“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.”
“She always did have a soft spot for her brother,” Saraid said.
“She was afraid of him,” Dogmaela said.
“No,” Saraid said.
“She feared his power, Saraid. She knew he was one of the few in the courts strong enough to take the throne from her.”
“To kill her, you mean,” Saraid said.
“Yes, that is what I mean.”
“My father loved his sister, and she loved her brother,” I said.
They looked at me.
“They were devoted to each other, in their own ways,” Saraid said.
We all just agreed.
“If only he hadn’t loved his nephew,” Dogmaela said.
“He might still be alive to see his grandchildren,” I said, and the thought made my chest tight, my eyes hot.
“But if our prince, your father, had lived, these would not be the grandchildren he would see,” Dogmaela said.
I looked at her.
“You speak nonsense, Dogmaela.”
“No, Saraid, if Prince Essus had lived, then Meredith would never have had to hide in the Western Lands, and the queen would never have sent Doyle to find her. He would never have brought her back to be guarded and bedded by the Queen’s Ravens, so she would never have had sex with them, or fallen in love with Frost and Galen, and well, all of them. For that matter, if she’d gone on to be a doctor, would she have been able to bring the Goddess’s blessing back to us, or would we all still be slowly fading as a people?”
Saraid and I stared at her. I wanted to say, Dogmaela, you’re a deep, philosophical thinker; I didn’t know that. But that seemed vaguely insulting, as if I’d thought her stupid before, and I hadn’t, but … “Are you saying that my father had to die for me to help bring life back to faerie?”
“It’s something I’ve talked to the therapist about, and yes, I think so. I would never have traded our prince, your father, for anything, but it is a way I’ve made sense of his death and everything that came after. If it was all so that you would save us, Meredith, bring our people and faerie itself back to life, then that makes all the pain worth something, don’t you see?”
“That’s just talk,” Saraid said. “If it makes you feel better, then believe it, but Prince Essus did not martyr himself so that Meredith could bring the Goddess back to us and save the sidhe from themselves.”
“I never said that our prince agreed to die to save us, Saraid, but it is a way at looking at all the pain and horror, and having some sense from it.”
Saraid shook her head. “And this is why I stopped going to the therapist.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about Dogmaela’s comforting therapy reasoning. I wasn’t even sure I thought it was comforting to me, but if it gave Dogmaela peace of mind, then I didn’t want to argue with it.
“I’m sorry, Princess Meredith, I didn’t mean to upset you. I have been thoughtless.”