Fucking brothers Grimm.
Chapter 20
WHILE MAEVE REED WAS OFF IN EUROPE STAYING OUT OF TARANIS'S reach, she'd given us full use of her house. She said it was a small price to pay for us saving her life and helping her become pregnant before her human husband had died of cancer. So for once good deeds had been rewarded. We had a mansion on a huge plot of land in Holmby Hills, with a guesthouse, a pool house, and a smaller cottage near the gate for the caretaker-gardener.
I still slept in the master bedroom of the guesthouse, but there were now enough of us to fill the bedrooms of both houses. The men were having to double up in some of the bedrooms.
Kitto had gotten a room to himself because it was too small a room to share with anyone much above my, and Rhys's size. Which meant no one.
We'd planned on using the main house's dining room for the initial meeting with the goblins. It was a huge room that had begun life as a ballroom. So it was light and airy and full of marble. It looked like something out of a human fairy tale. The Seelie Court would have approved, but then Maeve was exiled from there, so maybe the ballroom-dining room was a piece of home for her.
Most of my bodyguards looked as at home here in the brightness as the glittering chandeliers above us. The guards whom Ash and Holly had brought didn't look at home at all.
The Red Caps towered over everyone else in the room. Seven feet of goblin was a lot of goblin. But that was short for a Red Cap. Most were closer to the twelve-foot mark. The average height was eight to ten feet. Their skins were shades of yellow, gray, and sickly green. I'd known that the goblins were bringing Red Caps as guards. Kurag, the Goblin King, had felt that if he sent Ash and Holly without guards to us and something happened to them, it would be seen as a plot between him and me to rid himself of the brothers. Since the only way for him to step down as king and them to step up was for him to be dead at their hands, their deaths would be very convenient for him.
So why was he offering them to me to make them even more powerful? Because Kurag knew how his kingship would end, as all goblin kings ended. He wanted to ensure that his people were strong even after he died. He did not resent the brothers for their ambition. He just wanted to hold it off a little longer.
If the twins died by our hands, even by accident, without goblins around them, then it could be misconstrued. If the goblins thought that Kurag had had the brothers assassinated, his life was forfeit. All challenges were personal challenges. There were goblins who were assassins as a sideline, but they never took "jobs" where the victim was another goblin. They'd kill sidhe, or lesser folk, but never another goblin.
The only exception was if the goblin was one of the "kept," as Kitto had been. If you had a problem with one of them, their "masters" fought you. Because to be what Kitto was among them was an admission that he was not fighter enough to be part of the larger goblin culture.
I sat in a large chair that had been set up as a sort of temporary throne. The big table had been moved back against the wall, along with most of the chairs. Frost was at my back. Doyle was still closeted in his bedroom with the black dogs, Taranis had nearly killed my Darkness. If we'd been inside faerie proper, he might have been healed already. None of our magics were as strong here. It was one of the reasons that exile was so feared by most, because you were never as powerful outside of faerie.
"We have brought you inside so the human reporters cannot bandy it about in the press," Frost said in a voice as cold as his namesake. "But for the press I would not have allowed you inside our wards with such an army at your back."
I couldn't really argue with him, but I was strangely unworried. In fact, I felt better than I'd felt in hours.
"It is done, Frost," I said.
"Why are you not more worried about this?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said.
"If they were not goblins, I would say they had bespelled you," Rhys said.
Ash and Holly were impressed with all of the show, which set them apart from the other goblins and made them so much more sidhe.
"Greetings, Ash and Holly, goblin warriors. Greetings also to the Red Caps of the goblin court. Who leads here?"
"We do," Ash said, as he and his brother stepped up to stand before my chair. They were wearing the court clothes that they'd worn before, Ash in green to match his eyes, Holly in red to match his. The clothes were satin, and the height of fashion if the year happened to between 1500 and 1600.
Their short yellow hair brushed their ears as they bowed. They'd started to let their hair grow, though it wasn't long enough to get them in trouble with the queen - It had to touch their collars for that.
"You've let your hair grow in the month since I saw you," I said.
They exchanged a glance, then Ash said, "We do it in anticipation of your magic bringing us into our sidhe-side powers."
"That's very confident of you," I said.
"We have every confidence in your powers, Princess," Ash said.
I looked at Holly. There was no confidence in his eyes, just eagerness. He got to bed me tonight; all else was just pretense. Holly would give me what the brothers truly felt. Ash was nearly as good at playing courtier as sidhe lord. I didn't trust either of them, but Ash could lie with his eyes and face; Holly couldn't. Good to know.
I looked past them to the Red Caps. I recognized some of them from the fight weeks before. They had stood by me, not the brothers, or Kurag their king. The Red Caps had obeyed me beyond what was required of them by treaty. I had not explored that strange obedience, so unlike the usual Red Cap attitude toward sidhe or female, because I wasn't sure how Kurag would take it. I did not want to be seen as trying to seduce, even politically, the most powerful warriors of the goblin race to my service.