“I wish we did not have to ask, Merry, but what happened in the dream?” Doyle said.
I took in another deep breath and counted it out slowly, then nodded. I told them about the dream, everything that had happened in it.
“Do you believe that the injury to his arm will follow him out of dream?” Doyle asked.
“I do not know.”
“That is not possible,” Frost whispered.
“Once the king could use dream to seduce and bed a woman, and the children that came from those dreams were real enough,” Doyle said.
“Are you saying he was able to get women pregnant from just visiting them in their dreams?” I asked.
They both nodded.
I must have paled, because they moved toward the bed, then hesitated and looked at each other, then back at me. “We would comfort you if you would allow it, Merry, but we do not wish to rush this moment,” Doyle said.
I nodded, but I didn’t really want to be touched right that second. I gripped the hilt in my hands tighter, so that the leather-wrapped metal dug into my hands a little, helped remind me that I was awake and not trapped.
“I will take comfort in a little while, but right now just explain to me how he could do that in just a dream.”
“Once he was the Lord of Dreams, but that was centuries before we came to the Western Lands. I do not believe that he can make dreams as real as he once could,” Doyle said.
“Do not tell her that, for we do not know. He should not have been able to use his hand of light through the mirror when he nearly killed you, and that was months ago. The Goddess returns and wild magic follows in Her wake,” Frost said.
Doyle nodded. “And the magic is like most of our powers, like nature itself; the storm does not mean to tear down your house, but it still might.”
“Which means that we have no way of knowing who will have gained powers from the return of the Goddess,” I said.
“Sadly, no,” Doyle said. He gave me a very solemn look.
“What?” I asked.
“If you damaged his arm in this reality, then he may seek revenge outside of dream.”
Frost said, “Or he will be so terrified of Merry that he will not come near her.”
“It could go either way, true,” Doyle said.
“I didn’t know he had ever been able to enter dreams,” I said.
“Once upon a time,” Doyle said.
“The queen could enter nightmares, or speak to us through them, as well,” Frost said.
“So he was the Lord of Dreams, and she was what, the Lady of Dreams?”
They both shook their heads, and I was feeling better, because I was a bit distracted by them both standing there nude. Sadly, I still had weeks to go before we could have sex. It had been too long.
“Merry, did you hear what we said?” Doyle asked.
I blinked and had to think; had I heard anything that those lovely mouths had been saying in the last few minutes? I finally said, “No, I’m sorry, but your being nude distracted me.”
They smiled at each other, and then at me. I would have said,
Don’t be conceited
, but it was just truth that the two of them standing there nude, bodies not even ready for such things, had made me think of sex, and longing. I still ached too badly to do anything about it, even if the doctors hadn’t warned against it, but that my body was interested again was nice. After being hugely pregnant for so long, and so ill with the triplets, it was nice to feel something close to normal and think that maybe my body could get back to doing something besides having babies.
“You’re going to have to repeat everything you just said. I will endeavor not to be distracted, but perhaps if you sat down and put the sheet across your laps, that might help my powers of concentration.”
Their smiles turned to mischievous grins, but they did as I suggested and sat down on the sides of the bed that had become theirs, Frost to my left and Doyle to my right. Once they had piled the sheet in place, Doyle said, “She was the Queen of Nightmares, for she was never merely a lady of the nobility, Merry, but always destined to be more.”
“But the king was once just a lord?” I asked.
They both nodded, Frost’s hair spilling forward around his bare shoulders. His ponytail had come undone in the night, as it often did. Even braiding didn’t always hold it, as if the hair itself didn’t like to be bound.
“Who was the royal family of the Seelie Court, then?” I asked. It had never occurred to me that Taranis didn’t descend from a “royal” line like Andais did, but then he’d been king for over a thousand years. I wasn’t thirty-five yet; it was a little before my time.
“They were killed in the last great war between the two main courts,” Doyle said.
I stared up at him. “Then why isn’t our queen the high queen of everything in faerie?”
