Swallowing Darkness

Chapter Forty

I was lost in the dark. Her blackness had taken the sky. Only two things remained, the ground under my cheek, and the body next to me in the choking dark. I no longer knew right from left, and only the frozen ground let me know up from down, so I did not know who lay pressed against me in the blackness. A hand found mine, a hand to hold while we died.

The frost crunched under my free hand, and I clung to the warmth of that other hand. The frost began to melt against my hand, and I wished for Frost, my Killing Frost. He had let faerie take him away because he thought I loved him less than Doyle. It broke my heart to think that he would never know that I had loved him too.

I tried to say his name, but there was no air left to spare for words. I clung to the melting frost and the human hand, and let my tears speak for me into the frozen ground.

I regretted the babies inside me, and I thought, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I couldn't save you." But part of me was content to die. If Doyle and Frost were both lost to me, then death was not the worst fate. In that moment, I stopped fighting, because without them I didn't want to go on. I let the dark and the choking wash over me. I gave myself to death. Then the hand in mine spasmed; it clung to me as it died, and it brought me back to myself. I could have died alone, but if I died there was no one left to save them, my men, my soldiers. I could not leave them to the airless dark, not if there was anything I could do to save them. It was not love that made me fight again, it was duty. But duty is its own kind of love; I would fight for them, fight until death took me silently screaming. The babes inside me, without their fathers to help raise them, were almost a bitter thing, but the soldiers who clung to me had lives of their own, and she had no right to steal them. How dare she, immortal that she was, take their few years away.

I prayed, "Goddess, help me save them. Help me fight for them." I had no power in me to fight the dark and the very air made too heavy to breathe, but I prayed all the same, because when all else is lost, there is always prayer.

At first, I thought nothing had changed, then I realized that the grass under my hand and cheek was colder. The frost crunched as my fingers flexed, as if the melting that my warmth had caused had never happened.

The air was bitingly cold, like breathing in the heart of winter when the air is so cold it burns going down. Then I realized that I was breathing a complete full breath of the frigid air. The hand in mine squeezed, and I heard voices saying, "I can breathe," or simply coughing as if they'd been fighting to draw a full breath all this time.

I whispered, "Thank you, Goddess."

I tried to lift my head from the grass, but the moment my face got more than a few inches from the ground, the air was gone again. Sounds in the dark let me know that I wasn't the only one who had discovered how narrow our line of air was, but it was there. We could breathe. Andais could not crush our lungs. She would have to come into the dark and find us if she wanted us dead.

The frost thickened under my hand until it was like touching a young snow. The air was so cold that each breath hurt, as if ice were stabbing me. Then the frost thickened more, and moved under my hand. Moved? Frost didn't move. There was fur under my hand, something alive, growing out of the very ground. I kept my hand on that furred side, and felt it go up and up, until my hand was stretched tall to follow the curve of something. I stroked my hand down that furred but strangely cold side, and found the curved haunches of something. It was only as my hand followed the curve of the leg to find a hoof that I thought I understood. The white stag had formed out of the frost. My Killing Frost was here, beside me. He was still a stag, still not my love, but it was still him in there somewhere. I stroked his side, felt him rise and fall with breath. The stag's head had to be far above mine, and if he could breathe, so could I. I rose slowly to my knees, keeping one hand on the stag's side and the other in the hand that still clung to mine. The hand moved with me, and its owner got to their knees.

It was Orlando, next to me, who said, "I can still breathe."

I didn't answer. I was afraid to talk, as if my words would frighten the stag, make it run like the animal it was. My hand found the rapid beat of its heart against my palm. I wanted to wrap my arm around its neck, hold it tightly, but I was afraid that it would climb to its feet and run. How much of my Frost was in there? I had seen him watching me, but did he understand, or had the Goddess just sent the stag to help us?

I whispered, "Oh, Frost, please, please hear me."

The stag shook, as if something that it didn't like had touched it, and it got to its feet. My hand was just on its leg as I struggled to my feet in my long coat, with no hand to help me hold the hem, but I was afraid to lose my grip on either warmth that my hand touched. The stag because it was the closest I'd been to Frost since he had vanished, and Orlando's hand because it had been that touch that had made me fight. A human hand that had made me realize that a queen does not despair as long as her people are in danger. You fight, you fight even if your heart is broken, because it's not just about your happiness anymore. It's about theirs, too.

