Frost leaned into her, the way you’d intimidate someone by invading their personal space. Some of the effect was ruined by her wings and her size, but not all of it.
“I am not afraid of the Killing Frost either,” she said.
“You will be,” he said.
And that was how the negotiations began. They ended with a crowd of wingless demi-fey inside my room, and none of the sidhe happy about it. Niceven’s idea was that perhaps it had been Sage’s continuing to feed from sidhe blood that had done the damage. I couldn’t argue her logic. If I didn’t like Royal after tonight, I could choose one of the others, but all of them got to be in the room. We compromised, but she wouldn’t tell us what she knew of the Seelie Court until after we had fed Royal. Tomorrow, she promised, if she had fed off him and scoured out our magic from his flesh. Tomorrow, we might learn some of the secrets of the Seelie Court. Tonight, we had to pay for those secrets in blood, and flesh, and magic. And, as usual, someone would be tasting my blood, taking a bit of my flesh. Where was a stunt double when you needed one?
CHAPTER 27
RHYS PACED BY THE BATHTUB, THOUGH THERE WAS PRECIOUS little room for pacing. The bathroom was bigger than most standard modern bathrooms, but once you squeezed in Frost, Doyle, Galen, Nicca and his wings, Kitto, and me, no bathroom short of Queen Andais’s personal bathroom would have been big enough. Kitto was running the bath, playing servant, which he’d started doing more and more. Andais had offered me servants, but Doyle had refused on the grounds of my safety. We couldn’t trust anyone as we trusted each other. That was part of the reason. The other part was that the servant would spy for Andais, and we had too many secrets for that. We didn’t share that part with Andais.
“When I escorted Major Walters and the good doctor to their cars, the FBI was still there.”
“Persistent bastard,” I said.
Rhys shook his head, and stopped beside me. “No, Merry, not persistent. Carmichael, who thought our Killing Frost was so pretty, had just gotten to the cars, too.”
“What are you saying, Rhys?” Doyle was leaning to one side of the door.
“That according to the FBI and the people who escorted Carmichael out, only a few minutes had passed since I put Carmichael outside of the mound.”
“It’s been hours since then,” I said. I was sitting on the corner of the wide marble edge of the tub, trying to make myself small, so we weren’t too crowded.
“Not according to the humans outside,” Rhys said.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means that the sithen is playing with time,” Doyle said.
“Time always runs funny inside faerie,” I said.
“But only in pockets,” Rhys said, “and only by a few minutes, maybe an hour. Faerie has been on the same time schedule as the mortal world since before we came to America.” He leaned against the double sinks, fitting himself beside Galen.
Nicca had most of the far corner of the room for himself and the sweep of his wings. “What does it mean?”
Frost spoke from the wall on the other side of the door. “It means that it isn’t only the sidhe and the demi-fey who are regaining some of their old powers.”
“You told me that the humans reacted to the entrance to faerie as if the hallway had its old glamour,” Doyle said. “Why should we be surprised that the sithen is gaining back other abilities as well.”
I hugged my knees, trying to ignore the scratchy dried blood on my jeans. Kitto was testing the nearly full tub. I said, “Sometimes you talk about the sithen as if it’s just a building, sometimes you talk as if it’s a being in its own right, sometimes you speak of the sithen as if it is faerie. I asked my father once if the sithen was alive, and he said yes. I asked if it was a person, and he said no. I asked if it was faerie, and he said yes. I asked if it was the totality of faerie, and he said no. Does anyone alive today actually know what the sithen are?”
“You do ask the most difficult questions sometimes.” Rhys crossed his arms, the white of his trench coat framing his pale suit. A wet line on his trousers showed where the snow had stained the cloth. He’d made two more trips outside that night than most of the rest of us.
“Does that mean you can’t answer the question, or you won’t?”
“You’re Princess Meredith NicEssus, our future queen; if you order it, we have to answer,” he said.
I frowned at him. “I did not order you to tell me, Rhys, I asked.”
He rubbed the heel of his hand against his good eye, and when he lowered it, he looked tired. He might be boyishly handsome forever, but his face could still hold lines of weariness now and then. “I’m sorry, Merry. But if the sithen is messing with time, then we’re going to have to post a guard outside of faerie, so that we can figure out the difference between the two places chronologically. That will tell us how bad it is right now, but…”
“But not how big the difference will grow,” Nicca said.
Rhys nodded. “This could get really bad.”
“I’m losing something here,” I said. “Why do you all look so worried?”
“Don’t look at me,” Galen said. “I don’t know why they all look gloomy about it either. I mean the sithen does a lot of weird stuff, it always has.”
“And what if the sithen decides to make the difference between inside faerie and outside faerie not just hours to minutes, but years to days?” Rhys said.
Galen and I exchanged a look. He said, “Can it do that?” I said, “Oh.”
“It has in the past,” Rhys said.
“I thought that the queen or king of the court controlled the time difference,” I said.
“Once,” Doyle said, “but that ability went away long ago.”
“Wait,” Galen said, “did you say the queen could control how big the time difference was?”
Several of us nodded.
“Didn’t the old stories say that only hours would pass inside faerie, but centuries would pass outside in the human world?”
“Yes,” Doyle said, looking at Galen as if he had said something smart.
“We accomplished a lot in the last few hours, but the rest of the world has used up only a few minutes. In effect, our sithen is moving faster than everybody else. Isn’t that opposite of the way it used to work? Didn’t mortal time move faster than ours?”
I watched the rest of them exchange glances, except for Kitto, who seemed totally absorbed in running the bath. “By the looks on everyone’s faces, I’ve missed something.”
“We had a lot to do tonight,” Galen said. “We still have a lot to do tonight, and while we get all of it done, the outside world moves at a crawl. The question is, are we the only sithen experiencing the time shift?”
Rhys hugged him one armed. “You know, you’re smarter than you look.”
“Don’t compliment me too much, Rhys, it’ll go to my head.” But he was smiling.
“Am I slow tonight, or is everyone else just faster than I am?” I asked.
“Exactly,” Doyle said.
I frowned at him. “Exactly what?”
“Did you at any time tonight say out loud that you needed more time?” Doyle asked.
“I might have said something like, we don’t have enough time to investigate the murder and play court with the queen. Not those words, but…” I looked at Doyle. “Are you saying that I might have wished this into happening?”
“You did make a mirror appear in your room,” Doyle said, “simply by wanting to see what the cloak looked like.”
I was suddenly so scared that cold tingled down to my fingertips. “But Doyle, that could mean that anything I say could be taken literally by the sithen.”
He nodded.
“We must find out how time is running in another sithen,” Frost said. “If the goblins or the sluagh are gaining hours on the mortal world, then faerie itself has decided to change. Sometimes it does that.”
“And if it is only our sithen?” Nicca asked.
“Then Meredith must be very, very careful what she says.” He was looking at me, and I could almost watch some idea coming to life in his mind.