[Merry Gentry 04] - A Stroke of Midnight (30 page)

She folded her arms under her small breasts. “You are not like the other sidhe, Meredith, you are always difficult, tricksy.”

“You would try and bat your tiny eyes at me, and have me think Royal and the rest of you are harmless? That you are the children's storybook characters you ape? Oh no, Queen Niceven, you can't have it both ways, not with me. You're either dangerous or you're not.”

She gave me a perfect child's pout. “Do I look dangerous to you, Princess?” Her voice was wheedling, and for just a moment I felt like saying, “No, of course not.”

Galen gripped my arm tight, squeezing. It helped me think.

“I've seen your true face, Queen Niceven,” he said. “Your glamour won't work on me now, not even with it pushing at me like some sort of wall.”

“Yes,” Nicca said, “I've never felt any of the demi-fey this strongly before.”

“The demi-fey are the essence of faerie,” Doyle said. “As faerie grows in power, so will they, apparently.” He didn't sound entirely happy about it.

Niceven turned to him. “Why, Darkness, if I didn't know better, I'd say you were afraid of us, too.”

“My memory is as long as yours, Niceven.” The cryptic statement seemed to please her.

“You're afraid to bring us back into our full power, and here the princess has bargained to help us do just that. Irony is sweet when it is on the right foot.”

“Be careful how much irony you enjoy, Niceven, too much irony can be bad for you.”

“Darkness, is that a threat?” Her voice didn't sound gentle at all now.

“A warning,” he said.

“Am I important enough for the Queen's Darkness to threaten? My, we have moved up at court.”

“You'll know when Doyle threatens you, little queen,” Frost said.

She bobbed in the air, and again because of Sage, I knew it was their version of a stumble. “I am not afraid of Darkness.”

Frost leaned into her, the way you'd intimidate someone by invading their personal space. Some of the effect was ruined by her wings and her size, but not all of it.

“I am not afraid of the Killing Frost either,” she said.

“You will be,” he said.

And that was how the negotiations began. They ended with a crowd of wingless demi-fey inside my room, and none of the sidhe happy about it. Niceven's idea was that perhaps it had been Sage's continuing to feed from sidhe blood that had done the damage. I couldn't argue her logic. If I didn't like Royal after tonight, I could choose one of the others, but all of them got to be in the room. We compromised, but she wouldn't tell us what she knew of the Seelie Court until after we had fed Royal. Tomorrow, she promised, if she had fed off him and scoured out our magic from his flesh. Tomorrow, we might learn some of the secrets of the Seelie Court. Tonight, we had to pay for those secrets in blood, and flesh, and magic. And, as usual, someone would be tasting my blood, taking a bit of my flesh. Where was a stunt double when you needed one?

CHAPTER 27

RHYS PACED BY THE BATHTUB, THOUGH THERE WAS PRECIOUS
little room for pacing. The bathroom was bigger than most standard modern bathrooms, but once you squeezed in Frost, Doyle, Galen, Nicca and his wings, Kitto, and me, no bathroom short of Queen Andais's personal bathroom would have been big enough. Kitto was running the bath, playing servant, which he'd started doing more and more. Andais had offered me servants, but Doyle had refused on the grounds of my safety. We couldn't trust anyone as we trusted each other. That was part of the reason. The other part was that the servant would spy for Andais, and we had too many secrets for that. We didn't share that part with Andais.

“When I escorted Major Walters and the good doctor to their cars, the FBI was still there.”

“Persistent bastard,” I said.

Rhys shook his head, and stopped beside me. “No, Merry, not persistent. Carmichael, who thought our Killing Frost was so pretty, had just gotten to the cars, too.”

“What are you saying, Rhys?” Doyle was leaning to one side of the door.

“That according to the FBI and the people who escorted Carmichael out, only a few minutes had passed since I put Carmichael outside of the mound.”

“It's been hours since then,” I said. I was sitting on the corner of the wide marble edge of the tub, trying to make myself small, so we weren't too crowded.

“Not according to the humans outside,” Rhys said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means that the sithen is playing with time,” Doyle said.

“Time always runs funny inside faerie,” I said.

“But only in pockets,” Rhys said, “and only by a few minutes, maybe an hour. Faerie has been on the same time schedule as the mortal world since before we came to America.” He leaned against the double sinks, fitting himself beside Galen.

Nicca had most of the far corner of the room for himself and the sweep of his wings. “What does it mean?”

Frost spoke from the wall on the other side of the door. “It means that it isn't only the sidhe and the demi-fey who are regaining some of their old powers.”

“You told me that the humans reacted to the entrance to faerie as if the hallway had its old glamour,” Doyle said. “Why should we be surprised that the sithen is gaining back other abilities as well.”

