Chapter Nineteen

The sand was cool under our bare feet, which didn't promise well for the water. I shivered, and Rhys put an arm across my shoulders, drawing me in against his muscled firmness. More than any of the other guards he was honed down to his essence, all muscle. He didn't have a six-pack, he had an eight-pack, which I hadn't known was possible.

He wrapped me in his arms and held me in the warmth of his embrace, though the metal of his gun was not warm against my bare back. He had the leather sheath of the short sword in the same hand, so it swung gently against my body. I clung to his warmth, wiggling a little closer and away from the hard press of the gun's lines.

"Sorry," he said, and moved the gun a little so it wouldn't dig into me. He laid his face against my hair. "I have weapons, but once we start having sex I won't be able to use them. I'll be too busy using my favorite weapon to worry about guns and swords."

"Weapon, is it?" I said smiling.

I felt his smile just by the flexing of his lips against my head. "Well, I don't mean to brag."

I laughed and looked up at him. He was grinning down at me. His face was half in moonlight and half in shadow. It hid his good eye and left his scars painted silver, his face looking smooth and perfect except for that glimmer of scar, so that the scar simply became another part of that perfection.

"Why so solemn?" he asked.

"Kiss me and find out."

"Wait. Before we get distracted, my point was a good one."

"Why, yes it is," I said, and I traced my fingers over the firm muscles of his stomach toward lower things.

He caught my hands in his empty hand, and used the hand full of weapons to help hold me still. "No, Merry, not until you hear me on this." He moved his face so all of him was in the bright, soft moonlight. The light grayed his eye so that it was no longer blue at all.

"Once the sex starts I will be too distracted to guard you. Everyone else is in what amounts to an enchanted sleep, so there will be no help if we need it."

I thought about what he'd said, and finally nodded. "You're right, but first we've made it clear to all of faerie that we want no throne of either kingdom, so killing me gains them nothing. Second, I don't believe the Goddess brought us out here to be attacked."

"You think she'll keep us safe?"

"Have you no faith left, Rhys?" I studied his face as I asked it.

He looked very sad and sighed. "Once I did."

"Let us go down to the sea and find it again for you."

He smiled, but it was sad around the edges. I wanted that sorrow gone.

I pulled gently on his hand and he let me pull away. I leaned up and kissed him, soft and full of lips, and let my body fall against his so he made a small surprised sound, still kissing me. Then his arms came up with gun and sword still in one, so I could feel the press of them against my back again.

I drew back from the kiss to find him a little breathless, lips parted, eye wide. I could feel his body growing hard and firm against mine.

He didn't protest again, but let me lead him toward the sighing of the sea.

Chapter Twenty

The surf beckoned like white foaming lace, the water black and silver in the moonlight. The tide had grown and deepened around the bottom steps, so that I walked into the cold foam of the sea to find it spilling around my knees, while I could still touch the railing. It was cold enough to make me shiver, but the sight of Rhys there nude, suspicious, and very Rhys helped the shiver be more. The pull of the ocean made my legs move and the sand shift, as if the very world wasn't certain it would hold still.

"I'll have to pin everything down so the tide doesn't take it, Merry. Once I do that the weapons will be slow to draw."

I should have said no, or cautioned him, or tried to wake other guards, but I didn't. I said, "It will be all right, Rhys." Somehow, I knew it would be.

He didn't say a word, just moved down into the swirling water until he could touch my outstretched hand. The moment our hands touched, there was power, magic.

"We stand in a place betwixt and between neither land nor sea," I said.

"The closest we'll get to faerie here on the Western sea," he said.

I nodded.

Rhys threaded the straps of the sword sheath around the gun, and used the naked blade to pin the sheath to the sand. He knelt in the water, so that it was above his waist, to thrust the sword almost hilt deep into the shifting sand, so that it would not be pulled away by the sea.

He grinned up at me, still kneeling in the water, and the edge of it playing with the ends of his curls. "Most of the positions I'm thinking of will drown one of us."

"You can't drown, you're sidhe."

"Maybe I can't die from drowning, Merry, but trust me, it hurts like a son of a bitch to swallow that kind of water." He made a face and shivered, and I didn't think it was entirely the chill of the water.

I wondered what old memory was shaking him. I almost asked, but the scent of roses came mingled with the salt of the next wave. No bad memories tonight; we would make new and better ones.

