Swallowing Darkness

Chapter Thirteen

The stones of the garden path moved under my bare feet. I was suddenly aware that I had small cuts on my feet. The stones seemed to be touching the cuts.

I clutched Sholto's arm more tightly, and looked down at what we walked upon. The stones were shades of black, but there were images in them. It was as if pieces of the formless part of the wild hunt were inside the stones, but it wasn't just visuals. They reached out to the surface of the stones with tentacles and too many limbs, and they could touch us. The miniature pieces of the wild magic seemed particularly interested in anywhere that I was scraped or bleeding.

I jumped, nearly pulling Sholto off the path. "What is wrong?" he asked.

"I think the stones are feeding on the cuts on my feet."

"Then I need a place to lay the Storm Lord down, so I can carry you." At his words, the center of the knot garden spread wide like a mouth, or a piece of cloth that you open to make room for a sleeve.

There was the sound of plants moving at speeds that no natural plant was ever meant to move, a dry, slithering rustling that made me look around. Sometimes when plants moved like that it was to simply make a new piece of faerie, but sometimes it was to attack. I'd been bled by the roses in the Unseelie antechamber. My blood had awoken them, but it had still hurt, and it had still been frightening. Plants don't think like people, and making them able to move doesn't change that. Plants don't understand how animals think and feel. I suppose the same is true in reverse, but I wasn't going to hurt the plants by accident, and I wasn't so sure that the whispering, hurrying plants would grant me the same safety.

Normally I felt safe when the magic of the Goddess was moving this strongly, but there was just something about this garden that made me nervous. Maybe it was the feel of the stones moving under my feet, using small mouths to lick and drink from the minute cuts in my feet. Maybe it was the knotted herbs that made it almost dizzying if you looked at their patterns too long.

I looked behind us and found that the rose hedge had knitted itself completely around the garden. No, there was a gate in the hedge. It looked like a white picket fence gate with a wooden arch that curved gracefully over it. Then I realized that there were images in the pale wood. Then I knew it wasn't wood. The gate was formed of bone.

There were four small trees in the center of the garden now, where the herbs and stones had moved aside. Vines curved up them, and the wood formed to the curving lines of the vines, the way that trees will when they've had the vines shaping them their entire lives. The vines interlaced above the trees, and the limbs and leaves of the trees interwove into a canopy. The vines formed a lacework lower down, and new herbs grew under the vines, forming a cushion of vegetation under them. The garden was growing a bed for Mistral.

Flower petals began to rain down upon the bed. Not just the rose petals that sometimes fell around me, but flowers of all colors and kinds. They formed four pillows that went across the width of the bed's head. They formed a blanket, which pulled itself down to the foot of the bed, turning itself down for the night.

Sholto looked at me. His look was a question. I answered it as best as I could. "Your sithen has prepared a place for us to sleep and to heal Mistral."

"And to heal you, Meredith."

I squeezed his arm. "To heal us all."

Sholto walked to the bed on a spill of green grasses so bright that it looked too green to be grass. The moment I stepped from the stone to the grass, I realized that it was small stones too. I gazed down at what we walked upon, and knew that it was formed of emeralds. It crunched underfoot, but it wasn't sharp or hurtful. I had no words for the texture of the emeralds. It was almost as if they were real grass, but just happened to be formed of precious stones.

Sholto laid Mistral in the center of the bed. It was as if he knew what needed to be done to heal him. Deity wasn't talking just to me tonight.

The bed was tall enough that I had to climb, rather than step, onto it. Vines in the bed frame curled around me, lifting me. It was actually a little more help than was comforting. The bed was a marvelous thing, but the thought of vines that could move that much curling around me while I slept wasn't a completely good thought.

Sholto knelt on the other side of Mistral from where I was crawling up beside him. "Who is the fourth pillow for?" he asked.

I knelt in the surprising softness of herbs, vines, and petals, and stared at the pillow. I started to say, "I don't know," but in the middle of the breath to say it, another word came. "Doyle."

Sholto looked at me. "He is in the human hospital miles away, surrounded by metal and technology."

I said, "You are right," but the moment I said it, I knew we had to get Doyle. We had to rescue him. Rescue him? I said it out loud. "We have to rescue him."

Sholto frowned at me. "Rescue him from what?"

I had that moment of panic that I'd felt before. It wasn't words but a feeling. It was fear. I'd only felt it twice before: once when Galen had been attacked by assassins, and the other time when Barinthus, our strongest ally in the Unseelie Court, had been at the wrong end of a magical plot in which our enemies had maneuvered the queen to kill him.

