«He is a crafty one, for a goblin. He will not wish to be drawn into the royal squabbles of the Unseelie Court.»

«The goblins are the foot soldiers of the Unseelie Court. Kurag can pretend that our infighting means nothing to him, but so long as he calls himself a part of the Unseelie Court, then he must pay attention to our squabbles.»

«He will not see it that way,» she said.

«Let me worry about Kurag.»

«You sound confident. You cannot bed him, for you cannot help him commit adultery.»

«Sometimes you gain more from the promise of a thing than from the thing itself.»

«You cannot offer what our laws forbid,» she said.

«Kurag knows our laws as well as we do, never believe otherwise. He forgets them only when it is convenient for him. He will know that it is not sex I am offering.»

«Then what?»

«A chance to help me clean myself up.»

She frowned. «I do not understand.»

And she didn't, because though Kurag knew the laws of the sidhe, the same could not be said of our queen about the laws of the goblins. I knew that the fluids of the body were more precious to the goblins than almost anything. Flesh, blood, sex; somewhere in that combination was a goblin's idea of perfection. I was going to offer the goblins two out of three, and the touch, though not the taste, of sidhe flesh. I would have said that I was going to offer them all three, but knew better. The goblins' idea of flesh is a piece they get to keep in their stomachs or in a jar on a shelf.