She had my mother’s long, wavy hair, still a deep chestnut brown even though she was several hundred years old. Her eyes were liquid and brown and traditionally lovely. The rest of her wasn’t so traditional. Her face was more brownie than human, which meant she had no nose. The holes were there, but nothing else, and very little lips, so that her face seemed skeletal. Her skin was wrinkled and brown and it wasn’t from age, just taking after her brownie heritage. The eyes might have been my great-grandmother’s eyes, but the hair had to be my great-grandfather’s. He had been a Scottish farmer, and farmers didn’t have portraits painted. I had only glimpses of Gran and my mother and aunt to see what I could see of the human side of my family.
Gran came to the edge of the bed and laid her hand over mine. “Dearie, my little dear, what ha’ they done to thee?” Her eyes were shiny with unshed tears.
I moved my free hand to put over hers, where it lay over the IV. “Don’t cry, Gran, please.”
“An’ why not?” she asked.
“Because if you do, so will I.”
She gave a loud sniff, and nodded briskly. “That’s a good reason, Merry. If you can be this brave, so can I.”
My eyes burned, and my throat was suddenly tight. It was irrational, but somehow I felt safer with this tiny woman beside me than I had with the guards. They were trained to give their life for me, and they were some of the finest warriors the court could boast, but I hadn’t felt safe, not really. Now, Gran was here, and there was still something of that childhood feeling that as long as she was with me nothing truly bad could happen. If only it were true.
“The king will suffer for this outrage, Merry, my oath on that.”
The tears began to fade, on a wash of pure terror. I gripped her hand tightly. “I’ve forbidden the men to either assassinate him or challenge him to a duel, Gran. You are to leave the Seelie Court alone, too.”
“I am not your bodyguard to be bossed around, child.” The look on her face was one I knew well, that stubborn set to her eyes, her thin shoulders. I didn’t want to see it on this topic.
“No, but if you get yourself killed trying to defend my honor, that won’t help me.” I rose, grabbing at her arm. “Please, Gran, I couldn’t bear to lose you and know it was my fault.”
“Ach, ’twouldn’t be your fault, Merry. It would be that bastard king.”
I shook my head, almost sitting up with all the tubes and wires tugging at me. “Please, Gran, promise me you won’t do anything foolish. You have to be around to help with the babies.”
Her face softened, and she patted my hand. “So it is to be twins like my own girls.”
“They say twins skip a generation. I guess it’s true,” I said. The door opened and the doctor and the nurse were there again.
“I told you gentlemen not to upset her,” Dr. Mason said in her sternest voice.“Ah, and it were me,” Gran said. “I’m sorry, Doctor, but as her grandmother, I’m a wee bit upset at what has happened.”
The doctor must have already seen Gran, because she didn’t do that double take that most humans do. She just gave Gran a stern look and waved her finger at her. “I don’t care who is doing it. If you can’t stop sending her vitals up and down and sideways, then you are going to have to leave, all of you.”
“We’ve explained before,” Doyle said. “The princess must be under guard at all times.”
“There are policemen just outside the door, and more of your guard.”
“She can’t be alone, Doctor.” This from Rhys.
“Do you truly think the princess is still in danger? Here in the hospital?” she asked.
“Yes,” Rhys said.
“I do,” Doyle and Sholto said together.
“A powerful man with magic at his beck and call, who’d rape his own niece, might do anything,” Gran said.
The doctor looked uncomfortable. “Until we have a piece of DNA to compare to the king’s, we don’t have proof that it was his….” She hesitated.
“Sperm,” I said for her.
She nodded, and got a death grip on her stethoscope. “Very well. His sperm that we found. We have confirmed Mr. Rhys and the missing guard Frost as two of the donors, but we can’t confirm who the other two are yet.”
“Other two?” Gran asked.
“It’s a long story,” I said. Then I thought of something. “How did you get DNA to compare for Frost?”
“Captain Doyle gave me some hair.”
I looked past Gran at Doyle. “How did you just happen to have a lock of his hair with you?”
