"That is not true," he said.
"The fact that I gave up the crown to save Frost's life has made you doubt me."
He turned so I couldn't see his face, which was answer enough. "It was the choice of a romantic, not a queen."
"And am I a romantic, and not a king?" Doyle asked, moving a little toward the other man.
He looked from one to the other of us, and then said, "It was most unexpected that you, Darkness, would make such a choice. I thought you would help make her into the queen we needed. Instead she has made you into something soft."
"Are you calling me weak?" Doyle asked, and I didn't like the tone in his voice at all.
"Enough!" I didn't mean to shout it, but that's how it came out.
They all looked at me. "I've seen our courts ruled by fear my whole lifetime. I say that we will rule here out of fairness and love, but if there are those among my sidhe who will not take fair treatment or love from me, then there are other options." I walked toward Barinthus. It was hard to be tough when I had to crane my neck so far up to meet his eyes, but I'd been tiny among them all my life and I managed.
"You say you want me to be queen. You say you want me to be harsh, and you want Doyle to be harsh. You want us to rule the way the sidhe need to be ruled, correct?"
He hesitated, and then nodded.
"Thank the Goddess and the consort that I am not that kind of ruler, because if I was I would kill you as you stand there so arrogant, so full of your power from only a month beside the sea. I should kill you now, before you gain more power, and that is exactly what my aunt and my cousin would do."
"Andais would send her Darkness to kill me."
"I already told you I am too much my father's daughter for that."
"You would try to kill me yourself," he said.
"Yes," I said.
"And you could only defend yourself," Rhys said, "by killing both Essus's daughter and his grandchildren. I think you'd let her kill you before you'd do that."
Barinthus turned on Rhys. "Stay out of this, Cromm Cruach, or did you forget that I know your first name, a much older name?"
Rhys laughed and it startled Barinthus. "Oh, no, Mannan Mac Lir, you can't play true naming with me. I am no longer that name, and haven't been in so long that it is no longer a true name at all."
"Enough of this," I said, my voice calmer this time. "We are leaving, and I want you, Barinthus, at the main house tonight."
"I will be glad of dinner with my princess."
"Pack an overnight bag. You're going to be at the main house for a while."
"I would prefer to remain near the sea," he said.
"And I don't care what you would prefer. I say that you will move into the main house with the rest of us."
He looked almost pained. "It has been so long since I lived near the sea, Meredith."
"I know. I've seen you swimming in the water of it happier than I'd ever seen you and I would have let you stay here by your element, but today you proved that it goes to your head like some rich liquor. You are drunk with the nearness of wave and sand, and I say that you will go to the main house and sober up."
Anger filled his eyes, and his hair did that odd underwater movement in the air again. "And if I refuse to move to the main house?"
"Are you saying that you will disobey a direct order from your ruler?"
"I am asking what you will do if I do not comply," he said.
"I will exile you from this coast. I will send you back to the Unseelie Court and you can find out firsthand how Andais sacrifices the blood of all the fey to try to control the magic that remakes her kingdom. She thought that if I left, the magic would stop and she would be able to control it again, but the Goddess herself is moving again. Faerie is alive again, and I think all you old ones have forgotten what that means."
"I have forgotten nothing," he said.
"That is a lie," I said.
"I would never lie to you," he said.
"Then you lie to yourself," I said. I turned to the others. "Come on, everybody. We have a crime scene to visit."
I started for the door and most of the people in the room followed me out. I called back over my shoulder. "Be at the main house tonight in time for dinner, Barinthus, or be on a plane back to St. Louis."
"She will torture me forever if I go back," he said.
I stopped in the doorway and the crowd of guards had to make an opening so I could see him. "And isn't that exactly what you threatened to do to Galen just minutes ago?"
He looked at me, just looked at me. "You are still moved by your heart and not your head, Meredith."
"You know what they say. Never come between a woman and what she loves. Well, don't threaten what I love, for I will move the Summerlands themselves to protect what is mine." The Summerlands was one of our words for Heaven.
"I will be there for dinner," he said, and he bowed. "My Queen."
"I look forward to it," I said, and that last I didn't mean at all. The last thing I wanted at the main house was an egotistical, angry ex-deity, but sometimes decisions aren't about what you want, but about necessity. Right now, we needed to go to a crime scene and try to earn the paychecks that helped support the mass of people we'd become. If only my title had come with more money, more houses, and less trouble, but I'd yet to meet a princess of faerie who wasn't in trouble of some kind. Fairy tales are true in one respect. Before you get to the story's end, bad things and hard choices are lived through. In a way I'd come to my happily ever after ending, but unlike fairy tales, in real life there's no ending, happy or otherwise. Your story, like your life, goes on. One minute you think you have your life relatively under control, and then the next minute you realize that all that control was just an illusion.