Swallowing Darkness - Laurell K. Hamilton [126]
I pushed at that wall, willed my power to move forward, and for a moment the wall softened. I felt the whirlwind move forward; then it was as if the air was drawn away from it, sucked out and sent whirling into the moonlight. She pulled the air from my whirlwind as she could pull the air from your lungs.
Lieutenant Dawson barked orders and the soldiers formed two lines, one standing, one kneeling, both pointing at her. Would I have fired on my queen? I had a moment of hesitation, and that was my undoing. Darkness poured over us, and we were blind. The next moment the air was heavy, so heavy. We could not breathe. We had no air even to call for help. I collapsed to my knees, my hands on the cold grass. Someone fell against me, and I knew it had to be Dawson, but I could not see him. She was the Queen of Air and Darkness, a goddess of battle, and we would die at her feet.
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