concentration, and I simply made my lipstick look perfect, though I could feel it smeared around my mouth. I spilled the small magic across Frost's face, so that he looked as he had before, and not like he'd laid his face into a pot of red paint and rubbed back and forth.
It was illegal to use magic on the press. The Supreme Court had declared that it infringed on the first amendment, freedom of the press and all that. But we were allowed to use small magic on ourselves for cosmetic purposes. After all, there was no difference between that and regular makeup or plastic surgery for celebrities. The court wisely didn't try to open that particular can of movie-star worms.
I could have worn glamour instead of makeup in the first place, but it took concentration, and I'd wanted all my concentration for the questions. Besides, if there was another assassination attempt, the glamour would go, and the queen was just vain enough that she'd ordered me into makeup, just in case. I guess so that if the worst happened, I'd look good dead. Or maybe I was just being cynical. Maybe she simply didn't trust my abilities at glamour. Maybe.
I told Frost that he'd answered enough questions for one day, and it was a feeding frenzy of "Frost, Frost." There were even a few rude enough to shout out questions like "Is she good in bed...? How many times a week do you get to fuck her?" Gotta love the tabloids, especially some of the European ones. They make our American tabloids look downright friendly.
We all ignored such rude questions. Frost took his post behind me against the wall. I could feel the small magic around him. If he walked too far from me, the glamour would break, but this close I could hold it. Not forever, but long enough to get us through this mess.
Madeline chose one of the mainstream newspapers, the Chicago Tribune, but his question made me wonder if we'd have been better off answering the tabloids. "I have a two-part question... Meredith, if I may?" He was so courteous, I should have known he was leading up to something that wouldn't be pleasant.
Madeline looked at me, and I nodded. He asked, "If the sidhe can heal almost any wound, then why is your arm not healed?"
"I'm not full-blooded sidhe, so I heal slower, more like a human."
"Yes, you're part human and part brownie, as well as sidhe. But isn't it true that some of the noble sidhe of the Unseelie Court are concerned that you are not sidhe enough to rule them? That even if you gain the throne, they will not acknowledge you as queen?"
I smiled into the flash of lights and thought furiously. Someone had talked to him. Someone who should have known better. Some of the sidhe did fear my mortality, my mixed blood, and thought that if I sat on the throne I would destroy them. That my mortal blood would take their immortality. It had been the reason behind at least one, maybe both, of the extra attacks yesterday. We had an entire noble house, and the head of another, imprisoned now, awaiting sentencing. No one had briefed me on what to say if the question arose, because no one had dreamt that any sidhe, or lesser fey, would have dared talk to the press, not even to hint.
I tried for half-truth. "There are some among the nobility that see my human and lesser fey blood as inferior. But there are always racists, Mr...."
"O'Connel," he said.
"Mr. O'Connel," I said.
"Do you believe that it is racism then?"
Madeline tried to stop me, but I answered because I wanted to know how much he knew. "If not racism then what, Mr. O'Connel? They don't want some mongrel half-breed on their throne." Now if he pushed it, he'd look like a racist. Reporters from the Chicago Tribune don't want to look like racists.
"That's an ugly accusation," he said.
"Yes," I said, "it is."
Madeline stepped in. "We need to move on. Next question." She pointed to someone else, a little too eagerly, but that was all right. We needed to change topics. Of course, there were other topics that were almost as bad.
"Is it true that a magic spell made the policeman shoot at you, Princess Meredith?" This from a man in the front row who looked vaguely familiar in the way that on-air personalities often do.
The sidhe do not lie. We make a sort of