Siobhan stopped as if she'd come against a wall. Her white hands glowed with a pale flame that was not flame at all. Her power flared against something that not even I could see. But I felt her coldness trying to eat the warm, moving night, and she had no power here. If she had been among the truly living, if her touch had brought ordinary death, the Earth would not have stopped her. The power was more neutral than that. It loved me in a way, welcomed me back, but it would welcome my decaying body to its warm, worm-filled embrace just as readily. It would take my spirit on the wind and send it elsewhere.
But Siobhan's magic was not natural, and she could not pass. Understanding even that much might-might give me the key to her destruction. But it was going to take someone more adept at offensive spells than I to unravel the key.
There was movement beyond our little group. Cel and Siobhan turned to see this latest threat, and when they saw it was Doyle, their bodies didn't relax. The prince and heir to the dark throne and his personal guard were afraid of the queens Darkness. That was interesting. Three years ago Cel had not feared Doyle. He had feared no one except his mother. Even there he did not fear death, because he was all she had to pass her blood along. Her only child. Her only heir. No one challenged Cel to a duel, ever, because you dared not win, and to lose might mean your own death. He'd passed through the last three centuries untouched, unchallenged, unafraid, until now.
Now I saw, almost felt, Cel's unease. He was afraid. Why?
Doyle was dressed in a black, hooded cape that swept around his ankles and hid all of him. His face was so dark that the whites of his eyes seemed to float in the black circle of his hood.
"What goes on here, Prince Cel?"
Cel moved off the path so he could keep Doyle and the rest of us in sight. Siobhan moved with him. Keelin remained on the path, but the power was folding away, as if the power moved on the wind and was sweeping past us to travel elsewhere. It gave a last cool, spice-laden caress and slipped away.
I was suddenly solid once more inside my own skin. There was a price for all magic, but not this. It had offered itself to me. I had not asked. Maybe that was why I felt strong and whole instead of exhausted.
Keelin came down the path toward me, her primary hands held out toward me. She must have felt renewed as I did, because she was smiling and that awful pinched fear was gone, washed away in the sweet wind.
I took her hands in mine. We kissed each other twice on both cheeks, then I drew her into the circle of my arms and she hugged me across the shoulders with her upper arms, around the waist with the smaller lower ones. We held each other so tightly that I could feel the press of her small br**sts, all four of them. The thought came: Had Cel enjoyed being with someone with that many br**sts? An image came on the heels of the thought. I squeezed my eyes tight as if I could rid myself of the image.
I ran my hand down her back through her thick, furlike hair and realized I was already crying.
Keelin's sweet almost birdlike voice was comforting me. "It's all right, Merry. It's all right."
I shook my head and pulled back so I could see her face. "It's not all right."
She touched my face, catching my tears on her fingers. She couldn't cry. Some trick of genetics had left her without tear ducts. "You always cried my tears for me, but don't cry now."
"How can I not?" I glanced back at Cel who was talking in low whispers to Doyle. Siobhan was looking at me, staring at me. I could feel her dead gaze through the helmet she wore, even if I couldn't see her eyes. She would not forget that I had used magic against her and won, or rather not lost. She would neither forget nor forgive it.
But that was a problem for another night. I turned back to Keelin. One disaster at a time, please. My hands went to the hardened leather collar around her neck.
She touched my wrists. "What are you doing, Merry?"
"Taking this off of you."
She pulled my hands down, gently. "No."
I shook my head. "How can you... How could you?"
"Don't cry again," Keelin said. "You know why I did it. I only have a few more weeks, just until Samhain. Three years to the day. If I'm not with child, then I am free of him. If I am with child, he'll have to treat me as a wife should be treated, or not touch me at all."
She was so calm about it, a terrible, solid calm, as if it were quite... ordinary. "I do not understand this," I said.
"I know. But you've always been of royal blood, Merry." She reached up a free hand to touch my lips before I could protest, her other hands still holding my hands. "I know you have been treated like a poor relation, Merry, but you are a part of them. Their blood flows in your veins, and they..." She hung her head, dropping her hand from my mouth, but gripped my hands all the tighter. "You are a member of the club, Merry. You're inside the great house, while we wait outside in the cold and the snow with our faces pressed to the glass."
I looked away from those tender brown eyes. "You're using my own metaphor against me."
She touched my face with her left upper hand, her dominant hand. "I heard you use it often enough as we were growing up."
"If I had asked, would you have come with me?"
She smiled, but even by moonlight it was bitter. "Unless you could be with me every hour of the day or night, you couldn't use your glamour to protect me." She shook her head. "I am far too hideous for human eyes."
"You are not-"
She stopped me this time with only a glance. "I am like you, Merry. I am neither durig nor brownie."
"What of Kurag? He cared for you."