“How long ago?” Doyle asked.
“He’s talking to Kitto now.”
Doyle started toward the far bedroom, then stopped and glanced down at what he was wearing—or rather wasn’t wearing. He sighed, heavily, then padded barefoot across the tiles. He remarked over his shoulder, “If Meredith were dressed thus, it might gain us some advantage, but Kurag does not care for a man’s flesh.”
“That is not true,” Rhys said, and the bitterness in his voice made me turn and look at him. I was still in his arms, so that just turning my head was somehow intimate. “The goblins love a bit of sidhe flesh.”
Doyle stopped long enough to frown at him. “I did not mean to feast upon.”
“Neither did I,” Rhys said.That stopped Doyle firmly on his bare feet, so dark against the white and blue tiles. “What are you saying, Rhys?”
“I am saying that there were many goblins who had never tasted the pleasure of sidhe flesh, male or female, and there were those who did not care that it was male.” He rubbed the side of his face against my neck and shoulder, a comfort gesture.
“Kurag . . .” Frost began, but he couldn’t finish the sentence. The anger at Rhys, or the reporters, or whatever, was gone. His face displayed the outrage they were probably all feeling.
I stroked Rhys’s curls, so soft, and molded myself more tightly in his arms. I drew my fingers down the curve of his neck and shoulder. When the fey are anxious, we touch each other. I think humans would do it if their culture didn’t confuse touch with sex so often. Touch can lead to sex, but at that moment I just wanted to hold Rhys and take that look off of his face.
Doyle came back a few steps, one hand on a slender hip. “Are you saying that Kurag . . . outraged you.”
Rhys raised his face from the curve of my neck. “He never touched me, but he watched. He sat on his throne and ate snacks as if it were a show.”
“We have all had to sit through entertainments at our own court, Rhys. No one speaks of it, but how many of our fellow guards have agreed to a little one-on-one together for the queen’s pleasure, if it would free them of the celibacy even for an hour or two?”
“I never did it.” His hands convulsed around me, fingers digging in painfully.
“Nor I,” Doyle said, “but I did not fault those who did.”
“Rhys, you’re hurting me,” I said softly.
He put me down, gently, carefully, as if he didn’t trust himself. “It would be one thing to choose it. It is another to be bound and . . .” He shook his head.
I let the towel fall to the floor and touched his arm. “Rape is always ugly, Rhys.”
He gave a smile so bitter that it made me hug him, to comfort him and so I wouldn’t have to see that look on his face.
“A lot of the guards don’t agree with that, Merry. You’re too young, you don’t remember what we’re like during a war.”
I stayed clinging to him, trying to will him happier just by pressing my skin against his. I didn’t want to know that my guards had done horrible things. No, that wasn’t it. I didn’t want to know that the men I shared my bed with had done horrible things. Then I remembered a conversation that I’d overheard months ago.
I pulled back enough to look into Rhys’s face. “I remember this conversation, Rhys. You said you’d never touched a woman who didn’t welcome your touch. Doyle said, outright, that the penalty for the queen’s guards to touch any woman but the queen still applied to rape. You go to any other woman and it’s death by torture, for you and the woman.”
Rhys’s face was suddenly paler even than normal.
It was Frost who said, “Not all the Unseelie sidhe warriors are members of the Queen’s Ravens.”
I looked at him. “I know.” I felt like I was missing something. I stepped back from Rhys completely, so I could look at all three of them easily. “What am I not understanding here?”
“That nothing of which Rhys is accusing the goblins is something that members of the Unseelie have not done,” Doyle said. He shook his head. “I must go and speak with Kurag.” He seemed about to say something, then stopped and simply turned and walked toward the hallway and its string of bedrooms.
I looked at both the other men, still feeling as if they’d stopped the conversation early, as if there were secrets they would all keep to the death. The sidhe are a big one for secrets, but I was their princess, and perhaps one day their queen. That they kept secrets from me seemed a bad idea.
I let out a breath, and even to me the sound was impatient. “Rhys, I told you once that the goblin culture may not give you a choice on sexual contact, but they do let the ‘victim’ set the rules. They can demand intercourse, but you can dictate how much damage they can do to you.”
