Swallowing Darkness - Laurell K. Hamilton [69]
Mistral’s deep voice said, “I was dying in the field. How did I get here, and where in faerie is here?”
“They rescued me from the hospital,” Doyle said, then he frowned. “You were crowned and…” He raised my left hand, and for a moment it didn’t look like my hand. There was a new tattoo on it, one of thorny vines and blooming roses.
He rose to his knees, but he wasn’t looking at me now. He reached across to Sholto.
The other man hesitated, then offered him his right hand. Doyle held the paler hand in his black one, and the same tattoo curled around Sholto’s hand and wrist.
Mistral walked back to us, and we saw that the marks of the arrows seemed to have vanished as had Doyle’s burns. Neither of them looked happy to be healed, but instead were very serious.
Doyle drew our hands together so the tattoos were touching. “I did not dream it, then. You were handfasted and crowned by faerie itself.”
“By the Goddess,” Sholto said, and he sounded way too satisfied. The three men were acting oddly, and I had one of those moments when I knew I was missing something. That happened sometimes when you are barely more than thirty and everyone else in your bed is hundreds of years old. Everyone was young once, but sometimes I wished I had a cheat sheet so I wouldn’t need all the explanations.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Sholto said, again all too smug.
Doyle pulled Sholto’s hand down so I could see our two hands together. “You see the mark?”
“The tattoo, yes,” I said. “It’s a shadow of the roses that bound our hands.”
“You have been handfasted with Sholto, Merry,” Doyle said, and he said each word slowly, carefully, giving me the intensity of those dark eyes.
“Handfasted. You mean…” I frowned at him. “You mean married?” “Yes,” he said, and there was rage in that one word.
“It took both our magics to save you, Doyle.”
“The sidhe do not marry more than one spouse, Meredith.”
“I bear children by all of you, so by our laws you are all my kings, or will be.”
Sholto raised his hand, gazing at it. “I’m too young to remember when faerie married us to each other. Was it always like this?”
“The roses are more a Seelie mark,” Doyle said, “but yes, handfasted and marked as a couple.”
I stared at the pretty roses on my skin and was suddenly afraid.
“Am I within my rights to refuse to share Meredith?” Sholto asked.
I gave him a look. “I would be careful what you say, King of the sluagh.”
“Faerie has married us, Meredith.”
I shook my head. “It helped us save Doyle.”
“We are marked as a couple.” He held his hand out to me.
“When the Goddess makes me choose, she lets me know ahead of time. There was no choice offered, no warning of loss.”
“By our laws—” Sholto started to say.
I interrupted him. “Don’t start.”
“He’s right, Merry,” Doyle said.
“Don’t complicate this, Doyle. We did what we had to do last night to save you both.”
“It is the law,” Mistral said.
“Only if I am with his child and no one else’s, which is not true. The goddess Clothra, who got pregnant from three different lovers, wasn’t forced to marry just one of them.”
“They were her brothers,” Mistral said.
“Were they really, or is that just what legend made of them?” I was asking someone who might actually know.
Mistral and Doyle exchanged a look. Sholto wasn’t old enough to know the answer. “Clothra lived in a time when gods and goddesses were allowed to marry whom they would,” Doyle said.
“She wouldn’t have been the first goddess to marry a close relative,” Mistral said.
“But the point is, she didn’t marry any of them, and the sovereign goddesses, the ones whom humans had to marry to rule, had many lovers.”
“Are you saying that you’re a sovereign goddess, a living embodiment of the land itself?” Sholto asked with a raised eyebrow.
“No, but I am saying that you wouldn