A Lick of Frost

VOICES FROM AROUND THE ROOM SAID THAT FROST WAS NOT the only one down. Holly and Ash had collapsed to the floor. The demi-fey closed on them now that they could not resist.



But the other men who had fallen had only other guards to touch them, to try and wake them. I touched the glittering fall of Frost's hair, drew it back from his face.



"What is wrong with him? With all of them?" I asked.



"I'm not sure," Rhys said, "but his pulse is fading."



I looked at him over Frost's still form. I knew my face showed the shock.



"They didn't have the dogs," Galen said. "They didn't have anything to hold on to when you created more faerie land."



Rhys nodded. His small sea of terriers sat unusually silent and solemn around his legs as he knelt.



I started to say "they are just dogs," but Mungo bumped my shoulder with his head. Minnie leaned against my side. I looked into her eyes and there was dog in there, yes, but there was more. They were dogs formed of wild magic. They were fey creatures, and that is not simply a dog.



I stroked her ear, so velvety. I whispered, "Help me. Help them. Help Frost."



Doyle strode farther into the room with the huge black dogs milling around him. One of the dogs broke from the pack and went to one of the other fallen. He sniffed the hair with a loud snuffling sound. Then he grew taller, bigger. The dog's fur ran in streamers of green, chasing the black away, and the fur growing a little longer, a little shaggier.



The dog was the size of a pony when it was solid green. A green like new grass, spring leaves. It turned huge yellow-green eyes to me.



"Cu Sith," Galen whispered.



I simply nodded.



The Cu Sith: "Hound of the sidhe" was the literal meaning of its name. Once every sidhe mound had had at least one as guard. One had been created, or reborn, on the night when the magic had returned in Illinois. Now we had a second, here and now.



It lowered its great head and sniffed at one of the fallen guards again. It licked him with a huge pink tongue. He gave a breath so big we heard it across the room. His body shuddered with the return of life, or the retreat of death.



The huge green dog moved from one to the other, and everywhere he touched, the men revived. He came to Onilwyn, still collapsed on his side. He sniffed him, then growled low and deep, like thunder contained in a rib cage. He did not lick Onilwyn back to life. The Cu Sith let him lie. Interesting that I wasn't the only one who didn't want to touch him.



The green dog came to the twins, sweeping the demi-fey ceilingward with its great head. But it sniffed them, and moved away, too. Not sidhe enough for the Cu.



Doyle's deep voice came, but there was an echo in it of the god. I looked at Doyle, and found his face distant, as if he saw something other than this room. Vision held him, or Deity, or both.



He spoke in a dialect I did not understand, and one of the black dogs moved forward. It went to the twins, and sniffed their hair. The black fur ran with a white that glowed and shimmered. The white fur was thicker, longer than the black, even longer and shaggier than the Cu Sith's green.



The dog was as large as the Cu Sith, maybe even a little larger. The fur wasn't so much long like a sled dogs as just unkempt. It turned eyes the size of saucers to me, huge and out of proportion to its doggie face. But then the look in its eyes wasn't exactly the look a dog gives you either. It was a look somewhere between a wild animal and a person. There was too much wisdom in those eyes.



Rhys said softly, "It's a Gally-trot."



"A ghost dog," I said. It was supposed to be a phantom that haunted lonely roads and scared travelers.



"Not exactly," he said. "Remember, some humans believe that all the fey are the spirits of the dead."



The Gally-trot leaned its huge white head over the twins, and licked them with a tongue that was as black as the fur it had started with.



Holly stirred, blinking bloodred eyes at the room. Ash made a sound that was almost pain as the Gally-trot licked him back to life.



I waited for the Cu Sith to come to Frost, or even the Gally-trot, but they didn't. The Cu Sith moved among my guards, receiving pets and strokes. It smiled in that way that dogs do, with its tongue out.



The twins seemed unsure what to make of the white dog's attention. It was Holly who reached up and touched it first. The dog bumped him so hard he almost fell over. It made Holly laugh, a pleased masculine sound. Ash touched the dog, too, and they communed with the huge beast.



The demi-fey were beginning to leave the Red Caps. The faces revealed were gentler, as if the clay of their bodies had been remade into something more sidhe, more human. Jonty's words came back to me, "You are remaking us."



I hadn't meant to.



But there were a lot of things I hadn't meant to do.



I stared down at Frost, and saw a gleam of blue at his neck. His tie had already been loosened by someone. I snapped off buttons in my haste to see, and found blue glowing on his skin.



Rhys and Galen put him on his back, and helped me tear his shirt open. There was a tattoo on his chest that glowed blue. It was a stag head with a crown in its antlers. It was a mark of kingship, but it was also a mark of the sacrificial king. The white stag was what he had made with his touch that night in the winter dark. The white stag is a thing to be hunted and to lead the hero to his destiny.



I stared at Rhys's face because he looked as horrified as I felt.



"What does it mean?" Galen asked.



"Once all new creation came with sacrifice," Doyle's voice intoned, but it wasn't his voice.



"No," I said. "No, I didn't agree to this."



"He did," the voice said. The look in Doyle's eyes was not him either.



"Why? Why him?"



"He is the stag."



"No!" I stood up, stumbling on the hem of my robe. I went toward the black dogs and this stranger in Doyle's body.



"Merry," Rhys said.



"No!" I screamed it again.



One of the black dogs growled at me. My power washed over me, burst across my skin. I glowed like I'd swallowed the moon. Shadows of crimson light fell around my face from my hair, I saw green and gold light, and knew my eyes glowed.



