Maeve came and used one arm to hug me to her, so that she encircled the babies and me in her arms. “I am sorry for that then, Meredith, truly sorry.”
I realized I was crying, and wasn’t sure why; maybe it was postbaby hormones, or maybe the thought that my wonderful babies, my children, might have frightening magic hadn’t occurred to me. Most magic didn’t manifest in the sidhe until puberty, but both girls had already shown power. Gwenwyfar with her lightning birthmark that actually caused a sort of static shock sometimes, and Bree with this, whatever this was. I held Gwenwyfar and pressed my head against the sweetness of Alastair’s dark hair, and wept while Maeve Reed, the Golden Goddess of Hollywood, held me. In the end, faerie princess or box office queen didn’t matter as much as being two women, two mothers, two friends. Maeve joined me in the tears, and I doubted she could have said why she was crying either.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I LEFT MAEVE in the nursery to make sure Bryluen didn’t bespell the nannies, and went in search of the fathers who were doing the most baby duty. I wanted to know if they’d had any problems, or noticed that Rita was being manipulated by our baby daughter. The guards were doing weights, weapons practice, and hand-to-hand, in separate groups, so I went to the weight room first. It was easier to ask questions there.
I had two guards with me, because I went nowhere without them since Taranis had kidnapped me. I couldn’t complain about the extra security, but it meant that some of the guard had to miss the workouts at times. Saraid and Dogmaela paced just behind me and to each side. Saraid’s hair was as glitteringly gold as Frost’s hair was silver; her eyes were blue with a white starburst around the pupil, as if someone had drawn a shining white star in the middle of the blue of her iris. Dogmaela’s more ordinary yellow hair seemed pale compared to the glittering braids that Saraid could boast, and her eyes, three rings of green and gray, seemed almost human-normal, but they were both tall and slender with fine muscles showing in their bare arms. Saraid was six feet even, and Dogmaela two inches shorter at five-ten. Her yellow hair flowed free, held back from her face by a metal helmet that was so not modern, but if no one made her wear modern equipment Dogmaela had a habit of reverting back to more familiar things. She did keep her sidearm, a modern Beretta .45, and according to Doyle she was one of the most accurate with a pistol. She liked her helmet and her familiar sword at her side, but she’d embraced the modern weapons wholeheartedly. Except for the color of her hair and eyes, Saraid looked like a very modern Hollywood model/actress in skinny jeans tucked into knee-high boots, and a tailored mannish suit jacket that didn’t quite hide the sword she had strapped to her back, but distracted the eye from the two guns and extra ammunition that fit along her long, slender torso.
The women stayed outside the door, as the other guards had stayed outside the nursery. Rhys and other guards were inside the weight room, and that meant that the workout areas were one of the safest places in the house and grounds.
There was a big sign over the door to the weight room. It read, IF YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO USE A MACHINE, ASK FOR HELP. DO NOT BREAK THE MACHINES! THIS MEANS EVERYONE: SIDHE, RED CAPS, GOBLINS, DEMI-FEY, EVERYONE!
I knew Rhys had made the sign after one of the Red Caps had stripped all the cables out of one machine, and one of the newer sidhe guards had damaged another, all in the same week. I could hear his voice without even going through the doorway, not the words he was speaking, but the rhythm of his voice. The room had been a ballroom back in the day when houses had them, because it was the only room with ceilings tall enough for the Red Caps, since they averaged between seven and thirteen feet tall. Maeve had let us buy what Rhys felt was needed for training the guards, so the once-elegant ballroom was filled with state-of-the-art padding, enough free weights to make Mr. Universe happy, and a forest of machines. The latter were mostly mysterious to me, because they’d been purchased after I got pregnant. I’d never spent a lot of time with weights, but I’d been forbidden to use anything but the lightest hand weights for so long that it was like a foreign land to me now. The machines were all taller than me, with interchangeable handles, pulleys, and attachables, and I had no idea what most of them did. I wasn’t the only one overwhelmed by Rhys’s fully equipped room.
“How can you use all this cold iron?” a woman’s voice protested. I could glimpse Rhys through the maze of machines, but the woman was sitting down and I couldn’t tell from her voice who it was, over the machines’ mechanical clatter and the clink of the weights.
I nodded to the guards as I walked past. I’d learned that etiquette in the weight room meant you didn’t say hello when someone was lifting, unless they spoke first. If they were into the zone of their workout, just having to talk too much could throw them out of it. Rhys had explained all this to me. I’d never lifted weights seriously enough to experience a “zone,” but I trusted Rhys to know what he was talking about.
Most of the guards in the room were the newer ones who had only come from faerie in the last few months, but they were all tall and slender, with a play of muscles under their mostly pale arms, long legs moving the leg press machine easily. I didn’t usually still feel like the short ugly duckling, but seeing them in the tank tops and shorts, or even just sports bras for some of the women, I suddenly felt far too round, and much too short, and just awkward as I walked across the special padded floor in my three-inch heels. I’d felt pretty good about myself until that moment, and then it was as if all the childhood years of being told I wasn’t sidhe enough came spilling back. No one had said anything, or even lifted an eyebrow at me; sometimes it’s just the inside of your own head that is the problem.
I squared my shoulders, made sure my posture was perfect, and kept walking toward Rhys with a smile on my face. My insecurities in that moment were my own.
Of course, I wasn’t the only one who didn’t look like everyone else. There were three Red Caps in the room, too. They were all between seven feet, short for a Red Cap, and thirteen feet, which was almost as tall as they got. The tallest and the shortest were shades of gray, but the middle one was the yellow of aged ivory. I wasn’t close enough to see their true red eyes, but they were Red Caps; the eyes would be scarlet. The yellow-skinned one was Clesek, but I couldn’t recall the names of the other two. They all wore the short, round caps that gave them their name, but right now the caps weren’t red, more brown, the color of dried blood. They were all stuffed into sweat suits that strained to fit over their bodies. It was like trying to find workout clothes for the Incredible Hulk. They’d originally worked out in their undergarments, but Maeve had too many humans working in the house and they were uncomfortable with nearly nude giants striding through the hallways. They were in the far corner using the special free-weight bars that we’d had to get, so they could carry more weight than regular barbells without breaking; I hadn’t even known that there were special bars to hold weights once you got up to four to five hundred pounds and more. The fact that human beings with no fey ancestry needed special bars like that amazed me a little, and made me feel even weaker. I was so not the strongest person in this room, not in any way.
I heard Rhys say, “The metal makes us have to work harder, because not all our magic works.”
The woman’s voice: “It’s harder than I thought it would be.”
“Good,” he said.
The Red Caps saw me and dropped their weights with a clang that vibrated the room as they went down on one knee. They didn’t have to do that during exercise, I’d told them all that, but the Red Caps were very devoted.
I stopped and called out to them. “It’s all right, you don’t have to bow in the weight room, remember?”
“You are our queen, we must show proper respect,” Clesek said. He gave a narrow-eyed stare at the sidhe. “They should show it, too.”
“It’s dangerous in the weight room, Clesek; we discussed this,” I said.
“Which of you dropped it?” Rhys yelled it, as he came striding through the machines wearing midthigh-length compression shorts and a tank top that was more straps than shirt so that the muscled beauty of his upper body was more revealed than hidden by it. The shorts showed off assets, too, but in the gym you were supposed to be paying attention to other things. His hair was back in a ponytail held by multiple hair ties spaced a few inches apart along its length so that it was almost a braid, but not quite.