A Shiver of Light

CHAPTER TEN

DOYLE HAD NEGOTIATED three days for me to recover my strength from giving birth, and then Aunt Andais, the Queen of Air and Darkness, got to speak to me directly. She wasn’t going to use the telephone, because she wanted to see me while we spoke. We weren’t going to use the computer for a Skype face-to-face either. Aunt Andais didn’t even own a cell phone, and computers were for her staff, but for her it was the old-fashioned way: a mirror. The sidhe could speak through reflective surfaces of more than one kind, but mirrors were the easiest and clearest view. We chose the antique mirror in the dining room. One, because it was large and had been as big as one wall of the room once, before wild magic had expanded the room to the size of a small football field. The French doors showed a forest that had never existed in California. The clearing and forest were new lands of faerie, or old lands returned. We’d been so happy when it had happened, and then Taranis had walked into that bit of fairyland, knocked me unconscious, and stolen me away. Now there were locks on the French doors, and two guards posted at all times. If Taranis kidnapped me again, it wouldn’t be through this opening.

The mirror was still large enough to act like a huge flat-screen TV, so that the queen would get a good view first of me, and then, if that went well, the babies, but since some of us could use mirrors to travel from one point to another we weren’t risking the babies until Aunt Andais had shown herself sane, or at least sane-ish. I’d take the “ish” because asking for more than that would mean I’d never speak with her.

I debated on what color maternity dress to wear. It wasn’t a casual concern. Andais was very into fashion, but more than that, she had taken insult from my choice of clothing in the past. Her feeling insulted had led to my being hurt, or even bleeding, so we put serious thought into what I would wear to sit before the queen. Shades of rich, dark green were some of my best colors. They brought out the green in my eyes, but Aunt Andais didn’t always like to be reminded that my eyes were the color of the Seelie Court, and not the Unseelie. So, no green, which took out several of my maternity dresses. The red one was almost the color of fresh blood, not something we wanted my torture-loving aunt to think of when looking at me. The purple dress was at the dry cleaner. That left us with a soft floral print, royal blue, or a rich, salmon pink. Pants were a no-go; I was still too sore to want to wear them. We finally decided on the pink, saving the blue in case we had to do television earlier than we’d planned.

I sat facing the mirror, in the same large thronelike chair that I’d used to do business with the goblins months ago, before I started showing. It was the closest thing we had to a throne. The only downside to it was that my feet couldn’t touch the floor, so I felt like a child. There was no footstool in the house that wasn’t hard plastic and cheap looking. No one made velvet and wood stools for the queen to put her feet on anymore. Funny how things like that had gone out of style.

It was Kitto who came up with a solution. “I’ll be your footstool.”

He stood there gazing up at me, the only man I’d ever been with who was significantly shorter than my five feet even. He had moonlight skin like mine, like Frost’s, white and pale and perfect as a winter’s morn. His hair was a black almost as dark as Doyle’s, but as Kitto’s hair had grown out it had gotten wavy, so that it fell to his shoulders in an artful tangle of waves and curls as if it couldn’t quite decide. I’d taught him how to take care of his longer hair, so that it looked artfully tousled, not messy. If he’d been taller he could have passed for pure Unseelie sidhe, except for three things. His eyes were huge, dominating his face, almond-shaped and a wondrous bright blue that swallowed his entire eye, except for the black point of his pupil; the color was sidhe, the shape and form were not. But more than the eyes, the line of shining scaled skin that grew down his back along his entire spine showed him not pure sidhe. The scales were flat, smooth, in colors of pink, gold, ivory, and small flecks of black, but so bright in color that the line of it looked more like a purposeful decoration than the scales of a snake. It was his back scales that made me wonder if Bryluen’s wings might be partially from Kitto; goblins didn’t have wings, but her wings were almost the same color as his snake skin. We wouldn’t know until the tests came back. If Taranis hadn’t been pushing we wouldn’t have cared so much about who was the biological father or fathers of the babies, but to prove it wasn’t Taranis, we had to prove who it was. Kitto’s Cupid’s-bow mouth hid a forked tongue, and he had to work hard not to slur his s’s, and the last bit of difference was two long, retractable fangs that tucked up against the roof of his mouth unless he chose to bring them down. He was one lover that I could never allow to bite me, because snake goblins were venomous, and his father had been one. If Bryluen could possibly be his daughter, I’d want to watch for those when her teeth started coming in, because even baby vipers have venom.

“The queen may try to frighten you, Kitto,” I said.