"Would you challenge me?" Doyle's mouth said, but it wasn't Doyle who I would challenge if I said yes.



"Merry, don't," Rhys said.



"Merry," Galen said. "Please, Frost wouldn't want this."



My hounds bumped my hand, and my thigh. I looked down at them, and they glowed. Minnie's red half of her face glowed like my hair, and her skin gave white light around my hand as I petted her. Our glows mingled. Mungo, with his red ear and white coat, looked as if he were carved of jewels.



The queen's ring pulsed on my hand. It, like so many things, had more power inside faerie, and that was where we stood now.



I saw phantom puppies dancing around my hounds. I knew in that moment that Minnie was already pregnant. The first faerie hounds to be born in five hundred years, maybe more?



Minnie bumped my hip, made me look down at myself. Two small phantoms of my own, hovering around me. But I knew they were real. No wonder I'd been tired today. Twins, like my mother and her sister. Twins. And faint, like a thought that wasn't quite real, was a third. It wasn't real yet, just a promise of possibilities; It meant that the twins would not be all. There would be at least a third child for me with someone.



I realized as soon as I thought it that the ring had other powers. I wanted to know who the father was, and I could know here with the ring, inside faerie. I turned and looked at Doyle, and found the answer I most wanted. The ring pulsed, and the scent of roses rode the air.



I turned toward Frost. A child sat beside him, quiet, and too solemn. No, Goddess, no, not like this. Even the wonder of a child, of twins, could not make Frost's loss a fair trade. I did not know these phantom children yet. I had not held them. I did not know their smiles. I did not know how soft their hair was, or how sweet their skin smelled. They were not real yet. Frost was real. Frost was mine, and we had made a child.



"Goddess, please," I whispered.



Rhys moved through my edge of vision, and the child reached up for him. It passed a phantom hand through his. He reacted to it, trying to see what had touched him. That wasn't right. I held two children inside me, not three. I was one father over the line.



But not for long, unless... I went to Frost. Galen caught me in his arms, and the ring pulsed hard enough to make me stagger. Four fathers for two babies. It made no sense. I hadn't had intercourse with Galen for more than a month, because we all agreed he'd make a bad king. He and Kitto had been the only ones who had let me indulge my penchant for oral sex to my heart's content. But you couldn't get pregnant from that.



The scent of roses was stronger. That usually meant a yes. Not possible, I thought.



"I am Goddess, and you are forgetting your history."



"What history are you forgetting?" Galen asked.



I looked up at him. "You heard that?"



He nodded.



"The story of Ceridwen."



He frowned at me. "I don't understand..." Then comprehension slipped across his face. My Galen with his thoughts so easy to follow on his handsome face. "You mean..."



I nodded.



He frowned. "I thought Ceridwen getting pregnant from eating a grain of wheat and Etain being born because someone swallowed her as a butterfly were both myths. You can't get pregnant from swallowing anything."



"You heard what She said."



He touched my stomach through the silk of the robe. A smile spread across his face. He glowed with joy, but I could not join him.



"Frost is a father, too," I said.



Galen's joy dimmed like a candle put behind dark glass. "Oh, Merry, I'm sorry."



I shook my head, and drew away from him. I went to kneel beside Frost. Rhys was on the other side of him. "Did I hear you right? Frost would have been your king?"



"One of them," I said. I didn't feel like explaining that Rhys had also, somehow, hit the jackpot. It was too confusing. Too overwhelming.



Rhys put his fingers against the side of Frost's neck. He pressed against his skin. His head dropped, so his hair was a curtain to hide his face. One shining tear fell onto Frost's chest.



The blue of the stag mark blinked brighter, as if the tear had made the magic flare more brightly. I touched the mark, and that made it brighter, too. I laid my hand on his chest. His skin was still warm. The mark of the stag flared into blue flame around my hand.



I prayed. "Please, Goddess, don't take him from me, not now. Let him know his child, please. If I have ever held your grace, bring him back to me."



The blue flames flared bright and brighter. They did not burn, but felt more like electricity, stinging and biting, but just short of pain. The glow was so bright I could no longer see his body. I could feel the smooth muscles of his chest, but I could not see anything but the blue of the flames.



I felt fur under my hand. Fur? Then I was not touching Frost. Something else was inside that blue glow. Something with fur and not man-shaped.



The shape stood, and moved high enough that I could not touch it. Doyle was behind me, folding me in his arms, picking me up off the ground. The blue fire died down, and a huge white stag stood in front of us. It looked at me with gray and silver eyes.



"Frost," I said, and reached out, but it ran. It ran for the far windows over the acre of marble. It ran as if the surface wasn't slick for hooves. It ran as if it weighed nothing. I thought it would crash into the glass, but French doors that had never been there before opened so that the great stag could run out into the new land beyond.



The doors closed behind him, but the doors did not go away. Apparently, the room was flexible still.



I turned in Doyle's arms so I could see his face. It was him looking out of his eyes now, not the Consort. "Is Frost..."



"He is the stag," Doyle said.



"But does that mean he's gone as our Frost?"



The look on his dark face was enough.



"He's gone," I said.



"He is not gone, but he is changed. Whether he will change back to the man we knew, only Deity knows."



He wasn't dead, exactly. But he was lost to me. Lost to us. He would not be a father to the child we had made. He would never be in my bed again.



What had I prayed? That he would come back to me. If I had worded it differently would he still have transformed into an animal? Had my words been the wrong ones?



"Do not blame yourself," Doyle said. "Where there is life of any kind there is always hope."



Hope. It was an important word. A good word. But in that moment, it didn't seem enough.