She shook her head. "No, Meredith, I cannot be the only one who suspects. His death would restore fertility to our people. All our power descends from our king or queen. I believe that Taranis's inability to father children has doomed the rest of us to be childless."
"There are still children at court," I said.
"But how many of them are pure Seelie blood?"
I thought for a second. "I'm not sure. Most of them were born long before I came along."
"I am sure," she said. She leaned forward, her entire body language suddenly very serious, no flirting involved. "None. All the children born to us in the last six hundred years have been mixed blood. Either rapes during the wars of Unseelie warriors, or ones like yourself that are very mixed indeed. Mixed blood, stronger blood, Meredith. Our king has doomed us to die as a people because he is too proud to step down from the throne."
"If he stepped down because he was infertile, the other royals could still demand he be killed to ensure the fertility of the rest."
"And they would," Maeve said, "if they discovered that I told him of his little problem a century ago."
She was right. If Taranis had simply not known, then they might have forgiven him and allowed him to step down. But to have known for a century and have done nothing... They would see his blood sprinkled over the fields for that.
The murmur of voices made me turn around. A new man was speaking pleasantries to the men around the umbrella table. He turned toward us smiling, flashing very white teeth. The rest of him was so unhealthy that the artificially bright smile seemed to emphasize the sallowness of his skin, the sunken eyes. He was so eaten away by illness that it took me a few seconds to recognize Gordon Reed. He'd been the director who took Maeve from small parts to stardom. I had a sudden image of his body rotted away and those teeth the only thing left untouched in his grave. I knew in that instant that the macabre vision was a true seeing, and he was dying.
The question was, did they know?
Maeve held out her hand to him. He took her smooth golden hand in his withered one, laying a kiss on the back of that perfect skin. How must he feel to watch his own youth fade, to feel his body die, while she remained untouched?
He turned to me, still holding her hand. "Princess Meredith, so good of you to join us today." The words were very civil, very ordinary, as if this were just another afternoon by the pool.
Maeve patted his hand. "Sit down, Gordon." She moved to give him the lounge chair, while she knelt on the pool edge, much like Kitto had earlier. He sat down heavily, and a momentary flinching around his eyes was the only outward sign that he hurt.
Maeve took off her sunglasses and kept looking at him. She studied what was left of the tall, handsome man that she'd married. She studied him as if every line of bone under that sallow skin was precious.
That one look was enough. She loved him. She really loved him, and they both knew that he was dying.
She laid her face on that withered hand and looked at me with wide blue eyes that shimmered just a little too much in the light. It wasn't glamour; it was unshed tears.
Her voice was low, but clear. "Gordon and I want a child, Meredith."
"How -- "I stopped; I couldn't ask it, not in front of both of them.
"How long does Gordon have?" Maeve asked for me.
I nodded.
"Six..." Maeve's voice broke. She tried to regain herself, but finally Gordon answered, "Six weeks, maybe three months at the outside." His voice was calm, accepting. He stroked Maeve's silky hair.
Maeve rolled her face to stare at me. The look in her eyes wasn't accepting, or calm. It was frantic.
I knew now why, after a hundred years, Maeve had been willing to risk Taranis's anger to seek help from another sidhe. Conchenn, goddess of beauty and spring, was running out of time.
Chapter 15
It was dark by the time we arrived back at my apartment. I would have said home, but it wasn't that. It had never been home. It was a one-bedroom apartment originally intended for only one person. I wasn't even supposed to have a roommate in it. I was trying to share it with five people. To say we were a little cramped for space was a terrifying understatement.
Strangely, we hadn't talked much on the drive back to work to exchange the van for my car, or afterwards during the drive to the apartment. I don't know what was bothering everyone else, but seeing Gordon Reed dying, practically before my eyes, had dampened my enthusiasm. Truth was, it wasn't really Gordon's dying, but the way Maeve had looked at him. An immortal in true love with a mortal. It always ended badly.
I'd threaded my way through the traffic almost automatically, the trip livened only by Doyle's soft gasps. He was not a good passenger, but since he'd never had a license, he didn't have much choice. Usually I enjoyed Doyle's little panic attacks. It was one of the few times that I saw him completely unglued. It was strangely comforting, usually.
