Merry Gentry 03 - Seduced by Moonlight (45 page)

Andais nodded. "Yes, yes, we do." There was something in her voice that I didn't like. It was a purr of hatred. Hatred will blind you to the truth, especially if you want to be blinded. She said, "Bring me my Darkness."

Doyle came at her call, but he stayed by my side. "I am, by your own words, the princess's Darkness now."

She waved it away, as if it meant nothing. "Call whomever you like master, Darkness. I ask only if you can track this spell back to its owner."

"I could not track it off your skin, but the bottle is still here. It is too powerful a spell not to leave a taint, a signature as it were, of the one who made it. If I can smell their skin, taste their sweat, then yes, I can track this to its owner."

"Then do it," she said, and she looked at me as she said the last: "Wherever this trail leads, we will follow, and punishment will be swift."

I looked at her, afraid to believe that she meant what I hoped she meant.

"Heard and witnessed," Barinthus said.

The queen did not look at him, but only at me. "There, Meredith, another oath to hold over my head."

"What do you want me to say, Aunt?"

She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. Her gaze fled from my face and found a piece of wall to look at, as if she didn't want anyone to read her eyes in that moment. "What would you do, if you were me, niece?"

I opened my mouth, closed it, and thought. What would I do? "I would send for the sluagh."

She looked up then, her eyes very hard, as if she were trying to see through me. "Why?"

"The sluagh are the most feared of all the Unseelie. The sidhe themselves fear them, and they fear little. With the sluagh at your back, as well as your Ravens, no one will try a direct attack."

"You believe someone would dare attack me, us" —she motioned at the waiting knights—"head-on?"

"If the spell had gone its course, Aunt Andais, you would have slaughtered all your guards, and then with no one left to kill in this room, where would you have gone? What would you have done?"

"I would have found others to kill, any others."

"You would have ended in the banquet hall where there are sidhe who would not stand idle while you sliced them open," I said.

"They would have looked for a reason for my behavior," she said.

"I don't think they would. You have slaughtered and terrorized this court for a very long time. What you did here tonight is not that far from things I have seen you do before."

"Before, most of the slaughter had a purpose," she said. "My enemies fear me."

"Slaughter done coldly, and slaughter done in the heat of madness, look much the same when you are on the wrong end," I said.

"Have I been such a tyrant that the entire court would believe this of me?"

The silence in the room was thick enough to wrap around us all. To wrap us and choke us, because none of us knew how to answer the question without either lying, or angering her.

She gave a bitter laugh. "There is answer enough in your silence." She rubbed at her head as if it ached. "It is good to be feared by your enemies."

"But not by your friends," I said, softly.

She looked at me, then. "Oh, niece of mine, have you not learned, yet, that a ruler has no friends? There are enemies and allies, but not friends."

"My father had friends."

"Yes, my dear brother did have friends, and it's most likely what got him killed."

I fought back that flare of anger in me. Anger was a luxury that I could not afford. "If I had not been here today with the hand of blood, to bleed the magical poison out of your body, you would be dead, too."

"Be careful, Meredith."

"I have been careful all my life, but if we are not bold tonight, then our enemies will see us both dead. Perhaps Cel was even meant to die tonight. To be executed for killing me, and you. It would clear the way to the throne for other bloodlines."

"No one would be so foolish," she said.

"No one at court knows that I have the hand of blood. But for a quirk of magic, this would have worked exactly as they planned it."

"Fine, call the sluagh, and then what?"

"If I were you, or if I were me?" I asked.

"Either, both." Again she was studying me, trying to understand me.

"I would contact Kurag, Goblin King, and warn him, and have him bring more goblins than he is usually allowed into our sithen."

"You think he will throw his lot in with you against the entire Unseelie sidhe?"

"If I gave him a choice, no, but he has no choice. He is my sworn ally, and to deny me aid is to be forsworn. The goblins will kill a king for that."

She nodded. "Three months from now, he will not be your ally."

"Actually, four," I said.

"It was only six months, and they are half gone," she said.