“I am a stool for your feet, Merry. Footstools can’t hear, or talk, or interact with anyone. I can ignore her, because I can just be the object I’m acting as.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about him being just a piece of furniture for my feet. It must have shown on my face, because Kitto took my hand in his; his hand was the same size as mine, the only man in my life for whom that was true.

“I will be honored to act for you in this, Merry. I remember when the high kings, even among the humans, had virgins who held their feet so they did not touch the ground when the king sat upon the throne. It was an honored position, but you were not allowed to address the women at all. You had to treat them as the footstool for the king, and thus they were a part of the throne. If the queen speaks directly to me at all, it will be breaking protocol. I think she may talk to you about me, but I do not believe she will address me; besides, I am just a small goblin and she has never thought highly of me.”

I couldn’t argue that. There was some debate about what Kitto would wear, but not about his acting as my footstool. The other men agreed that he would wear the metal and cloth thong that I’d first seen him in; it was a lovely piece of workmanship, and it showed off his scales beautifully. Among the goblins if you had an extra bit of beauty, it was natural to dress to show it off. Though the fewer clothes you wore, the less dominant you were among the goblins; it was a way of showing visually that you were opting out of the near-constant battles for supremacy in the goblin court. By dressing as he had when I first met him, Kitto had been advertising that he was not a leader and didn’t want to be. There was no need to fight him, because his scanty clothing was a white flag of sorts. It had also marked him as a potential victim, if someone wanted to claim him as a sort of mistress, or concubine; there really was no good human word for a man in his situation, and among the goblins there was no word that differentiated between male and female for the role. Goblins didn’t care what sex you were, only how big, how strong, how tough. If a female was able to beat the shit out of enough other goblins, then she could rise as high in their ranks as a male. It was just rare, because their women, like most human women, had less muscle mass, size, and strength to back up their threat. It put women at a serious disadvantage in their culture, but then that was true among a lot of cultures.

The rest of the men had gone for the elegant warrior look. Doyle was in his signature black, but he’d put in the diamond stud earrings, to go with his usual silver rings that climbed up to the tops of his delicately pointed ears. He stood at my side, behind the throne, like a piece of the night made handsome and dangerous flesh.

Frost was at my other side in white and silver to match his skin, hair, and eyes, so that he was coldly elegant like a man carved of ice and snow. If Goddess could have taken winter and formed it into flesh and beauty, it would be the Killing Frost. His face was set in arrogant lines, the expression he wore when he was hiding his emotions. We would all hide our emotions tonight.

Rhys turned from where he was standing by the mirror and said, “Frost and Doyle look like bookends, light and darkness, balanced at your side, Merry.”

I glanced up and back at the two men and could only agree. It was in moments like this that I still marveled that these two men, the ones who had seemed the most remote, untouchable by any emotion I understood, were now my greatest loves and fathers to my children.

Rhys was in white as well, but whereas most of the men had chosen medieval dress or some older fashion, he was in modern dress pants with a pale blue T-shirt loose over them, and his cream-colored trench coat; he’d even added his white fedora pulled down at a rakish angle over his long white curls. He was wearing a new eye patch in a pale blue that complemented his remaining eye and made all three of the different shades of blue brighter and deeper.

“You look good, Rhys,” Galen said as he went to take his place beside the chair, “but I can’t tell if you’re doing Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon or a sexy ice cream man.”

Rhys grinned. “Well, I always go for sexy, and who doesn’t like ice cream, but film noir is where I get most of my clothing inspirations.”

Galen grinned back. “I just wear what I’m told to put on.” That wasn’t entirely true, because he had colors he preferred, but he was probably one of the least picky beyond that. He’d had less than a hundred years of my aunt choosing clothes for her guards, and he had never been a favorite, or far enough out of favor, for her to pay special attention to his appearance. That had given him freedom that the other guards had not had to find their own personal sense of style. Rhys’s style was personal, but he’d only been able to indulge his film noir kick here in California with me; before that the queen had dressed him to show off his muscles, somewhere between a pornographic warrior and disco. I’d always thought she did it to humiliate Rhys, or that she didn’t know what to do with him.

Galen was in pale green pants, untucked dress shirt, and a darker green tailored jacket. His pale curls with the one long braid always looked green, but his skin often looked just white; in the colors he’d chosen today his skin, eyes, and hair were all green. Only his soft tan dress shoes spoiled the solidarity of his color. He looked good in the outfit, but he didn’t look spectacular. Had he not cared? Had he thought the queen would pay more attention to everyone else, as she always had? Or perhaps he had chosen green defiantly, because it made it impossible not to think “pixie,” which was what his father had been—a pixie who had seduced one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, back before she’d exchanged them for gentlemen-in-waiting.

