Swallowing Darkness - Laurell K. Hamilton [139]
“Will you give them their birthright back?” the voices asked.
For politics, I should have said no. For the safety of my world, no. For the safety of everything we’d signed treaties for, no. But in the end, I gave the only answer that felt right. “I will.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
WE WERE LEFT ALONE IN THE CIRCLE OF STONES UNDER THE round, white glow of midsummer’s moon. It rose above us, unnaturally close, a harvest moon close enough that it seemed as if we had only to reach out to caress the surface of it. In that moment, I wasn’t certain whether it was illusion or reality. Could I have touched the moon? Perhaps, but the two men with me weren’t interested in celestial bodies, and they convinced me that the moon was for gazing at, and that their bodies were the world.
Their skin was as pale and perfect as that of any sidhe. Only the scars that decorated their skin said that they didn’t have enough magic to heal their wounds cleanly. But I was Unseelie, not Seelie, and scars were just another texture to run my fingers over, lick my tongue across, and worry at with my teeth.
I made Holly cry out with pleasure with my teeth around a scar on the hard, muscled expanse of his stomach. Ash’s back was crisscrossed with claw marks, white and shiny with age. I traced my fingertips across all of it, and said, “What happened?”
Ash lay on the grass in the nest we had made of our clothes. He let my fingers play across his bare back, but he drew no breath to answer me. It was Holly who answered. “Cathmore found Ash alone when we were young. Cathmore was a great warrior, but he hunted the younger warriors whom he thought might be a threat to him someday. A lot of the warriors bear scars from him.”
I traced the claw marks down and down, until I found the firm smoothness of his ass. He shivered under the gentleness of it. I didn’t know if it was the magic of this place or the fact that there were no goblins to impress, but they both showed that gentleness, and not just pain, worked for them as pleasure.
“Cathmore. I do not know the name.”
Holly gazed at me across his brother’s body, then he touched the scars and smiled. A close, tight smile. “When Ash was healed, we hunted Cathmore down. We killed him and took his head so everyone would know that we had slain him.”
He showed me the arm that lay across his brother’s back, flexing the muscle to show a curve of hard white scar tissue. The scar looked as if his arm had nearly been cut off. “Cathmore did that, with his sword, Cathmore’s Arm.” I knew it was not unusual for a goblin to name his sword after himself. I’d always found it a little odd, but it wasn’t my custom, it was theirs.
I touched the scar, tracing my fingertips down the line of it. “A fearsome wound,” I said.
He grinned at me. “Ash carries his sword.”
“Because he gave the killing blow,” I said.
That made Ash rise enough to gaze over his shoulder at me. “How did you know that?”
“It’s goblin law. The one who strikes the killing blow gets first pick of the weapons.”
“I had forgotten that your father used to bring you to visit the goblins,” Ash said, propping himself up on his elbows.
“The goblins are the foot soldiers of the faerie court. No war has been won since the goblins joined us that would not have been lost without you.”
“Now that we are forbidden to make war, the nobles of both courts forget that,” Ash said. “We are an embarrassment even to the Unseelie.”
“We don’t clean up well enough for the press to please the queen,” Holly said. He was sitting up now, his knees drawn to his chest, his arms encircling them. It made him seem younger, more