"Something like that, yes," he said.
I looked from one to the other of them, frowning. "I don't know how to reassure you, because you're right about my blood relatives. My father and grandmother were sane, but even my own mother isn't quite right. So I don't know how to reassure you."
"It's the fact that you haven't touched any of them that's creeping them out," Rhys said.
"What?"
"The queen would only let the guards she hadn't slept with find other lovers. If she'd had sex with you then you were hers forever even if she never touched you again."
I stared at him. "You mean before the celibacy nonsense that was her rule?"
"Her law," Ivi said.
"She was always a very possessive woman," Rhys said.
"She was always crazy, you mean," I said.
"No, not always," Rhys said.
The other men agreed.
"And the very fact that once the queen wasn't mad, but just ruthless, is what frightens us about you, Princess Meredith," Ivi said.
"You see," Brii said, "if she had always been mad then we would trust that your reasonableness would last, but once the queen was reasonable. Once she was a good ruler or faerie and the Goddess wouldn't have chosen her."
"I see the problem," I said, and wrapped the almost forgotten towel around me. I felt a little cold all of a sudden. I hadn't thought about my family quite like this. What if it was genetic? What if sadistic craziness was inside me somewhere, waiting for a chance to come out? Was it possible? Well, yes, but ... My hand went to my stomach, still so flat, but there were babies in there. Would they take after me and my father, or ... That was the most frightening of all. I trusted myself, but the babies were unknown.
"What can I do?" I asked. I wasn't even sure which fear I was asking about, but the men had only one fear to focus on.
"We failed you tonight, Princess Meredith," Brii said. "We do not deserve any more consideration than our lives."
"When the Goddess moves among us none can stand in her way," Rhys said.
"Do you really think that the Darkness or the Killing Frost would see it that way if something had happened to her?" Ivi asked.
"If something had happened to her, neither would I," Rhys said, and there was that hardness to him that he hid most of the time behind jokes and his love of film noir, but more and more I glimpsed it. He'd come back into a lot of his power that had been gone for centuries, and there is something about that much power that makes you harder.
"See," Ivi said.
"Again, I feel like I'm missing something. Rhys, just tell me what they keep tiptoeing around."
Rhys looked from one man to the other. "You have to ask for yourselves. That's always been the rule."
"Because if you won't ask for yourself, you don't want it that badly," Brii finished for him, a little sadly. He began to put all his arrows away, and turned for the still-open door.
"Stay, for if I ask it can be for both of us," Ivi said.
Brii hesitated in the doorway.
"I want it badly enough to ask," Ivi said.
"Ask what?" I said.
"Make love to us, have sex with us, f**k us. I don't care what you call it, but please touch us. If you touch us tonight and let us have other lovers tomorrow and are calm about it, then it will be proof that you are not your aunt, or even your uncle of the Bright court. He wouldn't kill lovers who went to another bed, but he destroyed them politically at court, because to go directly to another bed after a night with him said, to him at least, that he wasn't good enough to make you not want someone else."
"See why I would not ask tonight?" Brii said. "It is a great honor to be in the bed of our ruler, and it should not be a reward for such badly done duty."
"The Goddess woke you first," I said. "There has to be a reason for that."
"I don't smell flowers," Rhys said.
"Me neither, but maybe this isn't about Goddess work, as much as the fact that someone should have told me that sooner. I lived in fear of my aunt my entire life. I've been her victim of torture, and my cousin made my childhood a misery when my father wasn't watching."
"We need to know how much of the queen is in her niece," Ivi said, and he was very solemn, unlike his usual teasing self. I realized that maybe his teasing, like Rhys's humor, was hiding more serious things.
"Rhys needs the shower, and the beds are all taken, but the couches are big enough."
Rhys kissed me on the cheek. "Have fun." He moved past me to the showers, but put his weapons at the back of the shower, where the shelf had been designed for less lethal things, but it worked perfectly for weapons, as we'd all discovered.
"The couches are big enough for what?" Brii asked.
"Sex," I said. "Sex tonight, but tomorrow you have to persuade one of the other guards to be with you, because this only works if you go from my bed almost directly to someone else, right?"
"Will that not bother you?" Brii asked.
I laughed. "If I wasn't part fertility deity you wouldn't get sex tonight. Rhys did his duty very well tonight, and if I were truly mortal flesh I'd be a little sore, but I am not, and the power will rise between us and it will be good."
"So your orders are to make love to you now, but find another guard to sleep with as soon as possible?" Ivi asked.
I thought about it, and then nodded. "Yes, those are my orders."
Ivi grinned at me. "I like you."
I smiled back at him, because I couldn't help it. "I like you, too. Now let's go find the couches and prove just how much we like each other."