A Stroke Of Midnight   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

He was the youngest of the Queen’s Ravens, only seventy-five years older than me. Among the sidhe it was almost like being raised together. I’d thought that open, handsome face was the perfect face since I was fourteen, or maybe younger. It was Galen that I wanted my father to let me be engaged to, but he had chosen another. That engagement had lasted seven years, but there had been no children, and in the end, he had told me I was too human for him. Not sidhe enough. It had made me wonder even more why my father wouldn’t let me have Galen in the first place.

He turned lovely green eyes to me and smiled, and I smiled back. He was as armed as any of them with blade and guns, but there was a softness to him that most of the others had lost centuries before either he or I had been born. He’d give his life for me, and would have when I was a child, unlike the rest of them. But as a politician he was something of a disaster, and that could be fatal in the high courts of faerie.

Someone touched my shoulder. I jumped, and found Madeline with her hand over my mike. She leaned in and whispered, “You’re staring at him. Let’s not repeat the Frost incident, shall we?” She stepped back with a smile already for the press, hitting the switch at her waist.

I had to keep my face turned away from the crowd because I was blushing. I didn’t blush much, and by human standards it wasn’t too dark. Sidhe skin just doesn’t flush the way human skin tones do. Of course, keeping my face away from the cameras meant that Galen could see me. Some days it’s only a choice of embarrassments, not an escape from them.

Madeline was saying, “Princess Meredith is getting a little tired. We may have to cut this short, guys, sorry.”

There was a general outcry, and a renewed flash of cameras, which was bad, because Galen came to me. He knelt in front of me, beside my chair, and was tall enough that, from the shoulders up, he was still clearly visible to them. He touched my chin, so gently, with just the tips of his fingers. It made me look at him. It made me forget that we were both in profile to the cameras. He leaned his face closer to me, making me forget that we were onstage. I leaned in toward him, and his hand cupped the side of my face. That made me forget everything else. I have no explanation for it. We’d shared a bed for months. He was a disaster politically, and showing him this much favor in front of everyone could endanger him, but I wasn’t thinking that when we kissed. I wasn’t thinking anything, and all I could see was the pleased look on his face, the look in his eyes. He’d loved me since I was seventeen, and that was, in his eyes, as if nothing had changed and no time had passed.

The queen had ordered me not to show favoritism. She was going to be angry with me, with him, with us, but after Frost’s little incident, as Madeline called it, what was one more? It was bad, and still I kissed him. Still I wanted to kiss him. Still, for just a moment, the world narrowed down to Galen’s face, his hand against my skin, and his mouth on mine.

It was a soft, chaste kiss, I think because he knew if he kissed me too hard, I’d lose my hold on the glamour that kept Frost and me from looking like lipstick casualties. Galen drew back, and his eyes held that soft surprise that they did sometimes, as if he still couldn’t believe he was allowed to kiss me, allowed to touch me. I’d caught the same look on my face in the bedroom mirror a time or two.

“Do we all get a kiss?” The voice was deep and held the rough sloughing of the sea. Barinthus moved toward us in a swirl of his hair, the color of oceans. The turquoise of the Mediterranean; the deeper medium blue of the Pacific; a grey-blue like the ocean before a storm, sliding into a blue that was nearly black, where the water runs deep and thick like the blood of sleeping giants. The colors moved and flowed into one another so that the actual where and what his hair looked like was ever-changing, like the ocean itself. He’d once been a god of the sea. I’d only recently discovered that he had been Manannan Mac Lir, but that was a secret. Now he was Barinthus, a fallen god of the sea. He moved gracefully across the stage, all near seven feet of him. His eyes were blue but with a slit pupil like a cat or a deep-sea animal. He had a second clear membrane that could close over his eye when he was underwater, and would often flicker when he was nervous. It flickered just a touch now.

I wondered if anyone in the crowd of reporters knew how much it cost this very private man to have suggested a kiss, and make himself the target of all these cameras?

Galen had realized he’d misbehaved because he showed me with his eyes that he was sorry. Unfortunately, his face wasn’t that hard for anyone to read, including the reporters. The queen had said no favorites. Our behavior was going to force me to try to prove I had none. After what Galen and I had just done, that was going to be difficult.

A lot of the men standing with me would have played for the cameras, and it would have cost them, or me, nothing. Barinthus was not one of them. He’d been my father’s friend, and by American standards we hadn’t had sex. Not even by Bill Clinton’s standards. If I’d been him, I would have stayed against the wall, but he held to a higher standard of truth even than most of the sidhe.

I looked up at Barinthus, and with me sitting and him standing, it took awhile to get all the way to his face. “If you like.” I kept my voice light and my face pleasant. Barinthus and I had never kissed, and the first kiss should not be on film.

It was Rhys who saved the day. “If Barinthus gets a kiss, then so do I.”

Doyle said, “To be fair, we all should.”

Barinthus gave a slight smile. “I would bow to the larger need, and take my kiss in private.”

“Galen and Frost have already had theirs,” Rhys said, and as Galen went back to his place in line, Rhys pretended to box his ears.

Barinthus did a very graceful bow and tried to slink back to his place. But that wasn’t happening. A reporter asked, “Lord Barinthus, have you decided to go from being kingmaker to being king?” No sidhe would have called him kingmaker to his face, or queenmaker either. But the media, well, he couldn’t box their ears.

He knelt beside me, rather than lean into the mike. Kneeling down, his head was about even with mine. “I doubt I will stay with the princess as a permanent member of her guard.”

“Why not?”

“I am needed elsewhere.