Лорел Гамильтон - A Stroke Of Midnight

“Why would she think the queen wanted her dead?” Rhys asked.

I had an idea, an awful idea, because Queen Andais would hate it. I didn’t say it out loud, because though the new guards knew as well as we did that a sidhe had done this, they probably wouldn’t be thinking what I was thinking in that moment. Andais had saddled me with several men I did not know and a couple who I outright didn’t trust. The awful thought was, What if it had been Prince Cel’s people? What if the maid, Peasblossom, had seen one of Cel’s people leaving the scene of a double homicide? She’d never believe that the queen would want her to tell anyone.

The trouble was that I couldn’t see what Cel, or anyone serving his interests, would gain from killing Beatrice. The reporter seemed accidental, just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“You’ve thought of something,” Rhys said.

“Later,” I said, and let my eyes flick to the backs of the men just a foot away from us.

“Yes,” Doyle said, “yes, we do need some privacy.”

“We should hide the body,” said one of the men at our backs. Amatheon’s hair, in its tight coppery red French braids, left his face bare, but nothing could leave it unadorned, for his eyes were layered petals of red, blue, yellow, and green, like some multicolored flower. It often made me a little dizzy to meet his gaze, as if my own eyes rebelled at the sight of him gazing out at the world with flower-petal eyes. His face was square-jawed but slender, so that he managed to be both strongly masculine and vaguely delicate at the same time. Almost as if his face, like his eyes, couldn’t quite decide what it wanted to be.

“The reporter will be missed, Amatheon,” I said. “We can’t just hide his body and hope this will all go away.”

“Why can we not? Why can we not simply say we don’t know where he has gone? Or that one of the lesser fey saw him leave the sithen.”

“Those are all lies,” Rhys said. “The sidhe don’t lie, or did you forget that in all those years you hung around with Cel?”

Amatheon’s face clouded with the beginnings of anger, but he fought it off. “What I did, or did not do, with Prince Cel is not your business. But I know that the queen would want to hide this from the press. To have a human reporter killed in our court will ruin all the good publicity she has managed to acquire for us in the last few decades.”

He was probably right on that last part. The queen would not want to admit what had happened. If she even suspected that I suspected that one of Cel’s people was responsible, she’d want to hide it even deeper. She loved Cel too much, and always had.

The fact that Amatheon had suggested disposing of the body made me wonder even more if Cel’s interests were somehow behind this. Amatheon had always been one of Cel’s supporters. Cel was the last pure-blood sidhe of a house that had ruled this court for three thousand years. Amatheon was one of the sidhe who thought me a mongrel and a disgrace to the throne. So why was he here to compete to bed me and make me queen? Because Queen Andais had ordered it. When he refused the honor, she made certain that he got her point, her painful point, that she was ruler here, not Cel, and Amatheon would do as he was told or else. Part of the “or else” had been to cut his knee-length hair to his shoulders, still long by human standards, but a mark of great shame for him. She’d done other things to him, things more painful to his body than to his pride, but he hadn’t shared details and I didn’t really want to know.

“If Beatrice were the only one dead, then I might agree,” I said. “But a human is dead in our land. We can’t hide that.”

“Yes,” he said, “we can.”

“You haven’t dealt with the press as directly as I have, Amatheon. Was this reporter alone when he came here to the sithen? Or was he part of a group that will miss him right away? Even if he came alone, he will be known to other members of the press. If one of us had killed him out in the human world, we might be able to hide who did it, and let it be just another unsolved crime. But he was killed here on our land, and that we cannot hide.”

“You sound as if you are going to tell the press of his death.”

I looked away from his confusing eyes.

He reached out to touch my arm, but Frost simply moved in the way, and he never completed the gesture. “You will announce it to the press?” He sounded astonished.

“No, but we have to contact the police.”

“Meredith,” Doyle started to say.

I cut him off. “No, Doyle, he was stabbed with a knife. We’ll never figure out whose blade did it. But a good forensics team might.”

“There are spells for tracing a wound to the weapon that made it,” Doyle said.

“Yes, and you tried those spells when you found my father’s body in the meadow. You did your spells, yet you never found the weapons that killed him.” I did my best to make those words empty, to have nothing in my head with them. My father’s death, like the capital of Spain. Just a fact, nothing more.

Doyle drew a deep breath. “I failed Prince Essus that day, Princess Meredith, and you.”

“You failed because it was sidhe that killed him. It was someone who had enough magic to thwart your spells. Don’t you see, Doyle, whoever did this is as good at magic as we are. But they won’t know modern forensics. They won’t be able to protect themselves against science.”

Onilwyn stepped away from the guards. He was blockier than any of the other sidhe, tall but stocky, and yet he always moved with grace, as if he’d borrowed his movements from someone more slender. His hair fell in a long wavy ponytail over the back of his black suit and white shirt. Black, the queen’s color, and Prince Cel’s color. A very popular color here at the Unseelie Court. His hair was a green so dark it had black highlights. His eyes were pale green with a starburst in the center around his pupil.

“You cannot mean to bring human warriors into our land?”

“If you mean human policeman, yes, that is exactly what I mean to do.”

“You will open us up to that over the death of one human and the death of a cook?”

“Do you think the death of a human is less important than the death of a sidhe?” I looked him straight in the face and was happy to see that he realized his faux pas. I watched him remember that I was part human.

“What is one death, even two, over the damage it will do to our court in the eyes of the world?” He tried to recover, and it wasn’t a bad job of it.

“Do you think the death of a cook is less important than the death of a nobleman?” I asked, ignoring his attempt to fix things.

He smiled then, and it was arrogant, and so very Onilwyn. “Of course, I believe that the life of a noble-born sidhe is worth more than the life of a servant, or a human. So would you if you were pure sidhe.”

“Then I’m glad that I’m not pure sidhe,” I said. I was angry now, and I fought not to have it translate to power, not to start to glow, and raise the stakes of this fight. “This servant, whose name happens to be Beatrice, showed me more kindness than most of the nobles of either faerie court. Beatrice was my friend, and if you have nothing more helpful to add than class prejudice, then I’m sure that Queen Andais can find a use for you back among her guards.”

His skin went from pale whitish green to just white. I felt a swift burst of satisfaction at his fear. Andais had given him to me to bed, and if I didn’t bed him, he would suffer. So would I, but in that moment, I wasn’t sure I cared.

“How was I to know she meant anything to you, Princess Meredith?”

“Consider this my only warning to you, Onilwyn”—I raised my voice so that it carried down the hallway—“and for the rest of you who don’t know me. Onilwyn assumed that the death of a servant meant nothing to me.” Some of the men at the far end turned and looked at me. “I spent a great deal of time with the lesser fey while I was at court. Most of my friends here were not among the sidhe. You made it plain that I was not pure-blooded enough for most of you. You have only yourselves to blame, then, that my attitude is a little more democratic than usual for a noble. Think upon that before you say something as foolish to me as Onilwyn just did.” I turned back to the guard in question, and let my voice go lower. “Bear all that in mind, Onilwyn, before you open your mouth again, and say something else equally stupid.”