“I said what I meant, Rhys.”
He nodded. “It was diplomatically worded.” His tone was mild, but his face unhappy.
“Rhys,” Galen said.
The two men exchanged a long look, both their faces serious. Rhys looked away first. “You’re right, you are so right.”Since Galen hadn’t said anything out loud, I wasn’t sure what he was so right about. It was as if the men had had a conversation that I hadn’t heard and were still saying bits of it. I could ask, or …
“I’m sorry that you’re unhappy with me, but you aren’t going to distract me from my question. What else has gone wrong, besides my aunt?”
“Some of us love you more than you love us; it’s an old topic,” Rhys said.
“Stop changing the subject, and trying to distract me with emotional issues we’ve already discussed. It must be something bad for you to bring this back up again, Rhys,” I said.
He nodded, and sighed. “Bad enough.”
Sholto stood up, brushing the knees of his pants automatically. “I’m not in love with Merry, nor do I expect her to be with me. We care for each other, which is more than you usually get out of a royal marriage.”
“Then you tell me what the three of you, four of you, are keeping from me,” I said.
Galen held Alastair closer, much as I had with Gwenwyfar. “It’s the other side of your family.”
“The other side, you mean the Seelie Court?”
He nodded, resting his cheek against the top of the baby’s thick black hair.
Sholto came to stand beside the bed and laid a hand over my arm and half cradled Gwenwyfar, because his hand was that big in comparison to the baby. “Your uncle, the King of the Seelie Court, is trying to get permission to see the babies, also.”
I stared up at him. “My aunt wants to see the potential heirs to Unseelie thrones and her beloved brother’s grandchildren. I understand that, and if she weren’t a sexual sadist and serial killer we’d allow it, but what in the name of all that is holy makes Taranis think he has the right to see our children?”
Rhys came nearer the bed. “He’s still claiming that one or all of them are his, Merry.”
I shook my head. “I was pregnant when he raped me. They are not his.”
“But you were only weeks pregnant, not showing at all. He’s maintaining that you were with child only after he … was with you,” Rhys said, but I didn’t like the long hesitation before he finished his sentence.
“What is he really saying, Rhys?”
“He’s made it a ‘he said, she said’ sort of thing.”
“We knew he’d deny the rape, but we have forensic evidence that he did it. The rape kit came back …” I couldn’t even say it. Taranis, the King of Light and Illusion, ruler of the Seelie Court, the golden court of faerie, was my uncle. Technically he was my great-uncle, brother of my grandfather, but since the sidhe do not age, he didn’t look like a grandfather.
“He’s saying that it was consensual, but we all knew he would.”
“He’s probably come to believe his own lie,” I said.
“Taranis will not believe that you refused him in favor of the monsters of the Unseelie Court,” Sholto said.
“He’s the monster,” I said.
Sholto smiled, and bent and laid a gentle kiss on my forehead. “That you mean that, when speaking to me, means a great deal to me, our Merry.”
I looked at his face as he stood back upright. “He raped me while I was unconscious, Sholto, and he’s my uncle. That was monstrous.”
“I’m sorry, Merry, but one of the reasons that Taranis is making a case is that you don’t remember. He’s saying that you consented and then passed out, but he didn’t realize you were unconscious until it was too late,” Rhys said.
“Too late to stop? Too late to not have sex with his own niece? Too late for what, Rhys?” I was almost yelling.
Gwenwyfar stopped nursing and started to fuss, as if she hadn’t liked me yelling. I spoke in a calmer voice, but I couldn’t control how I felt. “Rhys, you said ‘make a case’; is he actually trying to get legal visitation with the babies?”
“He was, but our lawyers countered, and now Taranis is pushing for genetic testing of the babies. He’s so sure that one or all of them will be his, I think he believes his own delusion now.”
“He’s always believed his own magic more than he should,” Sholto said.
“Once his illusions could become real,” Rhys said.
“That was a very long time ago.”
