I WAS READY TO LIE DOWN AND GET SOME REST AND RELAXATION. It promised to be a long night. But I wasn't allowed to be alone. Not even just to sleep. Between Taranis's treachery and Queen Andais being able to see in the mirror at will, Rhys and Frost were just not willing to risk me being alone. I couldn't argue with them, so I didn't even try. I just started undressing so I could climb between the covers.
If it had been Doyle and Frost they would both have stayed, and we might have slept or we might have done something more active. But Rhys and Frost had never shared me, not even for sleep. There had been a moment of awkwardness as I undressed and they looked at each other.
It was Rhys who finally said, "I want sex with you before the goblins tonight, but I've seen that look on Frost's face before."
"What look?" Frost asked, but I didn't ask because I could see it, and I'd seen it before. Frost's need and uncertainty were plain in his eyes, in the lines of his mouth.
"I want sex," Rhys said, "but you need reassurance, and that takes longer to get."
"I do not know what you mean," Frost said in a cold voice. His face was at its arrogant best again, that moment of uncertainty hidden behind years of courtly living.
Rhys smiled. "It's all right, Frost. I understand, really I do."
"There is nothing to understand," Frost said.
I slipped naked under the covers, almost too tired to care who won the conversation. I settled against the pillows and waited for one of them to climb into bed with me. I was so tired, so overwhelmed with all of the day's events that it didn't seem to matter who slept next to me, as long as someone did.
"Doyle isn't just your captain, Frost. You've been each other's right hands for centuries. You're feeling the lack of him."
"We are all feeling the lack of him healthy at our sides," Frost said.
Rhys nodded. "Yes, but only you and Merry feel his loss this deeply."
"I do not understand you," Frost said.
"That's okay," Rhys said. He looked at me. The look asked me, did I understand? I thought I did.
"Come to bed, Frost. Sleep with me." I patted the bed.
"Doyle told me to take care of you until he is able."
I smiled at the face that was trying for blankness and failing around the edges. "Then come to bed and take care of me, Frost."
"You promised me sex, and I am going to hold you to it," Rhys said.
Frost hesitated by the bed. "We have never shared the princess."
"And we aren't going to now," Rhys said. "I'll share sometimes with the newer men because Merry likes me better than she likes them." He smiled, and I returned the smile. Then his face sobered, and there was something far too serious in his face. "But I could not bear to share her with you and see how she feels about you. I know she loves you more, you and Doyle, but I do not wish the fact rubbed into my body like salt into a wound."
"Rhys," I said.
He shook his head, and pushed a hand toward me. "Don't try to save my ego. You'd have to lie to do it, and the sidhe don't lie."
It was Frost who said, "Rhys, I do not mean to cause you pain."
"You can't help being who you are, and she can't seem to help loving you. I tried to hate you for it, but I can't. If you get her pregnant, and I end up back with Andais, then I'll hate you, but until then, I'll try to share with some grace."
I wanted to say something to make it better, but what could I say? Rhys was right; any comforting words would have had to be lies.
"I do not slight you on purpose, my white knight," I said.
Rhys smiled. "We are both equally pale, my princess. We knew going into this that only one man can be king. Even I think that Doyle and Frost together make a good ruling pair for you. Too bad that even among the Darkness and the Killing Frost there will be a winner and a loser."
With that, Rhys left, closing the door behind us. I heard him speak to the dogs, who must have been waiting outside the door. We did not let the dogs in when we spoke to Andais because she had touched the black dogs and they had not transformed into special dogs for her. The magic had not known her, and she resented it. Frost feared that the lack of a dog meant he was not sidhe enough. Andais simply hated the fact that the returning power didn't seem to know her. She was queen, and all the power of her court should have been hers, but it didn't seem to be working that way.
I almost called to Rhys to let the dogs in but didn't, because it would be a reminder to Frost of what he lacked. The door closed softly, but firmly, and I was left looking up at the man who had stayed.
Frost took off his suit jacket, and the moment he did I could see all the weapons he was carrying. There were many guns and blades, but he was always armed for war. I counted four handguns and two blades in the front of the leather. There would be more, because there were always more weapons than met the eye with the Killing Frost.