“Because the remaining Seelie nobles preferred death to the Golden Court being swallowed into the Court of Nightmares, which was one of the Unseelie names back then.”
“Why didn’t my aunt just slaughter them until the survivors surrendered? It is one thing to say you would rather die, but if you see enough people die before you, most relent, or so I’m told,” I said.
“Not always,” Doyle continued, “but though we had won the war, our side was sore hurt, and if we had continued the fighting it might have meant the destruction of all the sidhe.”
“So a Pyrrhic victory,” I said.
“If the fighting had continued, yes.”
“I did not know things were so dire,” Frost said.
“What do you mean, you didn’t know?” I asked.
“Belief and need did not turn me into the Killing Frost until Taranis was already king. The first battles I fought in were against the goblins when the courts of the sidhe joined forces against common foes.”
I knew that once my tall, commanding Frost had been little Jack Frost, a child-size embodiment of the hoarfrost that he painted on windows and the edges of things as he followed in the train of the Winter King. But people thought his work beautiful and paid attention to it, and once mortals pay attention and begin to believe or tell stories about something, it grows stronger, more alive. Just as love and belief made the toy rabbit in the Velveteen Rabbit story into a real bunny, so, too, had the man beside me gone from something that danced over the snow, barely more than a thought of cold and icy beauty, to the Killing Frost beside me. For my Frost, it had been the love of a mortal girl named Rose. She was long in her grave, but it was for love of her that Frost had been willing to grow tall and strong enough to build a life with her. I owed her a thank-you, and since I could not give it, when we had a second daughter to name and Frost suggested “Rose,” no one had argued. We’d just found the prettiest version of it, Bryluen, Cornish for “rose.”
I kept one hand on the knife he had given me, but reached out my other hand to touch his thigh where it lay peeking from the covers.
“I forget sometimes that Darkness and the Killing Frost were not always paired beside the queen.”
He put his hand over mine and gave me a smile that held everything I wanted to see in that moment: tenderness, love, and a gentleness that harked back to his first form that had skipped across the snow and decorated the world in icy beauty.
“There were small battles between the sidhe courts after that, and in those a very new Frost fought against me.”
I turned to look at Doyle. “Are you saying the two of you fought each other directly?”
He smiled. “No, I saw him across the battlefield a time or two. He was a shining thing and hard to miss, but he was new to battle and they had not schooled him to arms as I would have before allowing a newly risen warrior to take the field.”
“I believe that the Seelie saw me as an accident. I was the first lesser fey to become sidhe in a long time. You do not train lesser fey the way you train sidhe.”
“True enough even among the Unseelie, but I believe they expected you to die in those small battles; no need to waste training on cannon fodder.”
Frost started rubbing his thumb over my knuckles where I still touched his thigh. “You are probably right, but I survived and they began to teach me.”
“If you were once Seelie, then how did you get exiled from them?”
“A human serving girl spilled hot soup on the king’s hand. It would have healed in minutes, but he hit her, and when she didn’t fall down and cower, but kept her feet and glared at him, he started to beat her.” He rubbed my hand over and over, his eyes staring at nothing, empty with remembering.
“You saved her,” I said.
“I stepped between them, because I could not watch him kill her, and I didn’t understand the other nobles just watching.”
“You hadn’t been noble long enough,” Doyle said. “You didn’t understand the privileges of rulership.”
“I still don’t, but our queen taught me not to stand between her and her victims.” He shivered, his broad shoulders huddling in upon himself as if the Frost could be cold, but some chills go beyond temperature and reach the heart and soul.
Doyle reached across me to touch Frost’s shoulder. “We all learned not to risk the queen’s mercy.” It was a saying among the Unseelie; to be
at the queen’s mercy
had come to mean any hopeless situation, and to avoid being at the real queen’s mercy you would do much, or not do, as the case may be.
Frost looked up and met the other man’s eyes. They looked at each other and there was such pain in Frost’s face, and such long sorrow in Doyle’s. It was as if I had caught a glimpse of the long centuries that had made them the men they were now, and the friends they were to each other. They had been forged in fires of battle and torment.