I went to stand so that I could touch his shoulders and his face, and made him look up at me. There was a moment where the shadow of that old hurt was there in his face, and then he smiled up at me, wrapped his strong arms around my hips, and drew me in against his body. He kissed his way up my stomach, my chest, and my neck, as if the kisses themselves drew him to his feet until he could lay his lips against mine.

He kissed me. He kissed me as the water swirled and moved around us so that the pull and push of it was like more hands to caress our bodies, as our lips, hands, and arms explored the skin above the water's edge.

He leaned down, and used his hand to mound my breast up so his mouth could lick and suck, until just the pull of his mouth on my nipple made me cry out for him. He mounded the other breast with his other hand, and did the same again. He went back and forth between them as the water rose around us, until I cried out his name. Only then did he drop back to his knees, chest deep in the water, and lift me so that my knees were on his shoulders, and his face was between my legs.

I protested, "You can't hold this position long enough."

He gazed up the line of my body, his mouth close to that most intimate part, but not quite touching me yet. "Probably not," he said.

"Then why do it?"

He grinned. "Because I want to try." And that was very Rhys. It made me smile, and then his mouth found me, and it wasn't smiles he got from me.

He bowed my body backward with the strength of his hands and arms so that he could reach all of me to lick and suck. His hands were actually supporting my weight at the small of my back, my legs on his shoulders like some impossible act. I kept meaning to tell him to put me down, to be reasonable, but every time I came close to saying it, he would do something with his mouth, his tongue, and he would steal my words away with pleasure.

I felt his arms begin to tremble, ever so slightly, as that delicious pressure began to build between my legs, so that it would be a race to see if he could spill me over that edge before he had to put me down. A few sensations earlier and I would have told him to put me down when I felt his muscles begin to tremble, but the pleasure had passed to that point of selfishness so that I wanted release more than I wanted to be kind or generous. I wanted him to finish what he had begun. I wanted him to spill me over that wet, warm edge.

My skin had begun to glow as if I was some still pool that could reflect the moon's glow to herself. Rhys had called my magic to life.

In the end he moved on his knees, so that my back touched the railing. The water was high enough that the lower steps were underwater, and I leaned back against the wood, using the railing as I would have used the headboard of a bed to support my weight, to keep me at the angle he needed. He moved up the water-covered steps so that they helped him support my weight as he licked and sucked, and made love to me there with his mouth as he would make love to me later with other things.

I caught the glow of my own hair and eyes; crimson, emerald, and gold. His own skin had begun to glow white with a play of light underneath it as if clouds or something else moved inside his body, things I couldn't see or understand.

I was almost there, almost there, almost there, then between one caress of his tongue and the next that building warmth between my legs spilled out and over and through me in a warm rush that danced over my body, and made me grind my hips against his face. He sucked harder, drawing the pleasure out, making it last, growing one orgasm into another, into another, until I shrieked, and screamed at the moon above us.

Only when I sagged, limp, and couldn't quite make my hands keep their hold on the railing did he stop and stand on the steps to lift me with his arms, and let the rising water buoy me up. I felt him push against the front of my body. The cold water had done him no harm, because he was long and hard and eager as he pushed against my opening.

The sea came spilling between our legs. It was too soon since his kiss there, so that it made me cry out as he pushed his way inside me, as if the sea and Rhys were both making love to me at the same time.

Then he was inside me, as deep as he could go, pinning me against the railing, his hands holding onto the wood to keep the waves from chasing us down into the sea. I wrapped my legs around his waist, my arms around his shoulders, and I kissed him. I kissed him and tasted me on his lips, fresh and salty, my body mingled with the ocean so that it was different, as if he'd gone down on someone else, someone who tasted of the sea.

His eye with its three circles of color had regained its blue, because his magic had its own light to show me the day's blue sky in his eye, if the sky could burn blue.

He slid in and out of me, with the waves helping some of the time, and some of the time they seemed determined to pull us apart, as if they were jealous of what we were doing. I began to feel that growing weight of pleasure again, but deeper inside me this time.

I wasn't sure if I shouted or whispered against his face, "Soon, soon."