“If the genetic tests come back negative for him, then I think his days as King of the Seelie Court are over,” Rhys said.
“If we can prove that he knew he was infertile a hundred years ago but didn’t step down from the throne, they may execute him,” Galen said, and there was a hardness in his voice that I’d never heard before.
I looked past the other men to my green knight. “You want them to kill him, don’t you?”
“Don’t you?” he asked, and his green eyes held a bleak rage that was so not like him, but truth was truth.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good,” Galen said, and that one word wasn’t good at all. The tone was very bad, very sure of its anger.
“If the ruler of court is infertile, then it condemns the entire court to be childless; no true king would stay on the throne under those circumstances,” Rhys said.
“Or queen,” Galen said.
We all looked at him.
“That’s why she agreed to step down if Merry had a child, because she’d tried all the modern fertility treatments and was still childless.”
“She had a son,” I said, softly. Holding my own child in my arms made it seem like I should add out loud that I’d killed that only son. He’d been trying to kill me and the men I loved, but I’d still killed him, and his death seemed to have driven the last of her sanity away.
“Cel was hundreds of years old, and her only child. She knew she was infertile long before,” Galen said, and again there was a hardness to him that I had never heard or seen in him. People think that becoming a parent will make you soft, more sentimental, and maybe it does for some, but for him it seemed to have helped him find a new strength. I’d wanted him stronger, but I hadn’t understood that perhaps with the extra strength, some softness might be lost, that with every gain, there might be a loss.
I studied his face, and the other men were doing the same thing. We were all looking at my gentle knight and realizing that maybe he wasn’t that anymore. There were other men in my life that I counted on to be harsh and protective; until that moment I hadn’t realized that I’d counted on Galen for softer things. My eyes felt hot, my throat tight; was I going to cry? Not about the rape and the legal mess, but about losing Galen’s softness? Or maybe I was going to cry about it all, about both, about all three, or maybe baby hormones made you more emotional, or maybe, just maybe, I would cry because Galen wouldn’t anymore.CHAPTER
SIX
DOYLE CAME BACK in while I was still crying, which led to him asking what happened and the other men admitting they’d told me.
“The last orders I gave were for Merry not to be upset.”
“First, we are all fathers of her children,” Rhys said, “so as our captain you can order us, but as just another of Merry’s sweethearts you need to give us all room to decide the parameters of our relationship with her and our children.”
“Are you saying you deliberately went against my orders?” Doyle stalked farther into the room toward Rhys.
“I’m not stupid,” I said. “I could tell something was wrong and I demanded to know what it was.”
Doyle didn’t look back at me but continued to loom over Rhys. Galen still had Alastair in his arms as he moved toward the other men.
“Merry is our princess and crowned by Goddess as our queen; she outranks her own captain of the guard,” Galen said.
Doyle’s head turned, ever so slightly, neck and shoulders so tight it looked painful. His deep voice held anger like it was all he could do to contain it. “Are you saying that none of you will obey my orders?”
“Of course we will,” Galen said, “but Merry is supposed to lead not just us, but all our people. How can we ignore her when she demands something from us?”
Sholto got up from where he was kneeling by Bryluen. He left her in Royal’s arms. The demi-fey looked frightened and didn’t try to hide it. Sholto joined the other sidhe in the middle of the room.
“If you were the only king that Goddess and faerie had crowned for Merry, then we would obey you, Darkness, but you are one of many kings.”
Doyle turned to face the other man. “I have not forgotten that she was crowned to be queen to your king, Sholto.”
Sholto raised his arm and pushed back the sleeve just enough to show the beginnings of the tattoo that he and I shared. It had been real rose vines that night, and had pierced both our arms, entwining like the rope, or thread, that was used for a regular handfasting, but this “rope” had set thorns into our flesh and wedded our hands together more completely than any mere ceremony could have, and the marks of those vines and roses were painted on our arms.
“We were handfasted by Goddess and faerie,” Sholto said.