"You smile. Why?" he asked softly. He began to undo the buckles that held the leather in place.
"I would ask what army you had planned to fight today with so many weapons, but I know what you feared."
He removed the weapons carefully and laid them across the bedside table. The armament on the wood was heavy with the potential for destruction.
"Where did you put your gun?" Frost asked.
"It's in the drawer of the bedside table."
"You took it off as soon as you entered this room, didn't you?"
"Yes," I said.
He went to the closet and hung the jacket on a hanger. He started unbuttoning his shirt with his back still to me. "I do not understand why you would do that."
"One, a gun is not truly comfortable. Two, if I had needed my gun in this bedroom, it would mean that all of you were dead. If that happened, Frost, one gun in my hands would not save me."
He turned with the shirt unbuttoned to his waist. He pulled it the rest of the way out of his pants. And tired as I was, seeing him tug the shirt out of his pants, watching him undo the last few buttons, made my pulse speed just a little.
His skin was a strip of whiteness against the lesser whiteness of the cloth. He slid the shirt over his shoulders, exposing his muscled strength in inches. He'd learned that sometimes watching him slowly undress helped whet my appetite for him.
He hung his shirt on an empty hanger, even buttoning the collar so it would hang right and not wrinkle. But in doing so, he let me see the long line of his back and shoulders. He'd even swung all that silver hair over one shoulder so that the muscled smoothness of his back was an unobstructed show.
There were times when watching him hang up his clothes drove me nearly mad and had me making small eager noises before he was ready to come to bed. Today would not be one of those days. The view was lovely as always, but I was tired, and did not feel completely well. Part of it was grief and shock, but also the nagging knowledge that I was coming down with a cold or a virus. Frost had never had cold. He had never had so much as the sniffles.
He turned to face me, his hands sliding around the top of his pants. He'd had to undo the belt earlier to take off the rig of weapons. I had to be more tired than I knew to have missed him unbuckling his belt.
He started with the button at the top of his pants, and I rolled over. I rolled so my face was buried in the pillow and I could not watch. He was too beautiful to be real. Too amazing to be mine.
I felt the bed move, and knew he was on the bed with me. "Merry, what is wrong? I thought you enjoyed watching me."
"I do," I said, still not looking at him. How did I explain that I was having one of those rare moments when my mortality seemed too real and his immortality too large a reminder.
"Am I not enough to please you without Doyle by my side?"
That made me turn and look at him. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, one leg bent at the knee toward me. His pants gapped where he'd undone the buttons but not the zipper, his belt framing the undone work. He was slumping a little so that the fine muscles and lines of his stomach bunched. I had a choice of looking down to his lap and what I knew was still covered by his pants, or up to the beauty of his chest and shoulders and that face. In a different mood I would have gone down, but sometimes a man needs you to pay attention to things above the waist before you move below.
I sat up, keeping the cover in front of my breasts, because with me nude sometimes Frost forgot to listen, and I wanted him to hear me.
He sat there with his hair pooling like silver fire around his bare skin. He would not look at me, even though I knew he could feel the bed move as I inched close enough to touch his arm.
"Frost, I love you."
His gray eyes rose once, then went back to staring at his big hands where they lay in his lap. "Do you love me alone without Doyle's body beside me?"
My hand tightened on his arm while I tried to think what to say. This was certainly a conversation I hadn't expected to be having. I did love Frost, but I did not always love his moods. "I find you as desirable now as I did that first night."
He rewarded me with a small smile. "That was a very good night, but you avoided answering my question." He gave me the full force of his eyes then. "Which is answer enough." He started to get up, and I pressed my hand on his arm, not to force him, but to try to keep him where he was. He let me keep him sitting on the bed though he was stronger than I would ever be. There, that note of regret again.
I sighed, and tried to cut through his mood and mine to get to something better. "Is it because I turned away and did not watch you undress?"
He nodded.
"I don't feel well. I think I am coming down with a cold."
He looked at me uncomprehendingly.
"Remember that some of you thought that what happened inside faerie had made me immortal like the rest of you?"
