“I’m having to work to get back to my fighting weight. I guess after three hundred years the metabolism slows down,” she said with a grin.
“You’re half human; I’m not,” Fenella said.
“You know, Fenella, I’m beginning to wonder why you left faerie,” I said.
Those yellow eyes narrowed. “I came here to get with child, not to sweat and guard … you.”
Trancer’s hand stopped moving in those small useless circles on her back. His smile looked frozen. “Now, dearest …”
“Merry had triplets. The last set of triplets among the sidhe was at least eight hundred years ago,” Biddy said. Her solid brown eyes, so very human, were darkening with the beginnings of anger. She would get angry for me.
“Yes, triplets, like a litter of dogs,” Fenella said.
Biddy said, “Bitch.”
“Exactly,” Fenella said.
Rhys made a small movement forward, but I held him tighter around the waist.
I didn’t need to be protected; I had the power to do it myself now. “You know, Fenella, if you don’t want to be one of my guard, that’s fine; I don’t think you’re suited to the position.”
“I can stop lifting these things?” She motioned at the weights.
“Yes, and in fact pack your bags and go back to the beach house.”
“There is no fairyland at the beach house. It’s just ordinary land.”
“Princess Meredith, my wife didn’t mean …” Trancer began.
I held up a hand and stopped him midsentence. “The beach house is lovely all year round, and maybe going back there will remind your wife that all the fairyland around this house is here because of me.”
“The Goddess returned Her blessing to us,” Fenella said.
“No,” Biddy said, “the Goddess returned Her blessing to Merry, and Merry shares it with the rest of us.” She stood very tall, looking down at the other woman from where she still sat on the front of the weight machine.
Fenella opened her mouth again, but Trancer actually put a fingertip against her lower lip. “My love, we will go to the beach house, as the princess bids. She is, after all, the ruler here in the Western Lands.”
Fenella pouted with her lips still against his finger, but she didn’t try to talk again, which was a relief at this point. She was the perfect example of exactly why I hadn’t tried to stay at the Seelie Court. Yes, she was less astute than some of the nobles, but her attitude was about average. I wasn’t pure enough, sidhe enough, and more than the Unseelie, the Seelie put great stock in physical purity.
“Pack and go, now,” Rhys said, voice low. His skin began to hum with power, and about the time I noticed that, I could see the white glow of his power sliding almost cloudlike under his skin. I glanced upward and saw that the three circles of blue had begun to swirl, as his magic began to unsheathe itself.
“We will, my lord,” Trancer said. He got his wife to her feet and began to ease out from among the machines and us. I realized that “us” didn’t just include Biddy. The three Red Caps were looming behind us like the mountains were on our side, my side. I reached my free hand out and touched the closest Red Cap, who happened to be Clesek. I wanted them to know how much I valued them, and had since the night they risked themselves in battle to help me save the men I loved.
Clesek’s cap was suddenly a bright scarlet instead of the dried brown it had been. The first thin trickle of blood began to drip down the side of his face from his round skullcap. The Red Caps had once dipped their caps in fresh blood often enough to keep them scarlet, but random slaughter for dipping purposes had been forbidden since the fey immigrated to America. I’d known that to be a war leader among them you had to have enough magic to cause your cap to bleed on its own, but what I hadn’t known was that a sidhe with the hand of blood could give them back that ability and make all their caps bleed. That was why they called me their queen, and why they bowed, and why they had risked everything to help me, and had joined me in exile here.
Fenella hissed, “Unclean, Unseelie magic that.”
I stopped touching Clesek, because I didn’t want him to bleed enough to get the new padded floor bloody, but I’d had enough of the Seelie for today. “Yes, yes it is Unseelie magic, Fenella, and you might want to remember that the next time you insult me.”
“Are you threatening me?”
Trancer tried to pull her toward the door, saying, “Hush, my dearest.”
“Yes, yes, I think I am. I can come to you as a goddess of fertility and joy, or I can come as the dark goddess who brings the winter and kills the crops. That was the face of the goddess that the Seelie brought down upon themselves, centuries ago. You have learned nothing.” And that last sentence echoed in the room in a way that human voices did not. Pink and white rose petals began to fall from thin air around me, Rhys, Biddy, and the Red Caps, but the fall of flowers stopped short of the two Seelie nobles.
