Cathbodua and Usna were on the love seat, with her holding him. Cathbodua’s raven-black hair spilled only to her shoulders, part of it mingling with the black trench coat that she’d laid on the back of the love seat. The coat was a cloak of raven feathers, but like some other powerful items it could change, chameleonlike, into what worked best for the setting. Her skin looked paler against the pure blackness of the hair, though I knew it was no more white than my own. Usna was a contrast of colors compared to her. He looked like a calico cat, his white moonlight skin marked with black and red. Like the cat his mother had been shape-shifted into when she bore him, he was curled up in her lap, or as much of his six-foot-tall frame as would fit was curled up in her lap.
He’d undone his hair so that it spilled around her black clothes and her stark beauty like a fur blanket. Cathbodua stroked his hair idly as they both watched the emotional show before them. His gray eyes, the most uncatlike thing about him, and her black ones had almost the same expression in them. They were enjoying the turmoil in that dispassionate way that some animals have. Once he’d been able to turn into the cat he was colored to match, and once she could shift into the shape of a raven or a crow, and not have to depend on borrowing the eyes of some true bird for her spying. It made them both a little less human, or sidhe, and something more basic.
Of course, I hadn’t realized until that moment that they’d been sleeping together. They’d been partners on guard duty, but until I saw the distant and somewhat scary Cathbodua petting him, I hadn’t realized it was more. They had hidden it well.
Sholto seemed to understand, or maybe I looked surprised because he said, “You letting the other guards sleep together made them reveal their own liaison.”
“Nothing makes either of them do anything. They chose to share because they thought it was safe.”
Sholto nodded. “Agreed.” He moved forward farther into the room, and since I had my arm in his, he moved me with him like it was the beginning of a dance.
Galen started toward us, smiling, and then Barinthus moved in a blur that I couldn’t follow with my eyes. Galen was suddenly airborne and heading toward the big glass windows and the sea, and rocks, below.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
GALEN HIT THE CORNER OF WALL JUST TO THE SIDE OF THE WINDOWS. The wall cracked with the impact of his body, crumbling around him like one of those cartoon moments where people go through walls. It wasn’t a perfect outline of his body, but as he sagged against the wall, I could see where his arm had flung out and back trying to take some of the impact.
He was shaking his head, trying to get up as Barinthus strode toward him. I tried to run forward, but Sholto held me back. Doyle moved faster than I ever could to put himself in the bigger man’s path. Frost went to Galen.
“Get out of my way, Darkness,” Barinthus said, and a wave rose against the glass, spilling across it. We were far too high for the sea to reach us without aid.
“Would you steal a guard from the princess?” Doyle asked. He was trying to look at ease, but even I could see his body tensed, one foot dug into the floor in preparation for a blow, or some other very physical action.“He insulted me,” Barinthus said.
“Perhaps, but he is also the best of us at personal glamour. Only Meredith and Sholto can compare with him for disguise, and we need him to use his magic this day.”
Barinthus stood in the middle of the floor glaring down at Doyle. He took a deep breath, then let it out in one sharp gust. His shoulders lowered visibly, and he shook himself hard enough to make all that hair ruffle like feathers, though no bird I’d ever known could boast so many shades of blue on them.
He looked across the room at me with Sholto’s hand still holding my arm. “I am sorry, Meredith. That was childish. You need him today.” He took another deep breath and let it out again so that it was loud in the thick silence of the room.
Then he looked past Doyle’s still-ready form. Frost was helping Galen to his feet, though he seemed a little unsteady, as if without Frost’s hand he might have been unable to stand.
“Pixie,” Barinthus called out, and the ocean slapped against the windows higher and stronger this time.
Galen’s father had been a pixie who had gotten the queen’s lady-in-waiting pregnant. Galen stood a little straighter, the green of his eyes going from its usual rich green to something pale and edged with white. His eyes going pale was not a good sign. It meant that he was well and truly pissed. I had only seen his eyes that pale a handful of times.