I gripped Sholto's arm tightly. "There is no time to explain. Mistral can rest here in the magic of faerie. We will return and give our magic to him, but for now, Doyle's life hangs in the balance. I feel it, and this feeling has never been wrong before, Sholto."

He didn't argue again, which was one of the qualities I valued about Sholto. The petal blanket slid over Mistral where Sholto had laid him without the aid of any hands we could see or sense. Magic touched every wound that the iron had made; it was the best we could do until we returned to him.

Sholto turned to me. Without Mistral's body to block the view, the tentacles looked like some sort of clothing, and they were the only thing he was wearing above the waist. "How do we reach Doyle in time?" he asked.

"You are the Lord of That Which Passes Between, Sholto. You took us where a field met woods, and where the shore met ocean. Isn't there anything in a hospital that is a place between?"

He thought for a second, then nodded. "Life and death. A hospital is full of people who hover between. But there is too much metal and technology for me, Meredith. I have no human blood in me to help me work major magic around such things."

I took one of his hands and wrapped my much smaller fingers around his. "I do."

He frowned at me. "But this is not your magic. It is mine."

I prayed. "Goddess guide me. Show me the way."

"Your hair," Sholto whispered. "There is mistletoe in your hair again."

I turned my head and could feel the waxy green leaves. A touch found the white berries. I gazed up at Sholto, and he had a crown of woven herbs. They bloomed with tiny stars of lavender, white, and blue. He raised his free hand and there again was a tendril of green like a living ring on his finger. It burst into white bloom, like the most delicate of gemstones.

I felt movement around one ankle, and raised my gown to find an anklet of green and yellow leaves, lemon thyme wrapped around me. Except for the mistletoe in my hair, this was what we had gained the night that Sholto and I had first made love. The mistletoe had been from a night when I was with other of my men.

A vine rose from the bed like a thorny green serpent. It moved toward our clasped hands. "Why is it always thorns?" I asked, but this was one moment when my wishes would not change faerie.

Sholto said it, "Because everything worth having hurts." His hand tensed against mine, then the vine found our hands and began to wind around us. Thorns bit into our skin with small biting pains. Blood began to trickle down our hands, mingling our blood as our hands were pressed more and more tightly by the thorns. It should have simply hurt, but the summer sunshine fell upon us, and the perfume of herbs and roses, warmed by the life-giving sun, was all around us.

The vine around our hands burst into flowers. Pink roses covered the vine, hiding the pain, and giving us a bouquet more intimate than any ever made by man.

I felt my hair move, and as Sholto leaned in to kiss me, he said, "You wear a crown of mistletoe and white roses."

We kissed, and his free hand with its ring of flowers cradled my face. We drew apart just enough to speak. "By our mingled blood," I whispered.

"By the power of the Goddess," he said.

"Let us join our power," I said.

"And our kingdoms," he replied.

"Let it be so," I said, and there was a sound like some great bell being rung, as if the universe had been waiting for us to say those words. I should have been afraid of what it meant. I should have had doubts, but in that moment, there was no room for such things. There were only Sholto's eyes gazing into mine, his hand on my face, our hands tied together by the very magic of faerie itself.

"So mote it be," he answered. "Now let us save our Darkness."

I'd traveled with Sholto to the between places, but I'd never been able to feel his power stretching outward. It was surprisingly similar to a hand reaching outward in the dark until it finds what it needs and draws it near.

One moment we were in the heart of faerie, the next we were in an emergency room surrounded by doctors, nurses, and screaming monitors. There was a strange man on the gurney, and a doctor was trying to restart his heart.

They stared at us for a moment, then we simply walked away, leaving them to save the man if they could. "Where is he, Meredith?" Sholto asked.

Sholto had gotten us here. Now it was up to me to find Doyle in time.

Chapter Fourteen

I had a moment of panic as we walked down a corridor. How did I find Doyle? I thought about him, and the mark on my stomach pulsed. It had begun as a real moth but had thankfully become a tattoo. If I ever made a flag or a shield to represent me, it would hold that small moth with its bright hind wings. It was called the beloved underwing, an Ilia Underwing. It was my mark, and some of my guards bore it on their bodies. Doyle was one of those. The mark pulsed as we moved, like a game of hot and cold. If Doyle had been well, I could have simply called him to me, but I was afraid to call him. If his injuries were life threatening, then getting out of his sickbed to come to me might kill him.