The queen had executed Galen’s father for his audacious seduction. How dare a lesser creature of faerie touch the sidhe of her court—and then the lady had come up pregnant and it turned out the queen had killed half of a fertile couple. Galen had been the only child born into the Unseelie sidhe once they arrived on American soil. She would not have killed Galen’s father if she had known in time. Her temper coupled with her absolute power had cheated her court out of more babies, as her temper and power had cheated her out of being welcomed into our home to see our babies like a normal aunt.

Now Galen was the father of royal triplets, and he’d dressed to remind the queen of his father. Galen wanted her to remember what her anger and arrogance had cost her, and him, once. It was both brave and smart of him. Brave because he was rubbing the queen’s nose in her mistake, and smart because it might remind her that a mistake here and now might cost her more.

It was very unlike Galen, so much so that I had to ask, “Who chose your clothing tonight?”

He walked toward me, smiling. “I did.” But again there was a new look in his eyes, harsher, more sure of itself. I had mourned it earlier, but now I welcomed it. I needed all the help I could get negotiating with the queen.

I raised my hand and Galen took it, raising it to kiss first my hand, and then lowering his tall frame to kiss me gently on the lips. We didn’t want to muss my bright red lipstick. He drew back with lipstick on his mouth, like a scarlet shadow of my smaller mouth between his lips.

“You’ll want to rub that off,” I said.

He shook his head. “I’ll wear your lipstick proudly, my Merry. Let her see that I am in your favor, and that I am one of the Greenmen who prophecy said would bring life to the court.”

“And remind her that your father might have brought more life to the courts if she hadn’t killed him,” I said, still holding his hand.

“That, too,” he said. He squeezed my hand and stepped back because everyone else was spilling into the room at once. The prearranged time for the call was close, and we needed everyone in place so we could look impressive for our queen.

Mistral came first, looking impatient and tugging at his tunic. It was dark burnished gold with brighter gold and silver thread worked into the puff sleeves and cuffs, and in a more elaborate pattern across the chest. The pants were a color between tan and gold and bloused over the rich dark brown leather of his knee-high boots. The boots and pants he’d worn before, but the tunic had spent many long years put away, because it was a reminder of the power and magic he had lost. As he walked into the room it was as if lightning reflected down his long, unbound hair. Strands of it had turned gold, yellow, silver, a white so bright it nearly glowed. Some of that was a permanent color change, just a single strand here and there among the gray, but the flashing, reflected light that moved through all his hair came and went like lightning does.

His hair had changed in the last twenty-four hours, as if something had returned more of his power to him. He’d been holding Gwenwyfar, rocking her to sleep, when we’d noticed the first flash of light in his hair.

Now he strode into the room tugging at the tunic, and the colors in it brought out the strands of color in his hair, but I didn’t really think it showed off the flash of light. I thought solid black clothing might showcase the lightning display more, but we’d think about that for another night when we wanted to be impressive, or frightening.

Kitto came in, wearing his metal thong. He was smiling and said, “Nicca and Biddy are watching the babies.” That meant we could concentrate on meeting the queen without worrying that the babies would cry and need us, which was especially good since the pink dress was not a dark color. If the babies cried, any of the babies, sometimes my milk came down and the nursing bra wasn’t enough to stop it from staining. It was a mark of the blessing of the Goddess that I could nurse my children, but it was not convenient for looking serious and in charge.

Kitto went down on the floor so that my feet in their purple and pink flats could rest on his bare back. I’d felt that acting as my footstool had been degrading to him, but now that I felt him solid under my feet it just felt right, as if he grounded me, centered me. I felt less of an impostor dressed up to play queen, and more … queenly.

Sholto was the last of the fathers to stride in through the door, and he was in black, an outfit almost identical to the one he’d worn in the hospital when he wanted to be certain to be seen as a king. His white-blond hair was unbound around all the blackness and gleaming jewelry, so he looked both beautiful and frightening, which was the effect he wanted.

Behind Sholto came the guards, who were now just guards for me. We had all discussed it and decided that though our customs didn’t force me to limit my sexual attentions to the fathers of my children, there were already too many of them and not enough of me. So not every handsome face, beautiful body, dangerously armed guard, male or female, who came through the door was my lover. Honestly, most never had been, but sometimes it’s good to finalize the rules of a relationship, even one with a group as large as ours.

They fanned out around the room in their warrior garb, some in actual armor, but most in modern clothing with body armor under or over the clothing. Though in truth if the Queen of Air and Darkness wanted you dead, armor wouldn’t save you. Her name was not an idle title but named her two main powers. She could travel through the dark to anywhere else that was dark, and hear her name spoken in the dark. She could see in the dark without any light to aid her. The air she could make heavy, thick, until you could no longer breathe it and it felt as if your chest were being crushed by the weight of her magic. Andais was truly the Queen of Air and Darkness.

