Divine Misdemeanors

He hugged me to him, and our bodies touched from shoulder to thigh as close as we could. I could feel his body growing hard and happy to see me against the front of my own. I don’t know if we would have tried for a little predi

It wasn’t that he was not lovely, for he was, handsome, tall, slender, and muscular as most sidhe warriors were, but the air of sorrow that clung to him made my heart ache. He’d been a minor noble at the Unseelie Court His hair was straight and raven black like Cathbodua’s or even Queen Andais herself. His skin as pale as mine, or Frost’s. His eyes were still circles of red, red-orange, and finally true orange, like a fire banked down in his eyes. Andais had quieted that fire in him by the torture she’d done to him, the night her son died and we fled faerie. Caswyn had been brought to us by a cloaked woman who told us only that Caswyn’s mind would not survive any more of the Queen’s Mercy. I wasn’t entirely certain his mind wasn’t already broken beyond repair. But since Caswyn had been the whipping boy for Andais’s anger at us we took him in. His body had healed because he was sidhe, but his mind and heart were more fragile things.

He came down the hallway like a raven-haired ghost in an oversized white dress shirt untucked and billowing over a pair of cream dress slacks. The clothes were borrowed, but surely Frost’s shirt had fit him better last week? Was he still not eating?

He came straight for me as if Rhys wasn’t holding me. Rhys moved aside so that I could embrace Caswyn. He wrapped himself around me with a sigh that was almost a sob. I held him and let the fierceness of his grip envelop me. He’d been clingy and overly emotional since he had been rescued from the queen’s bloody bed. She’d tortured him to punish me in a way, and because my lovers had been out of reach. She’d picked him at random. He’d never been anything to me, not friend or enemy. Caswyn had been as neutral as the courts allowed and centuries of diplomacy had crashed against Andais’s madness. The cloaked noblewoman had said, “The queen asked him to bed her and as he was not one of her guards to be ordered so, he politely refused.” Caswyn had been one rejection too many for her sanity. She’d turned him into a red ruin on her sheets and made certain to show it to me with a spell that turned a mirror into a video phone better than anything human technology had yet created. When I’d first seen him, he’d been so unrecognizable that I thought he was someone I cared for.

When she told me who it was I’d been puzzled. He was nothing to me. I could still hear Andais’s voice, “Then you don’t care what I do to him?”

I didn’t know how to answer that, but finally I’d said, “He is a noble of the Unseelie Court and deserves protection from its queen.”

“You refused the crown, Meredith, and this queen says he deserves nothing for his years of hiding. He’s no one’s enemy and no one’s friend. I always hated that about him.” She’d grabbed his hair and made him beg while we watched.

“I will distroy him.”

“Why?” I’d asked.

“Because I can.”

I’d told him to come to us if ever he could. Days later, with the help of a sidhe who wanted no one to know her identity, he had come. I could not take responsibility for my aunt’s deeds. It was her evil and I was just an excuse for her to let out all her demons at once. I think and Doyle agreed, Andais was trying to force the nobles to assassinate her. It was a queen’s version of “Suicide by cop.”

Moments like that weren’t uncommon for Queen Andais, my aunt, and that was one of the reasons that so many of the guards had agreed to exile rather than stay with her once they had a choice. Most of them liked a little tie-me-up-tie-me-down, but there was a line that few would cross willingly, and Andais wasn’t a dominant in the sense of modern bondage and submission. She was a dominant in the old sense of might makes right, and being absolute ruler meant absolutely that. The old adage “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” applied to both of my royal relatives on both thrones. What I hadn’t foreseen was her idea of pain and sex spreading to outside her personal guard, or that the nobles would keep taking the abuse. Why hadn’t someone tried to kill her by now? Why didn’t they fight back?

“I thought you were gone,” Caswyn said. “I thought you were hurt, or worse; we all did.”

“Doyle and Frost wouldn’t let that happen,” Rhys said.

Caswyn looked at him, still trying to drape all of that six-feet-plus frame around my much smaller one. “And how would they keep Princess Meredith from being cut to pieces with glass? Weapon skill and bravery won’t stop every threat. Even the Queen’s Darkness and the Killing Frost ca

He spoke the truth. Old-fashioned glass made of naturally occurring substances with heat added could fall on my guards all day and not harm them, but anything with artificial additives, or metals, would cut them as much as me.

Doyle came across the room, speaking as he moved. “You are right, Wyn, but we would have shielded her body with ours. Meredith would have been unhurt no matter what happened to us.” Aloud we’d started calling him Wyn because my aunt had made his full name a thing whispered in the dark with blood and pain.

I pushed gently on Wyn’s chest to make him ease up and not lean so heavily on me. I couldn’t take that kind of hugging forever without it begi

“And the deli is owned by one of my Gran’s cousins, a brownie named Matilda. She would have kept me safe.”

Wyn unbent enough for his shoulder to go across mine, and my arm to encircle his waist. I could stand like that for hours, and he just seemed to need to touch me a lot. He was six feet of muscled warrior, but the queen had truly broken him in every way. His body had healed, as the sidhe do, but he only seemed to feel truly safe when he was with me, Doyle, Frost, Barinthus, Rhys, or anyone he perceived as powerful enough to keep him safe. The others made him afraid, as if he feared that Andais would snatch him away if he wasn’t with someone strong.

“One brownie does not seem enough protection,” he said in that uncertain voice that he’d had since he came to us. He’d never been the boldest of men, but now his fear was always there trembling below his skin, as if it ran in his blood now, so that fear was everywhere inside him.

I smiled up at him, trying to get him to smile back. “Brownies are a lot tougher than they look.”

He didn’t smile; he looked horrified. “Oh, Princess, forgive me.” He actually dropped to one knee and bowed his head, all that pale hair sweeping out and around his body. “I forgot that you are yourself part brownie. I did not mean to imply that you were not powerful.” He said all of it with his head bowed, and his gaze fixed on the floor, or at best my sandaled feet.

“Get up, Wyn. I took no offense.”

He dropped lower so that he could lay his hands on the floor by my feet. His hair covered his face, so all I had was his ever-more-frantic voice. “Please, your majesty, I meant no offense.”

“Wyn, I said that I took no offense.”

“Please, please, I didn’t mean any harm …”

Rhys knelt down by him. “Did you hear what Merry said, Wyn? She’s not mad at you.”

His forehead touched his hands on the floor so that he was in a position of abject abasement. He was saying “Please, please, don’t,” over and over again.

I knelt beside Rhys, and touched the long unbound hair. Caswyn actually screamed and laid himself flat on his stomach, hands out before him beseeching.

Doyle and Frost came to kneel on either side of him with us. They tried to calm him, but it was as if he couldn’t hear us or see us, and whatever he was hearing and seeing was terrible.