"Were they really, or is that just what legend made of them?" I was asking someone who might actually know.
Mistral and Doyle exchanged a look. Sholto wasn't old enough to know the answer. "Clothra lived in a time when gods and goddesses were allowed to marry whom they would," Doyle said.
"She wouldn't have been the first goddess to marry a close relative," Mistral said.
"But the point is, she didn't marry any of them, and the sovereign goddesses, the ones whom humans had to marry to rule, had many lovers."
"Are you saying that you're a sovereign goddess, a living embodiment of the land itself?" Sholto asked with a raised eyebrow.
"No, but Iamsaying that you wouldn't like what would happen if you tried to make me be monogamous with just you."
Sholto's handsome face set in petulant lines, and it was close enough to one of Frost's favorite emotions to make my chest tight. "I know you do not love me, Princess."
"Don't make this about hurt feelings, Sholto. Don't be ordinary. In the old days there were different kings, but only one goddess to marry to rule, right?"
They exchanged looks. "But they were human kings, so the goddess outlasted them," Doyle said.
"From what I heard, the sovereign goddess didn't give up her lovers just because she had a king," Sholto said.
Doyle looked down at me. I couldn't read the expression on his face. "Are you saying you will change a thousand years of tradition among us?" he asked.
"If that is what it takes, then yes."
He looked down at me, the expressions on his face all mixed together. A frown, a half-smile, amusement in his eyes; but what I valued the most was the fear leaving them. For it had been fear when he saw the marks on Sholto and me.
"I will ask again," Mistral said. "Where are we? I do not recognize this bower we rest in."
"We are in my kingdom," Sholto said.
"The sluagh have no place so fair inside their faerie mound," Mistral said, his voice thick with certainty and sarcasm.
"How would any of the Unseelie nobles know what is inside my kingdom? Once Meredith's father, Prince Essus, died none of you darkened my door again. We were good enough to fight for you, but not to visit." Sholto's voice held that anger that he'd come to me with, an anger forged of years of being told he wasn't quite good enough to be truly Unseelie. There had been years of the sluagh being used as a weapon. And like all weapons, you use it, but you do not ask a nuclear bomb if it wants to blow things up. You simply push a button, and it does its job.
"I have been inside your mound," Doyle said. His deep voice held an edge of something. Was it anger? Warning? Whatever it was, it wasn't good.
"Yes, and the sluagh would not follow the hound when they already had a huntsman." The two men glared across the bed at each other.
I'd known there was bad blood between them when they first came to me in L.A., but this was the first hint I had at what might lay behind it.
"Are you saying the queen tried to put Doyle in charge of the sluagh?" I asked. I sat up in the bed, the petals spilling around, as if the blanket had fallen back to being just flower petals.
The men looked up at the trees and vines that held the canopy aloft. "Perhaps we should finish this discussion in a more solid part of faerie?" Mistral asked.
"I agree," Doyle said.
"What do you mean 'more solid part'?" Sholto asked, laying a hand on the tree that formed one post.
"The blanket has gone back to what it began as. Some faerie magic does that," Doyle said.
"You mean like in the fairy tales, it only lasts a while," I asked.
He nodded.
A voice called from a distance, "My King, Princess, it is Henry. Can you hear me?"
Sholto answered, "We hear you."
"The opening to your new room is beginning to grow narrow, My King. Should you come away before it closes into a wall again?" He tried for neutral, but the worry was plain in his voice.
"Yes," Doyle said. "I think we should."
"I am king here, Darkness, and I say what we will and will not do."
"Gentlemen," I said, "as princess and future queen of all, I'll break the tie. We go before the wall grows solid."
"I will agree with our princess," Mistral said. He crossed to us and held his hand out to me.
I took the offered hand. He smiled at that one touch, wrapping his much larger hand around my small one, but the smile was full of something softer than anything I'd seen before. He started leading me down the path toward the bone gate. The herbs on the path were no longer trying to touch me. In fact, the stones that had been held together by the herbs were a little lose underfoot, as if whatever had formed them was letting go. We left Doyle and Sholto kneeling on the bed still glaring at each other. When we were back in Sholto's original bedroom, I would ask more questions about their mutual dislike.
The bone gate collapsed at Mistral's touch so that it was only a pile of debris. "Whatever held this place together is failing," he called back to them. "We need to get the princess to safety before it collapses completely."
Mistral picked me up, and carried me through the wreck of bones. Beyond the gate we could glimpse Sholto's bedroom, and Henry's worried face peering at us. The wall that had been as large as a cavern mouth was much smaller. I could actually see the stones knitting together like something alive, remaking themselves. They were strangely fluid; it was like watching flowers bloom, if you could catch them at it.
Mistral carried me through the opening, and we were back in Sholto's wine and purple bedroom. Henry bowed to us, then went back to peering behind us for his king. The opening continued to grow smaller, and neither of them was hurrying. Was it some kind of ego contest? All I knew was that with all that had happened my nerves couldn't stand watching them stroll toward the rapidly diminishing opening.
I called after them, "I will be really cross if you both get trapped behind the wall. We leave for Los Angeles tonight."
The two men exchanged a glance, then they began to jog toward us. Under other circumstances I might have enjoyed the view of both of them running toward me, nude, but the wall was closing. If it closed completely, I wasn't certain that we could reopen it. There were hands of power among the sidhe that could blast through stone, but neither Sholto nor Doyle possessed such a hand.
I called, "Hurry!"
Doyle broke into a run, spilling forward like some black, sleek animal, as if running were the purpose all that muscle and flesh had been designed for. I didn't get to see him from a distance much. He was always at my side.