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I opened my mouth, and he touched his fingers to my lips. “Shhh,” he said, and leaned in to lay a kiss where his fingers had laid their warmth. “You showed the world how you feel about me. That’s enough. I don’t have to own your whole heart.” He left us at a jog, hand on his sword hilt, the thin braid of his hair bouncing against his back.
“Galen!” I said. But he didn’t look back, and then the hallway turned, and he was gone. A feeling of foreboding came over me. Prophecy had never been my gift, but now I was suddenly so afraid I couldn’t draw a good breath.
I grabbed Frost’s arm. “He shouldn’t be alone. Something bad. Something bad is coming.”
Frost didn’t argue. “Adair, Crystall, go with him.”
The moment the other two men vanished around the corner the panic eased. I could breathe again. And something heavy dropped into my other hand, the one that was still hidden under the furred cloak. I grasped the heavy metal stem of the chalice. I let go of Frost, and put both my hands under the cloak to help hold the heavy cup. I’d never realized how heavy it was until that moment. Power is a burden.
“Are you all right?” Rhys asked.
I nodded. “Yes, yes.” I did not want everyone in the hallway to see what I held, but I also knew that if my panic was true, it was because the chalice had warned me. I had meant to tell the queen that the chalice had come to me, but the time never seemed right to tell her. All right, she never seemed sane long enough to have a metaphysical and political discussion. Now the chalice had materialized in my hand, and that usually meant it had an agenda. Something it wanted, at this moment. Something I needed to do. If it had just wanted to help Galen, it wouldn’t have been heavy in my hand. The chalice was quite capable of helping out magically without materializing. So why was it here now? What was about to happen? The tightness between my shoulder blades said, something bad.
I took a deep breath, and used my cloak and Frost’s coat to give him and Rhys a flash of gold metal under my cloak. Rhys’s eye went wide, and Frost’s face went even more arrogant, more angry. Rhys turned surprise to that joking half smile that he wore when he wanted to hide what he was thinking. It had taken me months to realize what that smile meant.
It was Ivi’s voice, full of laughter and with an edge of that joking that hid so much. “Oh, my,” Ivi said, and I knew that he’d seen it, too. I half expected him to tell the rest of the hallway what he’d glimpsed, but he didn’t. He just looked at me with that surprised laughter all over his face, as if he had beheld some wonderful private joke.
Hawthorne and Amatheon stood to either side of him, and they said nothing. Amatheon’s pale face had gone bloodless inside the hood that he had kept in place to hide his beauty from the woman. His flower-petal eyes went wide, but I doubted anyone but myself and Frost could see his face past the hood. Hawthorne’s reaction, or even if he had seen, was hidden behind his helmet.
“What is wrong?” Arzhel asked.
Amatheon said, “Nothing. I simply was not aware the princess was gifted with prophecy, that is all.” His voice sounded a little breathy, but otherwise normal, maybe even a little bored. You do not survive in the high courts of faerie by giving things away. We are the hidden people, and most of us earn that name.
Arzhel put his head to one side, as if he wasn’t entirely certain he believed Amatheon, but he said nothing. I did not know Arzhel that well, but I was certain he’d never guess that I held the chalice under my cloak.
Carmichael approached Ivi the way you’d sneak up on a statue in an art museum, afraid to touch it, compelled to run your hands down the smooth, hard curve of it. Afraid someone will tell you to stop.
“Carmichael,” Dr. Polaski said. “Carmichael.” She touched the other woman’s arm, but she might as well have been touching the wall for all the good it did her.
“Rhys, choose someone other than Ivi to watch her,” I said.
Rhys gri
“She’s not queen yet,” Ivi said. The bright green of his eyes still held that flash of humor that had covered his surprise.
“What’s wrong with her?” Walters asked. He’d gone to help Polaski, taking Carmichael’s other arm. She didn’t fight them, but she didn’t look away from the men either.
“She’s elf-struck,” Rhys said.
“Elf-struck,” Walters said, “but that takes sex with one of you, right?”
“Normally,” I said, “but our history is littered with people who caught a glimpse of us in the woods and spent the rest of their lives fascinated with the fey.” I sighed at the looks on most of the faces that were suddenly turned to me. “My oath, that it never occurred to me that any of you would be that susceptible to faerie.”
“The princess is right,” Amatheon said. “It has been centuries since I’ve seen any human so overwhelmed by merely entering the land.” He spoke for them, but his face was all for me and Frost, who was standing behind me. Amatheon’s face tried to ask a dozen questions that his words only hinted at. If he hadn’t seen this reaction in centuries, what had changed? I’d known that power was returning to the sidhe, but I hadn’t understood what that would mean for the humans I had so blithely invited inside. What had I done? And was it fixable?
“She has to leave,” I said, “now.”
Polaski looked at me. “What did you people do to Jeanine?”
“Nothing, absolutely nothing, I swear it.”
“Some humans are more affected by faerie than others,” Rhys said, “but it’s usually not police, or anyone that’s seen too much of the harsher side of things. If you’re too jaded, you just don’t believe in faeries anymore.” He said it with a smile, but he was having trouble not showing how worried he was. I could tell, or maybe I was simply projecting.
“Carmichael is new,” Polaski said. “She’s good, but she’s mostly a lab monkey.” A look of anguish and guilt came over her face. “I didn’t know not to bring her.”
“We didn’t know either,” I said. “It’s not your fault. It just never occurred to any of us that anyone would be this affected by just coming through our door.”
“Is this permanent?” Walters asked.
I looked at the men. “I’ve only heard stories of this kind of thing. So, honestly, I don’t know.” I looked at the men. “Gentlemen, can you answer Major Walters’s question, truthfully?”
“Absolutely truthfully?” Ivi asked.
I nodded.
He answered with a mocking smile, but I knew that the mockery was more for himself than anyone else. “Then I am not certain.”
“What is so damned fu
“Nothing,” Ivi said, “absolutely nothing. I admit to enjoying the lady’s fascination because I never thought to see such instant obsession on an woman’s face again.” The humor leaked away to show some of the sadness that underlay most of Ivi’s humor—a sorrow like some deep wound that cut through whatever he had once been, so that all that was left of Ivi was that biting humor and that sorrow.
“That is sick,” Polaski said.
His face showed that he had one other emotion left to him, arrogance. “And how would you feel, doctor, if once upon a time you were so beautiful that men wept as you walked down a summer’s lane, and then, one day, they no longer seemed to see you at all? A flower may be beautiful all on its own, but a person is never truly beautiful unless someone else’s eyes show him that he is beautiful.”
Walters called over one of his uniformed officers. “Take her back to the lab, get her away from the beautiful people.”
“Miller, go with them. Take Jeanine home,” Polaski said, “but don’t leave her alone. Stay with her all night. When the sun comes up, she may be okay.”
I raised eyebrows at Polaski.
“I read up on some of the things that can go wrong when dealing with your people. Nothing I read cautioned against bringing in new people, or I would have left her at the lab.”