I could not take that chance. We paced through the hospital guided by the mark on my body. I kept waiting for people to scream and point, but they didn't. They acted as if they could not see us. I asked, "You're hiding us?"

"I am."

"I can never make people walk around me without making them think too hard."

"I am the King of the sluagh, Meredith. I can hide a small army in plain sight. An army that would blast the minds of the humans we pass."

I glanced down at the pristine floor and realized we were leaving a trail of blood drops. My hand didn't hurt anymore, wound with his. It was as if the pain had already become familiar, but we were still bleeding. I could see the blood drops clearly, but the humans walked in it and left tracks, as if they could not see it.

The hospital was no longer a sterile environment. Was our blood a problem? Magic was often like this. It worked, but it could have unforeseen consequences. Were we contaminating everywhere we walked?

What was supposed to be a tattoo fluttered against my gown. It was a moth with wings again, stuck in my body, as if my flesh were ice that had captured it but left its wings to struggle vainly to free itself. The sensation was a little stomach-churning, or maybe the way I thought of it. But the frantic wings let me know that he was above us, and that we needed the elevator. The pulsing had been harder to interpret, but the frantic wings were easier to judge. We were running out of time. If I'd been inside faerie I could have moved the fabric of reality like a curtain and found him much sooner, but reality was harsher here, even for me with my human blood in my veins, and on the floor behind us.

The elevator went to the floor that someone had pushed, but the doctor there seemed unwilling to get inside with us, though he didn't see us. Sholto was keeping our way clear. The doors closed and we went up again.

The elevator opened, but when Sholto tried to get off, the moth was so frantic it hurt, as if it were trying to fly free of my body. I pulled him back, and we waited for the doors to close. I hovered over the buttons, and hit the floor that the wings seemed most excited about.

I'd never navigated like this, and being inside so much metal and technology, I think I had assumed that the moth would not work very well here, but it was part of my body, and that meant that man-made things did not weaken its magic. I had to trust that all the magic I possessed would work here, and work well.

The elevator opened and the moth flew forward. I stepped in the direction that it wanted to go. Its frantic movements made me begin to run. We were close. Were we running into a trap, or were Doyle's injuries stealing him away from me?

Sholto trotted at my side. He spoke as if he'd heard some of my thoughts. "I can hide us from other denizens of faerie as long as we do not interact with them."

"I know only that he is in danger, not what that danger is," I said. "I have no weapon," he said.

"Our magic works here. Not all of theirs will."

"The hand of power that injured Doyle and me worked just fine," he said.

He had a point but I said, "Brownies have always been able to work magic around men and machinery. It was one of the reasons that Cair used Gran. You need mortal and brownie blood to work major magic here."

Pain doubled me over. It felt as if the moth were trying to tear its way out of my skin. Only Sholto's hand on me kept me upright. I pointed at the door to our left. "In there."

He didn't argue with me, simply made sure I could stand, then reached for the door handle. He was using glamour to hide us, but a door opening on its own was almost impossible to hide. You had to wait for others to open things for you if you wanted to remain hidden, but there was no time. The panic was screaming in my head, the moth frantic against my body.

A doctor, a nurse, and a uniformed policeman sitting in the corner all looked up as the door opened. I started to rush forward, but Sholto held me back. He was right. If we wanted to remain unseen, we had to move slowly and let the door close behind us. If we drew any more attention to the magically opening door, someone might see us.

But it took everything I had not to simply run across the room to Doyle. He lay terribly still against the white sheets. There were tubes and monitors everywhere. Needles pierced his body, and tape held them in place. Liquids ran down tubes into him.

I'd been prepared for an attack, a spell, but I had forgotten. Doyle was a creature of faerie. There was no mortal blood in him. Nor brownie. There was nothing in him but some of the wildest magics that faerie could offer.

"His vitals just keep going down, Doctor," the nurse said.

The doctor had turned from the now-closed door and was looking at Doyle's chart. "We've treated the burns. He should be improving."

"But he's not," the nurse said.

The doctor snapped at her. "I can see that."

The uniformed policeman was still looking at the door. "Are you saying that someone's using magic to kill Captain Doyle?"

"I don't know," the doctor said, "and I don't say that often."

"I know," I said.

They all turned toward my voice, frowning but still seeing nothing. If it had been my glamour hiding us, my speaking would have been enough to break the spell and reveal us, but Sholto's power was stouter stuff.

"Did you hear that, Doctor?" the nurse asked.

"I'm not sure."

"I heard it," the cop said.

"I can save him," I said.

