Since he was six inches taller than me, I didn’t think of him as short, but as he went for the Red Caps, he looked small. It made me wonder how tiny I looked standing next to the biggest of the goblins.
His voice boomed out, filling the room. One of the visiting human soldiers had called it a drill sergeant voice. “You do not drop the weights! If you have to drop the weights, then it’s too heavy for you, and you do what?” He was pressed nearly into the Red Cap’s chest, but his voice thundered through the suddenly quiet room. Everyone had stopped exercising to see someone else get dressed down.
The Red Cap mumbled something.
Rhys did that big voice again. “I can’t hear you!”
“Lower the weights. But it wasn’t too heavy for me. We needed to show respect to Queen Meredith,” the Red Cap said. He looked sullen. His scarlet eyes narrowed in an unfriendly manner, though part of it was the color. Bloodred eyes with no whites in them could make the Red Caps look angry, or at least unfriendly, easily and often.
“But the humans on TV just let the heaviest barbells drop,” one of the other Red Caps said. This one was a gray so pale that he was almost white. He also had one of the most human of faces, not exactly handsome, but not the frightening fanged expression that most of them had once had.
Rhys turned and got up in the face of the second Red Cap. It was almost funny to see the huge Red Cap’s shoulders slump, head ducking, shame-faced at the much smaller man’s angry rant.
I heard one of the sidhe closest to me say, “She’s not our queen yet.”
I turned and found one of the very newest refugees from faerie. Our policy had been to take in any fey who wanted to leave faerie and come to the Western Lands, but a few of the recent sidhe were making me doubt the wisdom of that.
Fenella was just a fraction under six feet tall, with hair that fell like a gold and yellow cloak to her ankles when it was unbound; now it was in two long braids that had been looped back in upon themselves so they glittered as she moved, one moment more gold, the next like sunshine spun into rope, with the beauty of her face shining through the light and jewel-bright glory of her hair. She wasn’t called Fenella of the Shining Hair for nothing. She blinked her tricolored eyes at me. At first you thought her eyes were white with two circles of yellow shades, until you realized that the white around her pupil was actually an incredibly light yellow like winter sunlight, then butter, and the brighter yellow autumn leaves. I’d always thought that her eyes would have looked better with less spectacular hair, or that she needed eyes that were as amazing as the hair.
“Do you have something to say to me, Fenella?” I asked.
“No, Princess, I do not.”
“If you will not say it to my face, then please refrain from saying it behind my back.”
She startled, as if too caught off guard to hide it under centuries of courtly manners, or maybe I wasn’t worth the effort.
“Will you not allow us any privacy, even to our own thoughts?”
“Your thoughts are your own, but when they spill out your lips and I can hear, they are no longer private.”
“Very well, Princess Meredith. I find it disquieting that the goblins bow to you and call you queen when you are not a queen … yet.”
“I am not the official goblin queen, that is true, but I am Queen of the Sluagh.”
A look of distaste flitted across her face. “There was a rumor that you were Shadowspawn’s queen, but those of us in the Seelie Court had not believed it.”
“First, never call King Sholto by that name again; you know it is an insult. Second, why not believe it?”
“You are of the same bloodline as our king. It is a pure sidhe line, and even your mother’s lineage speaks to the light, but I suppose you cannot help the corruption of your father’s blood.”
“Are you trying to be insulting?” I asked.
She looked surprised, and I was almost certain it was genuine. She just didn’t understand the insult. “I have given offense; I am sorry, Princess, but your mother speaks endlessly of the corruption and vileness of your father, so I assumed that you felt the same.”
“And if I did, then why would I have stayed at my father’s vile and corrupt court, when I could have been with my mother at the Seelie Court?”
Fenella seemed to think about that, and watching her eyes while she did it, I realized something I hadn’t before. She wasn’t that bright, not stupid by any means, but not a deep thinker. Sometimes I thought that Taranis wasn’t that deep a thinker either; maybe his court reflected that?
Then a smooth voice came from the other side of the tall machine. “Most of us never blamed you for preferring to rule in hell, rather than serve in heaven, Princess.”
Trancer was inches above six feet, maybe six-five, and thin, even by sidhe standards, as if he’d been stretched just a little too much. His arms looked firm, but not muscled. If he’d been human you could have taken it to mean he wasn’t very strong, but among the fey, even the sidhe, what you saw was not what you got.
“My father loved me, my mother didn’t; a child goes where she’s loved,” I said.
“Love. What do the Unseelie know about love?” Fenella said.
Trancer touched her arm, and I watched her think about why he’d just cautioned her with that touch. I looked up into his tri-blue eyes. His hair was a more ordinary golden brown, waving just below his shoulders. The Seelie men let the women have the longer hair.
How many times had Trancer had to save his wife from speaking out of turn, or too boldly? How many centuries had he minded her, protected her from herself? I spoke to him, as I said, “Love is very important to most of us, don’t you agree, Lord Trancer?”
He gave me a long look. “Yes, Princess Meredith, we do.”
“I just don’t see why we have to exercise,” Fenella said, and there was a childish whine to her voice that went along with the lack of understanding I’d seen in her eyes.
Rhys said, “Because all of the guards exercise, that’s the rule.”
“But we were never guards,” she protested.
“Now, dearest,” Trancer said, “you know that we have to find a way to be useful.”
“I can set a fine table, and host a banquet, but I don’t think I will be very good at guarding anyone with strength of arms. Magic has always been enough in the past.”
Secretly I agreed with her, but I was letting Rhys and Doyle handle what to do with the fey who were seeking refuge with us. We had so many now that we did need them to pull their weight, but I doubted sincerely if I would ever trust Fenella to guard me or mine from anything. I would reserve judgment on Trancer, but … I wondered how well Fenella had done at weapons practice. What do you do with immortal beings whose major talents were being beautiful courtiers and toadies? What use were they in modern Los Angeles? I suppose that there were Hollywood equivalents of the job description, but Lady Fenella and Lord Trancer wouldn’t know the modern world enough to adapt, and I wasn’t a big one for sycophants, maybe because I’d never been powerful enough to have any, and now I didn’t trust them.
“Then think of it as getting into practice for losing the baby weight.”
“I won’t need that,” Fenella said.
“I thought you came into exile in the Western Lands so that you could get pregnant,” Rhys said. He put an arm across my shoulders, drawing me in against his body. I slid my arm around his waist automatically, and just holding and being held helped me feel less short, less round, less bad about the changes in my body since the babies. The circle of Rhys’s arms eased most of the anxiety that had started. Was it baby hormones still? It wasn’t like me to allow anyone to make me feel that unhappy with myself.
“We did,” Trancer said, beginning to rub his hand in small circles on his wife’s back.
“Then getting a habit of exercise will help her get her girlish figure back afterward,” Rhys said, smiling.
“But I will not need to exercise to lose my weight. It will just go.”
“I may have lost my weight faster than most human women, but I’ll still have to exercise when the doctor clears me for it.”
“But you’re much shorter than me, and I’m told that makes it much harder to lose weight.”