What good was armor against such magic? But they wore it all the same, because sometimes it’s not about whether it will actually stop the bullet or the blade, but more about drawing a line in the sand at your enemy’s feet. We hoped it would show Andais that we meant to fight rather than submit. All of us were exiles from her court, and almost all of us had suffered at her hands, some more than others. There were a handful of guards that Doyle had decided would not stand with us tonight, because he feared that their memories of what Andais had done to them would make them unable even to stand their ground, let alone fight if the need arose.

We had found therapists for the most damaged of our refugees from faerie. They had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. I wouldn’t have been surprised if most of us had a touch of it. You don’t have to be the one being cut up to be traumatized; watching it is enough sometimes. Those who were most fragile were barred from the room and given duties elsewhere. They could help keep the amazing crush of media from climbing the wall around Maeve’s estate, or help patrol the grounds looking for each new bit of faerie that appeared. It was as if the old lands were emerging in puzzle pieces in this bit of America where they had never existed, though faerie wasn’t a place you could reliably find on a map. It was more an idea, or ideal, of wild magic that had a mind and will of its own. Faerie moved at its own whim, and that of the Goddess and Her Consort. So the grounds were patrolled, searching for each bit of wild magic as it manifested. Already the lands inside the walls were much larger than ordinary senses said the walls could contain, which was wonderful, but Taranis had stepped through on the new lands, and so might the queen. The danger of that meant guards had to be posted, to warn the rest of us if either of them was seen. I think we all felt that we would lose a pitched battle against either the king or the queen, but if the alarm was given first, then even if the guard who discovered the breach died, there would be more warriors coming to defend us. And when I said “us,” I didn’t mean just my babies and me. Maeve and one other of our female guards had given birth here in this new Western kingdom of faerie. We’d run away from faerie to save our lives, and now faerie was coming to us, building itself around us. Doyle and I had given up our crowns to the Unseelie Court to save our Killing Frost, but the Goddess and the land of faerie itself wasn’t done. If we could not rule the Unseelie, it seemed likely we’d get a chance to rule something else, something new, something here.

I hadn’t refused Detective Lucy Tate’s offer of a safe house just because I thought it would get the nice policemen killed. I had refused because wild magic was everywhere around me and the fathers of my babies. In a human safe house surrounded by human police, we wouldn’t be able to hide just how much of the old powers were returning. What would the police have done if they’d woken up with their safe house growing an extra room overnight, or a new door that led to a forest that had never existed on the West Coast of America?

So we stayed inside Maeve’s walled estate and let it grow and become magical. I thought about the tree and roses in my hospital room. It had been miraculous even to the sidhe when such things first began appearing around me. Inside faerie some had faded, but others had remained and grown. Outside faerie they had faded over time in the beginning, but lately not so much. I hoped they faded, because we weren’t certain what the humans would do if they found out just how much magic was following me around.

Doyle and Frost’s positions at my back to left and right had been easily agreed on, but where the other men would stand had been more of a debate. Sholto had won the right to choose his place, because he was a true king in his own right and the Goddess herself had handfasted us and crowned me as his queen. The only issue had been when he tried to insist on standing higher than Doyle or Frost. I had to put my foot down on that, and he’d let me win with almost no argument, which meant he’d made only a token try. He chose to stand beside Doyle on the right of my chair. Rhys had wanted to mirror him beside Frost, until the others pointed out that because of his being six inches shorter than everyone else, he’d be mostly hidden behind whoever was in front. Mistral stood beside Frost, mirroring Sholto. That left Rhys beside Sholto and Galen beside Mistral. Kitto under my feet would not seem to be one of the fathers, and I’d told Royal he couldn’t stand at my side tonight. For one thing, Sholto was convinced that Bryluen’s wings were from his father’s side of the genetics. Even more importantly, if my third baby had truly been fathered after the twins were conceived, that gave credence to Taranis’s paternity claim. I didn’t want to help Taranis and his team of lawyers stake a claim to my children. I loved Bryluen already, but there was part of me that stared at her red curls, so like my own, and thought, So like Taranis’s hair. I prayed to Goddess that it was not so, but when so much wild magic and Deity intervention is everywhere, many things are possible, both good and terrible.

“It’s time, Merry,” Doyle said, his deep voice soft. He laid a hand on my shoulder as if he felt my nervousness.

I put my hand up to cover his, and said, “Then let us begin. Cathbodua, please let my aunt know we are ready to speak with her.”

