The Fear Dearg could be taller than an average human or they could be shorter than me by a foot, and almost any size in between. The only sameness from one to the other was that they were not humanly handsome and they wore red.
The voice that answered Doyle's question was high pitched though definitely male, but it was querulous with that tone that usually means great age in a human. I'd never heard that tone in the voice of a fey. "Why, I saved a parking spot for you, cousin."
"We are not kin, and how did you know to save a parking place for us?" Doyle asked, and there was now no hint of his weakness in the car in his deep voice.
He ignored the question. "Oh, come. I'm a shape-shifting, illusion-using goblin, and so was your father. Phouka is not so far from Fear Dearg."
"I am the Queen's Darkness, not some nameless Fear Dearg."
"Ah, and there's the rub," he said in his thin voice. "It's a name I'm wanting."
"What does that mean, Fear Dearg?" Doyle asked.
"It means I ha' a story to tell, and it would best be told inside the Fael, where your host and my boss awaits ye. Or would ye deny the hospitality of our establishment?"
"You work at the Fael?" Doyle asked.
"I do."
"What is your job there?"
"I am security."
"I didn't know the Fael needed extra security."
"Me boss felt the need. Now I will ask once more, will you refuse our hospitality? And think long on this one, cousin, for the old rules still apply to my kind. I have no choice."
That was a tricky question, because one of the things that some Fear Deargs were known for was appearing on a dark, wet night and asking to warm before the fire. Or the Fear Dearg could be the only shelter on a stormy night, and a human might wander in, attracted by their fire. If the Fear Dearg were refused or treated discourteously, they would use their glamour for ill. If treated well, they left you unharmed, and sometimes did chores around the house as a thank-you, or left the human with a gift of luck for a time, but usually the best you could hope for was to be left in peace.
But I could not hide behind Frost's broad body forever, and I was beginning to feel a little silly. I knew the reputation of the Fear Dearg, and I also knew that for some reason the other fey, especially the old ones, didn't care for them. I touched Frost's chest, but he wouldn't move until Doyle told him to, or I made a fuss. I didn't want to make a fuss in front of strangers. The fact that my guards sometimes listened more to each other than to me was still something we were working out.
"Doyle, he has done nothing but be courteous to us."
"I have seen what his kind does to mortals."
"Is it worse than what I've seen our kind do to each other?"
Frost actually looked down at me then, being alert for whatever threat might, or might not, be coming. The look even through his glasses said that I was oversharing in front of someone who was not a member of our court.
"We heard what the gold king did to you, Queen Meredith."
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The gold king was my maternal uncle Taranis, more a great-uncle, and king of the Seelie Court, the golden throng. He'd used magic as a date-rape drug, and I had evidence in a forensic storage unit somewhere that he had raped me. We were trying to get him tried among the humans for that rape. It was some of the worst publicity the Seelie court had ever had.
I tried to peer around Frost's body and see who I was talking to, but Doyle's body blocked me, too, so I talked to the empty air. "I am not queen."
"You are not queen of the Unseelie Court, but you are queen of the sluagh, and if I belong to any court left outside the Summerlands, it is King Sholto's sluagh."
Faerie, or the Goddess, or both, had crowned me twice that last night. The first crown had been with Sholto inside his faerie mound. I had been crowned with him as King and Queen of the Sluagh, the dark host, the nightmares of faerie so dark that even the Unseelie would not let them skulk about their own mound, but in a fight they were always the first called. The crown had vanished from me when the second crown, which would have made me high queen of all the Unseelie lands, had appeared on my head. Doyle would have been king to my queen there, and it was once traditional that all the kings of Ireland had married the same woman, the Goddess, who had once been a real queen whom each king "married," at least for a night. We had not always played by the traditional human rules of monogamy.
Sholto was one of the fathers of the children I carried, so the Goddess had shown all of us. So technically I was still his queen. Sholto had not pressed that idea in this month back home; he seemed to understand that I was struggling to find my footing in this new, more-permanent exile.
All I could think to say aloud was, "I didn't think the Fear Dearg owed allegiance to any court."
"Some of us fought with the sluagh in the last wars. It allowed us to bring death and pain without the rest of you good folk" - and he made sure the last phrase held bitterness and contempt in it - "hunting us down and passing sentence on us for doing what is in our nature. The sidhe of either court have no lawful call on the Fear Dearg, do they, kinsman?"
"I will not acknowledge kinship with you, Fear Dearg, but Meredith is right. You have acted with courtesy. I can do no less." It was interesting that Doyle had dropped the "Princess" he normally used in front of all lesser fey, but he had not used queen either, so he was interested in the Fear Dearg acknowledging me as queen, and that was very interesting to me.
"Good," the Fear Dearg said. "Then I will take you to Dobbin, ah, Robert, he now calls himself. Such richness to be able to name yerself twice. It's a waste when there are others nameless and left wanting."