He understood, and he began to work his hips faster, driving himself deeper and quicker, so that each thrust ran over that part of me, and the waves tried to help find that spot inside me, but Rhys gave them no room. He filled me up, and then between one thrust and the next I was screaming his name again, my nails pinning into his back, tracing my pleasure in half-moons on his pale skin.

I screamed his name as he rode me, in the sea and the steps leading up. I felt him fight his body to keep the rhythm that had brought me so that he could bring me again and again, and only when I'd lost count did he finally allow himself that last deep thrust that spasmed him backward, so that he was staring at the sky as he finally let himself go.

That last deep thrust brought me one final time, and it was then that the scent of roses fell around us in a shower of pink petals that glided out to sea with the waves. The magic rushed across our skin like a different kind of orgasm, so that our skin ran in shivers, but it was warm, so warm. Warm enough that the sea could not be cold for us. The twin glow of our bodies merged and became one, as if together we could make a new moon to send into the sky - a moon that had eyes of liquid fire, burning emeralds, spun garnets, melting gold, and sapphires so blue they would make you weep to see them. His hair was white foam around his face, across his shoulders, merging with the white glow of our bodies.

It was only then that I realized we should have put up a circle to keep in the power, or to control it, but it was too late. The power surged through us and went up and out into the night. I'd felt a release of power before, but never one with such purpose. Always before it had been almost accidental, but I felt our merged energies seeking something, like a magical missile aimed at a target.

We felt it hit, and I half expected to hear the echo of some great explosion, but there was no sound. The impact of it shook us, and sent Rhys thrusting inside me one last time, as we both cried out at the release of our bodies and the release of the magic miles away.

Only when our skin began to fade, glowing around the edges, instead of that white-hot light, only then did he let himself slide to his knees, still holding me, as I slid down the railing. The sea held our weight, and then tried to spill us down the steps. He moved us up in a kind of crawl until he had us safe on a drier step. He had fallen out of me somewhere in the climb but we were both ready to be done. It had been enough.

He gave a shaky laugh as he cradled me against him, and we leaned back against the steps.

"What was that magic?" I asked, my voice still breathless.

"It was the power of faerie creating a sithen."

"A hollow hill here in Los Angeles," I said.

He nodded, still trying to catch his own breath. "I caught a glimpse of it. It's a building, a new building that wasn't there before."

"Wasn't where before?" I asked.

"On a street."

"What street?" I asked.

"I don't know, but tomorrow I'll be able to find it. It will call to me."

"Rhys, how will you explain a new building appearing?"

"I won't have to, just as the hollow hills would appear and the people would think the hill had been there forever. If the magic works as it always has, everyone will accept that it's been there. I'll be new moving in, but the building won't look new, and people will remember it."

I laid my head on his chest, and his heart was still thudding fast. "A sithen is like a new court of faerie, right?"

"Yes," he said.

"So, in essence, faerie just made you a king."

"Not the Ard-ri, but a lesser king, yes."

"But I didn't see the building. I didn't feel it."

"You are the high queen, Merry. You don't have just one sithen; in a way they're all yours."

"Are you saying that the other men will get them, too?"

"I don't know. Maybe only those of us who had one once upon a time."

"Which would be you, and who?"

"Barinthus for one. I'll have to think about the others. It's been so long for most, so many centuries. You try to forget what you were before, because you don't ever think you'll get it back. You try to forget."

"First my dream or vision and being able to save Brennan and his men when they have to be hundreds of miles away, and then them being able to heal with my blessing, or whatever you want to call it. Now this. What does it all mean?"

"The sidhe didn't appreciate the Goddess coming back through you. I think she's decided to find out if the humans are more grateful than the fey."

"And what exactly does that mean?" I asked.

He laughed again. "I don't know, but I can hardly wait to see this new modern sithen, or try to explain all this to Doyle and Frost." He pushed to his feet, grabbing onto the railing to steady himself.

"I can't walk yet," I said.

He grinned. "High praise for me."

I smiled at him. "Very."

"I'm going to rescue my weapons before the tide rises any more. I'll have to clean everything. Salt water rusts like nothing else." He waded down into the water, and finally had to dive out of sight in the waves to find where he'd pierced the sand and left his weapons.

I had a moment of being alone with the sea and the wind and the moon full and glowing above me. I whispered, "Thank you, Mother."

