There was a flash from the window behind us. Doyle moved so fast it was hard to follow, as if the gun had just appeared in his hand and was pointed at the window, as he moved toward it. Frost had shoved me behind him. He had a gun in one hand and a blade in the other.
Maeve yelled, “It’s a camera, Doyle; don’t shoot them.”
“Unless they can fly, it cannot be reporters,” he said. There was another flash of light. I couldn’t see past Frost’s body and knew better than to even peer around him. He was guarding me; I had to let him do his job, but I wanted to see, badly.
Doyle cursed. “Anu’s Breasts, they’re on window-washing equipment, two of them.”
“Well, someone has to work the controls while the other one takes pictures, or film,” Maeve said as if it were just an everyday occurrence. Maybe it was for the Golden Goddess of Hollywood, but we’d never had reporters climbing down the windows of a hospital before.
Doyle shut the curtains, cutting out the sunlight with them so the room was suddenly dim.
“Thus it begins,” Maeve said.
“I hate paparazzi,” Frost said.
We all agreed with him and then called hospital security to let them know they’d been breached.
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.