I reached out toward the mirror, as if I could touch him, but it wasn’t one of my powers. I could not do what Taranis had done so easily earlier today.
“Princess,” Crystall whispered, and his voice was hoarse, roughened. I knew why his voice sounded like that. Screaming will do that. I knew because I had been at the queen’s mercy more than once. The queen’s mercy had become a saying among the Unseelie sidhe, as in, “I’d rather be at the queen’s mercy than do that.”
Andais had seen exile from faerie as worse than any torture she could devise. She did not understand why so many of her fey had chosen it. Just as she hadn’t understood why my father, Essus, took me and our household into exile in the human world after Andais tried to drown me at six years of age. If I was mortal enough to die by drowning, then I wasn’t sidhe enough to be allowed to live. Sort of the way you’d drown a puppy that your purebred bitch dropped after you realized it wasn’t the mating of your dreams, but some mongrel that had gotten inside the fence.
Andais had been shocked when my father left faerie to raise me among the humans, and she had been equally shocked when, many years later, nearly her entire guard would have followed me into the Western lands. For her, to leave faerie was worse than death, and she couldn’t understand why it wasn’t a fate worse than death to everyone else. What she failed to understand was that the queen’s mercy had become a fate even worse than exile.
I stared into Crystall’s luminous, hopeless eyes, and my throat tightened around the tears that I knew I could not afford to shed. Andais had left us a present to look at, but she’d be watching, and she would see tears as weakness. Crystall was her visual aid. Her example to us, to me. I wasn’t certain what the message was supposed to be, but in her mind there was one. But, Goddess help me, other than her jealousy and hatred of rejection I couldn’t see any message here.
“Oh, Crystall,” I said. “I am sorry.”
His voice had reminded me of the sound of chimes in a gentle wind. Now it was a painful croak. “You did not do this, Princess.”
His eyes flickered toward what I knew was the outer door, though I could not see that part of the room. His face closed down, and for a moment where there had been hopelessness there was rage. A rage that he stuffed down, and hid behind eyes that showed as neutral a face as he could find.
I prayed that Andais hadn’t seen that moment of rage. She’d try to beat it out of him if she had.
The queen swept into the room dressed in a loose, flowing black robe. It left open a triangle of white flesh, the flat perfection of her stomach and a trace of her belly button. There was a thin cord tied across the high, tight planes of her breasts that kept the front of the outfit from spilling open completely. There were long, wide sleeves that left most of her forearms bare. She must have been called away on important business to have put on that much clothing with Crystall still in her bed. He wasn’t hurt enough for her to be finished with him.
She’d tied her long black hair back in a loose tail of hair. The ribbon she’d chosen was red. I’d never seen her wear red before, not even a spot of it. The only red the queen liked on her person was other people’s blood.
I couldn’t have explained it, but that red ribbon made my stomach clench tight, and my pulse speed. Andais slid onto the bed in front of Crystall, but close enough that she could stroke the untouched flesh of his back. She stroked him idly as you would a dog. He flinched at her first touch, then settled down and tried not to be there.
She looked at us with her tricolored eyes: charcoal, to the color of storm clouds, to a pale winter gray that was nearly white. Her eyes went so perfectly with the black hair and the pale skin. She was so made for Goth fashion, like Abe, except she was scarier than any Goth on the planet. Andais was serial-killer scary, and she was my father’s sister, my queen, and there was nothing I could do about either.
“Aunt Andais,” I said, “we have arrived from the hospital to tell you much news.” We had already agreed that we needed to be clear from the beginning that we were telling her the news at the first opportunity.“My queen,” Doyle said, doing an awkward sitting bow as far as the bandages would allow.
“I have heard many rumors this day,” she said, in a voice that some thought was a throaty, seductive sound, but that had always filled me with dread.
“Goddess knows what the rumors are,” Rhys said as he moved back to stand by the bed, near me. “The truth is weird enough.” He said it with a smile and his usual teasing lightness.
She gave him a flat look that was anything but friendly. There would be no lightening her mood if that look was any indication. She turned those angry eyes back to Doyle.