Then I heard Rhys surface, taking a deep breath, splashing toward the steps, his weapons dangling from his hand, his curls plastered to his face and shoulders. He walked up beside me, the water running down his skin in shining rivulets.

"Can you walk yet?"

"With help, I think so."

He grinned again. "That was amazing."

"The sex or the magic?" I asked as he helped me to my feet. My knees were still weak enough that I grabbed for the railing even with his arm on mine.

"Both," he said. "Consort save us, but it was both."

We walked a little shakily up the steps laughing. The wind from the water seemed much warmer than before we'd made love, as if the weather had changed its mind and decided that summer was a better idea than autumn.

Chapter Twenty-one

Salt water is one thing you have to rinse off your body before you fall into bed. I was in the big shower doing just that when the door burst open and Ivi and Brii, short for Briac, were in the doorway, breathing hard, and weapons naked in their hands.

I froze in the middle of rinsing the conditioner out of my hair, blinking at them through the glass of the shower doors.

I caught movement from the corner of my eye, and Rhys was just suddenly sliding in low through the door they had left open behind them. He had his newly oiled sword at Brii's throat, and his newly cleaned gun pointed at Ivi as the other man froze in mid-motion of bringing his own gun up.

"Sloppy," Rhys said, "both of you. Why did you leave your posts?"

They were both breathing so hard I could see their chests fighting for air, so much so that they couldn't get enough air to talk. Brii might have been having trouble talking around the sword point that never wavered from his skin, and the short bow in his hand with its half-cocked arrow and a hand full of arrows fanned in his fingers were completely useless.

Brii blinked brilliant green eyes, his hair the yellow of cherry leaves in the fall, tied back in a long braid. His clothing was leather and could have looked like club wear, but was actually pieces of armor older than most people's history books.

Rhys's sword point seemed to be shoved up against the thudding pulse in his throat.

He looked at the other man, who was still frozen, unmoving under the point of his gun; only the frantic rise and fall of his chest betrayed him. His green and white hair was loose and swirled around his legs, but like Doyle and Frost, it never seemed to tangle. Unlike them, Ivi had a pattern of vines and leaves like a print upon his hair. His namesake on his hair was like a work of art, and his eyes were starbursts of green and white, so that people would ask him if it was fancy contacts, but it was just Ivi. He wore modern clothes, and the vest on his chest was modern body armor.

Rhys said, "Ivi, explain, and it better be good." He never took his gun off the other man.

Ivi fought his own breath and pounding heart rate to speak. "We woke ... on guard duty. Enchanted sleep ... thought enemies." He coughed, sharply trying to clear his throat, or take a deeper breath. He was being very careful about keeping the naked gun unmoving in his hand. "Thought we'd find Princess dead, or taken."

"I could kill you both for falling asleep on duty," Rhys said.

Ivi gave a small nod. "You're third in command, you have that right."

Brii finally managed to talk around the sword point and his pulse. "We failed the princess."

Rhys moved in one motion, taking the sword from Brii's throat, lowering his gun to the floor, and standing in the doorway as if he'd just walked through. With Frost and Doyle around me, I sometimes forgot that there was more than one reason that Rhys had been third in command of the Queen's Ravens. When everyone is this good, it's hard to remember just how good that is.

"It was the Goddess herself who did the enchanted sleep," Rhys said. "None of us can fight that, so I guess I won't kill you tonight."

Ivi said, "Shit." He went to his knees outside the shower doors, laying his head on his arm that held the gun. Brii leaned his back against the half wall by the shower. He had to adjust the long bow at his back so it didn't get damaged against the tile. He was one of the guards who hadn't embraced guns yet, but when you were as good with a bow as he was, it wasn't as big a problem as it might have been, according to Doyle.

I leaned my hair back into the water enough to finish rinsing off. It was Rhys's turn in the shower anyway. He'd cleaned his weapons first.

"What do you mean, the Goddess herself?" Brii asked.

Rhys started to explain, a much edited version of things. I turned off the shower, and opened the door to get the towels that always seemed to be hanging where we needed them. I had a moment to wonder if Barinthus put out the towels, but I doubted it. He didn't strike me as that domestic.

