It was a long, cold walk from the parking area to the faerie mounds. The snow was knee-deep on me, and there was no way for my mortal body to wade through it in four-inch spike heels and a miniskirt. Not without breaking an ankle or getting frostbite. So I was carried, and the only one who wasn't wet through was Barinthus. Everyone else's clothes began to freeze in the icy wind, and those who had no magical protection against the elements shivered as we waded through the snow.
Barinthus carried me easily. What would have had me floundering in the powdery depths was nothing to his height. I'd always known he was two feet taller than me, but as he carried me in his arms pressed against his broad chest, I was aware as I had never been before how physically imposing he was.
It was both comforting to ride in his strong arms, and unnerving. Curled up in his arms, I felt quite the child. He had carried me many times as a child, but now I had memories of him that did not match being child-like in his arms. I lay against his body and felt not embarrassed, but not comfortable, either.
I looked up at him from the nest he'd made of his coat for me. If he was cold without it, I could not tell. He looked out before him, and not at me, at all, as if I were indeed a child that filled his arms. Maybe I was to him. Maybe what had happened at the press conference hadn't changed how he saw me. The magic had meant something to him, that I knew, but as for the rest, perhaps I was no more than his old friend's daughter. He had always been more of a true uncle to me than any to whom I was related by genetics.
If it had been almost any other guard whom I had had such an intimate moment with and he'd ignored me like this, I would have done something to make certain he could not ignore me. But it wasn't anyone else, it was Barinthus, and somehow it seemed beneath both our dignities for me to grope him.
I must have sighed heavier than I meant to, because my breath came out in a cold white cloud. "Are you warm enough, Princess?"
The moment he asked, I realized that I shouldn't have been. I was coatless with almost nothing on my legs and lower extremities. "I'm warm enough, and why is that?" Then I realized what he'd called me. "You called me Princess. You never use my title."
He looked down at me, his clear eyelid flickering into sight, then vanishing again. "Do you not wish to be warm?"
"That is an evasion, old friend, not an answer."
He gave that deep chuckle that passed for a laugh. Held this close to his chest, the sound of it reverberated through my body, caressed me in places nothing should have touched me, save magic.
I shivered under that touch.
"My apologies, Princess, it has been long since I felt this much power. It will take me time to control all of it as finely as I once did."
"You're keeping me warm."
"Yes," he said, "can you not feel it?"
I was safe behind the shields I wore every day, every night. Shields that kept me from moving through a world of wonderment and magic. Some fey simply existed in the raw magic that surrounded everything, but I had found it confusing, frightening, as a child. My father had taught me how to shield out the noise of the everyday magic. But I should have been able to feel a spell done next to my skin. Even through the everyday shields.
I didn't lower my shields, because we were too close to faerie. I wasn't sure if it was being mortal, or merely not as powerful, but I found that without my shields to hide behind, the power of faerie was near overwhelming. Of course if it were either of those things, the humans who occasionally lived among us wouldn't have survived long. Madeline Phelps had no magic, no psychic gifts. How did she survive? How did she keep from being driven mad by the singing of the sithen?
I sent a tiny tendril of my own power through my shields. Many would have had to drop shields to do magic, but they were sidhe who did not have to weave their protection so close to their skin, as I did. With every loss there is some gain; with every gain, some loss.
I could feel his magic close above us, like an invisible pressure around us. We moved in a circle of his magic. I tested that magic, and it felt warm and vaguely liquid. I closed my eyes and tried to see his shield inside my head. I had an image of water rolling turquoise and lovely, warm as blood from a shore that was far from here, and always warm.
I could have done something similar by calling the heat of the sun, or the memory of warm bodies under blankets, but I would have had to fight to maintain the spell while I moved. Standing still, I was good at all kinds of shielding; moving, not so good.
"The water is very warm," I said.
He said, "Yes," without looking at me.
Galen came up to stride beside us. He was shivering in his wet clothes. Ice had formed in strands of his shorter hair, and there was a tiny cut on his cheek. His hair was just long enough to touch his face with the frozen strands. "If I hop on your back, will you keep me warm, too?"
"The sidhe are impervious to the cold," Barinthus said.
"Speak for yourself," Galen said, teeth nearly chattering.
Nicca waded through the snow on our other side. He was shivering, too. "I have never felt the cold as I do this day." His wings were held tightly together, rimmed with frost, like a stained-glass window in the snow.
"It is the wings," Sage called from behind us. Rhys had actually allowed the smaller man to ride on his back. Rhys seemed totally unaffected by the cold. But Sage huddled against Rhys, and I wondered why Rhys didn't help the demi-fey keep warm, as Barinthus helped me. "We are butterflies, and that is not a creature meant for winter snow."
"I am sidhe," Nicca said.
"As, apparently, am I," Sage called, "but I am still freezing my nuts off."