Their eyes went wide and I saw fear on their faces. “She meant nothing by it, Princess, please.”
“She meant everything by it, Trancer.” My voice was almost mine, just the faintest echo of the Goddess around the edges of my words.
“We will pack and we will go to the edge of the sea, and await your pleasure to bid us return to this new bit of faerie,” he said, pulling his wife backward toward the doorway.
“You do that,” I said. The petals were thick as a snowstorm, but spring warm, so that I watched their frightened faces leave through a pink snowfall.
“It is not our place to say so, but they do not deserve your blessing,” Clesek said.
Rhys hugged me. “I love you, our Merry, just as you are.” And just like that, I started to cry again; stupid baby hormones. The rose petals fell so fast it was like being inside some magical snow globe that had been shaken by a giant. What did the Christians say—if God be with me, then who can be against me? That was true, but it still hurt to know that no matter how many wonders I performed, I would always and forever be too short, too human, too Unseelie for the most of the Golden Court to ever accept me. But then hadn’t six out of sixteen of the Unseelie noble houses been against me the last time I stood in open court there, too? If the Goddess herself could not make them see their own bigotry, then there was no cure for it.
There was a soft kiss on my cheek. I looked up and found that Rhys’s face was pressed to the top of my hair, and no one else was close. The Goddess had kissed my tears like my own mother never had. I whispered my thanks, and the petals began to slow. I was almost ankle deep in petals now; that was enough.
RHYS AND BIDDY
both offered to escort me to the outdoor area where Doyle was conducting the hand-to-hand training, but I told Rhys to stay and supervise the weight training. Biddy wasn’t on full duty yet, and she helped run the household along with her husband, Nicca. I didn’t want to put her back on guard duty; it wasn’t where she was best used. Both of them were content when they realized Saraid and Dogmaela were just outside the door.
Rhys kissed me good-bye and gave me over to the two female guards. I’d already asked him my question, and he’d had no problem with Bryluen, and the two human nannies weren’t needed when he, Galen, and Kitto were on duty, so he hadn’t seen them with the littlest of our babes. It was interesting that Maeve and I both felt Bryluen’s magic, but Rhys didn’t. He was a death deity, and Maeve and I were both fertility, sex, and love. If that made us more susceptible to my daughter’s glamour, then Galen would also have an issue, but Doyle and Frost might not. Come to think of it, Galen was the only one of the fathers who was spring and fertility, though he wasn’t as close to Maeve’s and my magic as a couple of the other guards. Adair and Amatheon weren’t fathers, or my lovers anymore, but their magic was closest; I might see how they fared babysitting if Galen had more issues than the other fathers. If he didn’t, then I might ask one of the female sidhe and see if Bryluen had more power over women, though I couldn’t think why she should.
“If you don’t mind me saying so, Princess Meredith, you seem unusually solemn,” Saraid said.
I glanced at her and smiled. “I don’t mind, Saraid.”
“You have everything any woman could want, and more; what do you have to be so sad about?” Dogmaela said.
“Dogmaela,” Saraid said, making a caution of the other woman’s name.
“No, it’s all right, Saraid, truly. I may not answer the question, but you can all ask me anything.”
“That is a most democratic attitude, Princess,” Saraid said.
“I may be a faerie princess, but I’m also American. We tend to like democracy.”
“I’ve been following your politicians in the media,” Dogmaela said, “and I do not find all of them very democratic. In fact, many of them seem as if they would be happy to have a dictatorship if they could be in charge.”
I laughed. “Very accurate of some of them, I grant you that.”
“Well, you laughed, so that’s a good thing,” Dogmaela said, and she smiled. She was one of the guards who had gone to therapy with the same work ethic she’d applied to learning to shoot modern firearms.
Saraid had been one of the women who stopped going to therapy when she found out it wasn’t mandatory.
“Is Uther coming over this week for movie night?” I asked.