Cathbodua stepped forward from the guards that stretched in a semicircle behind us. She had been part of my father’s guards once, the Prince’s Cranes, but when he was assassinated the entire female guard had been given to Prince Cel, the queen’s son. It had been against the rules and customs to simply transfer them to Cel. Once his master was dead, a guard was supposed to have a choice of either transferring his loyalty to another royal or going back to “private service” and being just another noble of the Unseelie Court. We had learned only in the last year that none of the women had been allowed a choice, and Prince Cel had made them into his personal harem. Some had become his torture victims, as some of the male guards had been for the queen, but some were not so easily victimized.

Cathbodua moved toward the mirror in a rustle of feathers, her raven cloak spreading out around her like the feathers it had once become. She still couldn’t transform into full bird guise, but she could communicate with ravens and crows and a few other birds to help spy out the land and look for danger. Her hair was as black as the feathers, so that it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended. Her skin was moonlight skin like mine, like Frost’s, like Rhys’s, but somehow when you looked at her you thought bone white, not moonlight. She was beautiful as all the sidhe were beautiful, but there was a coldness to her beauty that did not appeal to me. But then I wasn’t dating her; as a guard she was excellent, and that was all I required of her.

She touched the side of the mirror, and I heard the distant cawing of crows, like hearing your own phone ringing in your ear, knowing it’s louder on the other end.

We had all bet that Andais would keep us waiting, but we were wrong. The mirror fogged as if some invisible giant breathed along the glass, and when it cleared there she sat.

She sat on the edge of her huge black-silk-and-fur-draped bed. It was rich and sensual, and a little threatening, as if there would be pressure to live up to such a bed, and the price for failing expectations might be harsh, or maybe that was just me knowing my aunt far too well.

She was wearing a black silk robe so that her ankle-length black hair mingled with the robe and the sheets, until it was as if her hair was formed out of all that silk and dark fur. Her skin was whiter than white, framed by all that raven darkness, except for one spill of honey-and-white fur to her left that spoiled the effect and showed her hair black and almost normal across it. It wasn’t like her to not notice that one bit of pale that spoiled the intimidating effect of her visual.

Her face was almost free of makeup, and without the black eyeliner she usually wore her triple-gray irises weren’t as striking, again leaving her eyes almost ordinary. Her beauty didn’t need makeup, though without it she was a cold, distant beauty as if carved of ice and raven’s wings. That was a strange thought, with Cathbodua standing beside the mirror in her raven wing cloak, but though both women might have begun as similar battle goddesses, where they had gone from their beginnings had made all the difference. It had made one a queen for a millennium and left the other to diminish until she was barely more than human. It is not where you begin, or what gifts you begin with, but what you do with them that matters in the end.

“Greetings, Aunt Andais, Queen of Air and Darkness, sister of my father, ruler of the Unseelie host.”

“Greetings, niece Meredith, Princess of Flesh and Blood, daughter of my beloved younger brother, mother of his grandchildren, and conqueror of hearts.”

I had chosen my words carefully to remind her that I was her niece and she might value my bloodline if not the rest of me, but she had given an answer as careful as my own, and as nonthreatening. It wasn’t like her.

“Aunt Andais, I’m not quite sure what to say next.” She was too far off script for me, and when in doubt truth is not a bad fallback plan.

She smiled, and she seemed tired. “I grow tired of torturing people, my niece.”

I fought to keep my face blank, and felt Doyle’s hand tense on my shoulder where I touched him. I forced my breathing even, and spoke in a normal voice. “May I be so bold as to say, Aunt Andais, that both surprises and pleases me.”

“You may, since you already have, Meredith, and you are not surprised that torture no longer pleases me, you are shocked, are you not?”

“Yes, aunt, quite so.”

She laughed then, head back, face shining with it, but it was the kind of laugh that slithered down your spine and tickled goose bumps from every inch of your skin. I’d heard that laugh as she cut people’s skin with a blade while they screamed.

I swallowed past my suddenly thudding pulse, and knew in that moment that I never wanted her around my babies. I never wanted them to hear that laughter, not ever.

“I see that look upon your face, Meredith. I know that look.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Aunt Andais.”

“Determination, decision, and not in my favor, am I right?”

“In your moments of clarity, aunt, you see much.”

“Yes,” she said, face growing somber, “in my moments of clarity, when I do not let my bloodlust have full rein, and carve my unhappiness and lust from the bodies of my courtiers.”

“Yes, Aunt Andais, when you’re not doing that,” I said.