He nodded again.
"If I'm coming down with a cold then it is not so. I am still mortal."
He put his hand over mine where it lay against his arm. "Why would that make you look away from me?"
"I love you, Frost, but loving you means that I will have to watch you stay young and handsome and perfect while I age. This body that you love will not remain. I will grow old and I will know death, and I will be forced to look at you every day and know that you do not understand. When I am very old, you will still take off your clothes and be as beautiful as you are now."
"You will always be our princess," he said, and his face showed that he was trying to understand.
I took my hand away and lay back on the bed, staring up at that impossibly lovely face. Tears burned at the back of my eyes and tightened my throat so that I could choke on regret. With everything that had happened today, all that had gone wrong, all the danger around us, I was ready to cry because the men I loved would always remain as beautiful as they were today but I would not. It wasn't death I feared, really, it was the slow decay. How had Maeve Reed's husband borne watching her remain while he grew old? How do love and sanity survive such a thing?
Frost leaned over me, and his shoulders were so broad that his hair fanned out around me like some shining tent, a waterfall caught in mid-motion to glitter in the dim light of my room. "You are young and you are beautiful this night. Why do you borrow such sorrows when they are far away, and I am right here?" He whispered the last words above my lips, and ended with a kiss.
I let him kiss me, but didn't kiss him back. Did he not understand? Well, of course he didn't. How could he? Or... or...
I pushed a hand against his chest and got enough space to look into his face. "Have you loved someone and watched her grow old?"
He sat back abruptly and would not look at me. I wrapped my hand around as much of his wrist as I could. It was too big for me to encircle it. "You have, haven't you?" I asked.
He would not look at me, but finally he nodded.
"Who, when?" I asked.
"I saw her through a pane of glass when I was not the Killing Frost but just Frost. I was just the hoarfrost made into something alive by the belief of the people and the magic of faerie." He looked at me, and there was uncertainty in that look. "You saw me in a vision once, what I began as."
I nodded. I remembered. "You came to her window as Jack Frost," I said.
"Yes."
"What was her name?"
"Rose. She had golden curls and eyes like a winter sky. She saw me at the window, saw me and tried to tell her mother that there was a face at the window."
"She had second sight," I said.
He nodded.
I almost let it go, but I couldn't. I just couldn't. "What happened?"
"She was always alone. The other children seemed to sense that she was different. She made the mistake of telling them the things she could see. They named her witch, and her mother with her. She had no father. From the talk among the other villagers she had never had a father. I heard them as I painted frost on their houses whispering that Rose was begotten by no man, but the devil. They were so poor, and I was just another part of the winter cold that hurt them the most. I wanted so to help her." He raised his big hands, as if he were seeing different hands, smaller and less powerful. "I needed to be more."
"Did you ask for help?" I asked.
He looked at me, startled. "Do you mean, did I ask the Goddess and consort to help me?"
I nodded.
He smiled and it lightened his face, made a joy shine through that he hid most of the time. "I did."
I smiled back at him. "And you were answered."
"Yes," he said, still smiling. "I went to sleep, and when I woke, I was taller, stronger. I found them fuel for their fire, all that long winter. I found them food." Then the joy fled from his face. "I took the food from the other villagers, and they accused her mother of stealing. Rose told them that her friend left it, her shining friend."
I took his hand in mine. "They accused her of withcraft," I said softly.
"Yes and theft. I tried to help, but I didn't understand what it was to be human, or even fey, I was so new, Merry, so new to being anything but ice and cold. I was a thought made into a being. I did not know how to be alive, or what it meant."
"You wanted to help," I said.
He nodded. "My help cost them everything. They were jailed and condemned to death. The first time I called cold to my hands, a cold so deep that it could shatter metal, was for Rose and her mother. I broke their bars and rescued them."
"But that's wonderful." Yet his hand convulsed around mine, and I knew the story didn't end there.
"Can you imagine what the villagers thought when they found the metal bars shattered and the two women gone? Can you imagine what they thought about Rose and her mother?"
"Nothing they hadn't already believed," I said softly.