"Who's there?" the cop asked, and he was standing, with his hand going for his gun.

"I am Princess Meredith NicEssus, and I have come to save the captain of my guard."

"Show yourself," the cop said.

Sholto did two things: he made his tentacles back into their lifelike tattoo, and he dropped the glamour. To the humans in the room, we simply appeared.

The cop started to raise his gun, then stopped in mid-motion. He blinked and shook his head, as if to clear his vision.

"So beautiful," the nurse said, and she looked at us with wonderment on her face.

The doctor looked frightened. He backed away from us until the bed was against him. He clutched Doyle's chart as if it were a shield.

I tried to think how we must look to them, crowned with living flowers, covered in the magic of the Goddess, but in the end, I couldn't imagine. I would never be able to see what they saw.

We moved toward the bed, and the policeman recovered himself enough to try to point his gun again. But the gun eased toward the floor once more. "I can't," he said in a strangled voice.

"Take the needles and tubes out of Doyle. You're using man-made medicine on him, and it's killing him," I said.

"Why?" the doctor managed to ask.

"He is a creature of faerie, and there is no mortal blood in him to help ease him around such modern wonders." I touched Doyle's arm, and his skin was cool to the touch. "We must hurry, Doctor, and remove him from this artificial place, or he will die." I reached for the IV in Doyle's arm. "Help me."

The doctor looked at me like I'd sprouted a second head, a frightening one. But the nurse moved to help me. "What do you want me to do?" she asked.

"Disconnect him from all of it. We need to take him back to faerie with us."

"I can't let you take an injured man out of my hospital," the doctor said, his voice regaining the ring of authority it had started with, as if now that he had a concrete fact, he felt better. Sick people didn't get taken from the hospital; it was a rule.

I looked at the policeman. "Can you please help the nurse free Captain Doyle of these machines?"

He holstered his gun, and moved to the other side of the bed to help.

"You're a cop," the doctor said. "You're not qualified to disconnect him from anything."

The cop looked at the doctor. "You just said that he wasn't improving, and that you didn't know why. Look at them, Doc, they're dripping magic all over the place. If the captain is used to living like that, then what is all the machinery doing to him?"

"There are channels to go through. You can't just walk in here and take my patient." He was looking at us.

"He is the captain of my guard, my lover, and the father of my children. Do you truly believe I would do anything to endanger him?"

The nurse and the cop were already ignoring the doctor. The nurse directed the cop, and between the two of them they turned everything off and left Doyle lying in the bed free of it all.

Now we could touch him; it was as if the magic knew that he needed to be free of all that was hurting him before we could heal him.

I touched his shoulder, and Sholto touched his leg. His body reacted as if we had shocked him, spine bowing, eyes wide, breath coming in a gasp. He reacted to pain a second later, but he looked at me. He saw me.

He smiled, and whispered, "My Merry."

I smiled back and felt the bite of happy tears. "Yes," I said. "Yes, I am."

His eyes lost focus, then fluttered closed. The doctor checked his pulse from his side of the bed. He was afraid of us, but not so afraid that he wouldn't do his job. I liked him better for that.

"His pulse is stronger." He looked at Sholto and me on the other side of the bed. "What did you do to him?"

"We shared some of the magic of faerie," I said.

"Would it work on humans?" he asked.

I shook my head, and the crown of roses and mistletoe moved in my hair, like some serpentine pet settling more comfortably. "Your medicine would have helped a human with the same injuries."

"Did your crown just move?" the nurse asked.

I ignored the question, because the sidhe are not allowed to lie, but the truth would not help her. She was already staring at us like we were amazing. The look on her face and to a lesser extent the policeman's reminded me why President Thomas Jefferson had made certain that we agreed to never be worshipped as deities on American soil. Neither of us wanted to be worshipped, Sholto and I, but how do you keep that look off someone's face when you stand before them crowned by the Goddess herself?

I expected the roses that bound our hands to uncurl so we could pick Doyle up, but they seemed perfectly happy where they were.

"Let us pick him up from the other side of the bed," Sholto said. "That way you will be carrying his legs, which are lighter."

I didn't argue; we simply moved to the other side of the bed. The doctor moved back from us as if he didn't want us to touch him. I couldn't really blame him. It had been so long since the Goddess had blessed us to this degree that I wasn't certain what would happen to a human who touched us in this moment.