She held her hand out to someone out of sight of the mirror. Eamon, her favorite lover for the last hundred years or so, came to take her hand. He was as pale of skin, as black of hair, as she; a little taller, broader through the shoulders, six-plus feet of sidhe warrior, but the face he turned to the mirror held that calm, even a kindness, that had often been all that stood between Andais and her worst instincts. He’d grown out a thin, neat Vandyke mustache and goatee, but it was still more facial hair than I’d ever seen my aunt allow at our court. Beards and such were for Taranis and his golden throng. Andais preferred her men clean shaven; many of the men couldn’t even grow facial hair.

Eamon sat on the bed beside her, putting his arm across her shoulders, and she leaned into him, as if she needed the reassurance of the touching. It was a show of weakness that I never thought she would allow me to see.

“Greetings, Princess Meredith, wielder of the hands of flesh and blood, niece of my beloved,” Eamon said.

In all the years that he had stood by her side in mirror calls to others, I had never heard him greet, or be greeted, by anyone. He had been an extension of Andais, nothing more.

“Greetings, Eamon, wielder of the hand of corrupting flame, consort of my Aunt Andais, holder of her heart.”

He smiled at me, and it was a good smile, a real one. “I have never heard myself called that last before, Princess Meredith; I thank you for it.”

“It was a title I suspected you deserved long ago, but I had never known for certain until today.”

He hugged Andais, and she seemed somehow diminished, smaller, or I just had never appreciated how big a man Eamon was, or perhaps a bit of both.

Eamon raised his eyes a little and spoke. “Greetings, Doyle, wielder of the painful flame, Baron Sweet-Tongue, the Queen’s Darkness, consort of Princess Meredith.”

“And to you, Eamon, all graces and titles deserved and earned to you, as well.”

He smiled. “Now, I do not know whom to greet next, Princess Meredith. Do I give formal acknowledgment to Lord Sholto, who is a king in his own right, or to the Killing Frost, who is dearest to you and the Darkness, or to Rhys, who has regained his own sithen again, and no offense to Galen the Green Knight, but our protocols have nothing to cover so many consorts or princes.”

“If it is a formal greeting for all of us, then Sholto should be next,” Frost said.

I reached out to touch his hand where it sat on the pommel of the sword at his waist. He always touched his weapons when he was nervous. He rewarded me with a smile, and that was enough.

“I will waive such niceties,” Sholto said. “For my fellow consorts to acknowledge my title is enough.” He gave a small bow from his neck toward Frost, who acknowledged with a bow as low as Sholto’s but no lower. There had been a time when you had to know just how low to bow to each level of noble, and to get it wrong was an insult. I was glad such things were in the past. How had anyone gotten anything done?

“Such calm, civilized behavior,” Andais said, in a voice that held distaste, as if it wasn’t a compliment at all.

Eamon hugged her, laying his cheek gently against her hair. “Would you rather they fight and demand every title we could paint upon them, my queen?”

She ignored his question and spoke, in a voice that seemed as diminished as the rest of her. “Why have you not come to kill me, Meredith?”

I fought to keep my face neutral, and watched Eamon look startled, and the first unease cross his face. What was worse, then his face went back to that handsome, unreadable mask that had allowed him to live and thrive in Andais’s bed for so long. Perhaps that last comment had been over the line even for him, chastising his queen in front of others.

I found my voice and said, “I was pregnant with my father’s, your brother’s, grandchildren and would not risk them for vengeance.”

She nodded and put her arm around Eamon’s waist, to be held closer. “I went mad after you killed my son and turned down the crown of my court to save your lover, Meredith. Did you realize that?”

“I was aware that you seemed … unwell,” I said.

She gave that horrible laugh again, and her eyes were fever bright. “Unwell; yes, I have been unwell.”

Eamon held her closer, but his face remained unreadable. Whatever happened here, if she went back to being her usual sadistic self, he would survive. Eamon was not our enemy, but he could not afford to be our friend either.

“Meredith, Meredith, the look on your body, your tight control. Do you not understand that after centuries even the fight for control shows to my eyes?”

“I do know that, Aunt Andais, but control is all I can offer.”

“Control is all any of us can offer in the end, and I lost mine,” she said.

“You seem better now,” I said.

She nodded. “It took me months to realize I was trying to force you to send my Darkness to me. I knew if anyone could slay me, it would be him, but day after long day he did not come. Why did you not send him to me, Meredith?”

We had actually discussed sending Doyle to assassinate her, but I had vetoed it. “Because I didn’t want to lose my Darkness,” I said.

“Your Darkness, yes, I suppose now he is ‘your Darkness.’” Anger showed on her face.

I didn’t like the “suppose” in that sentence. “Doyle is one of the fathers of my children, which makes us a committed coupling now.”

