Barinthus’s ankle-length hair was unbound and spilled around his body like a cloak made of water, for his hair was every shade that ocean can be, from darkest blue to tropical turquoise to the gray of storm and everything in between. You couldn’t see the extraordinary play of colors in the low light from the moonlit windows, but there was something of movement and flow to his hair even in the dark that made it ripple in the glow of what little light was available as if it were indeed water. His hair actually hid his body so I couldn’t tell anything of his clothes.
He lived at the beach house to be near the ocean, and it was as if the longer he was near it, the stronger he grew, the more confident. He had once been Mannan Mac Lir, and there was still a sea god in there trying to get out. It was as if fairyland had drained him of his powers, but being near the ocean gave him back what most of the sidhe had lost when they had left faerie.
Rhys put an arm around my shoulders, and whispered, “Even Doyle treats him as a superior.”
I nodded. “Does Doyle realize that yet?”
Rhys kissed me on the cheek, and he’d gotten his power under control enough that it was just a kiss, nice, but not so overwhelming. “I don’t think so.”I turned and looked at him; he was only six inches taller than I, so it was almost direct eye contact. “But you noticed,” I said.
He smiled and traced the edge of my face with one finger, like a child drawing in the sand. I leaned into that touch and he gave me more of his hand so that he cupped part of the side of my face in his hand. There were other men in my bed who could cup the entire side of my face in one hand, but Rhys was like me, not so big, and sometimes that was nice, too. Variety was not a bad thing.
Amatheon and Adair followed Hafwyn out the sliding-glass doors that led to the huge deck and the huge grill. The ocean rolled underneath that deck. Even without being able to see clearly, you could somehow feel all that power pulsing and moving against the pilings of the house.
Rhys put his forehead against mine and whispered, “How do you feel about the big guy taking over?”
“I don’t know. There are so many other problems to solve.”
His hand moved to the back of my neck and he moved our faces apart so he could move in for a kiss, but he spoke as he did it. “If you want to stop the power he is building you must do it soon, Merry.” He kissed me as he said my name, and I let myself sink into that kiss. I let the warmth of his lips, the tenderness of his touch, hold me in a way that nothing else had today. Maybe it was finally being inside, away from the prying eyes that seemed to be everywhere, but something hard and unhappy loosened inside me as he kissed me.
He hugged me to him, and our bodies touched from shoulder to thigh as close as we could. I could feel his body growing hard and happy to see me against the front of my own. I don’t know if we would have tried for a little predinner privacy in the bedrooms, because Caswyn came down the hallway from the bedrooms, and suddenly a lot of the happy seeped away from me.
It wasn’t that he was not lovely, for he was, handsome, tall, slender, and muscular as most sidhe warriors were, but the air of sorrow that clung to him made my heart ache. He’d been a minor noble at the Unseelie Court. His hair was straight and raven black like Cathbodua’s or even Queen Andais herself. His skin as pale as mine, or Frost’s. His eyes were still circles of red, red-orange, and finally true orange, like a fire banked down in his eyes. Andais had quieted that fire in him by the torture she’d done to him, the night her son died and we fled faerie. Caswyn had been brought to us by a cloaked woman who told us only that Caswyn’s mind would not survive any more of the Queen’s Mercy. I wasn’t entirely certain his mind wasn’t already broken beyond repair. But since Caswyn had been the whipping boy for Andais’s anger at us we took him in. His body had healed because he was sidhe, but his mind and heart were more fragile things.
He came down the hallway like a raven-haired ghost in an oversized white dress shirt untucked and billowing over a pair of cream dress slacks. The clothes were borrowed, but surely Frost’s shirt had fit him better last week? Was he still not eating?