"True, but Kitto is now sidhe, and for every sidhe-sided goblin I bring into their power, I gain a month of Kurag's aid."

"Will you fuck them all?" It was said with no offense, as if it was the only way she knew how to ask the question.

"There are other ways to bring someone into his power."

"You would not survive hand-to-hand combat with a goblin, Meredith."

"Kurag has agreed that we may help the princess bring over his people," Doyle said. He touched my arm, and in anyone else I would have said it was nerves. But it was the Queen's Darkness; Doyle didn't get nervous.

"Most will not agree to fighting you, Darkness, or the Killing Frost. They will pick on those among Meredith's guard whom they believe they can defeat. They will try to kill your men." She turned back to me. "How will you prevent that once the fight is joined?"

"I will choose champions," I said. "They fight the warriors of my choice, not theirs."

"I assume you will choose Darkness and Frost."

"Probably," I said.

"Many will refuse to fight them, so I ask again, are you willing to bed all the goblins who will line up for a taste of your shining flesh?"

"I will do what I said I would do."

She laughed. "Even I have not stooped so low as to bed a goblin. I would have thought it was beyond the pale for you."

"I think you'd like goblin sex. They like it rough."

She looked past me, and I realized she was looking at Kitto, who was trying to stay close to me and be as invisible as possible at the same time. "He looks a little fragile for my idea of rough."

Kitto pulled back even farther behind me and Doyle, and Galen. I moved just enough to bring her attention more firmly to me. "When you have to lay ground rules that your lover is not allowed to bite off pieces of your body, I think that qualifies as rough."

She looked past me again at the sliver of face that Kitto had left in view. She jumped, and said, "Boo." He scrambled behind me, and then pushed back into the other guards, putting distance between himself and the queen.

Andais laughed. "Fierce indeed."

"Fierce enough," I said.

"I will call the sluagh. You call the goblins." She put her head to one side like a bird that had spied a worm. "I can call the sluagh from a distance, for I am their queen, but how will you call the goblins?"

"I will try the mirror first."

"And if that fails you?" she asked.

"I will use blade and blood, and magic to call him."

"An old method," she said.

"But effective."

She nodded, then closed her eyes for a moment. "The sluagh come to my call. I grant you the use of my own mirror to try for Kurag's attention."

"You sound doubtful that I will gain his attention."

"He is a crafty one, for a goblin. He will not wish to be drawn into the royal squabbles of the Unseelie Court."

"The goblins are the foot soldiers of the Unseelie Court. Kurag can pretend that our infighting means nothing to him, but so long as he calls himself a part of the Unseelie Court, then he must pay attention to our squabbles."

"He will not see it that way," she said.

"Let me worry about Kurag."

"You sound confident. You cannot bed him, for you cannot help him commit adultery."

"Sometimes you gain more from the promise of a thing than from the thing itself."

"You cannot offer what our laws forbid," she said.

"Kurag knows our laws as well as we do, never believe otherwise. He forgets them only when it is convenient for him. He will know that it is not sex I am offering."

"Then what?"

"A chance to help me clean myself up."

She frowned. "I do not understand."

And she didn't, because though Kurag knew the laws of the sidhe, the same could not be said of our queen about the laws of the goblins. I knew that the fluids of the body were more precious to the goblins than almost anything. Flesh, blood, sex; somewhere in that combination was a goblin's idea of perfection. I was going to offer the goblins two out of three, and the touch, though not the taste, of sidhe flesh. I would have said that I was going to offer them all three, but knew better. The goblins' idea of flesh is a piece they get to keep in their stomachs or in a jar on a shelf.

The rumor mill of the court had me dead. Some of the sidhe had access to television, and they'd spent a good part of the afternoon watching the tapes from the press conference. The shooting, the downed policeman, and finally Galen carrying me out with blood running down my face. The human media reported only that I'd vanished into the back of a limo, and there were no reports of me at any hospital. We hadn't had time to tell anyone anything, and our very own little press agent, Madeline Phelps, didn't know anything to tell. We had been met at the door to the sithen by guards and taken straight to the queen. No one else had seen us. No one else knew we had actually arrived, safe or otherwise.

