WE WAITED FOR THE POLICE TO RETURN TO US AFTER ESCORTING their befuddled colleague away. The hallway should have been a short trip, but that long expanse of grey stone had grown longer, and now there was a curve that hid the door from view. The entrance to the sithen never changed.
“I believe the sithen wishes us to have some privacy,” Frost said.
The chalice under my cloak grew warm against my skin. I let my breath out in a sigh, and simply nodded. I did not like the chalice appearing like this. It amplified magic, and we’d had some very strange and powerful things happen between the guards and myself when the cup was present. It was almost as if the chalice didn’t want to leave me alone to solve the murders. The cup pulsed so hard that it made me gasp.
Hawthorne reached to steady me, but Frost caught his hand and gave a small shake of his head. Too dangerous in the open with the humans coming back so soon. Some things we did not want to explain to the police. Some things we couldn’t explain to anyone.
If everyone in the hallway had glimpsed the chalice, it would have been a quicker conversation, but we had guards with us who had been standing where they could not see, so we talked around it.
Ivi began, “I’m all for solving the murders. But I also think that we should be trying to make the princess queen instead of playing copper.”
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.
I understood then what he was offering, and with the Goddess riding me, I knew that his blood would return life to the land. He was Amatheon, a god of agriculture, but he was more than that. He was the spark, the quickening, that let the seed grow in the earth. He was that magic bridge between dormant seed, dark earth, and life. His “death” would bring that back to the land.
I shook my head. “I just saved his life, I will not take it now.”
Her voice came from my lips again. “He will not die as men die, but as the corn dies. To rise again, and feed his people.”
“I do not doubt that,” I said, “and if that is your will, so be it, but not by my hand. I work too hard to keep my people alive to start slaughtering them.”
“But this is not real death. This is vision and dream. It is not real flesh and blood that Amatheon offers you.”
Amatheon had opened his eyes and lowered his head and his sword. “The Goddess is right, Princess. This is not a real place, nor are we truly here. My death here would not be true death.”
“You have not seen the visions that I have seen, Amatheon. I dreamt of the chalice and woke with it solid and very real in my bed. I would not slay you here, and find your bleeding corpse in the hallway.”
“Will you leave the land barren?” the voice said, out of my mouth. Having both sides of the conversation coming out of my mouth was a little too psychotic for comfort. And this energy, this Goddess, felt heavier, not just a comforting presence.
“Why are you not happy with me?”
“I am very happy with you, Meredith, happier than I have been with anyone in a very long time.”
“I hear your words, but I feel your… impatience. You are impatient with me, and not about this.”
She thought her response, but I was mortal, and female, and I had to say it out loud. “You think I waste your gifts by trying to solve the murders.”
“You have your human police. Even now Cromm Cruach has them using their science for you.”
It took me a second to realize she was referring to Rhys, his original name.
“Not his real name,” she said with my mouth, “but the last true name he owned.”
“Rhys had a name older even than Cromm Cruach?”
“Once, though few remember.”
I started to ask the name, but I could feel her smile, and she said, “You are distracted by trivialities, Meredith.”
“Forgive me,” I said.
“I do not mean Cromm Cruach’s true name, I mean these deaths. They will be reborn, Child. Why do you mourn them so? Even true death is not an ending. Others can find your murderers and clues, but there are duties that only you can perform, Meredith, only you..”
“And what exactly would those duties be?”
She motioned at Amatheon. “Make my land live.”
Amatheon offered his sword up to me again, and closed his eyes. He put his neck back at an angle where I could have a clean strike.
“You’ve done this before,” I said.
He opened his eyes just enough to look at me. “In vision, and for truth.”
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Yes.” Then he closed his eyes, and lifted the sword up higher, as if that would make me take it sooner.
“He is a willing sacrifice, Meredith. There is no evil here.”
I shook my head. “How is that you, who have all eternity, are so impatient, and I, who have only a few decades, want to take the longer road?”
In that moment I felt her sigh, and her happiness at the same time. It had been a test of sorts, not of good versus evil, but of the direction this revival of power would take. She had offered me a quicker, more violent way to bring faerie back to its power. I knew with a knowledge as solid as the foundations of the world that Amatheon would die. It would be true death. The fact that he would rise from that grave, and be reborn to his “life,” did not change the fact that it would be my hand that slit his throat. My hand that spilled his blood hot across the earth, across my skin. I gazed down at him as he knelt, eyes closed, face peaceful.
I took the sword by the hilt, and lifted it from his hands. Those hands went to his sides, limp, only a slight tension in the fingers letting me know that he was fighting the impulse to guard himself from the blow.
He had gone from hating me for my mongrel blood to offering me up his pure sidhe flesh, and letting me spill that same pure blood in a hot wash across the ground.
I leaned over him and pressed my mouth to his. His eyes opened, wide and startled. I think the kiss surprised him more than any blow could have. I smiled down at him. “There are other ways to make the grass grow, Amatheon.”
He stared up at me, uncomprehending for a moment. Then the shadow of a smile caressed his lips. “You would refuse the call of the Goddess?”
I shook my head. “Never, but the Goddess comes in many guises. Why choose pain and death when you can have pleasure and life?”
The smile widened just a bit. He unbent his neck from its almost painful offering position, then looked from the sword in one hand to the chalice in the other. “What would you have of me, Princess, Goddess?”
