They were afraid of her. Truly afraid of her.
Andais laughed, and it was a wild, unnerving sound that promised pain or death.
She'd picked up a blade while I was mostly unconscious. Now she used that blade on Eamon's chest. She sliced at him as if he were a piece of shrubbery that she wanted to clear away. I expected to see blood spraying, but the air was so heavy that it held the blood close. Made it drip slowly, so that she'd made half a dozen wounds before the first began to bleed.
"Lady help us," Doyle said, and his voice sounded so sad, so empty. He was standing almost directly in front of me. I realized that somewhere in her walk toward Eamon, he had moved to block me from her sight. He sighed, and glanced back at the others. There was a look on his face that I'd never seen before.
Rhys sighed back at him. "I hate having to do this."
"As don't we all," Frost answered from my other side.
I found that I had enough breath to speak. "What are you going to do?"
Doyle shook his head. "There is no time to explain." His black eyes were turned away from me, looking at Eamon and the queen. Eamon's chest and stomach were decorated in blood, shallow cuts dripping down his body. There were deeper wounds on his chest that looked like wide scarlet mouths. She'd opened him up on one side of his body so that the white bones of his ribs glittered through the blood.
He repeated, "There is no time," then he was striding toward the queen. Frost followed him, and Rhys followed them both, giving me a backward glance. "It will look worse than it is. Remember, we'll heal."
My pulse was suddenly faster. What were they planning to do? I started forward, but Galen and Adair held my arms. What had been comforting, and supportive, was suddenly a trap. They held me, not so I wouldn't fall, but so I would not follow.
"Let me go, Galen," I said.
"No, Merry, no." But he wasn't looking at me as he said it; his eyes were all for Eamon. Tall, handsome Eamon, being turned into so much raw meat. "They'll be all right." His voice didn't sound as certain as his words.
I looked at Adair. "Let me go."
Adair shook his head. "I will not, Princess. I will stand and I will hold you, so you do not interfere."
Brii said, "You'll stand and hold her, because then you don't have to help." He moved past us in a swirl of yellow hair.
"Help do what?" I asked, and looked from Galen's serious face, his attention all for what was happening against the wall, to Adair, who would not meet my eyes or look at the queen butchering Eamon.
Doyle was close enough to touch the queen now. His deep voice carried. "My queen, we have returned."
It was as if she didn't hear him, as if the world had narrowed down to the blood-soaked blade in her hand, and the body she was cutting.
"My queen." This time Doyle reached out and laid his dark hand on the whiteness of her arm, just above where the blood had begun to run and stain her skin.
She turned on him in a movement almost too fast for the eye to follow. The blade flashed silver, and fresh blood flew in an arc from Doyle's arm.
I said his name before I could think. The queen turned puzzled eyes out into the room, as if seeking my voice, but Doyle stepped into her line of vision, and she slashed at him again. She hit him once more before Rhys moved up a little ahead of him. I couldn't hear what he said, but whatever it was, it was enough. She struck him. Only the twitch of his shoulders showed that it hurt, but he moved backward as if trying to escape the blow. She didn't like that. She came for him in a wild, slashing attack, and Amatheon was suddenly in her way. She opened his arm from shoulder to hand. The blow made him stumble and turn to protect the arm. She drove the knife into his back, and he fell, dropping to his knees. His eyes were wide with pain, and something else: resignation.
"Welcome to the world of the guards, Princess," Adair said. "Welcome to how we keep each other alive. None but the queen and her Ravens have ever witnessed this. You are most privileged." That last held an irony, a bitterness that seemed to cut the very air, as if there were power in it.
A small sound brought my gaze to the guards still kneeling on the floor in a host of bare skin and silken hair. Hair the color of new-mown hay, hair the color of oak leaves, hair the color of dragonfly wings in the sun, hair the color of purple Easter grass, skin that glistened in the light like white metal, skin that shimmered as if sprinkled with gold dust, skin that held the richness of fur on its surface like some elaborate tattoo, skin as red as flame, as pink as bubble gum. Even stripped of their armor, their clothes, their weapons, they were all different, all so terribly unique. They were the Unseelie sidhe, and stripping them could not make them less.
I wasn't sure who had made the noise, but one pair of eyes glared up at me through a fall of grey hair - not the grey of age, but the grey of clouds before a rain. The eyes that stared up through that long, pooling hair were a swimming green color, that greenish-yellowish, near gold, that the world looks just before the might of heaven roars down on your head. His eyes were the color of the world before it drowns in a storm. Because that was who he was, Mistral, the master of winds, bringer of storms. His eyes were as changeable as the weather, and this swimming green was a sign of high anxiety. I'd been told that once upon a time, the sky darkened when Mistral's eyes looked like that.
He caught my gaze, and held it. He told me with his eyes, his face, that I was just another useless royal. That I stood there guarded and well while they bled. Perhaps it was just my own guilt that I read in his eyes. My father had raised me to believe that being royal meant more than just having power over people. It meant in a way that people had power over you, too, because you were supposed to take care of them. I was in line to be queen, to have the power of life and death over these men, but here I was hiding. Hiding, and so afraid I could barely think. The feel of Galen's and Adair's hands on my arms had gone from an insult to a comfort. I wanted them to hold on to me. I wanted an excuse not to have to do anything. I was hiding behind the very people whom I was supposed to keep safe. I felt the look in Mistral's eyes like a blow. He knelt on the floor, knelt where the queen had told him to kneel, probably with the promise that if he moved he could be chained against the wall, too. That was her usual threat. I'd once knelt on this same floor until I passed out. I was after all only mortal, and could not kneel for a day and a night. They could. And if she willed it, they would.