The queen and her men were cleaning the blood off and getting dressed for the banquet. She and her entourage would go into the great hall as if nothing were wrong. She would take her throne. Eamon would take the consort's throne. They would leave the prince's throne and that side of the dais empty, as it had been since I left and Cel was imprisoned.

Doyle would enter with the queen, but not at her side. He would be one of the guards at the doors, so that he could scent all the nobles as they came in. He would search for the magic that the wine held. If he had appeared in his old place at the queen's back, there would have been questions, but no one would question him wishing to return to her service and no longer be exiled from faerie. No one would question that she would punish him by keeping him farther from her royal person.

The queen and her men would answer no questions. In fact, the plan was for her to be totally silent. To ignore all questions, until someone was finally bold enough to go to the throne and ask permission to speak. That would be my cue to come through the door with my entourage. I would still be covered nearly head to foot in blood, blood not my own, making the point, better than anything we could have planned that I was a fit heir to Andais. Some of the men were leaving the blood on them, and some were cleaning themselves free of it. It depended on who wanted to be part of the floor show.

We waited in the outer room before the big doors that led to the great hall. The silence was filled with a thick slithering of some giant snake, but what moved on the ceiling and against the walls wasn't reptilian. Roses filled the room. They'd been dying for centuries, until they were only dried vines and naked thorns, but they had awakened to my blood, my magic. Now months later the walls were lost in the deep green of leaves and fresh canes. Huge scarlet roses bloomed everywhere, their scent so heavy on the air that it was like swallowing perfume, almost overwhelming in its sweetness. The roses moved in the dimness of the chamber. It was the sound of vines and stems and leaves sliding over each other that filled the waiting room. A blossom would get pulled too far into the writhing mass, and a shower of scarlet petals would rain down upon us. I knew that some of the thorns near the ceiling were the size of daggers. The roses were not ordinary in any way. They were meant as a last-ditch defense if any enemy managed to get this far. The fact that most of our enemies were welcome here made the roses more a symbol than an actual threat.

Our plan to find Nuline and ask her where the wine had come from had failed. Sholto's sluagh had found Nuline, but she'd been beyond questions. Her head was still missing. Her death meant either that the would-be assassin was taking no chances, or that he, or she, or they, already knew they'd failed to kill the queen. It changed nothing about our plans, but it did make a person wonder.

Sage stood just behind Rhys and Frost at my back. We'd had to introduce his new form, along with its tricolored eyes, to his Queen Niceven. She was furious that he couldn't change back, but intrigued with his being newly sidhe. Intrigued enough to help us. The demi-fey were the ultimate spies — so tiny, so inoffensive. The sidhe ignored them as if they were truly the insects that they mimicked. They were not considered a power in the courts, and thus they could be anywhere, everywhere. Queen Niceven had scattered her people among the court. They would listen and report back. They would spy for me and for Queen Andais.

King Kurag, with his many-armed queen on his arm, was behind us in the waiting room. He and his entourage of goblins would enter as part of my entourage. He would take his throne at the end of the hall, closest to the doors, farthest from the throne, but we would enter together, and some of his warriors would stay with me as we walked the length of the hall.

In person Ash and Holly looked both more sidhe and less. Handsome and arrogant as any the court could boast with that flawless golden sunlit skin, but the eyes, vibrant green and burning red, respectively, were pure goblin, huge and oblong, taking up more of the face than sidhe or human eyes. It gave the goblins superior night vision, but marked them as
other.
Physically, they were bulkier, seeming to have more muscles under that lovely skin than they should have. I was betting they were stronger than a pure sidhe.

Ash had been more than happy to take part in our show of unity. Holly had not wanted to help. It was beneath him to sit at a woman's feet, especially a sidhe woman. I had had to let Holly have a little preview, and once he licked the blood along my skin, he hadn't argued again. They were goblin enough to value the sidhe blood that covered me. For tonight that was good; for later, when they came to my bed, it was a little unnerving. But one problem at a time; tonight had enough without borrowing.