Mistral's Kiss

CHAPTER 9

“DEITY MAGIC BROUGHT US HERE,” RHYS SAID, “BUT HOW DO WE get out? There’s no door anymore to the dead gardens.”

“Meredith,” Frost said.

I looked at him.

“Ask the sithen to give us a door leading out of here.”

“Do you think it will be that easy?” Rhys said.

“If the sithen wishes Merry to save Nerys’s people, yes,” said Frost.

“And if it doesn’t wish them saved, or if it doesn’t care?”

Frost shrugged. “If you have a better suggestion, I am listening.”

Rhys spread his hands as if to say no.

I looked out at the dark wall and said, “I need a door that leads out of here.”

The darkness grew less, and a door — a large golden door — appeared in the cave wall. I almost said, Thank you, but some of the older magicks don’t like to be thanked — they take insult from it. I swallowed, and whispered, “It’s a lovely door.”

Carving appeared around the door frame, vines drawn through the wood as if by an invisible finger. “That’s new,” Rhys whispered.

“Let us go through, before it decides to vanish,” Frost said.

He was right. He was most certainly right. But strangely, none of us wanted to pass through the door until the invisible finger had finished drawing its vines. Only when the wood had stopped moving did Doyle touch the golden handle, and turn it. He led the way into a hallway that was almost as black as his own skin. If he stood still, he’d blend into the background.

Rhys touched the wall. “We haven’t had a black corridor like this in the sithen for years.”

“It’s made of the same rock as the queen’s chamber,” I whispered. I’d had so many bad experiences in the queen’s shiny black-walled room that seeing the sithen turn black like that room frightened me.

Mistral was the last one through the door. When he stepped through, the door vanished, leaving a smooth black wall, untouched and unyielding.

“The hallway where Mistral and Merry had sex is turning to white marble,” Frost said. “What caused this corridor to change to black?”

“I do not know,” Doyle said. He was looking up and down the black hallway. “It has changed too much. I do not know where we are in the sithen.”

“Look at this,” Frost said. He was staring up at the wall across from us.

Doyle moved to stand beside him, staring at what, to me, looked like blank wall. Doyle made a harsh, hissing sound. “Meredith, call the door back.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.” His voice was quiet, but it vibrated with urgency, as if he were forcing himself to whisper when what he wanted to do was scream.

I didn’t argue with that tone in his voice. I called out, “I would like a door back into the dead gardens.”

The door appeared again, all gold and pale wood, and carved vines. Doyle motioned Mistral to take the lead. Mistral reached for the golden handle, a naked sword in his other hand. What was happening? Why were they frightened? What had I missed?

Mistral went through with Abe behind him, me in the middle, and Rhys and Doyle following. Frost came last. But before I passed thorugh the doorway, Abe stopped, and Mistral’s voice came urgent from inside the dead gardens, “Back, go back!”

Doyle said, “We cannot stay here in the black hallway.” Rhys was pressed against my back, Abe pressed against my front. We were frozen between the two captains of the guards, each trying to get us moving in the opposite direction.

“We cannot have two captains, Mistral,” Frost said. “Without a single leader we are indecisive and endangered.”

“What is wrong?” I asked.

There was a sound from down the hallway — a heavy, slithering sound that froze my heart in my chest. I was afraid I recognized it. No, I had to be wrong. Then a second sound came: a high chittering sound — one that could be mistaken for birds, but wasn’t.

“Oh, Goddess,” I whispered.

“Forward, Mistral, now, or we are lost,” Doyle said.

“It is not our garden beyond the door,” Mistral said.

The high-pitched bird-like sounds were coming closer, outpacing the heavy slithering weight. The sluagh, the nightmares of the Unseelie Court and a kingdom in their own right, moved fast but the nightflyers always moved faster than the rest of the sluagh. We were inside the sluagh’s hollow hill; somehow we had crossed to their sithen. If they found us here…we might survive, or not.

“Do sluagh wait on the other side of the door?” Doyle asked Mistral urgently.

“No,” Mistral called back.

“Then go, now!” Doyle ordered.

Abe stumbled forward as if Mistral had moved suddenly out of the way. We came through the door in a rush with Doyle pushing from behind. He was like some kind of elemental force at our backs. It put us in a heap on the ground. I couldn’t see anything but white flesh, and I felt the muscled weight of them all around me.