“What could possibly injure the Dark itself?” Her voice was angry, and almost disinterested. She knew, somehow she already knew. Who the hell had talked?
“When the Light appears, the Darkness must leave,” Doyle said, in his best flat nothing voice.
She ran the bright redness of her lacquered nails down Crystall’s back. She left red lines, though she didn’t quite break the skin. Crystall turned his face away from the mirror and from her, afraid, I think, that he could not control his expression. “What light is bright enough to conquer the Darkness?” she asked.
“Taranis, King of Light and Illusion, is still potent in his hand of power,” Doyle said, his voice even emptier than her own.
She dug fingernails into Crystall’s back just below the shoulder blade, as if she meant to dig a handful of flesh out of his back. Blood began to show around her hand, like water filling a hole in the ground, slowly seeping upward.
“You seem preoccupied, Meredith. Whatever could be the matter?” Her voice was almost conversational, except for that edge of cruelty.
I decided to concentrate on the things that might distract her from tormenting the man in her bed. “Taranis attacked us through the mirror in the lawyer’s office. He injured Doyle, and Abeloec. He was trying for me when Galen got me to safety.”
“Oh, I doubt he meant to injure you, Meredith, even in his madness. I suspect he was trying for Galen.”
I blinked at her. The way she said it meant that she knew something that we did not. “Why would he target Galen?”
“Ask yourself first, niece, why he accused Galen, Abeloec, and Rhys of raping the Lady Caitrin.” Her hand dug deeper into Crystall’s flesh, causing tiny red lines to begin to trickle over his skin.
“I do not know, Aunt Andais,” I said, and fought to keep my own voice even and empty. I was trying not to show either fear or anger, though right now, fear was by far the strongest emotion. She was pissed, and I didn’t know why. If she knew about the offer of the Seelie throne to me, then she might be pissed at that, but if I blurted it out, she’d think I felt guilty and I didn’t. She was always so difficult to deal with, like being in the middle of a minefield. You know you have to get to the edge, but how to do that without getting blown up, that was always the question.
“Oh, come, Meredith, think. Or are you so little Unseelie and so much Seelie that all you can think about is fertility?”
“I thought my fertility was supposed to be the thing I thought about most if I am to be your heir, Aunt Andais?”
She drew her fingers together, forcing a sound from Crystall. She’d made bloody scratches on his back like some evil flower carved into his flesh. She raised her pale hand so I could watch his blood drip down her fingers.
“Are you going to be my heir, Meredith, or is there another throne that calls to you more?”
There, she’d said enough that I could address it. “It is true that when Taranis was subdued by his nobles they offered me a chance at his throne.”
“You told them yes.” She hissed it at me, standing and striding toward the mirror.
“I did not. I told them we would have to discuss such news with our queen, with you, Aunt Andais, before I could say yes or no.”
She was at the mirror now, blocking our view of the bed and Crystall. Her anger had awakened her power. Her skin was beginning to glow. Her eyes were filling with the light, but not the way that most of the sidhe’s eyes glowed with power. She seemed to have light behind her eyes, as if someone had set a candle behind all that gray and black. For the rest of us, for the most part, the individual colors glowed, but not her. She was queen, and she had to be different.
“I heard you jumped at the chance, you ungrateful little bitch.”
“You have been lied to then, Aunt Andais.” I fought to keep my voice neutral.
“Yes, remind me that you are my bloodline, my last chance to have someone of my line to rule after me. If you would but get with child, Meredith. Goddess knows you’re fucking everything in sight. Why are you not with child?”
“I do not know, Aunt, but I do know that we came directly here from the hospital. We came into the house and to this mirror. We came to call you and tell you all that has happened. I swear to you by the Darkness that Eats all Things that I did not tell the Seelie I would sit upon their throne. I told them we would have to speak to our queen before we could answer them.”
Her eyes had begun to dim. Her power was beginning to fold away. Something tight in my stomach eased a little. I had used an oath that no fey would have taken lightly. There were powers older even than faerie, and they waited in the dark to punish oathbreakers.