“I know, I know,” he said, avoiding my gaze and starting to pace the room. “You’ve told me before that if I had known more of their culture I wouldn’t be short an eye.” He looked at me, and the anger was back, but it was directed at me now.
He didn’t have any right to be angry with me. Rhys was totally reasonable on almost every topic, except the goblins. The goblins were my allies for two more months. For two more months, if the Unseelie happened to go to war you would ask me, not Queen Andais, for goblin aid. Moreover, my enemies were the goblins’ enemies for two more months. I believed, and Doyle believed, and Frost believed, oh, hell, even Rhys believed that it was this alliance that had kept the assassination attempts to a bare minimum.
I was in the middle of trying to negotiate for more time on that alliance. We needed the goblins. We needed them badly. Every time I thought Rhys had worked through his issues on the topic, I was wrong.
“You’re right on one thing, Rhys, the goblins do not see same-sex sex as a bad or a shameful thing. If it’s the way you swing, it’s the way you swing. They also are much more likely than the sidhe to be opportunistically bisexual. If they have a chance to enjoy something they’ve never had, or something they may never get again, they’ll take it.”
Rhys had gone to the huge bank of windows that looked out over the pool. He gave me a view of his lovely backside, but his arms were crossed and his shoulders hunched with his anger.
“But just as you can negotiate for no damage done to your body, you can negotiate on the sex of your partners. There are some even among the goblins who are simply too heterosexual to be interested in exploring the possibilities. If you’d negotiated, then no male could have touched you.”
Frost made some small movement, as if he wanted to go to Rhys. He gave me a look that wasn’t entirely friendly.
Rhys’s voice brought us back to him. “Do you delight in reminding me that my worst nightmare was my own doing? That if I hadn’t been an arrogant sidhe who couldn’t be bothered learning about any people but my own, I might have known that I had rights among the goblins. That even the victims of torture have rights.” He turned, and rage filled his single blue eye with light. That circle of sky blue, the ring of winter sky, and that brilliant line of cornflower around the pupil blazed. The separate colors literally glowed with his rage, and a faint milky light began to flit behind his skin. His power raised with his anger.There was a time when I’d feared Rhys when he was like this, but I’d seen his anger too often to fear it. As Frost with his pouting, so Rhys with his anger; it was just a part of them. You accepted it and moved on.
If Rhys had suddenly blazed to life like some pale sun, then I’d have been worried. But this was a small display; it meant nothing.
“You’re still being arrogant about their culture, Rhys. You act as if what they did to you is nothing that could ever have happened in the high courts of the sidhe. If the Queen of Air and Darkness bid it, or the King of Light and Illusion wanted it, it would be done. And the sidhe have no laws protecting the victims of torture. You’re just tortured. The goblins may do more torture, maiming, and rape than the sidhe, but they’ve got more laws in place to protect the people who end up on the wrong end of the punishment. You get fucked over by the sidhe, and they fuck you any way they want to. So you tell me, Rhys, which race is the more civilized?”
“You cannot compare the sidhe to the goblins,” Frost said, his voice dripping with that arrogance that has been more than one sidhe’s undoing. I guess if you’ve been the ruling class for a few thousand years, you forget what it’s like to be ruled.
“You can’t honestly mean that you prefer the goblins’ world to ours,” Rhys said, and his surprise was overcoming his anger.
“I didn’t say that.”
“What did you say?” he asked.
“I’m saying that this attitude the sidhe have that nothing and no one is as good as they are isn’t necessarily so. My father used to say that the goblins are the foot soldiers of the sidhe armies. That without the goblins as our allies the Unseelie would have been destroyed by the Seelie centuries ago.”
“The goblins and the sluagh,” Rhys said.
The sluagh were the nightmares of the Unseelie court. They were all that was most frightening, most monstrous. All fey, sidhe or no, feared the sluagh. They were the Unseelie’s version of the wild hunt, and there was nowhere you could hide, no place you could run to, that sluagh would not find you. On rare occasions it had taken years, but the sluagh never give up unless called off by the Queen of Air and Darkness. The sluagh were the queen’s big scary gun. It is said that even King Taranis himself fears the sound of wings in the dark.