Merry Gentry 03 - Seduced by Moonlight (48 page)

Doyle nodded.

I had a moment to wonder if Doyle was up to this demonstration, but then he strode to the farthest edge of the dais, took a running start, and launched himself out into the air. He was obscured for a moment by a black mist that folded in upon itself, and he was flying out over the court with huge feathered wings, as black as his skin.

There were gasps and sounds of pleasure, as if some of the court were enjoying the show. The black eagle circled once, then came to the center of the room and began to flap its way to the floor, but before those great talons landed, the wings seemed to dissolve into mist, and it was great black hooves that struck the stones and pranced a few steps among the tables. The great black stallion walked to Maelgwn's table and looked at the wolf lord with Doyle's dark eyes. Either the mist rose up again, or the horse became the black mist, and it dissolved into the black mastiff that I had seen before. The huge dog panted at Maelgwn. Even sitting, the dog was tall enough to see over the table and meet Maelgwn's gaze.

The wolf lord gave a motion somewhere between a nod and a bow. It seemed to satisfy the dog, because it charged toward the dais. The great paws hit the steps and bounded up to sit next to me. The dog sat beside the arm of my throne, and I reached out to stroke that soft fur without thinking about it.

The mist rose up, and it felt as cool as it smelled, like breathing in rain deep in the forest. My hand tingled with magic as Doyle's body grew and shifted. There was no sliding of bones and flesh as there had been in California. Even with my hand lost in the black mist, it felt light and effervescent, like bubbles or electricity against my skin. Doyle was just kneeling beside my throne in human form, nude, with his long black hair lying in a dark pool at his feet.

My hand was still on his face, stroking his human cheek as I'd been stroking the dog's seconds before.

I wanted to compliment him, but I didn't dare let the court know that I'd never seen such an effortless performance.

"Most impressive," Maelgwn said, and there was nothing but seriousness left in his voice. "I don't remember you being a bird."

"I was not," Doyle said.

"So you have gained what was lost, and added to your powers besides."

Doyle nodded, my hand still playing in the thick fall of his hair.

"How has this miracle come to pass?" Maelgwn asked.

"A kiss," Doyle said.

"A kiss," Maelgwn repeated. "What does that mean?"

"You know a kiss," Rhys said from behind me, "you just pucker up your lips . . ."

"I know what a kiss is," Maelgwn interrupted. "What I don't know is how a kiss has brought about this change in the Darkness."

"Tell him whose kiss brought you back into your powers," Andais said.

"Princess Meredith's kiss," Doyle said, still kneeling by my chair, still with my hand playing in the thick warmth of his hair, tickling along the back of his neck.

"Lies." This from Miniver; she was head of her own house. She was tall and blond and could have passed for Seelie Court, because once she had been. She had come to the Unseelie and fought her way to a position of power, until the tall commanding beauty was the head of her own house in the dark court. That she had preferred to rule in the Unseelie Court, rather than accept exile to the human world, meant that the Seelie Court would never accept her back. Her exile from the shining throng would be eternal. They sometimes took back those who had wandered among the humans, but once you went to the dark court, you were considered unclean.

She stood in front of her throne, a shining thing with her yellow braids sliding over a dress of shimmering gold cloth. A golden circlet graced her brow, over the perfect arch of dark eyebrows and the tri-blue of her eyes. She had never adopted the darker colors favored by Andais and her court. Miniver dressed as if she expected to walk into a different court.

"Did you say something, Miniver?" Andais said, and by merely leaving off any title she had insulted the golden figure. It was a warning. A warning to sit down and shut up.

"I said, and I say again, that it is a lie. No mortal could bring anyone into his power."

"She is a princess of the sidhe, and that makes her a little more than a mere mortal," Andais said.

Miniver shook her head, sending those heavy yellow braids sliding along the gold of her dress. "She is mortal, and you should have drowned her when she was six, as you tried to. It was weakness for your brother that stopped your hand."

She spoke as if I could not hear her, as if I were not sitting there alive in the same room with her now.

"My brother, Essus, once told me that Meredith would make a better queen than my own son, Cel, would make a king. I did not believe it then."