She sat up a little straighter in the curve of Eamon’s arm. “Yes, yes, he is yours as a consort, Meredith. I mean nothing by it, beyond the fact that I thought he would be sent to end my pain, but he did not come, and gradually the madness and grief left me. Eamon risked much to bring me back to myself. I tortured Tyler to death one night. I valued him, and I have missed him since, and that helped me realize how far I had fallen.”

Tyler had been a barely legal teenage lover. He’d been a human brought into the Unseelie sithen to be her slave, in the bondage-and-submission sense, not in a bought-and-sold sense. Tyler had been good looking in a vapid sort of way; he had been entirely too much pet and not enough person for my tastes, but he had pleased Andais, met a need that was real for her. Apparently he had been more important to her than even she knew.

“I am sorry for your loss, Aunt Andais.”

“You sound as if you mean that.”

“I would not have wished death by torture on anyone. I had no quarrel with your slave, Tyler. I simply did not understand him or his interactions with you enough to comment.”

“Such careful wording, my niece; you never liked Tyler.”

“He disturbed me, because you wanted him to disturb me. I know it was part of your games to control me, or amuse yourself, but I was never afraid of Tyler, and he never harmed me. If I hadn’t found some value in him I wouldn’t have helped your guards and Eamon protect Tyler the night that you almost whipped him to death.”

There had been a night in the private chambers of the queen when she had chained Tyler to the wall of her bedroom, and it had gone from a pain-filled game to a near-death experience for him. Eamon had shielded the human with his own body, trying to bring Andais back to sanity in time to save Tyler and keep her from stripping the flesh even from Eamon’s bones.

The other guards had been forced to kneel and watch the torture, but what had begun as forcing her celibate guards to watch her have sex with her pet had turned into true life and death. I had watched Rhys, Doyle, Frost, Galen, Mistral, and so many others bloodied and dreadfully injured trying to come to Eamon’s aid. In the end I had stepped forward and hoped only to give them time to gather themselves, to think of a way to stop her, but the Goddess had blessed me, and the queen had been stopped by the blessing of the Goddess through me. It was not my power that had done it; I never had illusion otherwise. The best I could claim was that my faith and courage had been rewarded. That night Aunt Andais had been poisoned deliberately to drive her into her full bloodlust in hopes that she would be painted so mad that her nobles would see that Prince Cel, her son, should come to the throne sooner, but I had interfered, and the plan had backfired.

“But you were not there this time, Meredith. You were not in the court that the Goddess and Consort gave to you and Doyle. If you had been, Tyler might still live.”

Was she truly going to make this my fault? It was like her self of old; she took little blame for herself and had seen even less attached to Cel, her late son.

Eamon didn’t try to soothe her this time, but sat with his arm almost stiffly around her, as if he wasn’t sure whether she still welcomed it.

“Would you not have given up your crown to have the man you loved by your side again?” I asked. I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to ask, but it was all I could think of to say.

I smelled roses, and knew the Goddess was with me. She either approved of what I’d said or would aid me if the queen did not. Something brushed my cheek and I looked up to find pink and white rose petals falling from empty air. The petals began to collect in my lap like floral snow.

Andais made a sound between a scream and an inarticulate curse. “Pink and white petals, not red, not the colors of our court, but of that golden throng that thinks themselves so superior to us, why, Meredith, why the Goddess of the Seelie and not the Dark Mother?”

“The Goddess is all women, all things, or that is what She has shown to me.” I kept my voice calm, but surrounded by the scent of roses in the summer heat of a meadow, in the midst of the soft-petaled rain of roses, I couldn’t be upset. Her blessing was too close to me, and it felt warm, safe, like home is meant to be, but so seldom is.

Andais sat up, moving out from the curve of Eamon’s arm. “The gardens that have returned to our sithen are full of bright and happy colors. Your Seelie heritage has contaminated our kingdom. You would reshape us in the form of that other world of lies and illusions. You’ve seen what Taranis considers truth, Meredith. How can you wish our court to become a fairy-tale land that is not real?”

“I did not wish these changes on your court, Aunt Andais. The Goddess returned and with Her the wild magic, and it goes where it will, changing things as it goes. No one of flesh and blood can control the wild magic of faerie itself.”

“Would you have returned us to our former dark glory if you could have chosen, Meredith?”

The fall of petals began to slow, but my lap was full of them already. “I do not know, and that is the truth. I had no affection for the court of my uncle; if I had a home in faerie it was the Unseelie Court, and as you remind me, my uncle has made me dread his court even more. So no, aunt, I would not make the Unseelie Court over into that glittering place of lies.”

