There was a soft kiss on my cheek. I looked up and found that Rhys’s face was pressed to the top of my hair, and no one else was close. The Goddess had kissed my tears like my own mother never had. I whispered my thanks, and the petals began to slow. I was almost ankle deep in petals now; that was enough.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-EIGHT

RHYS AND BIDDY both offered to escort me to the outdoor area where Doyle was conducting the hand-to-hand training, but I told Rhys to stay and supervise the weight training. Biddy wasn’t on full duty yet, and she helped run the household along with her husband, Nicca. I didn’t want to put her back on guard duty; it wasn’t where she was best used. Both of them were content when they realized Saraid and Dogmaela were just outside the door.

Rhys kissed me good-bye and gave me over to the two female guards. I’d already asked him my question, and he’d had no problem with Bryluen, and the two human nannies weren’t needed when he, Galen, and Kitto were on duty, so he hadn’t seen them with the littlest of our babes. It was interesting that Maeve and I both felt Bryluen’s magic, but Rhys didn’t. He was a death deity, and Maeve and I were both fertility, sex, and love. If that made us more susceptible to my daughter’s glamour, then Galen would also have an issue, but Doyle and Frost might not. Come to think of it, Galen was the only one of the fathers who was spring and fertility, though he wasn’t as close to Maeve’s and my magic as a couple of the other guards. Adair and Amatheon weren’t fathers, or my lovers anymore, but their magic was closest; I might see how they fared babysitting if Galen had more issues than the other fathers. If he didn’t, then I might ask one of the female sidhe and see if Bryluen had more power over women, though I couldn’t think why she should.

“If you don’t mind me saying so, Princess Meredith, you seem unusually solemn,” Saraid said.

I glanced at her and smiled. “I don’t mind, Saraid.”

“You have everything any woman could want, and more; what do you have to be so sad about?” Dogmaela said.

“Dogmaela,” Saraid said, making a caution of the other woman’s name.

“No, it’s all right, Saraid, truly. I may not answer the question, but you can all ask me anything.”

“That is a most democratic attitude, Princess,” Saraid said.

“I may be a faerie princess, but I’m also American. We tend to like democracy.”

“I’ve been following your politicians in the media,” Dogmaela said, “and I do not find all of them very democratic. In fact, many of them seem as if they would be happy to have a dictatorship if they could be in charge.”

I laughed. “Very accurate of some of them, I grant you that.”

“Well, you laughed, so that’s a good thing,” Dogmaela said, and she smiled. She was one of the guards who had gone to therapy with the same work ethic she’d applied to learning to shoot modern firearms.

Saraid had been one of the women who stopped going to therapy when she found out it wasn’t mandatory.

“Is Uther coming over this week for movie night?” I asked.

Saraid ducked her head and grinned, that special stupid-faced, almost drunkenly happy grin. I loved seeing it on that angelically beautiful face, because Uther had been my friend back in the days when I’d been hiding as just plain Merry Gentry, a human with some fey ancestry. He’d been one of my coworkers at the Grey Detective Agency for three lonely years while I hid in L. A. on the shores of the Western Sea to keep my cousin, Cel, and his friends from killing me. Uther Squarefoot was the legal name on his license, and he was thirteen feet tall, with magnificent curling tusks, and a face that was almost more wild boar than human. He was a Jack-in-Irons, one of the solitary faeries, but still of the Unseelie Court, because the Seelie Court wouldn’t touch any fey who was ugly. But Saraid had found in Uther the first gentleness she’d known in a man for centuries. He had found in her the wonderment of being loved by a truly beautiful woman. There were only two Jacks-in-Irons in the entire United States, and no one had ever seen a female one, so Uther had been lonely in a way that mere friendship couldn’t fix. When he’d found out I was sidhe, he’d very politely asked me to help him break his fast for female companionship, but I was mortal and not sure I could survive his attentions. I wasn’t sure what Saraid and he did together on their dates, but whatever it was satisfied them both, and they’d been a couple for almost six months.

“He is, my lady.”

“Good,” I said.

She gave me a shy smile, those star eyes full of a contentment that I had feared I might never see in the faces of the women who had been abused by my cousin. It made me smile back.

“You are truly pleased when the people around you are happy, aren’t you, Princess?” Dogmaela said.

I glanced back at her. “Yes, I am.”

She shook her head. “You are your father’s daughter, Meredith, and it is a blessing for us all.”

I touched her arm. “If I had known that none of you had been given a choice to go from serving my father to serving Cel, I would have tried to free you sooner.”

Dogmaela looked frightened. “Oh, Meredith, no, the evil bastard was already trying to kill you through his toadies; if you had tried to take us away from him years ago, he would have seen you dead, or worse.” She patted my shoulder. “No, things happened as they were meant to, and now we are here and you are the ruler your father hoped you would be.”

I stopped walking, so they did, too. I looked at both of them. They’d been part of my father’s personal guard, the Prince’s Cranes, for centuries, and certainly through my childhood, but it had never occurred to me that they would know something I’d wanted to ask my father.

“People keep asking me why my father trained me to be a ruler when it seemed I would never wear a crown. I had no answer, but you were there. You were his guard, his confidants—did he intend me to take the throne, do you know?”

Dogmaela shook her head. “I was not a close favorite of Prince Essus, so I do not know what was in his heart.”

Saraid was very quiet, face careful and empty.

“You know something; please tell me.”

“He raised you the only way he knew, and that was to be a ruler, Princess Meredith, but he did not plan on assassinating his sister, your aunt, or her son, his nephew, to put you on the throne.”

“What did he intend for me then?”

“I was closer to him, but he did not confide in me about you, except to worry for your safety. He spoke of you getting your doctorate in biology of some kind and being the first American-fey doctor; that thought pleased him.”

I smiled, and nodded. “He wanted me to be a doctor at one point, a medical doctor.”

“I believe that course of study takes many years by human standards; that seems to imply he did not plan on you vying for the throne.”

I nodded. “I think you’re right, but he told his sister that I would be a better queen than Cel would ever be a king.”

“I heard him tell her that,” Dogmaela said, “and she was furious with him. Had it been anyone but Prince Essus, he would have been tortured for such talk.”