"Yes, my queen," he said in his perfectly neutral, perfectly careful voice.
"Who has harmed my Darkness?" But her eyes were already on me, and it was a very unfriendly gaze.
"I do not see it as harm, my Queen," Doyle said.
Her eyes flicked down to him, then back to me. "You've been a busy girl, Meredith."
I pushed up from Doyle, so that I was more or less sitting upright. "I thought you wished me to be a very busy girl, Aunt Andais."
"I don't know if I've seen your bare breasts before, Meredith. They are a little large for a sidhe, but very nice." Her eyes didn't hold lust, or kindness, only a dangerous light. All that she'd said so far could be mistaken for politeness. She'd never seen my breasts bare, so she should compliment them; but only if I was trying to be attractive, which I was not. I just happened to have no clothes on. I did not feel the least bit luscious around my aunt, and there was more to it than just being heterosexual, much more.
"And you, my Darkness, it's been so many centuries since I saw you nude that I can't remember. Is there some reason you have your back to me? Is there some reason you hide yourself from my sight? Is there some... aberration that I don't remember that spoils all that darkness?"
She was within her rights to compliment him, but asking if he was deformed, demanding he flaunt himself to her, that was impolite. If it had been almost anyone else, I'd have told her to go to hell.
"There is nothing spoiled here, Aunt Andais," I said, and I knew my tone wasn't neutral enough. I'd lost the knack of keeping my voice in line over the years I'd been away from the court. I was going to have to relearn, and quickly.
She gave me very cold eyes. "I was not talking to you, Princess Meredith. I was speaking to my Darkness."
She'd used my title; not niece, or just my name, but my title. It was not a good sign.
Doyle squeezed my arm again, tighter this time, as if telling me to behave. He answered Andais, but not in words. He rolled onto his back with his knees bent so his thigh hid him from her view, then he lowered the leg closest to her, slowly, like a curtain coming down.
There was heat in her eyes now, real heat, real need. "My, my, Darkness, you have been keeping secrets."
He turned and looked at her. "Nothing you couldn't have discovered at any time in the last thousand years." Now it was his voice that was not neutral. It was just a slight change in tone, a mild inflection of reproof, but I'd never heard him lose even that much control in front of Andais.
It was my turn to lay a warning hand on his stomach, just a touch to remind him who we were speaking to. I don't think my face showed the fear that was curling along my spine.
King Taranis might not hurt me for fear of Andais, but Andais might hurt me in a fit. She might regret it later, but dead is dead.
The look she gave Doyle was enough to tighten my hand against his skin, just a light digging of nails. It made his body react, and I hoped I'd done enough to remind him to tread lightly.
"Have a care, Darkness, or I will grow distracted and forget why I called."
"We await your news, Queen Andais," I said.
She looked at me then, some of the heat going from her eyes, replaced by puzzlement and, underneath, tiredness. Andais wasn't usually this easy to read, I think because she didn't have to be careful around anyone. "The Nameless is free."
Doyle spilled his legs to the floor and sat up. Suddenly it didn't matter that he was nude, nobody cared. The Nameless was the worst of both courts, Seelie and Unseelie. It was the last great spell that the two courts had cooperated on. They had stripped themselves of everything too awful, too hungry, to allow us to live in this new country. Nobody had demanded it of the sidhe, but we didn't want to be forced out of the last country that would have us, so we'd sacrificed some of what we were in order to become more... human. Some said that the Nameless was what caused us to begin to fade, but that wasn't true. The sidhe had been fading for centuries. The Nameless was just a necessary evil. So we didn't turn America into another battlefield.
"Did you set it free, my queen?" Doyle asked.
"Of course not," she said.
"Then who?" he asked.
"I could tell you a pretty story, but in the end, the answer is, simply, I don't know." It was obvious she didn't like saying it, and equally obvious that she was speaking the truth. She stripped off one of the black gloves in an abrupt movement and began to run it over and over through her hands.
"There are very few beings in faerie who could do such a thing," Doyle said.
"Don't you think I know that?" she snapped.
"What would you have us do here, my queen?"
"I don't know, but the last hint we had of it, it was traveling west."
"Do you believe it will come here?" he asked.