Swallowing Darkness - Laurell K. Hamilton [130]
There was a pressure building inside my head, pushing at my eyes. I would not cry, not yet. I would not shed tears when he might still live. Please, Goddess, please, Mother, let him be alive.
The wounded sidhe cried out, “Mercy, mercy on us, Princess. We followed our prince, as we would follow you.”
I didn’t answer, because I simply didn’t care. I knew they had betrayed me, and they knew I knew it. They were painting the best picture they could because we had filled them with bullets, had injured them until they could not flee. Their queen and their prince had left them to my mercy. They had nothing else to count on but the possibility that I was my father’s daughter. He would have spared them; such gestures of mercy were what made everyone love him. His mercy was also the thing his assassin had most likely used to lure him to his death. In that moment, for the first time, I saw my father’s mercy as weakness.
“Move away from Doyle,” I said, and my voice was choked with emotion. That I could not help. I wanted to run to him, to throw myself on him, but my enemies were too close. If Doyle were dead, then my death and the death of our children would not bring him back. If he still lived, then a few minutes of caution would not change that. Part of me screamed inside, hurry, hurry, but there was a larger part of me that was strangely calm. I felt icy, and somehow not quite myself. Something about tonight had stolen me away, and left a colder, wiser stranger in her place.
My father once said that as a ruler shapes a country, so the people of a country shape a ruler. The nobles on the ground, who were crawling, limping, and dragging their wounded away from Doyle’s still form, had helped bring me to this cold stranger. We would see how cold my heart would stay.
Jonty said, “Princess Meredith, we would protect you from their magic.”
I nodded.
“We are protecting the princess,” Dawson said.
“They can put their bodies between me and the hands of power of the nobles here. They would kill or maim you, but Red Caps are a tougher lot, Sergeant. They can be our shields.”
Dawson looked up at the towering figures. “You’ll be our meat shields?”
Jonty seemed to think about it, then nodded.
Dawson glanced at me, then shrugged as if to say, “If they’re willing to take the hit, better them than my men.”
“Okay” was what he said out loud.
The Red Caps moved around us so that they shielded both me and the soldiers. The humans were a little nervous, and several of them asked, “They’re on our side, right?”
Dawson and I assured them that, yes, Jonty and the rest were on our side. I wasn’t as reassuring as I might have been, because most of my attention was on the glimpses of Doyle that I kept getting as everyone moved around us. In that moment, I wasn’t sure I cared about anything, or anyone else. My world had narrowed down to that spill of black hair on the frost-rimmed grass.
My hands tingled with the need to touch him, long before Dawson and Jonty felt that it was safe. Finally, the way was clear, and I was able to hold up the leather skirt and run to him. I collapsed beside him, the skirt protecting me from the winter-rough grass. I reached for him, then hesitated. It seemed ridiculous that a moment before all I had wanted was to touch him, and now that I could, I was afraid. I was so afraid I could barely breathe through the tightness in my throat. My heart couldn’t decide if it was beating too fast, or forgetting