“I told you of the dream, Meredith.”
“So what?”
“We exchanged locks of hair, to give to you as a token. He had mine and would have given it to you to remember me if I had been chosen. I gave a few strands of the lock to the doctors for comparison.”
“Where were you hiding it, Doyle? You had no pockets as a dog.”
“I gave it to another guard for safekeeping. One who did not travel into the Golden Court with us.”
Just saying it that way meant he’d planned on the possibility of none of them surviving. It didn’t make me feel any better to hear that. We had all survived, but the fear was still there deep inside me. The fear of loss.
“Who did you trust to hold such a token?” I asked.
“The men I trust most are in this room,” he said in that dark voice that seemed to match his color. It was the kind of voice that the night itself would use, if it were male.
“Yes, and by your earlier words, you planned for failure as well as success. So you left the locks of hair with someone you didn’t take inside the Golden Court.”
He came to stand at the foot of the bed, not so near Gran. Doyle was aware that he had been the Queen’s Darkness, her assassin, for centuries, and many folk of the court were still nervous around him. I appreciated that he gave Gran room, and I approved of him sending Galen to fetch her. I wasn’t certain there was another guard among my men whom she would have trusted. The rest had been too much like enemies for too long.
I studied his dark face, though I knew that his face sometimes didn’t help me at all. In the beginning he had let his emotions show around me, but as I’d come to read his face better he’d schooled that face. I knew that, if he didn’t wish it, I would gain nothing from his face but the pleasure of looking at it.
“Who?” I asked.
“I left both locks of hair with Kitto.”
I stared at him, and didn’t try to keep the surprise off my face. Kitto was the only man in my life who was shorter than Gran. He was four feet even, eleven inches shorter than she. But his skin was moonlight white like mine, and his body a perfect male replica of the sidhe guards, except for the line of glittering, iridescent scales down his back, the tiny fold-away fangs in his mouth, and the huge slit-pupiled eyes in their sea of blue. All that proved that his father had been, or was, a snake goblin. His curling black hair, his white skin, and the magic that sex with me had awakened were from his mother’s bloodline. But Kitto had not known either parent. His sidhe mother had left him to die at the edge of the goblin mound. He’d been saved, because newborns are too small to make a good meal, and sidhe flesh is valued for food among the goblins. Kitto had been given to a female goblin to raise until he was big enough to eat, like a piglet being saved for Yule dinner. But the goblin female had come to…love him. Love him enough to keep him alive and treat him as another goblin, not as food on the hoof, as it were.
The other guards had not considered Kitto one of them. He was too weak, and though Doyle had insisted that he hit the gym along with the rest so there were muscles under that white skin, Kitto would never be a true warrior.
Doyle answered the question that must have been plain on my face. “Everyone I trusted more went into the faerie mound with us. Of those we left behind, who would have understood what those two locks of hair would have meant to you, our princess? Who but one of the men who had been with you since the beginning of this adventure? Only Nicca was left behind, and though a better warrior than Kitto, he is not stronger of will. Besides, our Nicca is soon to be a father, and I would not involve him in our fight.”
“It is his fight, too,” Rhys said.
“No,” Doyle said.
“If we lose, and Merry does not take the throne, our enemies will kill Nicca and his soon-to-be bride, Biddie.”
“They would nae dare harm a sidhe woman who carried a child inside her,” Gran said.
“I think some of them would,” Rhys said.
“I agree with Rhys,” Galen said, “I think Cel would rather see all of faerie destroyed than lose his chance to follow his mother onto the throne.”
Gran touched his arm. “Ya have grown cynical, boy.”
He smiled at her but it left his green eyes cautious, almost hurt. “I’ve grown wise.”
She turned to me. “I hate to think that any sidhe noble is so hateful, even that one.”
“The last I heard from my aunt, my cousin, Cel, had plans to get me with child, and we’d rule together.”
A look of disgust showed on Gran’s face. “You’d die first.”“But now, I’m already pregnant, and it can’t be his. Rhys and Galen are right; he’ll kill me now if he can.”