Divine Misdemeanors

Chapter Twenty-one

Salt water is one thing you have to rinse off your body before you fall into bed. I was in the big shower doing just that when the door burst open and Ivi and Brii, short for Briac, were in the doorway, breathing hard, and weapons naked in their hands.

I froze in the middle of rinsing the conditioner out of my hair, blinking at them through the glass of the shower doors.

I caught movement from the corner of my eye, and Rhys was just suddenly sliding in low through the door they had left open behind them. He had his newly oiled sword at Brii’s throat, and his newly cleaned gun pointed at Ivi as the other man froze in mid-motion of bringing his own gun up.

“Sloppy,” Rhys said, “both of you. Why did you leave your posts?”

They were both breathing so hard I could see their chests fighting for air, so much so that they couldn’t get enough air to talk. Brii might have been having trouble talking around the sword point that never wavered from his skin, and the short bow in his hand with its half-cocked arrow and a hand full of arrows fanned in his fingers were completely useless.

Brii blinked brilliant green eyes, his hair the yellow of cherry leaves in the fall, tied back in a long braid. His clothing was leather and could have looked like club wear, but was actually pieces of armor older than most people’s history books.

Rhys’s sword point seemed to be shoved up against the thudding pulse in his throat.

He looked at the other man, who was still frozen, unmoving under the point of his gun; only the frantic rise and fall of his chest betrayed him. His green and white hair was loose and swirled around his legs, but like Doyle and Frost, it never seemed to tangle. Unlike them, Ivi had a pattern of vines and leaves like a print upon his hair. His namesake on his hair was like a work of art, and his eyes were starbursts of green and white, so that people would ask him if it was fancy contacts, but it was just Ivi. He wore modern clothes, and the vest on his chest was modern body armor.

Rhys said, “Ivi, explain, and it better be good.” He never took his gun off the other man.

Ivi fought his own breath and pounding heart rate to speak. “We woke … on guard duty. Enchanted sleep … thought enemies.” He coughed, sharply trying to clear his throat, or take a deeper breath. He was being very careful about keeping the naked gun unmoving in his hand. “Thought we’d find Princess dead, or taken.”

“I could kill you both for falling asleep on duty,” Rhys said.

Ivi gave a small nod. “You’re third in command, you have that right.”

Brii finally managed to talk around the sword point and his pulse. “We failed the princess.”

Rhys moved in one motion, taking the sword from Brii’s throat, lowering his gun to the floor, and standing in the doorway as if he’d just walked through. With Frost and Doyle around me, I sometimes forgot that there was more than one reason that Rhys had been third in command of the Queen’s Ravens. When everyone is this good, it’s hard to remember just how good that is.

“It was the Goddess herself who did the enchanted sleep,” Rhys said. “None of us can fight that, so I guess I won’t kill you tonight.”

Ivi said, “Shit.” He went to his knees outside the shower doors, laying his head on his arm that held the gun. Brii leaned his back against the half wall by the shower. He had to adjust the long bow at his back so it didn’t get damaged against the tile. He was one of the guards who hadn’t embraced guns yet, but when you were as good with a bow as he was, it wasn’t as big a problem as it might have been, according to Doyle.

I leaned my hair back into the water enough to finish rinsing off. It was Rhys’s turn in the shower anyway. He’d cleaned his weapons first.

“What do you mean, the Goddess herself?” Brii asked.

Rhys started to explain, a much edited version of things. I turned off the shower, and opened the door to get the towels that always seemed to be hanging where we needed them. I had a moment to wonder if Barinthus put out the towels, but I doubted it. He didn’t strike me as that domestic.

Brii handed me the first towel, but his eyes were all for Rhys and the story. I bent over to wrap my hair, and it was Ivi’s hand that traced my back and slid lower. It made me look at him, because I would have thought that talk of the Goddess would have distracted him from such things. But, unlike Brii, his eyes were on me. There was a heat in his eyes that shouldn’t have been there after a month of freedom—a month when we had almost an even number of male and female sidhe guards.

“Ivi,” Rhys said, “you aren’t listening to me.” He didn’t sound angry, but rather puzzled.