Brii handed me the first towel, but his eyes were all for Rhys and the story. I bent over to wrap my hair, and it was Ivi's hand that traced my back and slid lower. It made me look at him, because I would have thought that talk of the Goddess would have distracted him from such things. But, unlike Brii, his eyes were on me. There was a heat in his eyes that shouldn't have been there after a month of freedom - a month when we had almost an even number of male and female sidhe guards.

"Ivi," Rhys said, "you aren't listening to me." He didn't sound angry, but rather puzzled.

Ivi blinked and shook himself like a bird settling its feathers. "I would say apologies, but we're both so old that that's an insult, so what do I say, that the sight of the princess naked distracted me from anything you could say?" He smiled at the end but it wasn't a completely happy smile.

"You and the others were supposed to talk to Merry at dinner about this."

"The Fear Dearg are back," Ivi said. "I remember them, oh Lord of Death. It was they I first thought of when we woke and found that both of us were asleep on duty." Ivi made a face; it was anger, disgust, and other things I couldn't read.

"I am too young to remember, for I was not yet aware," Brii said, "but I came to true life not long after the end of it and I remember the stories. I saw the wounds and the damage done. When such enemies are about, what good soldier complains about anything else?"

I stood there with my hair in its towel, but the other towel loose in my hands. "I'm missing something here," I said.

"Tell her," Rhys said, making a little go-ahead motion with his gun.

Brii looked embarrassed, and that was a rare emotion for the sidhe. Ivi lowered his bold eyes, but said, "I have failed at my post this night. How can I ask for more after that?"

"Galen and Wyn were still deep asleep when I came in here. This should have woken them?" I asked.

The three men looked at each other, and then Brii and Rhys both moved out through the door enough to see the big bed. They came back into the bathroom, with Rhys shaking his head. "They haven't moved." He seemed to think about that. "In fact, Doyle and Frost should be in here. All the rest of the guards should be in here with weapons drawn. These two" - and he motioned with his sword at them - "made a hell of a lot of noise rushing to save you."

"But no one else woke up," I said.

Rhys smiled. "The Goddess has kept everyone but the two of you asleep. I think that means you get to have your talk with Merry. My weapons are clean. Now it's my turn in the shower."

"Wait," I said, "what talk?"

Rhys kissed me on the forehead. "Your guards are afraid of you, Merry. They're afraid you'll be like your aunt, and your cousin, or uncle, or grandfather." He looked up as if thinking over the list.

"There's a lot of bad crazy in my family tree," I said.

"Most of the new guard who followed you out of faerie have stayed celibate."

I stared at him, and then turned slowly to stare from Brii to Ivi. "Why, in the name of the Danu? I told you my aunt's celibacy rule didn't hold anymore."

"She said that in the past," Brii said slowly, "and she was fine if it was casual lusts, but if we found someone we cared for ..." He stopped and looked to Ivi.

"I never fell in love with anyone," Ivi said, "and after seeing what she did to some of the lady loves, I had never been so happy that I was a cad and a bounder in my existence."

"I have six fathers and six consorts. I'm okay that the rest of you have sex, make friends, fall in love. It would be wonderful if more of you fell in love."

"You seem to mean that," Ivi said, "but your relatives have seemed sane over the centuries, but they weren't."

I realized what he was saying. "You think I'm going to go crazy like my aunt, and cousin, and uncle, and ..." I thought about it, and could only nod. "I guess I see your point."

"None of them but your grandfather was always cruel and horrible," Ivi said.

"There's a reason his name is Uar the Cruel," I said, and I didn't try to keep the look of disgust off my face. He'd never had any use for me, nor I for him.

"It always seemed that jealousy was what undid your relatives - jealousy of affection, of power, of possessions even," Brii said. "You have a relative on both thrones of faerie, and they are both vain and hate anyone who even hints that they may not be the most beautiful, the most handsome, the most powerful."

"You believe that if you go to other lovers I will see it as a rejection of my beauty?"

"Something like that, yes," he said.

I looked from one to the other of them, frowning. "I don't know how to reassure you, because you're right about my blood relatives. My father and grandmother were sane, but even my own mother isn't quite right. So I don't know how to reassure you."

"It's the fact that you haven't touched any of them that's creeping them out," Rhys said.

"What?"

"The queen would only let the guards she hadn't slept with find other lovers. If she'd had sex with you then you were hers forever even if she never touched you again."

I stared at him. "You mean before the celibacy nonsense that was her rule?"