I hugged my knees, trying to ignore the scratchy dried blood on my jeans. Kitto was testing the nearly full tub. I said, “Sometimes you talk about the sithen as if it's just a building, sometimes you talk as if it's a being in its own right, sometimes you speak of the sithen as if it is faerie. I asked my father once if the sithen was alive, and he said yes. I asked if it was a person, and he said no. I asked if it was faerie, and he said yes. I asked if it was the totality of faerie, and he said no. Does anyone alive today actually know what the sithen are?”

“You do ask the most difficult questions sometimes.” Rhys crossed his arms, the white of his trench coat framing his pale suit. A wet line on his trousers showed where the snow had stained the cloth. He'd made two more trips outside that night than most of the rest of us.

“Does that mean you can't answer the question, or you won't?”

“You're Princess Meredith NicEssus, our future queen; if you order it, we have to answer,” he said.

I frowned at him. “I did not order you to tell me, Rhys, I asked.”

He rubbed the heel of his hand against his good eye, and when he lowered it, he looked tired. He might be boyishly handsome forever, but his face could still hold lines of weariness now and then. “I'm sorry, Merry. But if the sithen is messing with time, then we're going to have to post a guard outside of faerie, so that we can figure out the difference between the two places chronologically. That will tell us how bad it is right now, but . . .”

“But not how big the difference will grow,” Nicca said.

Rhys nodded. “This could get really bad.”

“I'm losing something here,” I said. “Why do you all look so worried?”

“Don't look at me,” Galen said. “I don't know why they all look gloomy about it either. I mean the sithen does a lot of weird stuff, it always has.”

“And what if the sithen decides to make the difference between inside faerie and outside faerie not just hours to minutes, but years to days?” Rhys said.

Galen and I exchanged a look. He said, “Can it do that?” I said, “Oh.”

“It has in the past,” Rhys said.

“I thought that the queen or king of the court controlled the time difference,” I said.

“Once,” Doyle said, “but that ability went away long ago.”

“Wait,” Galen said, “did you say the queen could control how big the time difference was?”

Several of us nodded.

“Didn't the old stories say that only hours would pass inside faerie, but centuries would pass outside in the human world?”

“Yes,” Doyle said, looking at Galen as if he had said something smart.

“We accomplished a lot in the last few hours, but the rest of the world has used up only a few minutes. In effect, our sithen is moving faster than everybody else. Isn't that opposite of the way it used to work? Didn't mortal time move faster than ours?”

I watched the rest of them exchange glances, except for Kitto, who seemed totally absorbed in running the bath. “By the looks on everyone's faces, I've missed something.”

“We had a lot to do tonight,” Galen said. “We still have a lot to do tonight, and while we get all of it done, the outside world moves at a crawl. The question is, are we the only sithen experiencing the time shift?”

Rhys hugged him one armed. “You know, you're smarter than you look.”

“Don't compliment me too much, Rhys, it'll go to my head.” But he was smiling.

“Am I slow tonight, or is everyone else just faster than I am?” I asked.

“Exactly,” Doyle said.

I frowned at him. “Exactly what?”

“Did you at any time tonight say out loud that you needed more time?” Doyle asked.

“I might have said something like, we don't have enough time to investigate the murder and play court with the queen. Not those words, but . . .” I looked at Doyle. “Are you saying that I might have wished this into happening?”

“You did make a mirror appear in your room,” Doyle said, “simply by wanting to see what the cloak looked like.”

I was suddenly so scared that cold tingled down to my fingertips. “But Doyle, that could mean that anything I say could be taken literally by the sithen.”

He nodded.

“We must find out how time is running in another sithen,” Frost said. “If the goblins or the sluagh are gaining hours on the mortal world, then faerie itself has decided to change. Sometimes it does that.”

“And if it is only our sithen?” Nicca asked.

“Then Meredith must be very, very careful what she says.” He was looking at me, and I could almost watch some idea coming to life in his mind.

“What are you thinking?” I asked him.

“Not just him,” Rhys said.

“No, not just him,” Galen said. He shivered, rubbing his arms as if he was cold, too. “For once I know what the bad news is before anyone says it.”

“Then fill me in,” I said.

“If only the queen can make time change inside the sithen, and Merry was able to do it . . .” Galen said, and left it unfinished.

“Once upon a time,” Doyle said, his voice seeming deeper, as if the low-growling echoes needed to fill all the small room, “even if you fought your way to the throne, or were elected by all the other rulers as high king, or high queen, you still could not rule a faerie mound. You could not sit on the throne of a specific sithen unless the sithen itself accepted your right to rule.”

“I haven't heard that story,” I said.

“It is a forbidden story,” Frost said, looking at Doyle.

“Why would it be forbidden?” Galen asked.

I made the logic leap this time. “Andais wasn't chosen by the sithen,” I said.

“She was in Europe,” Doyle said, “but when we arrived in America, the new faerie mound did not.”

“What do you mean ‘new'?” I asked.