"At least Cel is not mortal," Miniver said.

"But Cel has not brought back a single drop of the power we have lost. Nor have I," Andais said, and there was no teasing to her now. There was no showmanship.

"And you would have us believe that this half-breed mortal has done what pure sidhe blood has not?" Miniver pointed at me in what I thought was an overly dramatic gesture, but it did show the sleeve of her dress to perfection, flashing the slits of cloth open so that the blue cloth of the underdress showed through. Sometimes if you've lived nearly forever, you think overly long about how things appear. "This abomination cannot be allowed on the throne, Queen Andais."

I thought
abomination
was a little harsh, but I said nothing, for in a way it wasn't me she'd challenged, it was the queen.

"I say who will and who will not sit on the throne of this court, Miniver."

"Your obsession with a hereditary monarchy of your own bloodline will be the death of us all. We have all seen what happens on the dueling ground when one of us shares blood with that thing. They become mortal through the disease that her blood carries."

"Mortality is not a disease," Andais said, quietly.

"But it kills like one." Miniver looked out over the court, and there were a lot of faces turned to her. Many showed by either silence or nodding that they agreed with at least this much. They, too, had worried about my blood. "If this mortal becomes queen, then we are honor-bound to take blood oath from her, to bind us to her. To take blood oath, very much as we take on the dueling ground." Miniver looked up at Andais, and there was something close to pleading on her face. "Don't you see, my queen, if we take her blood into us and bind ourselves to her mortal peril, then we could lose our own immortality? We would cease to be sidhe."

It was Nerys who stood up and said, "We would cease to be anything."

Three, then four others of the noble houses of the Unseelie stood. They stood and showed their support for what Miniver had said. Six houses out of sixteen stood against me. That was something we had not foreseen. Or I had not.

Doyle had gone very still under my hand. All my men had gone very still, except the goblins at my feet and the Red Cap at my back. Either immortality didn't mean the same thing to them as it did to the sidhe, or other things were happening with the goblins. Things I had not quite grasped.

"I say who will be my heir," Andais said, "unless you wish to challenge me to personal combat, Miniver, Nerys, all of you. I will gladly fight you each in turn, and this arguing will cease."

Miniver shook her head. "Your answer to everything is death and violence, Andais. It has led us to be childless and near powerless, but our immortality, you cannot have that."

"Then challenge me, Miniver. Make yourself queen, if you can."

If Miniver's anger could have flown across the room and struck Andais, the queen would have died where she sat, but Miniver's anger did not have that kind of power. The day when the fey, any fey, could have killed with simply an angry thought was centuries past.

Andais looked at Nerys. "You, Nerys, do you wish to be queen? Do you wish it enough to challenge me to a duel? Defeat me and you can be queen."

Nerys just stood there, staring at her with tri-grey eyes that nearly mirrored the queen's own. Nerys's long black hair was done in a series of complicated braids that hung like a heavy cloak at her back. Her dress was white with touches of black in the trim, the belt, the lace at her wrists. She looked cool and collected. There was no sense of outrage that Miniver vibrated with.

"I would never presume to challenge the Queen of Air and Darkness to a duel. It would be suicide." Her voice was quiet, and somehow dark. But there was no anger in it, nothing that could give true offense.

"But attacking me from secret, an assassination attempt, that would not be suicide, would it?" Andais's smile was not pleasant. "Not if you didn't get caught."

Nerys just stood there, looking up at the throne, with no hint of fear, no panic, no anything. If Andais thought she could frighten Nerys into a confession, she was wrong. Nerys was going to force Andais to produce proof. Did she not understand that we had proof? Did she think that with Nuline's death, she was safe?

"Assassination is a pretty business, so long as you are not discovered." Andais looked down the line of standing nobles, I think so that she did not single Nerys out, but it was like many things tonight, in trying to do one thing, another thing was accomplished.

Miniver began to move through her people to the space between her table and the next. Some of her people touched her arm; she shook her head, and they let her go. She walked out from between the tables, her back ramrod-straight, like something carved of gold and amber.

"Do you have something to say, Miniver?" Andais asked.