"Her law," Ivi said.

"She was always a very possessive woman," Rhys said.

"She was always crazy, you mean," I said.

"No, not always," Rhys said.

The other men agreed.

"And the very fact that once the queen wasn't mad, but just ruthless, is what frightens us about you, Princess Meredith," Ivi said.

"You see," Brii said, "if she had always been mad then we would trust that your reasonableness would last, but once the queen was reasonable. Once she was a good ruler or faerie and the Goddess wouldn't have chosen her."

"I see the problem," I said, and wrapped the almost forgotten towel around me. I felt a little cold all of a sudden. I hadn't thought about my family quite like this. What if it was genetic? What if sadistic craziness was inside me somewhere, waiting for a chance to come out? Was it possible? Well, yes, but ... My hand went to my stomach, still so flat, but there were babies in there. Would they take after me and my father, or ... That was the most frightening of all. I trusted myself, but the babies were unknown.

"What can I do?" I asked. I wasn't even sure which fear I was asking about, but the men had only one fear to focus on.

"We failed you tonight, Princess Meredith," Brii said. "We do not deserve any more consideration than our lives."

"When the Goddess moves among us none can stand in her way," Rhys said.

"Do you really think that the Darkness or the Killing Frost would see it that way if something had happened to her?" Ivi asked.

"If something had happened to her, neither would I," Rhys said, and there was that hardness to him that he hid most of the time behind jokes and his love of film noir, but more and more I glimpsed it. He'd come back into a lot of his power that had been gone for centuries, and there is something about that much power that makes you harder.

"See," Ivi said.

"Again, I feel like I'm missing something. Rhys, just tell me what they keep tiptoeing around."

Rhys looked from one man to the other. "You have to ask for yourselves. That's always been the rule."

"Because if you won't ask for yourself, you don't want it that badly," Brii finished for him, a little sadly. He began to put all his arrows away, and turned for the still-open door.

"Stay, for if I ask it can be for both of us," Ivi said.

Brii hesitated in the doorway.

"I want it badly enough to ask," Ivi said.

"Ask what?" I said.

"Make love to us, have sex with us, fuck us. I don't care what you call it, but please touch us. If you touch us tonight and let us have other lovers tomorrow and are calm about it, then it will be proof that you are not your aunt, or even your uncle of the Bright court. He wouldn't kill lovers who went to another bed, but he destroyed them politically at court, because to go directly to another bed after a night with him said, to him at least, that he wasn't good enough to make you not want someone else."

"See why I would not ask tonight?" Brii said. "It is a great honor to be in the bed of our ruler, and it should not be a reward for such badly done duty."

"The Goddess woke you first," I said. "There has to be a reason for that."

"I don't smell flowers," Rhys said.

"Me neither, but maybe this isn't about Goddess work, as much as the fact that someone should have told me that sooner. I lived in fear of my aunt my entire life. I've been her victim of torture, and my cousin made my childhood a misery when my father wasn't watching."

"We need to know how much of the queen is in her niece," Ivi said, and he was very solemn, unlike his usual teasing self. I realized that maybe his teasing, like Rhys's humor, was hiding more serious things.

"Rhys needs the shower, and the beds are all taken, but the couches are big enough."

Rhys kissed me on the cheek. "Have fun." He moved past me to the showers, but put his weapons at the back of the shower, where the shelf had been designed for less lethal things, but it worked perfectly for weapons, as we'd all discovered.

"The couches are big enough for what?" Brii asked.

"Sex," I said. "Sex tonight, but tomorrow you have to persuade one of the other guards to be with you, because this only works if you go from my bed almost directly to someone else, right?"

"Will that not bother you?" Brii asked.

I laughed. "If I wasn't part fertility deity you wouldn't get sex tonight. Rhys did his duty very well tonight, and if I were truly mortal flesh I'd be a little sore, but I am not, and the power will rise between us and it will be good."

"So your orders are to make love to you now, but find another guard to sleep with as soon as possible?" Ivi asked.

I thought about it, and then nodded. "Yes, those are my orders."

Ivi grinned at me. "I like you."

I smiled back at him, because I couldn't help it. "I like you, too. Now let's go find the couches and prove just how much we like each other."

I heard the shower turn on behind us as we moved for the door.