He drew back, or tried to; only Doyle and Frost's hands kept him from moving away. "She is injured, too," Frost said, "raising her hand to the back of your head caused her pain. It was not a gasp at your appearance." And Frost had said exactly what needed saying. Because Rhys stopped trying to pull back.
"How badly is she hurt?"
"Kiss me, Rhys, and I'll feel better."
This time he came to me, and didn't make me move more than necessary. This time when our lips met, he kissed me back, and it seemed to need both of us to be willing. For that one shared kiss was as if home had a single taste, as if the smell of fresh bread, clean laundry, wood smoke, laughter, and something warm and thick bubbled on that fire. Rhys didn't taste like any particular food, but his lips held the essence of all that was good and made you feel content, sated, happy.
I raised my hands up to hold him, without thinking, but the pain it caused rode away and vanished on the sensation of him. He drew back at last, and I clung to him, for I wanted more of that taste. I opened my eyes.
Rhys blinked down at me. That circle of robin egg blue, winter sky, cornflower blue, looked down at me. I was lost between laughter and tears, staring up at him in silent wonder.
"Goddess be praised." He whispered it so low, I don't think anyone else heard.
"Consort be praised," I said, in a whisper back to only him.
He smiled then, and something inside me loosened at the sight of it; a tightness I hadn't known was there went away. If Rhys could smile like that, everything would be all right.
Rhys moved away, and I took Doyle's wrist. I intended him to be next, for I did not know how long this blessing would last. He shook his head. I opened my mouth to insist, but Mistral appeared, carrying Onilwyn in his arms. I knew that Mistral and Onilwyn were not friends, but in this moment the guards seemed united in a way that was beyond friendship, or whom you like and whom you hate. Onilwyn's head lay backward at an odd angle, the muscles holding it in place severed. His spine was a glistening whiteness in the fearsome wound that had once been his neck. The front of his clothing was blue-violet with his own blood. His pale skin the color of wheat, green and fresh from the earth, had been bleached to a sickly greenish white. Only the wide staring of his green-and-gold eyes let me know he was indeed still alive. She'd slit his throat so completely that his breath whished and hissed, and gurgled wetly through the top of his severed windpipe. If he'd been human his throat would have collapsed under the damage, but he wasn't human, so he still breathed, still lived, but whether he could heal from such a terrible wound depended on how much personal magic he still had left. There was a time when the gods themselves blessed all of us, made of us saints able to withstand a decapitation, but that had been centuries ago. Not all of us could heal such damage now.
There was the very real possibility that Onilwyn would linger for days, but in the end, he would die. He was not a man whom I would have wasted such blessing from the God upon, but I also didn't have it in me to turn away from him. He was still one of my people. He had risked all to help save the others.
I met Doyle's gaze, and I let go of his wrist, slowly, reluctantly, but he was right. He could live and heal his wounds. Onilwyn could not.
Mistral knelt carefully, on the blood-slick floor, and started to lay Onilwyn down beside me. But too much blood had gone down his windpipe and he was choking, and trying to clear it, using nothing but the muscles of his stomach and chest. He made a horrible wet rattling sound, then blood spat out of the end of his neck, and he took the faintest of breaths, as if afraid that more blood would flow back down.
Goddess help us.
"I don't think he'll do well on his back," Mistral said, and his voice tried for neutrality, but failed. He was angry, and I couldn't blame him.
"No." I tried to sit up, but the pain took my breath and laid me back on the bloody floor. I waited until the pain had subsided, then said, "Kitto, help me lean up."
He looked to Doyle before he did it, and when Doyle nodded, Kitto moved in behind me, but Galen was already there. "Let me, Kitto, she healed me, let me help her."
Kitto nodded and moved back.
Galen lifted me, gently, into his lap, so that my head and shoulders were cradled against his body. It didn't hurt, too badly. "A little more," I said.
He did what I asked without looking at Doyle first. I was almost sitting up, fully supported by his body, before the pain came, like a knife, but it was a duller blade than last time. I could bear it. "There, just there." Galen went very still behind me.
"Wait." It was a woman's voice, so it must have been the queen, but it did not sound like her. "Wait," the voice said again, and the one word was pain-filled.
After what she had done to them, to all of us, a body would think none of us would have listened to her, but we did. We should have cursed her, but we didn't. We froze, waiting for her to make a slow progress across the room.
Mistral had moved back, just enough to let me see across the room. The floor was marked by a wide red path as if a heavily bleeding body had been dragged across it. That bloody path ended at the queen. She sat, propped against the wall. She had pulled Eamon into her lap, and I had never been so aware of what a large man he was, or perhaps she seemed smaller. His broad shoulders seemed to overwhelm her. She was a tall woman, and she always filled more space than just the physical, but now she sat with Eamon in her arms, and one arm wrapped around Tyler's naked, blood-soaked leg, and she seemed small.
But she had healed. Her neck wound had been almost as severe as Onilwyn's, but where he was still a broken thing, she had only a hand-size gash in her white throat. The wound seemed to be growing smaller, even as we watched. Not visibly, not like we could actually see the wound closing, but like trying to watch flowers bloom. You knew it was happening, but you just couldn't catch it actually happening before your eyes. She was our queen and that meant that the power of the sidhe ran stronger through her than through any of us.