The real problem was that only two of the guards were truly that good at personal glamour. Rhys and Galen could go with me as the main guards, but we needed more guards than that. I knew Doyle and Frost well enough to know that if they couldn’t be with me, they would insist on more guards, which was fine, but who? Sholto was great at glamour and he was on his way, but who else? Instead of relaxing we spent a lot of the morning debating who would go with me.
Rhys said, “Saraid and Dogmaela are both almost as good at glamour as I am.”
“But they have only been with us a few weeks,” Frost said. “We have not trusted them with Merry’s personal safety.”
“We have to try them sometime,” he answered.
Doyle spoke from the edge of the bed, where he was sitting as I got dressed. “They were Prince Cel’s pet guards only a few weeks ago. I am not so eager to give them personal guard duty over Merry.”
“Nor I,” Frost said.
Barinthus spoke from near the closed door. “I found them competent guards here at the beach house.”
“But that’s just running the perimeter,” Doyle said. “I would trust all the guards to do that. Merry’s safety is a different type of duty altogether.”
“We either trust them, or we need to send them away from us,” Rhys said.
Doyle and Frost exchanged a look, and then Doyle said, “I am not as distrustful as that.”
“Then you must let some of them guard Merry,” Barinthus said. “They have already begun to suspect that they will never be trusted because of their association with Prince Cel.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“They have spent centuries with a queen and a prince to answer to; they feel the need of someone to lead them. You have left many of them here at the beach house off and on these few weeks. I am who they have to follow.”
“You are not their leader,” Rhys said.
“No, the princess is, but your caution to keep them farther from her has left a vacuum of leadership. They are frightened by this new world that you have brought them to, and they wonder why you have not taken any of them as your ladies-in-waiting.”
“That was a human custom that the Seelie Court adopted,” I said. “It’s not an Unseelie custom.”
“True, but many of the ones with us now were longer at the Seelie Court than at our own. They would like something familiar.”
“Or is it you who would like something familiar?” Rhys asked.
“I don’t know what you mean, Rhys.”“Yes, you do.” And there was something far too serious in Rhys’s voice.
“I say again that I do not know what you mean.”
“Coyness does not become you, sea god.”
“Nor you, death god,” Barinthus said, and there was an edge of irritation to his voice now. It wasn’t anger. I’d rarely seen the big man truly angry, but there was some tension between the two of them that I’d never seen before.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
It was Frost who answered. “Of those of us at your side, they are two of the most powerful.”
I looked at Frost. “What does that have to do with the tension between them?”
“They begin to feel their way back to their full powers, and like rams in springtime they want to butt heads to see who is stronger.”
“We are not animals, Killing Frost.”
“But you would remind me that I am not truly sidhe. Nor was I one of Danu’s children when she first came to the shores of our homeland. All this you remind me with my old nickname. I was the Killing Frost, and once even less than that.”
Barinthus studied him. Finally, he said, “Perhaps I do see those who were once less than sidhe, but are sidhe now as lesser still. I do not mean to feel that way, but I cannot deny that I find it difficult to see you with the princess and about to be father to her children when you have never been worshipped and once were but a childlike thing to skip across the still winter’s nights and paint the windowpanes with hoarfrost.”
I’d had no idea that Barinthus thought that the sidhe who began life as non-sidhe were lesser, and I didn’t try to keep the surprise off my face. “You never mentioned any of this to me, Barinthus.”
“I would have taken anyone as father to your children if it would have put you on the throne, Meredith. Once you were on the throne, we could have solidified your power base.”
“No, Barinthus, we could have taken the throne and been victim to assassination attempts until some of us died. The nobles would never have accepted me.”
“We could have made them accept your power.”
“You keep saying ‘we,’ Kingmaker. Define ‘we,’” Rhys said.
I remembered Rhys’s warning when I’d first entered the beach house.
“We as in us, her princes and nobles,” Barinthus said.
“Except for me,” Frost said.
