Mistral's Kiss

CHAPTER 21

THE ARROWS CUT THE NIGHT SKY LIKE BLACK WOUNDS ACROSS the stars, vanishing into the boiling black silk of the clouds. We waited in the winter night for screams to let us know the bolts had found their mark, but there was nothing but silence.

I stood on the ground, pulling the borrowed trench coat around me. I stood on Holly’s cloak, which he had thrown on the ground to keep my bare feet from the rough ground and the cold. “The cloak gets in the way of my ax,” he’d said, as if he were afraid that I might think he was being gentlemanly. Then he moved forward to be with his brother and the other warriors.

Only Jonty and one other Red Cap stayed back with me, though every Red Cap who had come out tonight — a dozen of them — had touched me before they went to take their place in the ranks. They had laid their mouths, in a strange sort of kiss, against my shoulder where the coat hung heavy with blood from Jonty’s cap. One had caught the coat in his pointed teeth and torn it before Jonty had slapped him away. The ones who came after had widened the hole until the lips of the last few touched my bare shoulder where the blood had begun to dry to my skin. I had neither offered the Red Caps the familiarity, nor been asked; Jonty had called them, and spoken in a Gaelic so old that I could not follow it.

Whatever Jonty had said to them had turned their faces to me, and the look in their eyes was that odd mix of sex, hunger, and eagerness that I’d seen in Holly. I hadn’t understood the look — and hadn’t had time to question it — but because it cost me nothing to have their lips pressed to my shoulder, I allowed it. Then I noticed that each of the Red Caps who touched me began bleeding afresh after touching Jonty’s blood on my body.

I was fighting an urge to scream my impatience at them, but the Red Caps weren’t the ones delaying; the other goblins squabbled about who would go where. If Kurag, Goblin King, had come, there would have been no arguments, but Ash and Holly, though feared warriors, were not kings, and all other leadership among the goblins is a constant state of struggle. The goblin society represented the ultimate in Darwinian evolution: only the strongest survive, and only the very strongest lead.

If I had been truly queen enough to lead them, they would have done what I ordered, but I didn’t have their respect yet, so I knew better than to try to lead here. It would have undermined Ash and Holly, and gained me nothing. Besides, battlefield tactics wasn’t my strongest suit, and I knew that. My father had drilled into me from an early age to know my strengths and weaknesses. Find allies who complement you, he’d said. True friendship is a type of love, and all love has power.

Jonty leaned over me and said, “Call your hand of power, Princess.”

“How do you know they are hurt?”

“We are goblins,” he said, as if that settled it.

Another line of green flame flickered through the trees, and I was close enough now to see the black tendrils back away from it. I didn’t argue again, but called the hand of blood.

I concentrated on my left hand. It didn’t emit a beam of power, or anything like you see in the movies; it was simply that the mark, or key, to the hand of blood lay in the palm of my left hand. Or maybe doorway was a better term. I opened the mark in the palm of that hand, and though there was nothing to see with the naked eye, there was plenty to feel.

It was as if the blood in my veins had suddenly turned to molten metal. My blood tried to boil with the power of it. I screamed, and thrust my hand toward the cloud. I projected that burning, tearing power outward. I realized in that moment that it wasn’t just the archers who were shooting blind — I had never before tried to use the hand of blood on a target I could not see.

For a heartbeat the power turned back on me, and every small scrape I’d accumulated in the past twenty-four hours bled. Each tiny wound bled like a fountain, and I fought my body, fought my own magic to keep it from destroying me.

Lightning struck the cloud, and illuminated it, as it had inside the sluagh’s mound. But I wasn’t horrified this time, I was joyous; a fierce triumphant joy. If I could see it, I could make it bleed.

I had the blink of an eye to spot my targets. A breath to see that the tentacled mass was white and silver and gold, not the black and grey and white it had been. I had an instant to note that the hunt had a terrible beauty before I thrust my power toward that shining mass and screamed, “Bleed!”

Green flame climbed up the trees and lightning flared behind it so that both powers met mine in the cloud at the same instant. The cloud flashed green in reflected color. I called for blood and black fountains of it exploded into the green-yellow flare.

The light died, leaving the night blacker than before. My night vision had been ruined from staring into the light. Something spattered against the left side of my face, something that felt wet, but carried no shock of temperature difference. Only two things feel like that: water at body temperature, and very fresh blood. If I had been a warrior, I would have whirled, gun up, but I turned slowly, like a character in a horror movie who doesn’t really want to see the blow before it falls.