Ivi blinked and shook himself like a bird settling its feathers. “I would say apologies, but we’re both so old that that’s an insult, so what do I say, that the sight of the princess naked distracted me from anything you could say?” He smiled at the end but it wasn’t a completely happy smile.

“You and the others were supposed to talk to Merry at dinner about this.”

“The Fear Dearg are back,” Ivi said. “I remember them, oh Lord of Death. It was they I first thought of when we woke and found that both of us were asleep on duty.” Ivi made a face; it was anger, disgust, and other things I couldn’t read.

“I am too young to remember, for I was not yet aware,” Brii said, “but I came to true life not long after the end of it and I remember the stories. I saw the wounds and the damage done. When such enemies are about, what good soldier complains about anything else?”

I stood there with my hair in its towel, but the other towel loose in my hands. “I’m missing something here,” I said.

“Tell her,” Rhys said, making a little go-ahead motion with his gun.

Brii looked embarrassed, and that was a rare emotion for the sidhe. Ivi lowered his bold eyes, but said, “I have failed at my post this night. How can I ask for more after that?”

“Galen and Wyn were still deep asleep when I came in here. This should have woken them?” I asked.

The three men looked at each other, and then Brii and Rhys both moved out through the door enough to see the big bed. They came back into the bathroom, with Rhys shaking his head. “They haven’t moved.” He seemed to think about that. “In fact, Doyle and Frost should be in here. All the rest of the guards should be in here with weapons drawn. These two”—and he motioned with his sword at them—“made a hell of a lot of noise rushing to save you.”

“But no one else woke up,” I said.

Rhys smiled. “The Goddess has kept everyone but the two of you asleep. I think that means you get to have your talk with Merry. My weapons are clean. Now it’s my turn in the shower.”

“Wait,” I said, “what talk?”

Rhys kissed me on the forehead. “Your guards are afraid of you, Merry. They’re afraid you’ll be like your aunt, and your cousin, or uncle, or grandfather.” He looked up as if thinking over the list.

“There’s a lot of bad crazy in my family tree,” I said.

“Most of the new guard who followed you out of faerie have stayed celibate.”

I stared at him, and then turned slowly to stare from Brii to Ivi. “Why, in the name of the Danu? I told you my aunt’s celibacy rule didn’t hold anymore.”

“She said that in the past,” Brii said slowly, “and she was fine if it was casual lusts, but if we found someone we cared for …” He stopped and looked to Ivi.

“I never fell in love with anyone,” Ivi said, “and after seeing what she did to some of the lady loves, I had never been so happy that I was a cad and a bounder in my existence.”

“I have six fathers and six consorts. I’m okay that the rest of you have sex, make friends, fall in love. It would be wonderful if more of you fell in love.”

“You seem to mean that,” Ivi said, “but your relatives have seemed sane over the centuries, but they weren’t.”

I realized what he was saying. “You think I’m going to go crazy like my aunt, and cousin, and uncle, and …” I thought about it, and could only nod. “I guess I see your point.”

“None of them but your grandfather was always cruel and horrible,” Ivi said.

“There’s a reason his name is Uar the Cruel,” I said, and I didn’t try to keep the look of disgust off my face. He’d never had any use for me, nor I for him.

“It always seemed that jealousy was what undid your relatives—jealousy of affection, of power, of possessions even,” Brii said. “You have a relative on both thrones of faerie, and they are both vain and hate anyone who even hints that they may not be the most beautiful, the most handsome, the most powerful.”

“You believe that if you go to other lovers I will see it as a rejection of my beauty?”

“Something like that, yes,” he said.

I looked from one to the other of them, frowning. “I don’t know how to reassure you, because you’re right about my blood relatives. My father and grandmother were sane, but even my own mother isn’t quite right. So I don’t know how to reassure you.”

“It’s the fact that you haven’t touched any of them that’s creeping them out,” Rhys said.

“What?”

“The queen would only let the guards she hadn’t slept with find other lovers. If she’d had sex with you then you were hers forever even if she never touched you again.”

I stared at him. “You mean before the celibacy nonsense that was her rule?”

“Her law,” Ivi said.

“She was always a very possessive woman,” Rhys said.

“She was always crazy, you mean,” I said.

“No, not always,” Rhys said.

The other men agreed.