Galen laughed and nearly stumbled in the snow.
Doyle called back from the front of our little group. "If you will stop gossiping, we can all get inside more quickly, and all will be warm."
"Why aren't you shivering?" Galen asked.
Amatheon answered over to the far right, shivering with his own newly shortened hair icy and cutting his cheeks every time the wind blew it against his skin. "The Darkness is never cold."
Onilwyn called from the far left. He was shivering, too, but at least his long hair kept the ice in his hair from lashing his face. "And you cannot freeze the Killing Frost."
The mention of him made me glance back to see him bringing up the rear. It wasn't that he couldn't have walked faster, because he could have - the cold truly meant nothing to him - but Doyle had ordered him to be our rear guard. There had been one attempt on my life, they were taking no chances.
I realized we were missing one of our number. I had to raise up to find Kitto struggling behind us in the drifts. I think I would have asked someone to help him, but Frost fished him out of the snow and tossed him up on his shoulders. He did it without asking. He did it without a word of any kind.
Kitto didn't say thank you, for both Frost and he were old, and among the oldest of us, thank you was an insult. You had to be younger than three hundred to be comfortable with modern niceties. Which meant that only Galen and I would have thanked someone for a thank you. Everyone else was too old.
I settled back into Barinthus's arms and magic. "Why am I suddenly Princess to you, Barinthus, and not Meredith? You've called me Meredith or Merry-girl since I was a child."
"You are no longer a child." He stared studiously ahead as if the way were treacherous and he had to be careful. I did not think it was the snow that he feared.
"You're trying to distance yourself from me?"
"No." Then a small smile curled his lips. "Well, perhaps, but not a-purpose."
"Then why?" I asked.
He glanced down at me again, and that flicker of eyelid came and went again. "Because you are princess, and heir to the throne. And I have too many enemies among the sidhe to be allowed in your bed."
"Once they learn you have come back into your godhead..."
"No, Meredith, if they discover that, then they will try to slay me before I have returned to my full powers."
I started to say, They will not dare, but I knew better. "How much danger have you been in, staying here and trying to drum up support for my claim to the throne?"
He would not look at me again. "Some," he said.
"Barinthus," I said, "truth between us."
"I do not lie, Princess. Some is an honest answer."
"Is it a complete answer?" I asked.
That made him smile again. "No."
"Would you give me a complete answer?"
"No," he said.
"Why not?"
"Because it would make you worry when you leave again, and I remain behind."
"Everyone else the ring has recognized my aunt has sent to Los Angeles with me."
"You know what they call me behind my back."
"Kingmaker," I said.
"Queenmaker now." He shook his head, that long blue hair trailing like a cloak behind him in the sudden rise of wind. "They have feared me as a power behind the throne for millennia. Do you believe they would tolerate me as your consort, knowing that I might become king?" He shook his head again. "No, Meredith, no, the queen herself understands this. It is why she did not send me the last time you came home. I have too many enemies, and too much power, to be allowed so near the throne."
"And if you got me pregnant?"
He stared off into the distance. "We have had our moment, Meredith. The queen cannot allow us more."
"This isn't what you said in the car, when Usna suggested it."
"We had many ears in the car, and not all of them our friends," he said.
"Barinthus - " He hushed me with a small shake of his head.
I glanced up and found both Amatheon and Onilwyn closer than they had been. Close enough perhaps, to hear our words. I knew almost with a certainty that they were spies for Queen Andais. The question was, who else would they spy for? Did Queen Andais really believe that either man would tell secrets only to her? No, it wasn't their loyalty she counted upon. It was their fear. Andais counted on all the sidhe fearing her more than anyone else.
Yet someone had tried to kill me. Someone had risked the queen's anger. Either they did not fear her as they once had, or fear alone is not enough to rule a people. She was still the Queen of Air and Darkness, and that was plenty scary enough for me. But I'd never believed that fear alone was enough to rule the sidhe. Of course, neither had my father, and his lack of ruthlessness had gotten him killed. If I survived to come to the throne, I knew I could not be Andais; I didn't have the stomach for it. But I also knew I could not be my father, because the sidhe already saw me as weak. If I were as compassionate as my father, it would be my death. If you cannot rule by fear, or by love, what is left? To that, I had no answer. As the faerie mounds rose out of the winter twilight, I realized that I didn't truly believe there was an answer. Two words came into my mind as if someone had whispered them: ruthless and fair.
Could you be ruthless and be fair, at the same time? Isn't to be ruthless, to be unfair? I'd always thought so, and my father had taught me so, but maybe there was a middle ground between the two. And if there was, could I find it? And if I did, did I have enough power, enough allies, to walk that middle road? To that last question, I truly had no answer, because I knew enough of court politics to understand that no one really knows how much power she has, how good her friends are, how stout her allies, until it's too late, and she's either won, or lost; lived or died.