“I’d be happy to help, but you will have to choose what kind of image you want to project.”
I laughed. “Isn’t it a little late for me to be the perfect mother since I’ve just given birth to triplets out of wedlock?”
“It’s not that making the mother image hard to sell, it’s the multiple fathers, and the fact that rumor has it that Frost and Doyle are lovers, too, that has really hurt their image in the mainstream media.”
“Very homophobic,” I said.
“Yes, it is, but it’s still the truth.”
“Can I be the sexy young thing having just given birth to triplets?” I asked.
It was her turn to laugh. “I don’t know; I’ve never seen anyone recover their figure as fast as you who wasn’t full-blooded sidhe. You’re built human, but you’re certainly getting your figure back more like a sidhe.”
“Especially with triplets,” I said.
She laughed again. “Yes, especially with triplets. The human media will want to know your secret for postbaby weight loss.”
“There’s no secret; apparently it’s just good genetics.”
“They won’t want to hear that, Meredith. They want some exercise plan, or better yet some magic food, or pill, that will make them all pre-baby thin without any effort on their part.”
“I’m getting my figure back without much effort, but every other good thing in my life has come with a lot of effort.”
Her face sobered, and she hugged me. “I know that, and I’m sorry that I’ve been taking my mood out on you.”
I hugged her back. “Now I’m supposed to say, ‘That’s all right,’ but it’s not. I will never again be anyone’s whipping girl for their issues.” I hugged her tighter and looked up into the face that had launched a thousand blockbuster movies. “Not even the most beautiful movie star in Hollywood.”
“Do you really think so?” she asked, looking down from all that six-plus feet height in her high heels.
I smiled. “Of course I do.”
She leaned down, and I went up on tiptoe to meet her kiss. It was a chaste kiss by fey standards, though if some paparazzi had gotten a picture they’d have sold it for a bundle, and the rumor would have been that Maeve and I were lovers. We had made wonderful magical love once, but it wasn’t what we were to each other. I wasn’t sure if we were extended family, or if she was a member of my inner circle of courtiers. Once such things had been more formalized, and they still were at the Seelie Court, but less so at the Unseelie, and if this was a court then it was the most informal of all.
She smiled down at me, her pinkish lipstick slightly smeared. I wasn’t wearing lipstick, just not bothering with glamour so my lips looked red. Humans would assume I was wearing something, but the proof was in the kissing, and the only lipstick smeared was hers.I pulled out of the embrace with a smile.
“I appreciate you letting me choose lovers from among the new sidhe guards,” she said.
“They are free to choose and so are you.”
“It’s been a long time since I was surrounded by people who truly felt that way. Among humans and the Seelie there is always a price to pay, or strings attached.”
“The Unseelie who are not under the queen’s direct control are more like the rest of the fey. Sex is another need, like food.”
“Yes, but your steak doesn’t have feelings and emotional baggage; people, even the sidhe, do.”
I nodded. “I can’t argue that. The lesser fey treat it more sensibly.”
“I think you’ll find, Princess, that the lesser fey treat sex with the sidhe sensibly, because they expect it to be a onetime thing, or a fling. Very few non-sidhe ever become a marrying match for the sidhe.”
“My grandmother did,” I said.
“Your grandfather wanted to end his curse, and only willing marriage to another fey would do that.”
“At least the curse didn’t demand a love match. My grandfather wasn’t called Uar the Cruel for nothing; he’d have never found someone to love him.”
“How are his sons, your uncles?”
“They’ve seen modern doctors and nothing seems to be able to stop the venom from dripping out of the pores of their fingers, but modern plastic gloves have helped. They don’t accidentally poison people now.”
“Good, they did nothing to earn their curse. I always thought it was unfair that Uar’s curse manifested in all his children being born with that birth defect,” she said.
“Agreed, but then are curses ever fair? I mean, most of the fairy tales have a grain of truth, and so many of them talk about a curse on the prince, or princess, spreading to everyone in the castle, or kingdom.”