"Perhaps, but I was a piece of winter. I could not build them a shelter. I could not keep them warm. I could do nothing but take them out into the dead of winter with every human within reach turned against them."
I sat up and tried to hold him, but he wouldn't let me. He turned away and finished his story. "They were dying because where I went, winter followed. I was still too much an elemental thing to understand my own magic. When all was lost, I prayed. The consort came to me and he asked me if I would give up all that I was to save them. I hadn't been alive very long, Merry, and I remembered what it had been like before. I didn't want to go back to that, but Rose lay so still in the snow, her hair fading into the whiteness, that I said yes. I would give up all that I was if it would save them. It seemed a suitable sacrifice, since my meddling, no matter how well intentioned, had brought about their misery."
He stopped talking for so long that I came to him and wrapped my arms around him from behind. This time he let me do it. He even leaned back against the pull of my body so that I cradled his upper body against my kneeling one.
I whispered, "What happened?"
"There was music in the snow, and Taranis, Lord of Light and Illusion, came riding on a horse made of moonlight. You have no idea how amazing a golden court could be when they rode out in those days, Merry. It wasn't just Taranis who could make a steed out of light or shadow or leaves. It was truly magical. He and his men lifted them out of the snow and began to ride away toward the faerie mound. I was content to lose her if it meant she lived. I waited to be blasted back to nothingness and I was content. I had saved them, and my existence for theirs seemed right. I won't say my life for theirs because I wasn't alive yet then, not as I am now."
I hugged him close, and he gave me more of his weight, so that I leaned back against the foot of the bed, and cradled him. I kept one hand on his chest so I could feel his words rumbling up through his body.
"She woke, held in the lap of one of the shining court. My little Rose woke. She cried out for her Jackie, for her Jackie Frost. I came to her as I had from that first moment. I came to her because I could do nothing else. She pushed herself from the arms of that shining lord of the sidhe and came to me. I was not as I am now, Merry. I was young and childlike. The goddess gave me a body that could do more. But I was not one of the shining court. I was a lesser fey in every way. I suppose to human eyes I might have appeared as a boy of perhaps fourteen or younger. I looked a good match for my Rose."
He lay still in my arms.
"What happened to her mother?" I asked.
"She is still a cook at the golden court."
I kissed his forehead, then asked, "What happened to Rose?"
"We found shelter, and I used my magic to carry her far away from her village. People didn't travel then as they do now, and twenty miles was enough distance that we never saw any of the others again, She taught me how to be real, and I grew with her."
"What, do you mean, you grew with her?"
"I looked like a boy of fourteen, as she was a girl of fifteen. As she grew, so did I. It was not sword and shield that I first learned with these arms, it was axe and any other work a strong back could do to help take care of his family."
"You had children," I whispered.
"No. I thought it was because I wasn't real enough. Now, since you remain without child I wonder if it is simply not my fate to have children."
"But you were a couple," I said.
"Yes, and a priest who was more friendly than Christian even married us. But we could not stay in any one village for long, because I did not age. I grew with my Rose until I am as you see me now. Then I stopped, but she did not. I watched her hair turn from yellow to white, her eyes fade from the blue of winter to the gray of snowy skies."
He looked up at me then, and there was fierceness in his face. "I watched her fade, but I loved her always. Because it was her love that made me real, Merry. Not faerie, not wild magic, but the magic of love. I thought I was giving up what life I had to save Rose, but the consort had asked if I would give up everything I was, and I did. I became what she needed me to be. When I realized that I would not age with her I wept, because I could not imagine being without her."
He came to his knees and put his hands on my arms, and stared down into my face. "I will love you always. When this red hair is white, I will still love you. When the smooth softness of youth is replaced by the delicate softness of age, I will still want to touch your skin. When your face is full of the line of every smile you have ever smiled, of every surprise I have seen flash through your eyes, when every tear you have ever cried has left its mark upon your face, I will treasure you all the more, because I was there to see it all. I will share your life with you, Meredith, and I will love you until the last breath leave your body or mine."
He leaned down and kissed me, and this time I kissed him back. This time I melted into his arms, his body, because I could do nothing else.