Today when we stepped into the pale pink walls of my living room, I didn't think anything could comfort me. I was, as usual lately, wrong.
First, there was the rich smell of stew and fresh baked bread. The kind of stew that simmers all day and just gets better. And there is no such thing as bad homemade bread. Second, Galen walked around the only corner in the main room from my tiny kitchen to the even tinier dining area. Usually, I notice Galen's smile first. He has a great smile. Or maybe the pale green hair that curls just below his ears. Tonight I noticed his clothes. He was not wearing a shirt. He was wearing a white lacy apron that was sheer enough that I could see the darker skin of his nipples, the curl of darker green hair that decorated his upper chest, the thin line of hair that traced the edge of his belly button and vanished inside his jeans.
He turned his back to finish setting the table, and his skin was flawless, pearlescent white with the faintest tinge of green. The see-through straps of the apron did nothing to hide his strong back and broad shoulders, the perfect length of arm. The one thin braid of hair that still fell past his waist curved over his skin like a caress.
I hadn't realized that I had stopped dead just past the door until Rhys said, "If you move a little bit farther into the room, the rest of us can get past."I felt my skin burn as I blushed. But I moved and let the others come past me.
Galen continued coming and going out of the kitchen, as if he hadn't noticed my reaction, and maybe he hadn't. It was sometimes hard to tell with Galen. He never seemed to understand how beautiful he was. Which, come to think of it, might have been part of his appeal. Humility was a very rare commodity in a sidhe nobleman.
"Stew's ready, but the bread needs to cool a bit before we cut it." He went back into the kitchen without really looking at any of us.
There had been a time when I would have given and gotten a hello kiss from him. But there was a little problem. Galen had been injured during one of the court punishments just before Samhain, Halloween. I could still see the scene in my mind's eye: Galen chained to the rock, his body almost lost to sight under the slowly fanning butterfly wings of the demi-fey. They looked like true butterflies on the edge of a puddle, sipping liquid, wings moving slowly to the rhythm of their feeding. But they weren't sipping water; they were drinking his blood. They had taken bites of his flesh with the blood, and for reasons that only Prince Cel knew, he'd ordered them to pay particular attention to Galen's groin.
Cel had made certain that I would not be able to take Galen to my bed until he healed. But he was sidhe, and sidhe healed while you watched, their bodies absorbing the wounds like flowers blooming in reverse. Every dainty bite had vanished into that flawless skin, except the wounds on his groin. He was, for all intents and purposes, unmanned.
We'd been to every healer we could find, both medical and metaphysical. The medical doctors had been baffled; the witches had only been able to say it was something magical. Twenty-first-century witches hesitate to use the word curse.
No one did curses; they were too bad for your karma. You do a curse and it comes back on you, always. You can never do truly evil magic, the kind that has no intent but to harm, without paying a price. No one is exempt from that rule, not even the immortal. It's one of the reasons that a true curse is so rare.
I watched Galen bustling about the kitchen in his peekaboo apron, careful not to look at me, and my heart hurt.
I went to him, wrapping my arms around his waist, pressing my body against the warmth of his back. He went very still under my touch, then slowly his hands came up to slide along my arms. He hugged my arms against his body. I cuddled my cheek against the smooth warmth of his back. It was the closest to a hug that I'd gotten from him in weeks. He'd found any interaction painful, in more than one way.
He began to pull away and I tightened my grip. He could have forced me away from him, but he didn't. He just stood there and dropped his hands from mine. "Merry, please." His voice was so soft.
"No," I said, holding him tight, tight against me. "Let me contact Queen Niceven."
He shook his head, sending his braid spilling against my face. The scent of his hair was sweet and clean. I remembered when his hair had draped to his knees like most of the high-court sidhe. I'd mourned when he cut it.
"I will not let you put yourself in that creature's debt," he said, and his voice held a solemnity that was so unlike him.
"Please, Galen, please."
"No, Merry, no." He tried to push me away again, but I wouldn't let go.