A Shiver of Light

They came, the sidhe, armed, helping shield me from danger, but all I could see was Sholto. Dogmaela rolled him onto his back and I could see the wound that came out a few inches below his right arm. The hole looked big enough to put my fist through. Exit wound, I thought, and then, could he heal it? Could King Sholto, Lord of the Sluagh, heal a high-powered rifle round that might have gone straight through his heart?

Dogmaela was trying to hold pressure on the bullet hole on the entry wound. Someone else knelt and started trying to hold pressure from the other side. I saw them look at each other, and then Dogmaela looked not at me, but at Saraid.

I screamed, “No! Sholto! No!”

Far off I heard seagulls calling in their rough, complaining voices, but there was no mockingbird to sing sweet music. The wind from the sea was cold, and the sea was colder.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

I SAT AT the hospital with Galen on one side of me and Frost on the other. He was still hurt, but as he said when he came through the door, “I am well enough for this.”

I hadn’t let the nurses and doctors take the jacket or the clothes I was wearing, because the jacket was Sholto’s and it, and my dress, were covered in his blood. When they all gave up on the beach, I’d gone to him and held him, and he’d bled on me. He’d still been warm, neither death nor the sea had stolen him that far away, so that he still felt like he should open his eyes and smile up at me. But he’d lain in my lap with that stillness that nothing mimics, not sleep, not illness, nothing but the warm dead feel—so alive and at the same time they move in your arms as you hold them, nerveless, flopping like some great doll, so that you know, you know even while life still warms their skin, you know, oh Gods, you know, that it is the last warmth that their skin will ever hold, and the only thing left is the cold, the terrible cold.

Galen held my hand, and Frost had his arm around my shoulders and it helped, but … I had prayed to Goddess and the Consort, but the petals that had fallen from the sky had been all white, no pink, just white, and I’d known that there would be no help even from Her.

I was starting to shiver and couldn’t seem to stop. A nurse came and kneeled in front of me so she could look into my face, because I seemed to be staring at the floor. “Princess Meredith, please let us take your clothes and get you in something warmer. You’re in shock and the cold, wet clothes aren’t helping.”

I just shook my head.

She pushed a strand of hair back behind her ear to try to get it to stay in the ponytail she’d started her shift with, but she needed to take it out and redo the ponytail, just shoving it back behind her ear wasn’t going to fix her hair. I almost told her that, and then realized concentrating on her hair I’d stopped listening to what she was saying.

“I’m sorry, but I didn’t hear any of that,” I said.

“We have to get you warm, honey, or we’ll be admitting you next.”

“Can we just take her home?” Galen asked.

“We’d like to get her warm and dry, and have a doctor look at her.”

Frost asked, “I thought you did all that before we arrived.”

The nurse smiled, sort of an unhappy or maybe frustrated smile. “The Princess wouldn’t go into a private area, she just kept insisting she was all right.”

Frost hugged me with the one arm across my shoulders and spoke low with his face against my hair. “Merry, you need to let the doctors look at you.”

“I’m all right,” I said, and even to me it felt automatic.

Galen raised my hand that he was holding up so that he could lay a kiss on the back of it, but I pulled back at the last second. “I have blood on my hands.”

“There’s no blood on the back of your hand.” He held it up so I could look at it. “See, all clean.”

I just shook my head, over and over again, and shivered harder. My teeth started to chatter.

“We have to get her dry and warm,” the nurse said, her voice sounding like there was no more arguing about it.

“I’m fine,” I managed to say between chattering, and even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. I had no idea why I didn’t want to let them help me, except that I hadn’t been shot. Sholto had been shot. Sholto was dead, not me. I realized that part of me seemed to think that if I just didn’t let them help me, they’d be able to help him more. It made no sense, but that was finally the thought I dragged up into the front of my head, from where it had been hiding in the back of my thoughts, so I was acting on it, but didn’t know why.

“Merry,” Frost said, “you are not fine. Where does she need to go for a doctor to look at her?”

“Follow me,” the nurse said, obviously happier now that someone was being reasonable.

I didn’t want to be reasonable. I wanted to be totally unreasonable. I wanted to scream at her, lash out at Frost, scream at the world, and the only thing that kept me from it was that voice in my head saying, “That makes no sense.”

I was a princess, a queen actually, Sholto’s queen, which meant I had to do better. The last thing I could do for him was to remember I was his wife—funny, but I’d never thought the word wife much about Sholto and me, but we had been married by the very magic of fairie and Goddess, and that was about as blessed a union as you could get.

I thought of something I hadn’t before. I looked at Frost. “Has anyone told the sluagh that their king is dead?”

“They know,” he said.