“And the very fact that once the queen wasn’t mad, but just ruthless, is what frightens us about you, Princess Meredith,” Ivi said.

“You see,” Brii said, “if she had always been mad then we would trust that your reasonableness would last, but once the queen was reasonable. Once she was a good ruler or faerie and the Goddess wouldn’t have chosen her.”

“I see the problem,” I said, and wrapped the almost forgotten towel around me. I felt a little cold all of a sudden. I hadn’t thought about my family quite like this. What if it was genetic? What if sadistic craziness was inside me somewhere, waiting for a chance to come out? Was it possible? Well, yes, but … My hand went to my stomach, still so flat, but there were babies in there. Would they take after me and my father, or … That was the most frightening of all. I trusted myself, but the babies were unknown.

“What can I do?” I asked. I wasn’t even sure which fear I was asking about, but the men had only one fear to focus on.

“We failed you tonight, Princess Meredith,” Brii said. “We do not deserve any more consideration than our lives.”

“When the Goddess moves among us none can stand in her way,” Rhys said.

“Do you really think that the Darkness or the Killing Frost would see it that way if something had happened to her?” Ivi asked.

“If something had happened to her, neither would I,” Rhys said, and there was that hardness to him that he hid most of the time behind jokes and his love of film noir, but more and more I glimpsed it. He’d come back into a lot of his power that had been gone for centuries, and there is something about that much power that makes you harder.

“See,” Ivi said.

“Again, I feel like I’m missing something. Rhys, just tell me what they keep tiptoeing around.”

Rhys looked from one man to the other. “You have to ask for yourselves. That’s always been the rule.”

“Because if you won’t ask for yourself, you don’t want it that badly,” Brii finished for him, a little sadly. He began to put all his arrows away, and turned for the still-open door.

“Stay, for if I ask it can be for both of us,” Ivi said.

Brii hesitated in the doorway.

“I want it badly enough to ask,” Ivi said.

“Ask what?” I said.

“Make love to us, have sex with us, fuck us. I don’t care what you call it, but please touch us. If you touch us tonight and let us have other lovers tomorrow and are calm about it, then it will be proof that you are not your aunt, or even your uncle of the Bright court. He wouldn’t kill lovers who went to another bed, but he destroyed them politically at court, because to go directly to another bed after a night with him said, to him at least, that he wasn’t good enough to make you not want someone else.”

“See why I would not ask tonight?” Brii said. “It is a great honor to be in the bed of our ruler, and it should not be a reward for such badly done duty.”

“The Goddess woke you first,” I said. “There has to be a reason for that.”

“I don’t smell flowers,” Rhys said.

“Me neither, but maybe this isn’t about Goddess work, as much as the fact that someone should have told me that sooner. I lived in fear of my aunt my entire life. I’ve been her victim of torture, and my cousin made my childhood a misery when my father wasn’t watching.”

“We need to know how much of the queen is in her niece,” Ivi said, and he was very solemn, unlike his usual teasing self. I realized that maybe his teasing, like Rhys’s humor, was hiding more serious things.

“Rhys needs the shower, and the beds are all taken, but the couches are big enough.”

Rhys kissed me on the cheek. “Have fun.” He moved past me to the showers, but put his weapons at the back of the shower, where the shelf had been designed for less lethal things, but it worked perfectly for weapons, as we’d all discovered.

“The couches are big enough for what?” Brii asked.

“Sex,” I said. “Sex tonight, but tomorrow you have to persuade one of the other guards to be with you, because this only works if you go from my bed almost directly to someone else, right?”

“Will that not bother you?” Brii asked.

I laughed. “If I wasn’t part fertility deity you wouldn’t get sex tonight. Rhys did his duty very well tonight, and if I were truly mortal flesh I’d be a little sore, but I am not, and the power will rise between us and it will be good.”

“So your orders are to make love to you now, but find another guard to sleep with as soon as possible?” Ivi asked.

I thought about it, and then nodded. “Yes, those are my orders.”

Ivi grinned at me. “I like you.”

I smiled back at him, because I couldn’t help it. “I like you, too. Now let’s go find the couches and prove just how much we like each other.”

I heard the shower turn on behind us as we moved for the door.