Doyle squeezed my arm again, tighter this time, as if telling me to behave. He answered Andais, but not in words. He rolled onto his back with his knees bent so his thigh hid him from her view, then he lowered the leg closest to her, slowly, like a curtain coming down.
There was heat in her eyes now, real heat, real need. "My, my, Darkness, you have been keeping secrets."
He turned and looked at her. "Nothing you couldn't have discovered at any time in the last thousand years." Now it was his voice that was not neutral. It was just a slight change in tone, a mild inflection of reproof, but I'd never heard him lose even that much control in front of Andais.
It was my turn to lay a warning hand on his stomach, just a touch to remind him who we were speaking to. I don't think my face showed the fear that was curling along my spine.
King Taranis might not hurt me for fear of Andais, but Andais might hurt me in a fit. She might regret it later, but dead is dead.
The look she gave Doyle was enough to tighten my hand against his skin, just a light digging of nails. It made his body react, and I hoped I'd done enough to remind him to tread lightly.
"Have a care, Darkness, or I will grow distracted and forget why I called."
"We await your news, Queen Andais," I said.
She looked at me then, some of the heat going from her eyes, replaced by puzzlement and, underneath, tiredness. Andais wasn't usually this easy to read, I think because she didn't have to be careful around anyone. "The Nameless is free."
Doyle spilled his legs to the floor and sat up. Suddenly it didn't matter that he was nude, nobody cared. The Nameless was the worst of both courts, Seelie and Unseelie. It was the last great spell that the two courts had cooperated on. They had stripped themselves of everything too awful, too hungry, to allow us to live in this new country. Nobody had demanded it of the sidhe, but we didn't want to be forced out of the last country that would have us, so we'd sacrificed some of what we were in order to become more... human. Some said that the Nameless was what caused us to begin to fade, but that wasn't true. The sidhe had been fading for centuries. The Nameless was just a necessary evil. So we didn't turn America into another battlefield.
"Did you set it free, my queen?" Doyle asked.
"Of course not," she said.
"Then who?" he asked.
"I could tell you a pretty story, but in the end, the answer is, simply, I don't know." It was obvious she didn't like saying it, and equally obvious that she was speaking the truth. She stripped off one of the black gloves in an abrupt movement and began to run it over and over through her hands.
"There are very few beings in faerie who could do such a thing," Doyle said.
"Don't you think I know that?" she snapped.
"What would you have us do here, my queen?"
"I don't know, but the last hint we had of it, it was traveling west."
"Do you believe it will come here?" he asked.
"It is unlikely," she said, slapping the glove against her arm. "But the Nameless is nearly unstoppable. It is everything we have given up, and that was a great deal of wielding power. If it was sent for Meredith, then you would need all the preparation time you could manage.""Do you truly think it was loosed to hunt the princess?"
"If it had merely been set free, it would have ravaged the countryside by now. But it has not." She stood, giving us a view of the nearly naked back of the dress. She turned back to us with an abrupt gesture. "It vanished from our sight, all of our sights, very quickly. We cannot track it, which means that the thing is getting some very highly placed help."
"But the Nameless is a part of the courts, a part of who you were. You should be able to track it as you would track your own shadow." The moment I finished, I knew I should have kept quiet.
All the anger flowed into her face, her posture, her hands where they gripped her elbows. She shivered with rage. I think for a second she was too angry to speak.
Doyle stood, putting himself in front of me. "Have you told the Seelie Court?"
"You do not need to hide her away, Darkness. I am working too hard to keep her alive to kill her myself. And, yes, the Seelie know what has happened."
"Will the two courts come together to hunt the Nameless?" he asked. He hadn't moved from in front of me, which left me peeking around his body like a child. That wasn't exactly the way to be a strong presence. I moved so I could see the mirror, but they both ignored me.
"No."
"But it is to each one's benefit, surely."
"Taranis is being difficult. He's acting as if the Nameless is made up of only Unseelie energy. Pretending that all his light has no taint." She looked like she'd tasted something sour. "He will not claim its parentage, so he will give no aid, for to give aid is to admit his part in its making."
"That is foolishness."
