winter tree upon it. There was a moment of vertigo, as if I could have fallen into that landscape, into his eyes, and been somewhere else. I closed my eyes then, because I was never certain where that hill was, or what tree it would be.
The rhythm of his body in and out of mine, the size of him gliding in and out of my body, was beginning to fill me up. The first faint glow of orgasm began to build.
“Merry, Merry, look at me.” There was urgency in his voice, that rough urgency that said that he too was close.
I opened my eyes, and his were just above mine, wide, staring, demanding that I not look away. He moved one hand so that he gripped my hair near one cheek. “I want to watch your face,” he said, his voice breathy and deep with effort.
There was snow in his eyes, falling on that lonely tree and the hillside beyond. Something moved in his eyes, a figure.
The rhythm of his body changed, grew more urgent, and it was too much. I could not watch his eyes while his body ran through mine. I tried to watch his body moving above mine, but his grip on my hair tightened, forcing my face to look up into his. His face was the face of my beloved, Frost. There was no vision in his eyes to distract me from the beauty of his face, the fierceness in his eyes.
I whispered, “Almost, almost, almost.” Then one last thrust, and almost was now.
I screamed, and only his grip, gone almost cruel in my hair, kept my neck from bowing. He kept our faces staring into each other, tolerated no looking away. We stared at each other as our bodies rode the pleasure. His strength demanded that we share this, the most intimate of moments, with no flinching, no looking away, nothing to save us from the wildness in each other’s eyes.
We fell into that wildness, that near-frantic fierceness. He cried out above me as I screamed my pleasure, then his body collapsed atop mine, and he lifted me in his arms, with his body still sheathed inside me. He knelt, pinning me to the headboard. I grabbed the wood to keep me where he seemed to want me. He had gone, but he was not spent. He proved that as he began to pound me against the wood, the bed shivering with the strength of it, the entire frame of the bed protesting the abuse.
I screamed for him, and fought to keep my hands on the wood to hold myself in place as he plunged inside me as deeply as he could. Deep enough from this angle that pleasure and pain rode each other, as Frost rode me.
I let go of the bed and ran my nails down his white skin. Where I bled him the glow of his skin split, but it wasn’t blood that ran out. Blue glowing lines followed the lines of my nails and painted our skin. There was a moment when I saw a thorn vine around my forearm, and the head of a stag traced across his chest. His body shuddered against mine, inside mine as I painted his body with my pleasure and his pain.
He pressed me in his arms so that I saw the glow on his shoulder, and that sign of power I had seen before as the vine on my arm. I realized that the tattoo that had first appeared in faerie was the same image as in his eyes.
We stayed frozen a moment, pressed against the headboard. His heart beat so fast and so hard I felt it against the side of my face like a hand. He took us slowly to our sides so that we finally lay across the head of the bed on what pillows had not been knocked off.
“I had forgotten how magnificent you could be, Frost.” The voice was not mine; it came from the mirror. Where a second before I could not have moved, fear made me sit up and grab for spilled sheets.
“Don’t cover yourselves,” Andais said from the mirror.
We drew the sheets over us.
“I said, do not cover yourselves, or have I ceased to be your queen?” There was an evil tone in her voice that made us push the sheets back. She’d seen the end of our lovemaking; no reason to be shy now, I supposed.
Frost kept himself pressed against me so that he was as hidden as he could manage. I found my voice first, and said, “My queen, what brings you to our mirror?”
“I thought I would see Rhys with you, or was that a lie when you said you’d be with him?”
“Rhys will have his turn, my queen.”
She stared at Frost, as if I were not there. I looked at him, his body dewed with the sweat of his exertions, his hair a glorious tangle of silver, to decorate all that pale muscled strength. He was beautiful. Beautiful in a way that even among the sidhe not everyone could boast. Ironic that one who had not begun as sidhe would be among our most handsome men. But now that I knew that he had been shaped by love, not a desire for power, but selfless love, I understood. For love makes us all beautiful.
“The look on your face, Meredith, as you gaze upon him, what are you thinking?”
“Love, Aunt Andais, I am thinking of love.”
She made a disgusted sound. “Know this, niece of mine. If the Killing Frost is not your king, I will have him back, and I will see if he is as good as he looks.”
“He was your lover once, hundreds of years ago.”
“I remember,” she said, but not like it made her happy.
I didn’t understand the look on her face, or the tone of her voice. I didn’t truly understand why she had been so determined to catch me with Rhys—or, was she eager to catch me without him? Was she looking for an excuse to order Rhys back to faerie? If yes, then why? She had never treated him as one of her favorites, not in the memory of anyone I knew.
“I see fear in your eyes, my Killing Frost,” she said.
My arms tightened around him. I couldn’t help it. “Would you protect him from me, Meredith?”
“I would protect all my people from harm.”
“But this one is special to you, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” I said, because anything else would be a lie.
“Frost, look at me.” She ordered it.
He raised his eyes to her.
“Are you afraid of me, Frost?”
He swallowed hard enough that it sounded painful, and said in a voice gone rough, “Yes, my queen, I fear you.”
“You love Meredith, don’t you?”
He answered, “Yes, my queen.”
“He loves you, niece, but he fears me. I think you will discover that fear is a more potent threat than love.”
“I don’t want to threaten him.”
“One day you will. One day you will find that all the love in faerie is not enough to keep the man you love obedient. You will want fear on your side, and you are too soft to wield it.”
“I am not frightening. I know that, Aunt Andais.”
“I look at you and I see the future of my court and I despair.”
“If love is the future of our court, Aunt Andais, then I am hopeful.”
She looked once more at Frost, as if he was something to eat and she was starving. “I hate you, Meredith. I truly do.”
I fought not to say what I was thinking, but she said, “Your face betrays you. Say what is in your mind, niece. I hate you, Meredith. What does that make you want to say to me?”
“I hate you, too.”
Andais smiled like she meant it. The bed behind her had been stripped down to its bare essentials. Apparently Crystall’s torture had produced too much blood even for her to sleep in. “I think I will have Mistral tonight, Meredith. I will do to that strong body what I did to Crystall earlier.”
“I cannot stop you,” I said.
“Not yet you can’t.” With that the mirror was blank again. I was left staring at my own startled reflection.
Frost did not look at the mirror. He just crawled off the bed and started getting dressed. He didn’t even bother to clean up first. He just seemed to need to be dressed, and I guess I couldn’t blame him.
He spoke without looking at me, all his concentration on getting his nakedness covered as quickly as possible. “I told you once that I would rather die than go back to her. I meant it, Meredith.”
“I know you did,” I said.
He started buckling on his weapons. “I still mean it.”
I reached up to him. He took my hand, kissed it, and gave me the saddest smile I’d ever seen. “Frost, I….”
“If you are going to be with Rhys before evening, I’d use another room. I would not want her as an audience again today.”
“I’ll do as you suggest.”
“I’m going to check on Doyle.” He had his clothes in place, and all his weapons. He was tall and handsome, and coldly beautiful. He was my Killing Frost, as arrogant and unreadable as when I’d first met him. But I carried with me the memory of his eyes wide and frantic as he plunged inside my body. I knew what lay inside that cool, controlled man, and I valued every glimpse of the real Frost. A glimpse of the man who had fallen in love with a peasant’s daughter, and given up everything he ever knew to be with her.
He walked out of the room, tall and straight and, to most eyes, unmoved. But I knew why he left me there in the bed. He left because he was terrified that his queen would come back for a second peek.