“Oh, no,” she said, and this time it wasn’t my lips. There was a hooded figure not far from us, her feet not touching the bare soil. In fact she was misty, and try as I might, I could not see her clearly. The hand that held the hood close was neither old nor young nor in between. She was all women and no woman. She was the Goddess. “Oh, no, Amatheon, she has made her choice. I will leave her to that decision. She does not need me to finish this task.” She gave a small chuckle that held something of the dryness of an old woman’s voice, the rich melodious sound of a woman in her prime, and the lightness of a girl. “I do not often agree with Andais, but in this I might. Bloody fertility goddesses.” But she laughed again.
“I did not know that Andais still spoke with you, Goddess.”
“I did not stop speaking to my people, they stopped listening to me, and after a time, they could no longer hear my voice. But I never stopped speaking to them. In dreams, or that moment between waking and sleep, there is my voice. In a song, the touch of another’s hand in theirs, I am there. I am Goddess, I am everywhere, and in everything. I cannot leave, nor can you lose me. But you can leave me, and you can turn your back on me.”
“We did not mean to leave you alone, Mother,” Amatheon said.
“I was not alone, Child. I cannot be truly alone, but I can be lonely.”
“What can I do, Mother, to repent?”
“Repentance is an alien concept to us, Amatheon. But if you wish to make it up to me…”
“Yes, Goddess, with all my heart.”
“Make the earth live again, Amatheon. Spread your seed over that which is barren, and make it live again.” She began to fade like mist in the sun.
“Goddess,” he said.
Her voice floated to us. “Yes, Child.”
“Will I see you again?”
Just her voice now, young and old at the same time. “In the face of every woman you meet.” And she was gone.
He gazed at the spot where she had been, and only when I let the sword fall to the ground did he turn to me.
“What would you have of me, Princess? I am yours in any way you want me. Whether by my life, my blood, or my strong right arm, I will serve you.”
“You sound as if you’re about to pledge me your sacred honor like some knight of old.”
“I am a knight of old, Meredith, and if it is my honor you want, you may have it.”
“You told Adair you had no honor, that the queen had taken it with your hair.”
“I have touched the chalice and seen the face of the Goddess. Such blessings are not given to the unworthy.”
“Are you saying your honor is intact because the Goddess treated you as one who is honorable?”
A quick puzzled look flashed through his multicolored eyes, then he said, “Yes, I suppose I am.”
“Say what you are thinking.”
He smiled, a quick flash of real humor, that made his face less perfectly handsome, but more real, more precious to my sight. “My honor was never gone, because no one can take your honor from you, not without your letting it go. I was going to say that you have given me back my honor, but I understand now.”
I smiled at him. “No one can take your honor, but you can give it away.”
The smile wilted around the edges. “Yes. I let fear take my honor from me.”
I shook my head.
He smiled again, almost embarrassed. “I mean that my fear became more important than my honor.”
I stopped his words with a kiss. I wrapped my hands across his back, the chalice still held in my right hand. His arms came up tentatively, as if he wasn’t certain how to begin. I think the sex would have been slow and gentle, but I held the symbol of the Goddess, and I was the living symbol of the Goddess. An impatient Goddess. The chalice pulled us backwards as if there was some huge magnet underneath the ground. When the chalice met the earth, it went into the ground, and I was left holding nothing. Amatheon’s back hit the spot where the chalice had vanished, and his spine bowed, eyes fluttering closed, his fingers convulsing against my back, his body pushing against mine. The strength of his hands, the solidness of his body, and the raw need in his face, all of it pulled me down to him, put my mouth against his, my hands eager on his body. When my hand slid between our bodies so I could cup the hard, thick length of him, he shuddered and cried out. His eyes were wild when he looked up at me again.
“Please, Princess.” His voice was so hoarse it didn’t sound like him.
“Please what?” I whispered against his mouth.
“I cannot promise how long I will last.”
“What do you want, Amatheon?”
“To serve you.”
I shook my head, so close above him that my hair brushed his face when I did it. “Say what it is you want, Amatheon.”
He closed his eyes, and swallowed so hard it sounded painful. When he opened his eyes again, he was calmer, but there was something in those flower-petal eyes that was still cautious. His voice was a whisper, as if he didn’t want to speak his wish too loudly, as if someone might overhear him. “I want you to ride me, to press my naked body into the dirt. I want to watch your breasts dance above me. I want to feel your body slipped over mine like a sheath to a sword. I want to watch your skin shine, your eyes and hair dance with power while I shove myself into you as far and as often as I can. I want to hear you cry out my name in that voice that women use only at the height of their passion. I want to pour my seed inside your body until it spills down the sides of you, and trails down my own hips. That is what I want.”
“Sounds wonderful to me,” I said.
He gave a small frown.
I smiled, and touched the lines between his eyes that would have been frown lines by now, if he’d been able to wrinkle. “What I mean, Amatheon, is yes. Let’s do all that.”
“You mean I get my wish,” he said.
“Isn’t that what we used to do, grant people’s wishes,” I whispered, smiling.
“No,” he said, “we, none of us, ever granted wishes.”
“It was a joke,” I said.
“Oh, I’m…”
I put my finger on his lips and stopped him. “Let’s make the grass grow.”
He frowned.
“Fuck me,” I said, and removed my finger from his lips.
He smiled that bright smile that made him seem younger and more… human. “If that is what you wish.”
“Now who’s offering to grant wishes?”
“I will grant anything that is within my power to give you.”
I sat up and pressed my most intimate parts against his most intimate parts, and even through all our clothes, the sensation was amazing. He was so hard, so very hard, that it must have been a pleasure that was nearly pain.
“Give me this,” I said, and it was my voice that was hoarse now.
“Willingly. Let us get out of our clothes, and it will be done.”
I stared down at his face with that eager hardness pressing up through my jeans. It sounded like a plan to me.