A Stroke Of Midnight   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

”

Truth was that before Queen Andais had accepted him into the Unseelie Court after the Seelie Court kicked him out, Barinthus had to promise that he would never accept the throne here, not even if it was offered. He’d been Manannan Mac Lir, and the queen and her nobles all feared his power. So he’d given his most solemn oath that he would never, personally, sit on our throne.

He bowed to the room in general and simply went back against the wall. He made it clear that he was done with questions for the day. Kitto, the half-goblin sidhe, had already moved back to his place. He was only four feet tall, and that made a lot of the media try to portray him as child-like. He was old enough to remember what the world was like before Christianity was a religion. But his appearance made the media uncomfortable. His short black curls, pale skin, and sunglasses made him look ordinary in his jeans and T-shirt. The queen didn’t have a designer suit to fit someone so short. There hadn’t been time even for the queen’s seamstress to make those kind of alterations. He got away with hugging his section of the wall.

“Princess Meredith, how will you choose your husband from among all these gorgeous men?” a reporter was asking.

“The one who gets me pregnant wins the prize,” I said, smiling.

“What if you are in love with someone else? What if you don’t love the one who gets you pregnant?”

I sighed, and didn’t fight the smile slipping away. “I am a princess, and heir to a throne. Love has never been a prerequisite for royal marriages.”

“Isn’t it traditional to sleep with one fiancé at a time, until you either get pregnant or don’t get pregnant?”

“Yes,” I said, and cursed that anyone knew our customs that well.

“Then why the marathon of men?”

“If you had the chance, wouldn’t you?” I asked, and that got them laughing. But it didn’t distract them.

“Would you marry a man you didn’t like just because he was the father of your child?”

“Our laws are clear,” I said. “I will marry the father of my child.”

“No matter who it is?” another reporter asked.

“That is our law.”

“What if your cousin Prince Cel gets one of his female guards pregnant first?”

“Then, according to Queen Andais, he will be king.”

“So it’s a race to get pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“Where is Prince Cel? No one has seen him in nearly three months.”

“I’m not my cousin’s keeper.” In fact, he was in prison for trying to kill me one too many times, and for other crimes that the queen didn’t want even the court to know. He should have been executed for some of them, but she’d bargained for her only child’s life. He was to be locked away for six months, tortured with the very magic he had used against sidhe-ancestored humans. Branwyn’s Tears, one of our most guarded ointments. It was an aphrodisiac that worked even against someone’s will. But more than that, it made your body crave to be touched, to be brought. He was chained and covered in Branwyn’s Tears. There were bets around the court that what little sanity he’d been born with would not survive it. The queen had given in to one of his guards only yesterday, to let the woman slack Cel’s need, save his sanity. And suddenly I had not one, but two, no, three attempts on my life, and one on the queen’s. It was more than a coincidence, but the queen loved her son.

Madeline was back in front of me, looking at me. “Are you all right, Princess?”

“Sorry, I’m getting a little tired. Did I miss a question?”

She smiled and nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

They repeated it, and I wished I’d missed it again. “Do you know where your cousin the prince is?”

“He’s here in the sithen, but I don’t know what he’s doing this exact moment. Sorry.”

I needed off this subject, off this stage. I signaled to Madeline, and she closed it down with a promise of a photo op in a day or two, when the princess was fully healed.

A tiny faerie with butterfly wings fluttered into camera range. This was a demi-fey. Sage, whom I’d “slept with,” could make himself human tall, but most of the demi-fey were permanently about the size of Barbie dolls, or smaller. The queen would not be happy about the little faerie fluttering in front of the cameras. When there was press in the sithen, the less-human-looking stayed away from them, and especially away from cameras, or faced the queen’s wrath.

The figure was a pale blue-pink with iridescent blue wings. She fluttered through a barrage of flashbulbs, shielding her eyes with a tiny hand. I thought she’d land on me, or maybe Doyle, but she flew the length of the stage to land on Rhys’s shoulder.

She hid herself in his long white curls. She whispered something in his ear, using his hair and hat as a shield. Rhys stood up and came to us smiling.

Doyle was standing beside me, but even that close I couldn’t hear what Rhys whispered to him.

Doyle gave a small nod, and Rhys left the room ahead of us with the tiny fey still tangled in his hair. I wanted to ask what could be important enough for Rhys to leave early in front of the press.

Someone shouted, “Rhys, why are you leaving?”

Rhys left the room with a wave and a smile.

Doyle helped me stand, then the rest of the guards closed around me like a multicolored wall, but the reporters weren’t finished.

“Doyle, Princess, what’s happened?”

“What did the little one say?”

The press conference was over; we got to ignore them. It might have been wise to give them an excuse, but Doyle either didn’t think we needed to bother or he didn’t know what to say. There was a tension in his arm where he touched me that indicated that whatever Rhys had said had shaken him. What does the Darkness fear?

My wall of bright-colored muscle marched me down the steps and out. When we were in the hallway, clear of the media, I still whispered. Modern technology was a wonderful thing, and we didn’t need some sensitive microphone picking us up. “What’s happened?”

“There are two dead bodies in one of the hallways near the kitchen.”

“Fey?” I asked.

“One, yes,” he said.

I stumbled in my high heels because I tried to stop, but his arm on mine kept us all moving. “What about the other?”

He nodded. “Yes, exactly.”

“Is it one of the reporters? Did one of them go wandering?”

Frost leaned in from the line of men. “It cannot be. We had spells that would make them unable to leave the safe path inside the sithen.”

Doyle glanced at him. “Then explain a dead human in our sithen with a camera beside his hand.”

Frost opened his mouth, then closed it. “I cannot.”

Doyle shook his head. “Nor can I.