I stumbled on the hem of my coat, and Orlando's hand steadied me as I righted myself by the stag's side. It shifted nervously, as if getting ready to bolt. I knew he was a stag, and I knew he wasn't really in there, but this was the closest I had come to him, and I wanted him to stay. This curve of fur and warmth was all I had left of him.

The stag began to walk. I kept my hand on its side, and pulled Orlando with me. I felt a tugging, and thought that Orlando had someone else by the hand. The stag pranced nervously, and I felt the presence of someone else on its other side. We touched the stag, and held hands like children, as it led us forward in the dark.

It was Sergeant Dawson who said, "Weapons off. Safe. When we can see again, fire. Don't give her a chance to use her magic again."

Andais was queen and my aunt. My father had refused to kill her and take her throne. That bit of mercy had probably cost him his life, because once the rebels offer you a throne, even if you don't take it, there are those who fear that you will. He had loved his sister, and even his nephew. I realized in that moment that I did not. They had both made certain that there was no love between us. Some would say I had a duty to my queen, but my duty was to the men crowded around me in the dark. My duty was to the stag who led us forward, and what was left of my Frost. My duty was to the children inside me, and anyone who would steal them away was my enemy. War in the abstract is a confusing thing. War on the ground, in the middle of a battle, is not. When someone shoots at you, they are your enemy, and you shoot back. When someone tries to kill you, they are your enemy, and you try to kill them first. War is complicated, battle is not. She was going to kill us, even knowing I held the grandchildren of her brother inside me. In that moment I had only one duty, for all of us to survive.

If she used her magic again there might not be a second miracle to save us. Goddess helps those who help themselves. We were armed with automatic weapons; we'd help ourselves.

I felt the soldiers around me shifting, and thought they were readying their guns. Orlando squeezed my hand one last time, then took his hand into the dark. He was getting ready to kill my queen. Would she still be where we'd left her? "The queen may not be standing where we last saw her," I said.

Dawson gave orders for the men to cover a circle around us, because there was no cover save the darkness that held us. Once free of that, we would be naked to the view of all.

We stepped into the moonlight, and it seemed unbearably bright, bright enough to make me blink. I was still blinking into the brightness when the first gunshots exploded around me. It made me jump, but the stag jerked so violently that for a moment I thought he had been hit. Then he bounded away, a blur of white, streaking away from the noise, the guns, the violence.

I yelled his name. I could not help it. "Frost!" But there was no one inside that body to answer the sound of human words. The stag vanished into the tree edge, and I was alone again.

Dawson yelled beside me, "Field of fire, the black area. Suppressive bursts with rifle, squad weapons, give me ten seconds of raking fire. She's hiding behind it."

I turned and looked at the battlefield. I turned and looked at my aunt and my cousin and the nobles from the court I was supposed to be fighting to rule, and I cared more about the stag leaving than about them dying.

Andais had called darkness, like a mist to hide herself and Cel and the other nobles. Dawson and the rest were firing into it. If they were still there, the bullets would find them, but there was no way to tell what lay in the dark. Had she fled?

I looked behind us, and found that the men who had been given the job of watching the back of the circle were doing just that. They were letting the others fire into the dark, but they watched to see whether the darkness was a trick, whether our enemies were trying to sneak up behind us.

What could I do to help them?

"They're behind us!" someone yelled, and I turned with that yell.

I had time to knock the rifle to point at the ground, and move myself into the line of fire. I could have tried yelling, but watching the Red Caps move out of the darkness, I knew that words wouldn't have kept the men from firing on them. The Red Caps were small giants, seven to twelve feet tall, and all of them wore close-fitting caps on their heads that bled fresh blood down their faces and bodies. Before magic returned to faerie, their hats were dry, and only fresh death helped them wet them again. My hand of blood had given them back their own blood magic. But there was no time to explain all that in the middle of battle. I did the only thing I could think of; I stood between the two groups with my hands outspread. It kept the soldiers from firing and gave Dawson time to turn around and give orders.

I yelled, "They are allies, friends!"

"Fuck that," someone said.

I couldn't blame them for the fear in those words. It looked like every Red Cap the goblin kingdom could boast was coming toward us across the field. There were dozens of them, armed to the teeth, covered in blood, and coming for us. If I hadn't been certain they were on our side, I'd have shot them too. Shot them, and run for my life.