Mistral's Kiss

His laughter made me smile, and there were answering chuckles from around the room. It was the kind of laughter that would be infectious. He would laugh and you would have to laugh with him.

"Just by holding the cup in your hand," Rhys said, "your laughter makes me smile. You haven't been that amusing in centuries." He turned his boyishly handsome face to us, with its scars where his other tricolored blue eye would have been. "Drink, and see what is left of who you thought you were, or don't drink, and go back to being shadow and a joke."

"A bad joke," Abeloec said.

Rhys nodded and came to stand close to us. His white curls fell to his waist, framing a body that was the most seriously muscled of any of the guards. He was also the shortest of them, a full-blooded sidhe who was only five foot six—unheard of. "What do you have to lose?"

"I would have to try again. I would have to care again," said Abe. He stared at Rhys as completely as he had at me, as if what we were saying meant everything.

"If all you want is to crawl back into another bottle or another bag of powder, then do it. Step away from the cup and let someone else drink," Rhys said.

A look of pain crossed Abeloec's face. "It's mine. It's part of who I was."

"The God didn't mention you by name, Abe," Rhys said. "He told her to share, not who with."

"But it's mine."

"Only if you take it," Rhys said, and his voice was low and clear, and somehow gentle, as if he understood more than I did why Abe was afraid.

"It's mine," Abe said again.

"Then drink," Rhys said, "drink and be merry."

"Drink and be damned," Abeloec said.

Rhys touched his arm. "No, Abe, say it, and do your best to believe it. Drink and be merry. I've seen more of us come back into our power than you have. The attitude affects it, or can."

Abeloec started to let go of the cup, but I moved off the bed and came to stand in front of him. "You will bring everything you learned in this long sad time with you, but you will still be you. You will be who you were, just older and wiser. Wisdom bought at great cost is nothing to regret."

He stared down at me with his eyes a dark and perfect grey. "You bid me drink."

I shook my head. "No. It must be your choice."

"You will not command me?"

I shook my head again.

"The princess has some very American views on freewill," Rhys said.

"I take that as a compliment," I said.

"But…," Abe said, softly.

"Yes," Rhys said, "it means it's all on you. Your choice. Your fate. All in your hands. Enough rope to hang yourself, as they say."

"Or save yourself," Doyle said, and he came to stand on the other side, like a taller darkness to Rhys's white. Abeloec and I stood with white on one side, black on the other. Rhys had once been Cromm Cruach, a god of death and life. Doyle was the queen's chief assassin, but once he had been Nodons, a god of healing. We stood between them, and when I looked up at Abeloec something moved in his eyes, some shadow of that person I had glimpsed on the hill inside the hood of a cloak.

Abeloec raised the cup, taking my hands with it. We raised the cup together and he lowered his head. His lips hesitated for a breath on the edge of that smooth horn, then he drank.

He kept tipping the cup back, until he had to drop to his knees so that my hands stayed on the cup while he upended it. He drank it down in one long swallow.

On his knees, releasing the cup, he threw his head back, eyes closed. His body bent backward, until he lay in a pool of his own striped hair, his knees still bent underneath him. He lay for a moment so still, so very still, that I feared for him. I waited for his chest to rise and fall. I willed him to breathe, but he didn't.

He lay like one asleep, except for the odd angle of his legs—no one slept like that. His face had smoothed out, and I realized that Abe was one of the few sidhe who had permanent worry lines, tiny wrinkles at eye and mouth. They smoothed in his sleep, if it was sleep.

I dropped to my knees beside him, the cup still in my hands. I leaned over him, touched the side of his face. He never moved. I placed my hand on the side of his face and whispered his name: "Abeloec."

His eyes flew open wide. It startled me. Drew a soft gasp from my lips. He grabbed my wrist at his face, and his other arm wrapped around my waist. He sat up, or knelt up, in one powerful movement, with me in his arms. He laughed, and it wasn't a mere echo of what I'd heard in my vision. The laughter filled the room, and the other men laughed with him. The room rang with joyous masculine laughter.

I laughed with him, them. It was impossible not to laugh with the pure joy in his face so close to mine. He leaned in, closing the last inches between our mouths. I knew he was going to kiss me, and I wanted him to. I wanted to feel that laughter inside me.

His mouth pressed against mine. A great cry went up among the men, joyous and rough. His tongue licked light along my bottom lip, and I opened my mouth to him. He thrust himself inside my mouth, and suddenly all I could taste was honey and fruit, and mead. It wasn't just his symbol. He was the cup, or what it contained. His tongue shoved inside me until I had to open my mouth wide or choke. And it was like swallowing the thick, golden honeyed mead. He was the intoxicating cup.

I was on the floor with him on top of me, but he was too tall to kiss me deeply and press much of anything else against my naked body at the same time. Beneath us was a fur throw that lay on the stone floor. It tickled along my skin, helped every movement he made be something more, as if the fur were helping caress me.

Our skin began to glow as if we'd swallowed the moon at her ripe bursting fullness, and her light was shining out from our skin. The white streaks in his hair showed a pale luminous blue. His charcoal-grey eyes stayed strangely dark. I knew that my eyes glowed, each circle of color, green of grass, pale green jade, and that molten gold. I knew that every circle of my iris glowed. My hair cast a reddish light around my vision: It shone like spun garnets with fire inside them when I glowed.

His eyes were like some deep, dark cave where the light could not go.

Abruptly, I realized that for a long while, we hadn't been kissing. We'd simply been staring into each other's faces. I leaned up toward him, wrapped my hands around him. I'd forgotten I still held the cup in one hand, and it touched his bare back. His spine bowed, and liquid poured across his skin; though the cup had been emptied before, it was full again. Heavy, cool liquid rushed down his body and over mine, drenching us in that thick golden flow.

Pale blue lines danced across his skin. I couldn't tell if they were under his skin, inside his body, or on the surface of his glowing torso. He kissed me. He kissed me deep and long, and this time he didn't taste like mead. He tasted of flesh, of lips and mouth and tongue, and the graze of teeth along my lower lip. And still the mead ran down our bodies, spreading out, out into a golden pool. The fur underneath us flattened in the tide of it.

He spilled his mouth and hands down my body, over my breasts. He held them in his hands, gently, caressed my nipples with his lips and tongue until I cried out, and I felt my body grow wet, but not from the spreading golden pool of mead.

I watched the pale blue lines on his arm flow into shapes, flowers and vines, and move down his hand and across my skin. It felt as if someone traced a feather across my skin.

A voice cried out, and it wasn't me, and it wasn't Abeloec. Brii had fallen to his hands and knees, his long yellow hair spilling down into the growing pool of mead.

Abeloec sucked harder on my breast, forcing my attention back to him. His eyes still didn't glow, but there was that intensity in them that is a kind of magic, a kind of power. The power that all men have when they spill themselves down your body with skilled hands and mouth.