Stroke of Midnight--chapter 19-20

One of the first things a professional writer ever told me was roughly, "You're a writer. Don't do indescribable things. Describing them is your job."

Why do I bring this up?

I was calm, that breathless, icy calm that is part anger, part terror, part things there are no words for.

Nope. You don't get a pass on this one. I get the emotion she's trying for (personally it's more of a perceptive blankness than anything else. The emotions are there, and they are affecting your decisions, but you aren't experiencing them.) but goddamn it, this is your job. 

 Galen has been shot, if you remember. So now...we are focusing on endless descriptions of what all the men are doing, and how they're standing, and how they look while they're doing all of the above. Goddamn it, plot. Plot is over there. Stop getting destracted by the shiny penises and go pay attention to the dude who is bleeding.

Magic filled the air, crawling over my skin.

....right. 

 Anyhoo, magic is showing up. That means we're probably going to start making out over her lover's bleeding body. Possibly with.

My eyes were hot and tight with things I did not want to cry away.

Laurel. Your primary method of describing vaginal excitement is "Wet and tight". It's a VERY VERY BAD IDEA to use something this close to describe your main characters eyes. It's calling up an image that I very much did not ever want to have in my head.

So the would be assassins are killed and captured (Knowing this crowd, probably in that order) offscreen, while Merry is pinned under Frost's body. Of course. Then they make Merry give up her gun because...um...emotional woman, I guess. She puts it back in the hoster and spends a couple sentences on how she has to hide it so it doesn't ruin the line of her clothes.

By the way? Seventeen people in this world are melodramatic gits.

Habit is what we have when the inside of our head is screaming, and we’re so scared that it sits like dry metal on our tongues.

Sometimes her word choice just fascinates me. It's not just metal, it's dry metal. Why is it dry metal? Are we trying to combine dry mouth and that bitten-tongue coppery taste into one neat little package? Are we trying to draw paralelles between this and the guy's swords and war attitudes? Is Merry eating random pennies?

Somehow I think it's that latter one.

I should have been praying to the Goddess harder than I’d ever prayed before. I’d just been in her presence, so she would have listened. But I didn’t pray to her or any deity I knew. If it was a prayer, it was a prayer to Galen.

While there is an element in here I kind of like...why are we pulling the "prayer without religion/humanist" angle when we just spent several chapters making out with the Divine Whatsis in the world of random baby powder? And if you KNOW your god is real and you KNOW they are taking a personal interest in you and you KNOW there's a good chance they'll do shit...WHY ARE YOU NOT PRAYING? In this series, the closeness of the Faerie and their deities is one of the ways they are superior to humans. Merry has called on the Goddess for everything from cups to guilt free sex, and you expect me to believe that asking for help when her lover is dying is somehow not a reflex?

 Well, Galen is a bloody mess. He's in shock (skin "Cool but not cold" indicating a major medical emergency) and the other sidhe are all "Let's let him bleed to death", and personally I'm with them because it'll thin the herd a little bit.

The attackers severed his femoral artery. LKH says that a human would bleed out from this in twenty minutes. Google-fu says this is completely inaccurate. You have, if you are very lucky, five minutes. It's more like minute, as in one, as in dead before the ambulance gets there. 

When I was about fifteen, my dad stabbed himself in the thigh trying to open a toy for my brother. He sat there for about a minute with the knife in there while my mom ran for towels, thinking, I am about to bleed to death in front of my family. Fortunately for all of us, he missed.

One of the would-be assassins offers to heal Galen. This falls somewhere between "You think I'm stupid" and "FUCK no" but of course, that's what we do.

Meanwhile, LKH reminds us all that her Fae are all white.

Her skin had looked white, but it was gold the way that Galen’s was green, so pale that something had to make you see that other color.

One, I thought that Galen was the color of nice green leaves. Two, there are two Fae males who could be described as brown. One is Nicca, who has just been traded off to Biddy. The other one is Doyle, who started life out as a dog. Literally.

The guard turns out to be a good healer. She's one of Cel's bodyguards because Cel is a sadistic little fuck, and now he'll probably order her tortured and killed for saving one of Merry's men.

...is it sad that I just understood why Merry has that name?

And then Halfwyn, the female healer, explains the rest of her ploy. See, anyone can be a guard for Merry, but they can stay only if they sleep with her. Halfwyn doesn't want to die, so she wants Merry to sleep with her.

Because sex, expecially lesbian sex, has to be justified by bullshit. RIGHT.

Merry agrees to save the fairy girl by sleeping with her, and that is the end of the chapter.