Their short yellow hair brushed their ears as they bowed. They'd started to let their hair grow, though it wasn't long enough to get them in trouble with the queen—It had to touch their collars for that.
"You've let your hair grow in the month since I saw you," I said.
They exchanged a glance, then Ash said, "We do it in anticipation of your magic bringing us into our sidhe-side powers."
"That's very confident of you," I said.
"We have every confidence in your powers, Princess," Ash said.
I looked at Holly. There was no confidence in his eyes, just eagerness. He got to bed me tonight; all else was just pretense. Holly would give me what the brothers truly felt. Ash was nearly as good at playing courtier as sidhe lord. I didn't trust either of them, but Ash could lie with his eyes and face; Holly couldn't. Good to know.
I looked past them to the Red Caps. I recognized some of them from the fight weeks before. They had stood by me, not the brothers, or Kurag their king. The Red Caps had obeyed me beyond what was required of them by treaty. I had not explored that strange obedience, so unlike the usual Red Cap attitude toward sidhe or female, because I wasn't sure how Kurag would take it. I did not want to be seen as trying to seduce, even politically, the most powerful warriors of the goblin race to my service.
Kurag desperately wanted out of the treaty with me. He feared that civil war was coming either within the Unseelie themselves, or between both courts. He wanted no part of the coming battles, yet his treaty with me held him to me. I would not give him an excuse to pull out. We needed him too much. So I had not probed further into the Red Caps motivations for their loyalty to me.
Now they stood before me, more of them than I'd ever seen in one place at one time. They were like a living wall of flesh and muscle. They all wore little round skullcaps. Most were covered in dry blood so that the wool was shades of brown and black. But about a third of them had blood running from their caps to trickle down their faces and stain the shoulders and chest of their clothes.
Once to be war leader among them you had to be able to make the blood on your cap stay fresh. The alternative was to kill a foe often enough to keep your hat red. This little cultural habit had made them some of the most bloodthirsty warriors in all of faerie.
I'd only met one Red Cap who could make his hat stay fresh and bright red: Jonty. He stood among them, in the front near the center. He was about ten feet tall with gray skin and eyes the color of fresh blood. All the Red Caps had red eyes, but there are shades of red, and Jonty's were as bright as his cap.
When I'd met him his skin had reminded me of the gray of dust, but his skin didn't look dry or harsh now. He looked… like he'd had a good deep moisturizer used on all the skin I could see. Since goblins didn't go to spas, I didn't understand the change in his skin tone.
There were other changes as well. His hat bled in thick runlets of blood so that his entire upper body was soaked in it. The blood had trickled down his clothes, and dripped off the ends of his thick fingers as he stood there, making a delicate pattern of blood on the marble floor.
"Jonty, it is good to see you again." I meant it. He had saved us. He had forced the twins to join our fight. The Red Caps had followed him, not Ash and Holly.
"And you, Princess Meredith," he said in that voice that was so low it was like gravel rumbling.
"Should we have greeted the Killing Frost and Rhys?" Ash asked. "I am not completely clear on the rules of sidhe etiquette."
"You may greet them or not. I greet Jonty because he stood beside me in battle. I greet Jonty and his Red Caps because they helped me and mine. I greet the Red Caps as true allies."
"The goblins are your allies," Ash said.
"The goblins are my allies because Kurag cannot get out of our bargain. You would have let my men die that night in the dark."
"Are you going to go back on your bargain to bed us, Princess?" Ash asked.
"No, but seeing Jonty and his men reminds me, that is all." Actually, I was angry. Ash and Holly had been like all goblins, and most sidhe. It wasn't their fight, and they didn't want to die defending sidhe warriors who wouldn't have given a damn for them. I shouldn't blame them, but I did anyway.
Jonty had picked me up in his huge arms and run through the winter night toward the fight. Where he went the other Red Caps had gone. Because the Red Caps went, the other goblins had to go. To avoid the fight would have branded them as weaker and more cowardly than the Red Caps. I'd known it was a point of pride, but Kitto had explained that it was more than that. It would have opened the other goblins to being challenged in single combat by the Red Caps who fought beside me. No goblin would have willingly invited such a challenge.
I knew what I owed Jonty and his men, but not why they had done it. Why had they risked everything for me? If I could have figured out a way to ask that wouldn't have insulted them, Ash and Holly, or even their king, I would have asked. But goblin culture was a maze that I did not have a map for yet. It had no room for asking why of a warrior. Why were you brave? Because I was a goblin. Why did you help me? Because no goblin turns from a good fight. Neither was completely true. But it was popularly true, and to say otherwise would bring into question Ash and Holly's lack of enthusiasm.
Frost touched my shoulder, just a light touch. If Doyle had been there, he'd have touched me sooner. Frost didn't like why the goblins were here tonight. He didn't like me being with them, but he knew we needed them as allies.
Rhys spoke softly, "Merry."
I looked up at him, startled. "Did I miss something?"
"Yes." He motioned with his gaze at the twins.
I turned to them. "I am so sorry, but so much has happened today that I find worry overriding my duty."
"So the Darkness is still too injured to be by your side," Ash said.
"He will not be here tonight. I told you that earlier."
"Will Rhys and the Killing Frost be your guards tonight?" Holly asked.
"No."
Rhys couldn't do it. Frost I'd ordered not to. He could not hide his feelings well enough. I feared he would insult Holly with a look or a sound tonight. The middle of sex could be very like the middle of blood lust in battle for a goblin. I didn't want to have Frost start a fight by accident.
"Amatheon and Adair will guard me." At the mention of their names, they stepped forward from the line of guards behind me. Amatheon was copper-haired, and Adair was crowned with a dark gold that had once been closer to just brown, before we'd had sex inside faerie, and he had come back into some of his power. Amatheon had been a deity of agriculture. Adair was the oak grove, but also once a solar deity. I wasn't sure if he'd been solar, then downgraded to oak, or if he'd been both simultaneously. It was considered the height of rudeness to ask a fallen deity what their old powers once were. It was like rubbing their noses in their lost status.
"Is it true that fucking them is what turned Andais's garden of pain into the meadow it is now?" Holly asked.
"Yes," I said.
Rhys said, "I wish Doyle were here, I really do. I hate goblins, everyone knows that, so I don't trust my judgment with you."
"Rhys," I said, "what…"
"Is no one going to ask why they have brought every Red Cap the goblins have at their command?"
"I, too," Frost said, "do not wish Merry to do this. It colors my judgment as well."
"Well, I don't give a damn who she fucks as long as she eventually fucks me, so I'll say it. Why in the name of the consort do you have this many Red Caps with you?" Onilwyn stepped away from the rest of my guards.