Saraid ducked her head and grinned, that special stupid-faced, almost drunkenly happy grin. I loved seeing it on that angelically beautiful face, because Uther had been my friend back in the days when I’d been hiding as just plain Merry Gentry, a human with some fey ancestry. He’d been one of my coworkers at the Grey Detective Agency for three lonely years while I hid in L. A. on the shores of the Western Sea to keep my cousin, Cel, and his friends from killing me. Uther Squarefoot was the legal name on his license, and he was thirteen feet tall, with magnificent curling tusks, and a face that was almost more wild boar than human. He was a Jack-in-Irons, one of the solitary faeries, but still of the Unseelie Court, because the Seelie Court wouldn’t touch any fey who was ugly. But Saraid had found in Uther the first gentleness she’d known in a man for centuries. He had found in her the wonderment of being loved by a truly beautiful woman. There were only two Jacks-in-Irons in the entire United States, and no one had ever seen a female one, so Uther had been lonely in a way that mere friendship couldn’t fix. When he’d found out I was sidhe, he’d very politely asked me to help him break his fast for female companionship, but I was mortal and not sure I could survive his attentions. I wasn’t sure what Saraid and he did together on their dates, but whatever it was satisfied them both, and they’d been a couple for almost six months.
“He is, my lady.”
“Good,” I said.
She gave me a shy smile, those star eyes full of a contentment that I had feared I might never see in the faces of the women who had been abused by my cousin. It made me smile back.
“You are truly pleased when the people around you are happy, aren’t you, Princess?” Dogmaela said.
I glanced back at her. “Yes, I am.”
She shook her head. “You are your father’s daughter, Meredith, and it is a blessing for us all.”
I touched her arm. “If I had known that none of you had been given a choice to go from serving my father to serving Cel, I would have tried to free you sooner.”
Dogmaela looked frightened. “Oh, Meredith, no, the evil bastard was already trying to kill you through his toadies; if you had tried to take us away from him years ago, he would have seen you dead, or worse.” She patted my shoulder. “No, things happened as they were meant to, and now we are here and you are the ruler your father hoped you would be.”
I stopped walking, so they did, too. I looked at both of them. They’d been part of my father’s personal guard, the Prince’s Cranes, for centuries, and certainly through my childhood, but it had never occurred to me that they would know something I’d wanted to ask my father.
“People keep asking me why my father trained me to be a ruler when it seemed I would never wear a crown. I had no answer, but you were there. You were his guard, his confidants—did he intend me to take the throne, do you know?”
Dogmaela shook her head. “I was not a close favorite of Prince Essus, so I do not know what was in his heart.”
Saraid was very quiet, face careful and empty.
“You know something; please tell me.”
“He raised you the only way he knew, and that was to be a ruler, Princess Meredith, but he did not plan on assassinating his sister, your aunt, or her son, his nephew, to put you on the throne.”
“What did he intend for me then?”
“I was closer to him, but he did not confide in me about you, except to worry for your safety. He spoke of you getting your doctorate in biology of some kind and being the first American-fey doctor; that thought pleased him.”
I smiled, and nodded. “He wanted me to be a doctor at one point, a medical doctor.”
“I believe that course of study takes many years by human standards; that seems to imply he did not plan on you vying for the throne.”
I nodded. “I think you’re right, but he told his sister that I would be a better queen than Cel would ever be a king.”
“I heard him tell her that,” Dogmaela said, “and she was furious with him. Had it been anyone but Prince Essus, he would have been tortured for such talk.”
“She always did have a soft spot for her brother,” Saraid said.
“She was afraid of him,” Dogmaela said.
“No,” Saraid said.
“She feared his power, Saraid. She knew he was one of the few in the courts strong enough to take the throne from her.”
“To kill her, you mean,” Saraid said.
“Yes, that is what I mean.”
“My father loved his sister, and she loved her brother,” I said.
They looked at me.
“They were devoted to each other, in their own ways,” Saraid said.
We all just agreed.
“If only he hadn’t loved his nephew,” Dogmaela said.
“He might still be alive to see his grandchildren,” I said, and the thought made my chest tight, my eyes hot.
“But if our prince, your father, had lived, these would not be the grandchildren he would see,” Dogmaela said.