I’d always wondered about her insisting that Barinthus join her guard. It hadn’t been standard at the time for exiles from the Seelie Court Most of the other sidhe who had come from that time had just joined the court. I’d always thought it was because the queen feared Barinthus’s power, but now I saw another motive. She had loved her brother, my father, but she had also been jealous of his power. Essus was a name that people still spoke as a god, at least in the recent past, if you counted the Roman Empire as recent, but her own name, Andais, had been lost so completely that no one remembered what she had once been. Had she forced Barinthus to be her celibate guard to keep him out of her brother’s bed?

I had a moment to think about Essus and Mannan Mac Lir joined as a couple both politically and magically, and though I didn’t agree with what she’d done, I understood the fear. They were two of the most powerful of us. Combined, they could have owned both courts, if they’d been willing to, because Barinthus had joined us before we were cast out of Europe. Our internal wars had been our own business and no matter for human law, so they could have taken first the Unseelie and then the Seelie Court.

I spoke into that weighted silence. “Or was it Andais who made it impossible for you to have his love? She would never have risked the two of you joining your power together.”

“And now there is a queen of faerie who would have let you have all you desired, but it is too late,” Rhys said quietly.

“Are you jealous of the closeness you see between Frost and Doyle?” I asked it with a careful, quiet voice.

“I am jealous of the power I see in the other men. That I will admit to, and the thought that without your touch I will never come back to my power is a hard thing.” He made certain to give me eye contact, but his face was a mask of arrogance, beautiful and alien. It was a look that I’d seen him give Andais. It was his unreadable face, and he’d never had to use it on me before.

“You flooded every river around St. Louis when Merry and you had sex only in vision,” Rhys said. “How much more power do you want?”

This time Barinthus looked away, and would not meet anyone’s eyes. That was answer enough, I supposed.

It was Doyle who stepped forward a step or two, and said, “I understand wanting to have all the old power back, my friend.”

“You have regained yours!” Barinthus yelled. “Don’t try to soothe me when you stand there full to bursting with your own power.”

“But it is not my old power, not completely. I still cannot heal as I did. I cannot do many things that I once could do.”

Barinthus looked at Doyle then, and the anger in his eyes had turned them from happy blue to a black where the water runs deep and there are rocks just under the surface, ready to tear the hull of your boat and sink you.

There was a sudden splash against the side of the house. We were too far above the sea for the tide to find us, and it was the wrong time of day for it anyway. There was another slap of water, and this time I heard it smack into the huge windows of the master bathroom attached to this bedroom.

It was Galen who slid from the doorway and walked farther into the bathroom to check on the sound. There was another burst of water on the glass, and he came back, his face serious. “The sea is rising, but the water is like someone picked it up and threw it at the windows. It is actually separating from the sea, and seems to float for a moment before it hits.”

“You must control your power, my friend,” Doyle said, his deep voice going deeper with some strong emotion.

“Once I could have called the sea and washed this house into the water.”

“Is that what you want to do?” I asked. I squeezed Frost’s hand and then moved forward to stand with Doyle.

He looked at me then, and his face showed great anguish. His hands ground into fists at his side. “No, I would not wash away into the sea all we have gained, and I would never harm you, Merry. I would never dishonor Essus and all he tried to do by saving your life. You carry his grandchildren. I want to be here to see the babes born.”

His unbound hair writhed around him, and where most hair seemed to blow in wind, there was something of liquid in the way his hair moved, as if here in this room somehow the currents below touched and played with his ankle-length hair. I was betting that his hair didn’t tangle either.

The sea quieted outside, the noise drawing away until it was just the quiet hush of water on the narrow beach below. “I am sorry. I lost control of myself, and that is unforgivable. I, of all sidhe, know that such childish displays of power are pointless.”

“And you want the Goddess to give you back more power?” Rhys asked.

Barinthus looked up and that flash of black water showed for a moment, then was swallowed into something calmer, more controlled. “I do. Wouldn’t you? Oh, but I forgot, you have a sithen waiting for you, regained from the Goddess only last night.” There was bitterness to his voice now, and the ocean sounded just a little rough, as if some great hand stirred it with an impatient hand.

“Maybe there’s a reason the Goddess hasn’t given you back more of your powers,” said Galen.

We all looked at him. He leaned in the doorway looking serious but calm.

“You have no stake in this, boy. You don’t remember what I lost.”

“I don’t, but I do know that the Goddess is wise, and she sees further into our hearts and minds than we do. If this is what you do with only part of your power back, how arrogant would you be with all of it back?”

Barinthus took a step toward him. “You have no right to judge me.”

“He is father to my children as much as Doyle,” I said. “He is a king to my queen as much as Doyle.”

“He was not crowned by faerie and the gods themselves.”

There was a knock on the door. It made me jump. Doyle called out, “Not now.”

But the door opened, and it was Sholto, Lord of Shadows and That Which Passes Between, King of the Sluagh. He came in with his unbound hair, in a white-blond cloak over a black-and-silver tunic and boots.

He wasted a smile on me, and I got the full impact of his tricolored eyes: metallic gold around the pupil, then amber, then yellow like aspen leaves in the fall. His smile faded as he turned to the other men and said, “I heard you yelling, Sea Lord, and I have been crowned by faerie and the gods themselves. Does that make this fight more mine?”

Chapter Twenty-six

“I do not fear you, Sluagh Lord,” Barinthus said, and again there was that angry sound from the sea outside.

Sholto’s smile vanished completely, leaving his handsome face arrogant, starkly beautiful, and totally unfriendly. “You will,” he said, and his voice held an edge of anger. There was a sparkle of gold as his eyes began to shine.

The sea outside slapped against the glass again, harder, angrier. It wasn’t just that it was a bad idea for the men to duel; it was dangerous for all of us here by the sea. I couldn’t believe that Barinthus, of all people, was behaving so badly. He’d been the voice of reason for centuries at the Unseelie Court, and now … I’d missed some change in him, or maybe without Queen Andais, the Queen of Air and Darkness, to keep him in check, I was seeing the real him after all. That was a sad thought for me.

“Enough of this,” Doyle said, “both of you.”

Barinthus turned on Doyle, and said, “It is you who I’m angry at, Darkness. If you prefer to fight me yourself that will be fine.”

“I thought you were mad at me, Barinthus,” Galen said. That caught me off guard; I’d thought he would know better than to attract the big man’s anger a second time.

Barinthus turned and looked at Galen, who was still in the bathroom doorway. The sea slapped against the windows behind him hard enough to shake them. “You didn’t betray everything by refusing the crown, but if you want a piece of this fight, you may have it.”