I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The gold king was my maternal uncle Taranis, more a great-uncle, and king of the Seelie Court, the golden throng. He'd used magic as a date-rape drug, and I had evidence in a forensic storage unit somewhere that he had raped me. We were trying to get him tried among the humans for that rape. It was some of the worst publicity the Seelie court had ever had.
I tried to peer around Frost's body and see who I was talking to, but Doyle's body blocked me, too, so I talked to the empty air. "I am not queen."
"You are not queen of the Unseelie Court, but you are queen of the sluagh, and if I belong to any court left outside the Summerlands, it is King Sholto's sluagh."
Faerie, or the Goddess, or both, had crowned me twice that last night. The first crown had been with Sholto inside his faerie mound. I had been crowned with him as King and Queen of the Sluagh, the dark host, the nightmares of faerie so dark that even the Unseelie would not let them skulk about their own mound, but in a fight they were always the first called. The crown had vanished from me when the second crown, which would have made me high queen of all the Unseelie lands, had appeared on my head. Doyle would have been king to my queen there, and it was once traditional that all the kings of Ireland had married the same woman, the Goddess, who had once been a real queen whom each king "married," at least for a night. We had not always played by the traditional human rules of monogamy.
Sholto was one of the fathers of the children I carried, so the Goddess had shown all of us. So technically I was still his queen. Sholto had not pressed that idea in this month back home; he seemed to understand that I was struggling to find my footing in this new, more-permanent exile.
All I could think to say aloud was, "I didn't think the Fear Dearg owed allegiance to any court."
"Some of us fought with the sluagh in the last wars. It allowed us to bring death and pain without the rest of you good folk" - and he made sure the last phrase held bitterness and contempt in it - "hunting us down and passing sentence on us for doing what is in our nature. The sidhe of either court have no lawful call on the Fear Dearg, do they, kinsman?"
"I will not acknowledge kinship with you, Fear Dearg, but Meredith is right. You have acted with courtesy. I can do no less." It was interesting that Doyle had dropped the "Princess" he normally used in front of all lesser fey, but he had not used queen either, so he was interested in the Fear Dearg acknowledging me as queen, and that was very interesting to me.
"Good," the Fear Dearg said. "Then I will take you to Dobbin, ah, Robert, he now calls himself. Such richness to be able to name yerself twice. It's a waste when there are others nameless and left wanting."
"We will listen to your tale, Fear Dearg, but first we must talk to any demi-fey who are at the Fael," I said.
"Why?" he asked, and there was far too much curiosity in that one word. I remembered then that some Fear Dearg demand a story from their human hosts, and if the story isn't good enough, they torture and kill them, but if the story is good enough they leave them with a blessing. What would make a being thousands of years old care that much for stray stories, and what was his obsession with names?
"That is not your business, Fear Dearg," Doyle said.
"It's all right, Doyle. Everyone will know soon enough."
"No, Meredith, not here, not on the street." There was something in the way he said it that made me pause. But it was Frost's hand squeezing my arm, making me look at him, that made me realize that a Fear Dearg might be able to kill the demi-fey. He might be our killer, for the Fear Dearg walked outside many of the normal rules of our kind, for all this one's talk of belonging to the kingdom of the sluagh.
Was our mass murderer standing on the other side of my boyfriends? Wouldn't that have been convenient? I felt a flash of hope flare inside me, but let it die as quickly as it had risen. I'd worked murder cases before, and it was never that easy. Murderers did not meet you on the street just after you'd left the scene of their crime. But it would be nifty if just this once it really was that easy. Then I realized that Doyle had realized the possibility that the Fear Dearg might be our murderer the moment he saw him; that was why the extreme caution.