“I think some of them would slaughter their own photographers on altars, with incense and prayers, to get a chance at covering this story.”
“Clever, Meredith, very clever.” She turned to Barinthus then. She stroked her hand down the side of his face, like you’d touch a lover, though I knew she had never taken him to her bed. “Why did you never try to make a king of my son?”
Unless Barinthus and the queen had been having a very different conversation, the question seemed out of nowhere.
“You do not want me to answer that question, Queen Andais,” he said in his deep, sighing voice.
“Yes,” she said, still stroking his face, “yes, I do.”
“You will not like it.”
“I have not liked many things of late. Answer the question, Kingmaker. I know that if my brother, Essus, had been willing, you would have had him kill me and put himself on the throne. But he would not slay his own sister. He would not have that sin on his heart. Still, you thought he would be a better king than I a queen, didn’t you?”
Dangerous questions. Barinthus said again, “You do not want the truth, my queen.”
“I know the truth of that question. I’ve known that for centuries, but I do not know why you never looked to Cel. He approached you after Essus died. He offered to help you slay me, if you would help put him on the throne early.”
I think all of us across the room held our breaths in that moment. I had not known this. The looks on everyone’s faces around me said that most of them had not either. Only Adair and Hawthorne behind their helmets were still hidden from their surprise.
“I warned you of his treachery,” Barinthus said.
“Yes, and I had you tortured for it.”
“I remember, my queen.”
Her smile did not match her words, but then neither did the constant caressing of his face and shoulders. “When Meredith came of age, you turned to her. If she had had the magic she now possesses since her stay in the lands to the west, you would have offered her what you offered Essus, wouldn’t you?”
“You know the answer, my queen.”
“Yes,” she said, “I do. But Cel always had the power to be king. Why did you not put him on the throne? Why did you foster a half-breed mongrel of a princess over my pure-sidhe son?”
“Do not ask me this,” he said.
She slapped him twice, hard enough to stagger him even on his knees. Hard enough to have blood spill from his mouth. “I am your queen, damn you, and you will answer my question. Answer me!” The last was screamed into his face.
Barinthus answered her, blood flowing from his mouth. “You are a better queen than Cel will ever be a king.”
“And what of Meredith? What of my brother’s child?”
“She will be a good queen.”
“A better queen than Cel a king?”
“Yes,” he said, and that one word dropped into the silence of the room like a stone thrown down a great height. You know it will make a sound, but only after a very, very long fall.
The sound came with her words. “Meredith, you will do nothing with Barinthus that will chance you being pregnant by him. Nothing, is that clear?”
“Yes.” My voice sounded strained and hoarse as if I’d been the one screaming.
“Contact the police. Do what you think best. I will announce to the court and the media that you are in charge of this little problem. Do not bother me with it again. Do not report to me unless I ask it. Now go, all of you, get out.”
We went. All of us, even Barinthus. We went, and were grateful to go.
CHAPTER 5
I CALLED MAJOR WALTERS OF THE ST. LOUIS POLICE DEPARTMENT, who had been in charge of our security at the airport the day before. I called from the only land line phone in the Unseelie sithen. The phone was in the queen’s office. Which always looked to me like a black and silver version of Louis the Fourteenth’s office if he had liked going to Goth dance clubs for the dissipated rich. It was elegant, dark, expensive, and exciting in that chill-up-your-spine way; modern, but with a feel of the antique; nouveau riche done right. It was also a little claustrophobic to me. Too many shades of black and grey in too small a space, as if a Goth curtain salesman had persuaded them to cover every inch of the room with his wares.
The phone was white and always looked like bones on the secretary’s black desk. Or maybe that’s just me projecting. I did not understand the mood of the queen tonight. I’d asked Barinthus, as we walked to the office, if she’d given him any clues as to why she was behaving so oddly, and he’d said no. No clues.
Why was I calling the St. Louis police when the faerie lands are technically in Illinois? Because Major Walters was the current police liaison for the lands of faerie and the human police. Once upon a time, a few hundred years ago, there’d been an entire police unit assigned to us. Why? Because not everyone in America agreed with President Jefferson’s decision to bring the fey to this country. The local people who were going to be close to us were especially upset. They didn’t want monsters of the Unseelie Court coming to live in their state. At that time, St. Louis was the closest major city with a working police department. So even though we were technically located in Illinois, police problems had been sent to Missouri and St. Louis. They got the joyous duty of protecting us from the angry humans and also walking the perimeters of our lands so we couldn’t sneak out and wreak havoc. If the courts of faerie hadn’t come with a sizable bribe for several different branches of government, and certain powerful individuals, we might have never made it into this country. No one wanted to mess with either court after the last great human-fey war in Europe. We’d shown ourselves entirely too powerful for comfort.
What no one really understood about us—from Jefferson on down to the yelling mob—was that a line of human police wasn’t really going to keep the fey, any fey, from leaving the area. What kept them inside and behaving themselves were threats and oaths to and from their respective kings and queens. But the police did keep the humans from harassing us.
Gradually, when nothing bad happened, the police presence was reduced, until they left altogether, and we only called on them when they were needed. As the local humans realized that we mostly wanted to be left alone, we had to call on our private police less and less. Soon, the police assigned to us had other jobs in other areas of the police force until they were needed for faerie duty, as it came to be called. Come up to present day and the unit had become a single detective or officer. The last time he’d been used was my father’s death, but since that had been on government-owned farmland, the locals had been cut out twice. Once by the feds and once by us. All right, by the queen. I’d have taken a platoon of soldiers into the mounds if I thought they could have caught my father’s killers.
After the liaison was so ineffective with my father’s murder, I thought the post had been abandoned. But I’d been wrong.
Doyle had found out that Major Walters was still our liaison. The last remnants of a unit created by Thomas Jefferson himself. We’d also never had anyone as high a rank as major in the job. Major Walters had volunteered for the job, because the last person to have it had also done our security at press conferences, and that had landed Walter’s predecessor a large salary as chief of a big corporation’s security. Executives like to be guarded by someone who’s guarded royalty. It adds a certain panache to the résumé. Doyle had even learned that Walters had a very well paying job lined up. I wondered how the big corporation felt about Walters after yesterday. It looks great on your résumé to guard royalty, but not so great to let them get injured on your watch. Nope, probably the executives would be a little nervous about being guarded by someone who let Princess Meredith get shot at by one of his own officers. Humans believed in magic, but not as an excuse for screwing up. No, they liked to blame someone, not something.