My pulse had sped, not from Andais being so close, but from the thought of Taranis. I mercifully didn’t remember most of the attack, but I remembered enough.

Frost and Doyle both laid a hand on my shoulders at the same time. Sholto and Mistral each laid a hand on mine, and I took their hands. Galen went to one knee beside me, his leg almost brushing Kitto, who had remained motionless and still as the footstool he pretended to be, so still that I had almost forgotten him. He had the gift of being that still even when standing beside me. Galen laid his hands on my knee through the layer of petals. He gazed up at me, giving most of his back to the mirror. It was both an insult and a sign that he didn’t see her as a threat, or it would have been if one of the other men had done it, but it was Galen and I doubt he thought beyond comforting me. Rhys had taken a half-step forward, so that his hands were free if she was as rash as Taranis had been when he got angry over a mirror call. Galen seemed oblivious to the danger. He had not changed completely. I was both relieved and afraid of what I would find when I raised my eyes from his sweet face to look at my aunt.

I expected anger, disdain, but what I saw was pain, and the closest I’d ever seen to sympathy except when my father died. “It was not my intent to remind you of what he did to you, niece. Our lawyers have told me of what the Seelie king is trying to do, and for that I am sorry, Meredith. I believe Taranis is madder in his own way than I am, or was. At least I come to my senses. He lives in his delusions.”

“I appreciate your sentiments, Aunt Andais, more than I can say.”

“I made a bargain with you, Meredith, that if you produced a child I would step down for you. Now you have produced three. It is beyond my wildest hopes. I also know that there are two babes from other couplings in your exiled court; again it is more than I hoped for. Come home, Meredith, and the throne is yours, for I gave my word and I cannot go back upon it.”

Galen’s hand tensed against my knee; the rest of the men went very still where they touched me. Rhys stayed in his forward position. I felt the guards at our backs shift as if a wind had touched them. Turning down Andais never went well.

I fought to keep my voice even. “I do not believe that I would live long upon your throne, Aunt Andais. There are still too many among our court who see my mortal blood as the doom of them all.”

“They would not dare harm you for fear of me, just as they have not harmed me during my madness for fear of worse from me, Meredith.”

There was a certain logic to what she was saying, but in the end I believed I was correct. “To rule either court, the nobles must take oath to the new ruler, and bind themselves to her or him. At our court it is a blood oath, and I proved on the dueling grounds that to share my blood made my opponents mortal.”

“That was unexpected when you killed Arzhul.”

“He certainly did not expect the blood oath to make him killable by bullet, or he would never have allowed me a gun against his sword.”

She smiled, and looked satisfied. “You were always ruthless, Meredith; why did I not see your worth sooner?”

“You hated my mixed blood as much as any in court, Aunt Andais.”

“You’re not going to bring back up the time I tried to drown you when you were six, are you? It’s very tiresome to be reminded of it, and I would take it back if I could.”

“I appreciate that you would take it back, but your belief that I am not worthy to be an Unseelie noble, let alone rule there, is shared by many at the court. They fear taking oath to me, Aunt Andais, for fear that my mortality will cancel out their immortality permanently. Since I cannot promise them it will not happen just as they fear, I think they will choose my death over theirs, or worse, my death over slowly aging like a human.”

“For fertile wombs, Meredith, you might be surprised how many would accept you.”

“I think that not all the sidhe at your court are as wedded to having children as you are, aunt.”

“Perhaps, but have I proved myself calm enough to be allowed a glimpse of my great-nieces and nephew?”

I fought the urge to look at Doyle for reassurance. Rhys glanced back at me and gave me the look I needed. He thought she had been good enough to see the babies, or at least hadn’t done anything bad enough to not have earned a glimpse of them. I gave a small nod and then said, “Yes, we will have the babies brought into the room so you may see them tonight, Aunt Andais.”

I worded that last carefully, because if I had said, You may see the babies, she could interpret it as being allowed to come visit in person, and that she hadn’t earned yet.

I gave the order for the babies to be brought into the room. One of the guards went to fetch our nurses and our children to be paraded before their great-aunt, who had nearly killed me when I was little because she thought me not pure-blooded enough, like a mongrel puppy that your prize-winning bitch had dropped. You didn’t keep the mistakes, and Andais had seen me as that, or worse. My father had found us, rescued me, fought with his sister, and taken me and all his courtiers with him into the human world. He had chosen exile to keep me safe. I didn’t understand what it had cost him until I spent my own three years alone and exiled, hiding here in Los Angeles. My father had loved me dearly; my aunt … didn’t love me at all. How could I ever trust her around our babies? The answer was obvious: I couldn’t.