"I challenge the princess Meredith to a duel." For someone who had seemed so angry, she was strangely calm as she said it.

People at her table cried,
No, do not do this.
She ignored them, and kept her Seelie face pointed toward the dais. She never looked at me, only at Andais. She asked for my life, but it was not me she asked it of.

"No, Miniver, it will not be so easy as all that. The princess has had one assassination attempt tonight. We do not need two."

"I would have preferred my spells to work earlier tonight, but if she will not die from a distance, then I will do it here, now."

My face gave nothing away, because it took a few seconds for me to realize what she'd said. Andais looked amused, her eyes glittering.

Doyle had stood, putting himself more in front of me. My other guards moved to shield me from her sight, and whatever she might do. I had to peer between them to see that more of the armored guards spilled around her to form a half circle. She was as tall as any of them, and there was nothing fragile or fearful about that shining figure. She seemed very sure of herself.

"Are you admitting, before the entire court, that you tried to assassinate Princess Meredith earlier tonight?" Andais asked.

"I am," Miniver said, and her voice rang through the room, matter-of-fact, as if now that the worst was happening she didn't need her anger anymore.

"Take her to the Hallway of Mortality, and leave extra guards."

They began to close around her, but Miniver's voice carried: "I have given challenge. That challenge must be answered before my punishment begins. That is our law." I think the guards might have managed to take her away, but there were other voices.

"Regrettable as it is to agree with such an undeniable criminal," Afagdu said, "Lady Miniver is correct. She has challenged the princess, and that challenge must be answered before any action may be taken about her crime."

Galen spoke from behind me. "So she tries to kill Merry earlier, fails, and now she gets another try. I don't think so."

"It is our law." Doyle's hand had reached out, and I took it, resting my face against the nude line of his hip. Nervous touching.

"No," Andais said, "the young knight is right. To allow her to go forward with this challenge is to reward her for trying to assassinate a royal heir. Such treachery will not be rewarded."

"When it was Cel and his allies who challenged the princess over and over, you did not intercede," Nerys said. "You were more than willing that Meredith take the field when it was your son behind the duels. We all knew that Cel meant her death. Meredith did her best to give no offense to anyone, yet sidhe after sidhe found an excuse to challenge her. When you challenge a mortal being to duel after duel against the immortal sidhe, what is it but an assassination plot by another name?"

Andais shook her head, not as if she did not agree but as if she didn't want to hear. "Take Miniver away, now!"

"No one is above the law, except the queen herself, and the princess is not yet queen." This from another of the lords who had stood when Miniver gave her rant against my mortality.

"Have you turned against me, too, Ruarc?" Andais asked.

"I speak the law, nothing more," he said.

"You did not stop the duels before," Nerys said.

"I stop it now," Andais said.

"Are you saying that Meredith is too weak to defend her claim to the throne?" Afagdu asked.

"If that is true," Nerys said, "then let her take the throne, for once she is queen we can challenge her and if she refuses, she will be forced to relinquish her crown."

Maelgwn spoke, and he, like Afagdu, had not been one of the nobles who stood. "Princess Meredith fights now, or later, my queen. Too many of the houses have lost faith in her. She must regain that faith or she will never be queen."

"We have not lost faith," Miniver said from behind her wall of guards, "for you cannot lose what you have never had."

Doyle's hand tightened on mine, and I slid my arm around his waist. I'd been trapped by our laws before. I probably knew the laws concerning dueling better than most, because I had looked for a loophole three years ago, before I'd been forced to flee the court before I was dueled to death. And everyone had known that Cel was behind it all. If someone else hadn't been trying to kill me, again, it would have been good to hear the truth about Cel spoken aloud in open court.

I clung to Doyle, realizing in a strange way that I was right back where I'd begun three years ago. I'd left for fear that the next duel would be my last, and now here I was, challenged again. Challenged not just by a sidhe, but by the head of an entire house. There are three ways to be head of a house. You can inherit it, you can be elected into it, or you can challenge one after the other of a house until you either destroy them all or they concede that you are the better fighter, and they will not stand in your way. Guess which way Miniver had made her mark in our court?