All that met my eyes was the shortest of my Red Cap guards, Bithek. Someone had sliced open his scalp to spill blood in a gory mask down his face, so that even his eyes were lost to the dark flow of it. Then he shook his head like a wet dog, spattering me with warm drops. I closed my eyes, put up a protecting hand.

Jonty’s chided Bithek. “You’re wasting the blood.”

“But so much, can’t keep it out of my eyes. I’d forgotten that it was ever like this,” Bithek growled.

I looked behind me at Jonty and found him as bloody as the other guard. It made me look around at all of them. They were all covered in blood, but even by moonlight and starlight, I could see now that the blood welled from the caps on their heads.

“Your magic brings our blood, Princess,” Jonty said.

“I don’t understand…”

“Make them bleed for us,” the last Red Cap said.

I looked at him. “I can’t remember your name,” I said.

“For this magic, I would follow you nameless, Princess Meredith. Bleed our enemies, and cover us in their blood.”

I turned away from the Red Caps. I didn’t understand completely, but trusted. One mystery at a time — later, later I would unravel it all.

Even facing away from the Red Caps, I could still feel them. It was as if their power complemented mine, fed it. No; our powers fed each other; they were like a warm battery at my back, comforting, energizing.

I threw that warmth, that weight of power against our enemies. I called their blood by the flash of lightning and the flicker of green-gold flame. I called their blood and knew that the Red Caps at my back bled with them. I could feel it. The ones who waited ahead of us bled, too.

A goblin came ru

Now I understood why he was abasing himself — he had been afraid I’d take the message badly.

“Tell them I’ll aim better,” I said wryly.

He ducked his head, bumping his forehead to the earth, then sprang to his feet and raced back the way he had come. I drew my magic back, swallowed the hand of blood. The pain was instantaneous, grinding, and sharp, like broken glass flowing through my veins. I screamed my pain, wordlessly, but kept the magic inside me.

I fought to visualize the creatures inside the cloud. Tentacles, veined with silver and gold, white and pure, muscled magic. I fell to my knees with the pain. Jonty reached for me, and I hissed, “No, don’t touch me.” The magic wanted to bleed someone, anyone, and his touch would make him the target.

I closed my eyes so I could mentally draw the picture of what I sought. When I could see it, shining and writhing across the inside of my eyes, I reached my left hand out again, and threw that broken-glass pain into the image. My pain intensified for a shining, breathless moment — all there was in that second was the pain, so much pain. Then it eased, and I could breathe again…and I knew the hand of blood was busy elsewhere.

I kept my eyes closed so nothing else could catch my eye. I was afraid that if I saw the goblin warriors again, I’d bleed them by accident. I knew what I wanted to bleed, and that was above their heads in the sky. I thought about all the beautiful things that could have flown above their heads. Did it have to be frightening? There was such beauty in faerie, why did it have to be nightmarish?

I heard the sound of wings whistling overhead, and opened my eyes. I’d fallen to the ground on top of Ash’s cloak, though I didn’t remember falling. Above us, so close that the great white wings brushed Jonty’s head, were swans. Swans gleaming white in the moonlight: There had to be more than twenty of them, and had I seen what I thought I saw on their necks and shoulders? Chains and collars of gold? It couldn’t be — this was the stuff of legends.

It was the nameless Red Cap who voiced my thought: “They had chains on their necks.”

I heard the wild call of geese next. They flew just overhead, following the line the swans had taken. I got to my feet, stumbling on the edge of the borrowed trench coat. Jonty caught me, but it didn’t seem to hurt him or me. I felt light and airy, as if the hand of blood had become something else. What had I been thinking just before the swans flew overhead? That the beauty in faerie was too often nightmarish?

There was a flight of cranes then: my father’s bird, one of his symbols. The cranes flew low and seemed to dip their wings at us, almost in a salute.

“They fall!” shouted Bithek.

I looked where he pointed. The storm cloud had vanished, and with it most of the creatures. There had been so many, a writhing mass of them, but now there were only a few — less than ten, maybe — and one of them had already crashed through the trees. A second fell earthward, and I heard the sharp crack of the trees breaking under the weight like a ca