She nodded. "He was always one more interested in the illusion of purity than in purity itself."
"What can stand against the Nameless?" he asked, voice soft, almost as if he were thinking aloud.
"We do not know, for we bound it without testing it. But it is full of old, old magicks, things we no longer tolerate among even the Unseelie." She sat down on the end of the bed, almost jerkily. "Whoever released it, and hid it from our sight... if they can truly control it, it is a powerful weapon."
"What do you need of me, my queen?"
She looked up at that, and the look was not unfriendly. "What if I said come home, come home and protect me? What if I said I don't feel safe without you and Frost at my side?"
He dropped to one knee. His face was lost in a wave of his own hair. "I am still captain of the Queen's Ravens."
"You would come?" she asked, voice soft.
"If you commanded it."
I sat on the bed and tried to keep my face neutral. I hugged my knees to my chest and tried to not look anything, nothing. If I could just not think, it wouldn't show on my face.
"You say you are still the captain of my Ravens, but are you still my Darkness, or do you belong to another now?"
He kept his head down and stayed silent. I kept trying to think of nothing. She gave me a very unfriendly look. "You have stolen my Darkness from me, Meredith."
"What do you want me to say, Aunt Andais?"
"It's good to remind me that you are my blood. Seeing his back sliced up makes me hope you are more mine than I knew."
Nothing, nothing, I would think nothing. I imagined emptiness like looking through a pane of glass into another pane and another and another. Clear, nothing.
"The Nameless was loosed for a reason, Darkness. Until I know what that reason is, I'm covering my assets. The fair Meredith is one of those assets. I still hope to get a child out of her."
She looked at me, and it was not a friendly look. "Is he as magnificent as he looks?"
I fought for a neutral voice to match the face. "Yes."
The queen sighed. "A pity, but I didn't want to give birth to puppies, now did I?"
"Puppies?" I said.
"Didn't he tell you? Doyle has two aunts whose true forms are dogs. His grandmother was one of the hounds of the great hunt. Hellhounds, humans call them now, though you know we have nothing to do with hell. A different religious system altogether."
I remembered the baying and the look of hunger in Doyle's eyes. "I was aware that Doyle wasn't pure sidhe."
"His grandfather was a phouka so evil that he bred in dog form with the wild hunt itself and lived to tell the tale." She smiled, and it was sweetly malicious.
"Doyle's as mixed a bag of genetics as I am then." The voice was still neutral; yeah for me.
"But did you know he was part dog before you took him to your bed?"
Doyle stayed kneeling through all this, his hair hiding his face.
"I knew he owed his bloodline in part to the wild hunt before he came inside me."
"Really?" She made it sound like she didn't believe me.
"I've heard the belling of the hounds come out of his mouth." I moved my hair so she could see the bite mark on my shoulder, very near my neck. "I knew that he dreamed of my flesh in more than one way before I allowed him to satisfy either hunger."
Her eyes grew hard again. "You surprise me, Meredith. I never thought you had the stomach for violence."
"I do not enjoy hurting people. Violence in the bedroom when all agree is different."
"I've never found it different," she said.
"I know," I said.
"How do you do that?" she asked.
"How do I do what, my queen?"
"How do you sound so neutral, utterly neutral, yet somehow you manage to say 'go to hell' with a smile and a neutral word."
"It's not deliberate, Aunt Andais, believe me."
"At least you didn't try to deny it."
"We do not lie to each other," I said, and this time my voice was tired.
"Arise, Darkness, and show your queen your ravaged back."
He stood without a word, gave his back to the mirror, and swept his hair to one side.
Andais came close to the mirror, reaching out with one gloved hand, so that for a second I thought her hand would keep traveling and come out like a 3-D image. "I had taken you for a dominant, Doyle, and I don't enjoy being dominated."
"You never asked what I enjoyed, my Queen." He was still facing away from the mirror, his back to it.
"I also never thought you'd be so blessed down below." She sounded wistful now, like a child who hadn't gotten what she wanted for her birthday. "I mean, you are descended from dogs and phoukas, and they are not much in that way.""Most phoukas have more than one shape, my Queen."