In that moment I was so glad they were mine, so glad I could keep them safe. Once Queen Andais had said that any man who wasn’t father to my children would be forced back into her Raven guard, there to be celibate again except for servicing her. It showed how distracted her son’s death had left her, that she believed she could make that threat and still have me come home to accept the crown, to force all the guards I had come to consider mine back to be tortured by a madwoman for all eternity. Everyone wants to be immortal—even I did—but there were times when living forever and healing most injuries could have serious downsides, and being tortured forever was one of those.
That thought made me say out loud, “Once the genetic tests come back and prove conclusively who the fathers are and aren’t, do you think the queen will demand her Raven guards back?”
“She has stated that many times,” Doyle said.
“But most of them have taken oath to Merry now,” Frost said.
“Does one oath supersede the other?” Doyle asked.
“That’s why Cathbodua did it,” I said.
“You mean offered her oath?”
“Yes.”
We all thought about it for a few moments, and then Doyle said, “The queen has been too busy trying to die to think about living, but if she believes either that she will live and need her guards, or that by demanding that all her Ravens come home we will help her die, then she might call all those who are not father to your children back to the Unseelie Court.”
“What would we do?” Frost asked.
“I cannot send them back to death and torment,” I said.
“Cathbodua was free to give her oath anew, because all the princes were dead, but the male guards shouldn’t have been able to make such a vow to Merry while the queen still lived,” Doyle said.
“You mean literally, the words wouldn’t have come out their mouths, or that some curse for oathbreaking should have happened?” I asked.
“The latter.”
“How do we know it has not?” Frost asked.
“Because Sholto and Merry are the ones who brought the Wild Hunt back to life, and that is what hunts oathbreakers among us, but you felt no sense of wrongness as they made oath to you, did you?”
I thought about it, and then shook my head. “No, nothing felt wrong, and Sholto was with us when it happened.”
“How can the oath to the queen be mute?” Doyle asked.
“Did you take your oath willingly?” Frost asked.
Doyle nodded.
“I did not, but it was the only avenue left open to me, the only safety from the king’s mad pride.”
“You’re saying if the oath was coerced, then it’s not a true oath,” Doyle said.
“Perhaps,” Frost said.
“If they’re oathed to me for real, then they can’t be forced back to the queen.”
“The oath can’t force them back, but her rage and madness could.”
We had a moment of just sitting there thinking about it all. I finally said, “Being held sounds very good right now.”
“Then let us put away our weapons and huddle together,” Doyle said.
“The Darkness does not huddle,” Frost said.
“Nor does the Killing Frost,” Doyle said.
“I promise not to tell; just hold me, and tell me how to keep the king out of my dreams.”
I placed the relic, Aben-dul, on top of the headboard. We’d put it back in the weapons locker later. It was far too dangerous to leave lying about. Frost took back his knife, and we lay down with the two of them wrapped around me, and their long arms touching each other. The Darkness and the Killing Frost might not huddle, but I did, and unless there was a way to keep Taranis out of my dreams, I’d be doing more cuddling and less sleeping from now on. I’d never suffered from insomnia, but I was willing to learn.
THE BABIES WERE
all asleep in their cribs. Once I calmed down from the dream, I had to see them. I knew in all reason that they were safe, but fear isn’t always about reason; maybe fear is never about reason, but some fears are reasonable. I feared my uncle, and my aunt, that was reasonable, but I also feared that my babies had somehow been left inside my nightmare—not reasonable.
Kitto stood beside the crib with me. We held hands as we gazed down at Bryluen. She was curled into a tiny ball, as if she were still asleep inside me, trying to find room between her bigger siblings. We walked to Gwenwyfar, to see her white curls almost gleaming in the glow of the night light. Alastair was flopped on his back, arms and legs akimbo, as if he’d played hard and just collapsed where he was the way Liam did sometimes. Were boys so different from the very beginning than girls? I honestly didn’t know; there’d been no babies around me growing up, so my learning was all books and classes, and on-the-job training.