He shook Frost’s hand off, and the other man let him go, though his face showed clearly that he wasn’t sure it was a good idea.
“I’m as sidhe as you are, Barinthus,” Galen said.
“Don’t ever try to use your pixie wiles on me again, Greenman, or the next time I won’t miss the windows.”
I realized in that moment that Rhys had been right. Barinthus was beginning to take on the role of king, because only a king would have been so bold to the father of my child. I could not let it stand unchallenged. I could not.
“It wasn’t the pixie in him that let him almost bespell the great Mannan Mac Lir,” I said.
Sholto’s hand squeezed my arm, as if trying to tell me that he wasn’t sure this was a good idea. It probably wasn’t, but I knew I had to say something. If I didn’t I might as well concede my “crown” to Barinthus now.
Barinthus turned those angry eyes on me. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that Galen has gained powerful magic through being one of my lovers, and one of my kings. He’d have never come so close to fogging the mind of Barinthus before.”
Barinthus gave a small nod. “He has grown in power. They all have.”
“All my lovers,” I said.
He nodded, wordlessly.
“You truly are angry that I have not taken you to my bed at least once, not because you want sex from me, but because you want to know if it would give you back everything you have lost.”
He would not look at me, and his hair washed around him again with that sense of underwater movement. “I waited until you came back into the room, Meredith. I wanted you to see Galen put in his place.” He looked at me then, but there was nothing I could understand on his face. My father’s best friend and one of the most frequent visitors to the house we had lived in in the human world was not the man before me now. It was as if his few weeks here by the sea had changed him. Was this arrogance and pettiness what he’d been like when he first came to the Unseelie Court? Or had he already been diminished in power even then?
“Why would you want me to see that?” I asked.
“I wanted you to know that I had enough control not to send him out the window, where I could use the sea to drown him. I wanted you to see that I chose to spare him.”
“To what purpose?” I asked. Sholto drew me in against his body so that I wrapped my arms around him almost absently. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to protect me or just to comfort me, or maybe even just to comfort himself, though touch is more comfort to the lesser fey than to the sidhe. Or maybe he was warning me. The question was, warning me about what?
“I wouldn’t drown,” Galen said.
We all looked at him.
He repeated it. “I am sidhe. Nothing of the natural world can kill me. You could shove me under the sea but you couldn’t drown me, and I wouldn’t explode from pressure changes either. Your ocean can’t kill me, Barinthus.”
“But my ocean can make you long for death, Greenman. Trapped forever in the blackest depths, the water made near solid around you as secure as any prison, and more torturous. The rest of the sidhe cannot drown, but it still hurts to have the water go down your lungs. Your body still craves air and tries to breathe the water. The pressure of the depths cannot crush your body, but it still presses down. You would be forever in pain, never dying, never aging, but always in torment.”
“Barinthus,” I said, and that one word held the shock I felt. I clung to Sholto now, because I needed the comfort. It was a fate truly worse than death that he threatened Galen with, my Galen.
Barinthus looked at me, and whatever he saw on my face didn’t please him. “Don’t you see, Meredith, that I am more powerful than many of your men?”
“Are you doing this in some twisted bid to make me respect you?” I asked.
“Think how powerful I could be at your side if I had my full powers.”
“You’d be able to destroy this house and everyone in it. You said as much in the other room,” I said.
“I would never harm you,” he said.
I shook my head, and pulled away from Sholto. He held on to me for a moment, then he let me stand on my own. It was how this next part had to be done.
“You would never hurt my person, but if you had done that terrible thing to Galen, stolen him as husband and father for me, it would be harming me, Barinthus. Surely you see that?”
His face fell back into that handsome unreadable mask.
“You don’t understand that, do you?” I asked, and the first trickle of real fear wormed its way up my spine.
“We could form your court into a force to be feared, Meredith.”
“Why would we need it to be feared?”
“People only follow out of love or fear, Meredith.”
“Don’t go all Machiavellian on me, Barinthus.”