“Where are we?” Frost asked.

Rhys moved, drawing me to my feet with him. Doyle, Mistral, and Frost were all on alert, weapons out, searching for something to fight. The door had vanished, leaving us on the shore of a dark lake.

Lake may have been too strong a word. The depression was dry except for a slimy skim of water at the very bottom. Bones littered the floor of the dying lake, and the shore where we stood. The bones shone dully in the dim light that fell from the stone ceiling, as if the moon had been rubbed into the rock. All around the shore, the stone walls of the cavern rose steeply up into the gloom, surrounded only by a narrow ledge before a steep drop-off into the lake bed.

“Call the door again, Meredith,” Doyle said, his dark face still searching the dead land.

“Yes, and be more specific about our destination this time,” Mistral said.

Abe was still on the ground. I heard a sharp intake of breath, and glanced over at him. His hand was black and shiny in the dim light. “What are these bones that they could cut sidhe flesh?”

Doyle answered him. “They are the bones of the most magical of the sluagh. Things so fantastical that when the sluagh began to fade in power, there was not enough magic to sustain their lives.”

I clung to Rhys and whispered, “We’re in the sluagh’s dead gardens.”

“Yes. Call the door, now.” Doyle glanced at me, then back to the dim landscape.

Rhys had one arm around me, the other hand full of his gun. “Do it, Merry.”

“I need a door to the Unseelie sithen.” On the far side of the dead lake, the door appeared.

“Well, that’s inconvenient,” Rhys whispered wryly, but he tucked me closer against his body.

“There is room to walk the edge, if we are careful,” Mistral said. “We can make our way between the cavern walls and the lake bed, if we pick our way carefully around the bones.”

“Be very careful,” Abe said. He was on his feet now, but his left hand and arm were coated with blood. He still held the horn cup in his right hand, though nothing else — he’d left all his weapons behind in the bedroom. Mistral had dressed and rearmed. Frost was as armed as he had begun the night. Doyle had only what he had been able to grab — no clothes limited how much you could carry.

“Frost, bind Abeloec’s wound,” said Doyle. “Then we will start for the door.”

“It is not that bad, Darkness,” Abe said.

“This is a place of power for the sluagh, not for us,” Doyle said. “I would not take the chance that you bleed to death for want of a bandage.”

Frost didn’t argue, but went to the other man with a strip of cloth torn from his own shirt. He began to bind Abe’s hand.

“Why does everything hurt more sober?” Abe asked.

“Things feel better sober, too,” Rhys said.

I looked up at him. “You say that like you know that for certain. I’ve never seen you drunk.”

“I spent most of the fifteen hundreds as drunk as my constitution would let me get. You’ve seen Abe working hard at it — we don’t stay drunk long — but I tried. Goddess knows, I tried.”

“Why then? Why that century?”

“Why not?” he asked, making a joke of it, but that was what Rhys did when he was hiding something. Frost’s arrogance, Doyle’s blankness, Rhys’s humor: different ways to hide.

“His wound will need a healer,” Frost said, “but I have done what I can.”

“Very well,” said Doyle, and he began to lead the way around the edge of the lake, toward the soft, gold shine of the door that had come because I called it. Why had it appeared all the way across the lake? Why not beside us, like the last two times? But then, why had it come at all? Why was the sluagh’s sithen, as well as the Unseelie sithen, obeying my wishes?

The shore was so narrow that Doyle had to put his back to the wall and edge along, for his shoulders were too broad. I actually fit better on the narrow path than the men, but even I had to press my naked back to the smooth cave wall. The stones weren’t cold as they would have been in an ordinary cave, but strangely warm. The lip of shore we inched across was meant for smaller things to travel, or perhaps not meant to be walked at all. The skeletons littering the shore were those of things that would have swum, or crawled, but nothing that walked upright. The bones looked like the jumbled-together remains of fish, snakes, and things that normally didn’t have skeletons in the oceans of mortal earth. Things that looked like squid, except that squid did not have internal skeletons.

We were halfway around that narrow, bone-studded shore when the air wavered on its far side next to the door. For a moment the air swam, and then Sholto, King of the Sluagh, Lord of That Which Passes Between, was standing there.