"Will she be pleased, or pissed?" Usna asked.
I think it was a rhetorical question, but I said, "I don't know."
Doyle said, "I do not know."
Frost said, "I wish I knew."
We had a chance of being caught between a ruler of faerie who was crazy and a ruler of faerie who was simply cruel. I had found years ago that the difference between madness and cruelty doesn't matter much to a victim.
CHAPTER 11
DOYLE AND FROST PICKED USNA'S MIND FOR OTHER BITS OF unimportant news from his mother about the Seelie Court. There was a lot of it. Apparently Taranis had been acting erratically for some time. Aisling asked as we pulled into the gates of Maeve Reed's estate, "Why did you request me for this talk? Taranis forbade anyone to speak to me of the Seelie Court on pain of torture, so I have no intelligence to report."
"The Seelie sithen recognized you as king when we arrived in America," Doyle said. "You were exiled because of that."
"I am aware of what cost me my place at court," Aisling said.
"So the princess is in effect being offered your rightful throne," Doyle said.
Aisling's eyes went wide. Even through the veil his astonishment showed. Obviously he had not put two and two together and come up with that.
The door to the limo opened, and Fred held the door. We all stayed sitting while we waited for Aisling to digest this. "Close the door for a moment, Fred," I said.
The door closed.
"Just because the sithen recognized me more than two hundred years ago does not mean that I would still be its choice for king," Aisling said. "And it is not me to whom the nobles are making this offer."
"I wanted you to hear it first, Aisling," Doyle said. "I did not want you to think that we had forgotten what faerie itself offered you once."
Aisling looked at Doyle for a long moment. "That was a very decent thing for you to do, Doyle."
"You sound surprised," I said.
He looked at me. "Doyle has been the queen's Darkness for a very long time, Princess. I am beginning to realize that some of his finer emotions may have been buried under the queen's orders."
"That is the most polite way I've ever heard anyone say that we thought you were a heartless bastard, Doyle," Abe said.
Aisling's eyes crinkled at the edges. I think he was smiling. "I would not have put it quite that way."
Doyle smiled. "I think many of us will find that under the princess' care we are more ourselves than we have been in a very long time."
They all looked at me, and the weight of that look made me want to squirm. I fought it off and sat there trying to be the princess they thought I was. But there were moments, like now, when I felt that I could not possibly be everything they needed. No one could meet so many needs.
I got a whiff of a spring breeze and flowers. A voice that was not a voice, but more something that thrummed through my body, hummed along my skin and whispered, "We will be enough."
I knew it was the old idea that with God, or Goddess, on your side you could not lose. But there were moments when I was no longer certain that winning meant the same thing to me that it did to the Goddess.
CHAPTER 12
WE WERE MET BY A BOIL OF BODIES AT THE DOOR TO THE BIG house. Dogs, faerie hounds, met us with barks, bays, yips, and noises that sounded like they were trying to talk. Since they were supernatural in origin I wouldn't have put it past them.
There were so many dogs trying to greet so many different masters at the door that we couldn't move forward. As dogs will, they were acting as if we had been gone days instead of only hours. My hounds were like greyhounds, but not quite. There were differences in the head, the ears, the line of body from shoulders to tail, but they had that muscled grace. In color they were white, a pure, shining white like my own skin, but with marks of red, again like my own hair. Minnie, short for Miniver, was white save for half her face and one large spot of red on her back. The face was very striking: red on one side, white on the other, as if someone had drawn a line neatly down her face. Mungo, my boy, was a little taller, a little heavier, and even whiter, with only one red ear to give him color.
Some of the larger hounds looked like Irish wolfhounds had, before they'd gotten mixed with anything less beefy. There were only a few of them among the greyhounds, but the few towered over everything else like mountains rising above a plain. Some had rough coats, some smooth, but all were a variation of red and white. Then you had the terriers that spilled around our ankles. They, too, were mostly white and red, except for a few who were black and brown. The old black and tan, brought back to existence by wild magic, was the breed that most of the modern terriers are descended from.
Rhys had the most terriers, but then he was a god of death, or had been. Our people see the land of the dead as an underground place, most of the time, so the fact that he had earth dogs was logical. He didn't seem to mind that he had none of the graceful hounds, or the huge war dogs. He knelt in the mass of barking, growling dogs, all so much smaller, and glowed with the joy that all of us showed. We had always been a people who honored our animals. They had been much missed.
There was one other exception to the color of the dogs—Doyle's hounds. They were not as tall as the wolfhounds, but meatier, black muscle over bone. They were the original shape the dogs had come to us in, black dogs, what the Christians called hellhounds. But they had nothing to do with the devil. They were the black dogs, the black of void and nothing from which comes life. Before there is light, there must be darkness.
Doyle tried to walk unaided but stumbled. Frost gave his strong arms to his friend. Strangely, there was no dog to greet Frost. He and only a few others had touched the black dogs but they had not changed into some other hound for them.
None of us knew why, but I knew it bothered Frost. He feared, I think, that it was a sure sign that he was not enough to be truly sidhe. Once he had been the hoarfrost, Jack Frost, and now he was my Killing Frost, but there was always that insecurity that he was not born sidhe, but made.
Hovering above the sea of dogs were small winged fey; the demi-fey. To be wingless among them was a mark of great shame. All that had followed me into exile had been wingless until I brought new magic back to faerie. Penny and Royal, twins with dark hair and bright wings waved at me.
I waved back. To be greeted like this by a cloud of demi-fey and our dogs was an honor I never thought I would have.
I offered to help Frost with Doyle, but Doyle refused. He wouldn't even look at me. His supposed "weakness" had cut him deeply. One of the big black dogs pushed at me and gave a soft growl. Mungo and Minnie both moved up, hackles beginning to raise. That was not a fight I wanted to see, so I backed off, calling them to my hands.
My hounds were capable of protecting me if they had to, but against the black dogs they looked fragile. I stroked their heads. Mungo leaned against my leg, and the weight was comforting. I wanted nothing more than a nap with my dogs on the floor by the bed, or at the door. Not all my men liked a furry audience, and sometimes neither did I. Regardless, we had one more task to do before we could rest.
We called my aunt, Andais, Queen of Air and Darkness, as soon as we got inside. I would have put Doyle and Abe to bed immediately, but Doyle had pointed out that if someone else told the queen before we did that I had been offered her rival's throne she might view it as treason. She might view it as me jumping ship. Andais didn't take rejection, any type of rejection, well.
She was already fairly pissed that so many of her most devoted guards had dumped her for me. I didn't see it as dumping her for me. I saw it as them choosing a chance for sex after centuries of forced celibacy. For that, most men would have gone to any woman. It helped that I wasn't a sexual sadist and Auntie Andais was, but that, too, was a fact best not shared.