“I’ve never actually known that to happen. I think the human fairy tales were supposed to be a warning to rulers to be fair and just, or their kingdom suffered, but most kings didn’t see themselves in such stories.”
“Really, so there’s no truth to ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ or ‘Beauty and the Beast’?”
“‘Sleeping Beauty’ is the old sleeping warrior idea, and that’s real enough, but ‘Beauty and the Beast’ isn’t based on anything that I’m aware of.”
“There are Raven warriors asleep under the Tower of London,” I said.
She looked at me, eyes narrowing. “How do you know that? The queen did not tell you, and I know Taranis didn’t. She felt it unjust that only her people were used, and he was too cowardly to offer up his own guard as sacrifice at the end of the last great human and fey war.”
“The Goddess showed me in a vision that some of the Queen’s Ravens sleep an enchanted rest underneath the human tower. They’re the ravens the legend refers to, not the birds.”
“When the last Raven leaves the tower, then England will fall,” Maeve said.
I nodded.
“If England is ever in danger of truly being conquered, then the Ravens are to wake and defend the country, that’s really what it means.”
“Why didn’t they wake during World War Two?”
“If the Germans had touched English soil they might have.”
“Who is trapped under there?”
“You mean names?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head and all her smiles were gone as she looked at nothing, her eyes full of remembering. “We do not speak their names, and will not until they rise again to fulfill a bargain that should have been shared between the two high courts of faerie. That our king refused to sacrifice any of his golden throng should have told us all what kind of man he was. Instead the story was put about that the warriors sealed up were all monsters that even the dark court was happy to be rid of, when in truth they were some of the best warriors among the sidhe, and no worse men than the rest.”
“But you will not speak their names?”
“I will not, for Taranis made all of us at the Seelie Court vow never to speak their names until they rise to complete the treaty between human and fey.”
“Was it very hard to pretend to be a starlet back in the fifties when you had all those centuries behind you, inside you?”
She gave me a look, a considering look, and let me glimpse the fine burning intelligence that she usually hid. She didn’t pretend to be stupid, but she didn’t show everything either.
“That is a very good question. One that in all the decades of interviews I’ve never been asked.”
“I found it hard to pretend I wasn’t Princess Meredith when I came to L. A. Even I found all my secrets hard to keep, hard not to share with someone.”
“I told some of my secrets to Gordon. I wish he’d lived to see Liam. I think he’s going to grow up to look like that handsome man I first met.”
By the time I’d met Maeve’s late husband he’d been riddled with the cancer that would claim his life, and the man who had been young in the sixties wasn’t young three, almost four decades later. He had been a dying shell of the handsome director who had won Maeve’s heart, but her dearest wish had been to have his child. Galen and I had done a fertility rite and the Goddess had blessed us with the energy to give Maeve and Gordon Reed their last wish as a couple. He’d died months before Liam was born, but he’d gotten to hear the heartbeat, see sonograms, and know for certain he had a son.
“I’m sorry that you lost Gordon.”
“You gave us our son, Meredith; you have nothing to be sorry for.”
“Shall we visit the nursery and the children?”
She smiled. “Yes, let’s. If I’m going to remind Liam that I’m Mommy, I need to see him more.”
“Am I supposed to apologize again for Liam’s behavior?”
“If you had been raised in faerie courts and never left them, you would never have said that.”
“Not apologized, or not felt like I should apologize for something that isn’t my fault?” I asked.
“Both,” she said, and smiled softly, but it was sad around the edges and left her eyes almost haunted.
I took her hand in mine, squeezed it. “I am sorry that you have had to spend so much time away from your son.”“If you hadn’t said that, and meant it, I probably wouldn’t say this: The movie I just finished filming is an amazing chance for me to stretch myself as an actress. If you and the others hadn’t been here for Liam I wouldn’t have taken it, or I might have tried to take him and a nanny with me, but he was better here at his home with his family. I just need to figure out how to be a bigger part of that family.”