“Faerie is not just a physical location. The moment Andais stepped into the new mound here, it should have been the same, but it wasn't.”

“We all assumed it was because of the third weirding, the one that the American government forced on us before they would allow us to move here,” Rhys said. “So many of us lost so much power that we—” he shrugged—“sort of looked the other way about the sithen not cuddling up to Andais.”

“She did allow the nobles to enter the sithen and have us watch them one by one,” Frost said. “If the sithen had reacted to any of them more than to her, she had agreed to step aside.”

“My aunt agreed to let the throne go to any noble the sithen chose?” I said.

“Hard to believe, I know,” Rhys said, “but she did. We all assumed that the last weirding had taken too much of her power for her to rule us. Then the worst happened.”

“The sithen knew none of them,” Doyle said.

“Okay, I understand how that would be bad, but why is it forbidden to talk about it?” I asked.

“Did Prince Essus ever explain to you how the various faerie courts came into being?” Doyle asked.

I started to say yes, of course he had, but he hadn't. “I know that once the sidhe were not simply two courts, Seelie and Unseelie, but dozens, with different kings and queens, like the goblin court and the sluagh, but more independent.”

“So independent that we fought among ourselves, until we all agreed that we needed a high king,” Rhys said. “Once there was only one sidhe high ruler, not two.”

“I know this one,” I said. “The first Unseelie sidhe ruler was cast out of the Seelie Court, but he refused to leave faerie. He went from court to court and asked for entrance, but they feared the sidhe, and so finally the only fey court left was the sluagh. The most frightening and least human of all the fey. They took him in, and from that time on any sidhe who was cast out of other courts could petition to join the sluagh.”

“Very good,” Rhys said, “but do you know when the Unseelie became a sidhe court, separate from the sluagh?”

“When there were enough sidhe who didn't want to be called sluagh,” I said.

“Almost,” Doyle said.

“Why almost?” I asked.

“At one time, a fey of a certain kind would simply become powerful enough, magical enough, for the very stuff of faerie to acknowledge them, and create a kingdom for them. One of the sidhe who had joined the sluagh was our first king. Faerie created a place for him to rule, and the sidhe left the sluagh's court and made one of our own.”

“Okay,” I said.

“We're all afraid to say it,” Rhys said, “because we've all managed not to say the part that is most likely to get us in trouble.”

“What part?” I asked.

“A court without a ruler begins to fade,” Nicca said.

They all looked at him as if surprised he'd had the courage to say it. It took me a moment to understand the implications.

It was Galen who had said it out loud. “Goddess save us, that's what's been happening to our court. We had no true ruler, so the sithen was dying. Our slice of faerie has been dying.”

“Not just ours,” Doyle said.

“Who else?” I asked.

“Our bright cousins follow a king whose sithen did not know him.”

“Their sithen didn't know any of their nobles either?” I asked.

“Rumor has it, and it's only rumor, that instead of welcoming sidhe who the sithen recognized, he exiled them,” Rhys said.

“It's not rumor,” Doyle said.

We all looked at him. “Who?” I asked.

“Aisling,” he said.

Something on Frost's face told me that he had known. The rest looked as shocked as I felt. “They had a true king and Taranis exiled him?”

Doyle and Frost nodded.

“But that is monstrous,” Nicca said. “Even Andais was willing to give up her throne if a true queen could have been found.”

“Does his court know?” I asked Doyle.

“Most, no.”

“But some?” I asked.

“Some,” he said.

“How can they support him? The Unseelie had no choice but to fade, but he had a new king to sit on the Seelie throne. They didn't have to fade.”

“Did our sithen recognize Aisling when he came here?” Galen asked.

“No,” Doyle said.

“Why not?” he asked.

Doyle shrugged, and I guess that was answer enough, or the only answer he had.

“The bath is ready,” Kitto said, his voice as neutral and empty as a servant's.

I touched his shoulder, and he gave me a small smile. Something occurred to me. “Did the goblin mound know Kurag when you came to this country?”

“I am not important enough to know such things. I do not know.”

“The goblins are less faded than the sidhe. They are still what we left them.”

“But wait,” Galen said, “the Seelie sidhe are less faded in power than we are. Why is that? Shouldn't both courts be fading at about the same rate?”

“They should be,” Doyle said.

“But they aren't,” I said.

“They don't seem to be,” Rhys said.

“You've thought of something,” Doyle said.

“What made Taranis desperate enough to help release the Nameless, one of our most dangerous magicks, into the human world to kill Maeve Reed? She'd been exiled from faerie for more than a century. It couldn't have just been Merry's visit to her. That could have gotten him to send someone to assassinate Maeve, but not to release the Nameless.” Rhys shook his head. “I've been thinking about it, and I can't make it make sense.”

“Like his inviting Merry to his ball,” Galen said. “That makes no sense either. He's hated her all her life.”