Abeloec let go of my thighs, and the moment he did the lights dimmed, just a little. He knelt between my legs and began unlacing his breeches. His modern clothes had been ruined in last night's assassination attempt, and he, like most of the men who rarely left faerie, had few things with zippers or metal buttons.
I started to say no, because he hadn't asked, and because the magic was receding. I could think again, as if the orgasm had cleared my mind.
I was supposed to be having as much sex as I could, for if I didn't get with child soon, not only would I never be queen, but I'd probably be dead. If my cousin Cel got someone with child before I got pregnant, he would be king, and he would kill me, and all who were loyal to me. It was an incentive to f**k that no aphrodisiac could match.
But there was something sharp under my back, and more smaller pains up and down my body. Dead branches and bits of plant poking and biting at me. I hadn't noticed it until after the orgasm, when the endorphins were receding at a rapid rate. There'd been almost no afterglow, just mind-blowing orgasm, and then this feeling of fading, of being aware of every discomfort. If Abeloec had missionary position in mind, we needed a blanket.
It wasn't like me to lose interest so quickly. If Abeloec was as talented with other things as he was with his mouth, then he was someone I wanted to bed, just for sheer pleasure. So why did I suddenly find myself with no upon my lips and a desire to get up off the ground?
THEN A VOICE CAME OUT OF THE GROWING DARK AS THE LINES of color faded - a voice that froze us all where we were and sent my heart pounding into my throat. "Well, well, well, I call for my captain of the guard, Mistral, and he is nowhere to be found. My healer tells me that you all vanished from the bedroom. I searched for you in the dark, and here you are." Andais, Queen of Air and Darkness, stepped out from the far wall. Her pale skin was a whiteness in the growing dark, but there was light around her, light as if black could be a flame and give illumination.
"If you had stood in the light, I would have not found you, but you stand in the dark, the deep dark of the dead gardens. You cannot hide from me here, Mistral."
"No one was hiding from you, my queen," Doyle said - the first any of us had spoken since we'd all been brought here.
She waved him silent and walked over the dry grass. The wind that had been whipping the leaves was dying now, as the colors died.
The last of the wind fluttered the hem of her black robe. "Wind?" She made it a question. "There has not been wind in here for centuries."
Mistral had left me to drop to his knees before her. His skin faded as he moved away from me and Abeloec. I wondered if his eyes still flashed with lightning, but was betting they did not.
"Why did you leave my side, Mistral?" She touched his chin with long pointed nails, raised his face so he had to look at her.
"I sought guidance," he said in a voice that both was low and seemed to carry in the growing dark. Now that Abeloec and I had stopped having sex, all the light was fading, all the flow on everyone's skin was dying away. Soon we would stand in a darkness so absolute that you could touch your own eyeball without first blinking. A cat would be blind in here; even a cat's eyes need some light.
"Guidance for what, Mistral?" She made of his name an evil whine that held the threat of pain, as a smell on the wind can promise rain.
He tried to bow his head, but she kept her fingertips under his chin. "You sought guidance from my Darkness?"
Abeloec helped me to my feet and held me close, not for romance, but the way all the fey do when they're nervous. We touch one another, huddling in the dark, as if the touch of another's hand will keep the great bad thing from happening.
"Yes," Mistral said.
"Liar," the queen said, and the last thing I saw before the darkness swallowed the world was the gleam of a blade in her other hand. It flashed from her robe, where she'd hidden it.
I spoke before I could think: "No!"
Her voice crawled out of the darkness and seemed to creep along my skin. "Meredith, niece, do you actually forbid me from punishing one of my own guards? Not one of your guards, but mine, mine!"
The darkness was heavier, thicker, and it took more effort to breathe. I knew she could make the very air so heavy that it would crush the life out of me. She could make the air so thick that my mortal lungs couldn't draw it in. She'd nearly killed me just yesterday, when I interfered in one of her "entertainments."
"There was wind in the dead gardens." Doyle's deep voice came so low, so deep, that it seemed to vibrate along my spine. "You felt the wind. You remarked upon the wind."
"Yes, I did, but now it is gone. Now the gardens are dead, dead as they will always be."
A pale green light sprang from the darkness. Doyle holding a cup of sickly greenish flames in his hands. It was one of his hands of power. I'd seen the touch of that fire crawl over other sidhe and make them wish for death. But as so many things in faerie, it had other uses. It was a welcome light in the dark.
The light showed that it was no longer her fingertips that held Mistral's chin upward, but the edge of a blade. Her blade, Mortal Dread. One of the few things left that could bring true death to the immortal sidhe.
"What if the gardens could live again?" Doyle asked. "As the roses outside the throne room live again."
She smiled most unpleasantly. "Do you propose to spill more of Meredith's precious blood? That was the price for the roses' renewal."
"There are ways to give life that do not require blood," he said.
"You think you can f**k the gardens back to life?" she asked. She used the edge of the blade to raise Mistral up high on his knees.