“I did not say that,” he said.
“But did you mean it?” I asked, and held my hand out to Frost, so he came to stand tall and straight beside me. I leaned my head against his hip.
“Is it true that you were crowned by faerie itself with the blessing of the Goddess herself?” he asked. “Did you truly wear the crown of moonlight and shadows?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Was Doyle truly crowned with thorn and silver?”
“Yes,” I said, and played with Frost’s hand, rubbing my thumb over his knuckles, and feeling the solid comfort of his hip against my cheek.
Barinthus put his hands before his face, as if he could not bear to look at us anymore.
“What is wrong with you?” I asked.
He spoke without moving his hands. “You had won, Merry, don’t you understand that? You had won the throne, and the crowns would have silenced the other nobles.” He lowered his hands and his face looked tormented.
“You can’t know that,” I said.
“Even now you stand before me with him at your side. The one you gave up everything for.”
I finally understood what was bothering him, or thought I did. “You’re upset because I gave up the crown to save Frost’s life.”
“Upset,” he said, and he gave a harsh laugh. “Upset—no, I wouldn’t say I’m upset. If your father had been given such a blessing he would have known what to do with it.”
“My father left faerie for years to save my life.”
“You were his child.”
“Love is love, Barinthus. What matters what kind of love it is?”
He made a disgusted sound. “You are a woman, and perhaps such things move you, but Doyle.” He looked at the other man. “Doyle, you gave up everything we could have ever wished for to save the life of one man. You knew what would happen to our court and our people with a failing queen and no heir to the bloodline.”
“I expected that there would either be civil war or assassins would kill the queen and there would be a new ruler of our court.”
“How could you hold the life of one man above the better good of your entire people?” Barinthus asked.
“I think your faith in our people is too great,” Doyle said. “I think that Merry crowned by faerie and Goddess or not, the court is too deeply divided with power factions. I think that the assassins wouldn’t have stopped with the queen. They would have aimed at the new queen, at Merry, or at those closest and most powerful near her until she stood alone and helpless as they saw it. There are those who would have been happy to turn her into a puppet for their hand.”
“With us at her side and in our full power they would not have dared,” Barinthus said.
“The rest of us have been brought back into our power, but you have only regained a small portion of yours,” Rhys said. “Unless Merry brings you back fully into your powers, then you are not as powerful as most of the sidhe in this room.”
The silence in the room was suddenly heavier, and the very air was suddenly thicker, like trying to drink our breath.
“The fact that the Killing Frost may be more powerful than the great Mannan Mac Lir must rankle,” Rhys said.
“He is not more powerful than I am,” Barinthus said, but in a voice that held some of the slurring of the sea, like angry waves crashing on rock.
“Stop this,” Doyle said, and he actually moved to stand between them.
I realized that it was Barinthus’s magic making the air thick, and I remembered stories of him being able to make humans fall down dead with water flowing out of their mouths, drowned on dry land miles from water.
“And will you finally be king?” Barinthus asked.
“If you are angry with me, then be angry with me, old friend, but Frost had no say in the choices we made on his behalf. Merry and I chose freely.”
“Even now you stand guard over him,” Barinthus said.I stood up, still holding Frost’s hand. “Are you bothered that we gave up the crown for just one man, or are you bothered that we gave it up for Frost?”
“I have no quarrel with Frost as a man, or a warrior.”
“Then is it really that he’s not sidhe enough for you?”
Rhys stepped just enough around Doyle so he could meet Barinthus’s eyes. “Or do you see in Doyle and Frost what you wanted with Prince Essus but were always afraid to ask for?”
We all froze, as if his words were a bomb that we could all see falling toward us, but there was no way to stop it. There was no way to catch it, and no way to run. We just all stood there, and I had moments for my childhood memories of my father and Barinthus to run through my head. It was quick flashes. A hand on someone’s arm, a hand held a little too long, an embrace, a look, and I suddenly realized that my father’s best friend might have been more than just his friend.