Sholto bent over, putting his arms under Doyle's shoulders. I did the same at his legs, though I didn't have to bend nearly as far. It took some maneuvering, like an arm version of a three-legged race, but we picked Doyle up. He seemed to fill our arms as if he were meant to be there, or maybe that was just how I felt about touching him. As if he filled my arms, filled my body and my heart. How could I have left him to human medicine without another guard watching over him?

Where were the other guards? That policeman shouldn't have been on his own.

"Meredith," Sholto said, "you are thinking too hard, and we must move together to get him home."

I nodded. "Sorry, I was just wondering where the other guards are. Someone should have stayed with him."

The policeman answered. "They went with Rhys, and the one who's called Falen, no, Galen. They took the body of your  -  " and he looked hesitant, as if he'd already said too much.

"My grandmother," I finished for him.

"There were horses with them," the cop said. "Horses in the hospital, and no one cared."

"They were shining and white," the nurse said. "So beautiful."

"Every guard who they passed seemed to have a horse, and they rode out of the hospital," the cop said.

"The magic took them," Sholto said, "and they forgot their other duties."

I hugged Doyle to me, and gazed at his face cuddled against Sholto's body. "I'd heard that a faerie radhe could make the sidhe forget themselves, but I didn't know what it meant."

"It is a type of wild hunt, Meredith, except it is gentle, or even joyous. This one was for grief, and taking your grandmother home, but if it had been one of singing and celebration, they might have carried the entire hospital with them."

"They were too solemn in their grief," the nurse said.

"Yes," Sholto said, "and good for your sakes."

I looked at the nurse, gazing up at Sholto. She looked damn near elfstruck, a term for when mortals become so enamored of one of us that they will do anything to be near their obsession. It can happen about faerie in general, but we didn't have glorious underground places to give the mortals now. So that wasn't such a problem, but Sholto's face was as fair as any in faerie, and, crowned with the blooming herbs, in their haze of colored blossoms, he was like something out of the old fairy stories. I supposed we both were.

"We need to go, Sholto."

He nodded, as if he knew that it wasn't just Doyle's health we were attending to. We needed to get away from the humans before they became any more bemused by us.

We started for the door, having to use our bound hands to steady Doyle's body in our arms. The thin gown moved, and we were suddenly touching the bareness of his body. The thorns must have pierced his body because he made a small sound, moving in our arms like a child disturbed by a dream.

"You're bleeding," the nurse said. She was staring at the floor. Blood drops had formed a pattern beneath us. What was it about touching Doyle with the roses that had made her see the blood? I left the thought for later; we needed to get back to faerie. I suddenly felt like Cinderella hearing the clock begin to strike midnight.

"We must get back to the garden and the bed now."

Sholto didn't argue, only moved us toward the door. He asked the policeman to get the door for us, and he did without complaint.

The doctor called from the open door, "You melted the walls in the room you were in, Princess Meredith."

Did I say I was sorry? I was, but I'd had no control over what the wild magic did to the room I'd woken in earlier this night. It seemed like days ago that I'd woken in the maternity ward.

The doctor's call to us had made others turn. We walked through a world of stares and gasps. It was too late to hide now.

"Find us another patient who is betwixt and between," I said.

He led us to a patient who was housed in an oxygen tent. A woman beside the bed looked up at us with a tearstained face. "Are you angels?"

"Not exactly," I said.

"Please, can you help him?"

I exchanged a glance with Sholto. I started to say no, but one of the white roses fell from my crown onto the bed. It lay there, shining and terribly alive. The woman took the rose in her shaking hands. She started to cry again. "Thank you," she said.

"Take us home," I whispered to Sholto. He led us around the bed, and the next moment we were back in the edge of the garden, outside the gate of bone. We were back, and we had saved Mistral and Doyle, but the woman's face haunted me. Why had the rose fallen onto her bed, and why had it seemed to make her feel better? Why had she thanked us?

It was the humpbacked doctor, Henry, who opened the bone gate. We had to turn sideways to ease through with Doyle in our arms. The gate closed behind us without Henry touching it. The message was clear: none but we were allowed inside.

I was suddenly tired, very tired. We laid Doyle beside the still-sleeping Mistral. We took off Doyle's hospital gown, and crawled up on the bed. Our hands were still bound tightly, so it was awkward, but we seemed to know that we needed to be on either side of the two men. I expected to be unable to sleep with the thorns still in our hands and the bulky crown on my head, but sleep came over me in a wave. I had a moment to see Sholto on the far side of Mistral, still wearing his blooming crown. I snuggled in tightly against Doyle's body, and sleep washed over me. One moment awake, the next asleep. Asleep and dreaming.