He came straight for me as if Rhys wasn’t holding me. Rhys moved aside so that I could embrace Caswyn. He wrapped himself around me with a sigh that was almost a sob. I held him and let the fierceness of his grip envelop me. He’d been clingy and overly emotional since he had been rescued from the queen’s bloody bed. She’d tortured him to punish me in a way, and because my lovers had been out of reach. She’d picked him at random. He’d never been anything to me, not friend or enemy. Caswyn had been as neutral as the courts allowed and centuries of diplomacy had crashed against Andais’s madness. The cloaked noblewoman had said, “The queen asked him to bed her and as he was not one of her guards to be ordered so, he politely refused.” Caswyn had been one rejection too many for her sanity. She’d turned him into a red ruin on her sheets and made certain to show it to me with a spell that turned a mirror into a video phone better than anything human technology had yet created. When I’d first seen him, he’d been so unrecognizable that I thought he was someone I cared for.
When she told me who it was I’d been puzzled. He was nothing to me. I could still hear Andais’s voice, “Then you don’t care what I do to him?”
I didn’t know how to answer that, but finally I’d said, “He is a noble of the Unseelie Court and deserves protection from its queen.”
“You refused the crown, Meredith, and this queen says he deserves nothing for his years of hiding. He’s no one’s enemy and no one’s friend. I always hated that about him.” She’d grabbed his hair and made him beg while we watched.
“I will distroy him.”
“Why?” I’d asked.
“Because I can.”
I’d told him to come to us if ever he could. Days later, with the help of a sidhe who wanted no one to know her identity, he had come. I could not take responsibility for my aunt’s deeds. It was her evil and I was just an excuse for her to let out all her demons at once. I think and Doyle agreed, Andais was trying to force the nobles to assassinate her. It was a queen’s version of “Suicide by cop.”
Moments like that weren’t uncommon for Queen Andais, my aunt, and that was one of the reasons that so many of the guards had agreed to exile rather than stay with her once they had a choice. Most of them liked a little tie-me-up-tie-me-down, but there was a line that few would cross willingly, and Andais wasn’t a dominant in the sense of modern bondage and submission. She was a dominant in the old sense of might makes right, and being absolute ruler meant absolutely that. The old adage “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” applied to both of my royal relatives on both thrones. What I hadn’t foreseen was her idea of pain and sex spreading to outside her personal guard, or that the nobles would keep taking the abuse. Why hadn’t someone tried to kill her by now? Why didn’t they fight back?
“I thought you were gone,” Caswyn said. “I thought you were hurt, or worse; we all did.”
“Doyle and Frost wouldn’t let that happen,” Rhys said.
Caswyn looked at him, still trying to drape all of that six-feet-plus frame around my much smaller one. “And how would they keep Princess Meredith from being cut to pieces with glass? Weapon skill and bravery won’t stop every threat. Even the Queen’s Darkness and the Killing Frost cannot stop the perils of modern life like man-made glass. It would have cut them all to pieces, not just the princess.”
He spoke the truth. Old-fashioned glass made of naturally occurring substances with heat added could fall on my guards all day and not harm them, but anything with artificial additives, or metals, would cut them as much as me.Doyle came across the room, speaking as he moved. “You are right, Wyn, but we would have shielded her body with ours. Meredith would have been unhurt no matter what happened to us.” Aloud we’d started calling him Wyn because my aunt had made his full name a thing whispered in the dark with blood and pain.
I pushed gently on Wyn’s chest to make him ease up and not lean so heavily on me. I couldn’t take that kind of hugging forever without it beginning to hurt a little. The angle of my neck wasn’t right for it.
“And the deli is owned by one of my Gran’s cousins, a brownie named Matilda. She would have kept me safe.”
Wyn unbent enough for his shoulder to go across mine, and my arm to encircle his waist. I could stand like that for hours, and he just seemed to need to touch me a lot. He was six feet of muscled warrior, but the queen had truly broken him in every way. His body had healed, as the sidhe do, but he only seemed to feel truly safe when he was with me, Doyle, Frost, Barinthus, Rhys, or anyone he perceived as powerful enough to keep him safe. The others made him afraid, as if he feared that Andais would snatch him away if he wasn’t with someone strong.
“One brownie does not seem enough protection,” he said in that uncertain voice that he’d had since he came to us. He’d never been the boldest of men, but now his fear was always there trembling below his skin, as if it ran in his blood now, so that fear was everywhere inside him.