I smiled again and let the banter go on around me. Doyle hadn’t liked me coming out to the beach house without him or Frost, but our shared man was still healing, and I’d felt that we needed to use the human guards more, at least the ones who had braved hand-to-hand practice with Doyle and the others. I had brought Saraid and Dogmaela with me, but they were inside the house. One of the other female guards needed a word with them. The shared abuse had made many of the guards more comfortable talking to each other, so I’d let them handle it. I’d also reminded Doyle that there were other sidhe guards at the beach house. We’d started putting anyone we weren’t sure was entirely trustworthy here first. The main estate was building more rooms, but there were still more sidhe than rooms. The other sidhe had been very insulted that I’d come down to the beach with only the human guards, until I’d asked them if they thought humans were lesser beings, bearing in mind that I was part human. To that they’d said the only thing they could—“Of course not,” which was a lie, but a political lie. When everybody knows it’s a lie, it isn’t like lying at all, just doing what I wanted them to do, and we could all live with that. The sidhe had been impressed that Becket and Cooper had joined practice at the main house. That the men had even tried to hold their own with the fey had earned them points with me and with Doyle. He’d said, “They aren’t bad, and for humans they are really quite good.” If Becket only knew what high praise that was from him, he’d have been happier about it.
“It’s okay, Agent Cooper, you and the rest of the human guards are the outsiders at the house.”
“See, told you so,” Becket said.
“But it’s not just because you’re human, it’s because you’re new. We don’t know you yet, and you don’t know us; that makes you all the odd people out. There’s a learning curve when new sidhe join the guards, too,” I said.
“You usually give very good eye contact, but you’re staring at the horizon while we’re talking. What are you looking for, Princess Meredith?” Cooper asked.
“King Sholto.”
“What?”
“You asked what I was looking for, and I answered the question.”
“I thought his title was Lord Sholto,” Becket said.
“He’s the only sidhe noble with a different title in another court,” I said.
“Is Lord, or King, Sholto coming in by boat?” Cooper asked.
“No,” I said.
“Then why are you looking out at the ocean for him?”
“He is coming from the ocean, just not by boat,” I said.
“Okay, I’ll bite; if he’s not coming by boat, how is he getting here?” Becket asked.
“He’ll walk,” I said.
“Princess, you don’t do this often, but when you do, it’s like pulling teeth to get you to answer a straight question.”
I turned and looked at Cooper, and thought about it. “I’m sorry, you’re right. I’ve spent the last few months with just other fey, and we aren’t always known for straightforward information sharing.”
Becket gave a snorting laugh. “That’s an understatement.”
“Becket,” Cooper said, voice sharp.
“It’s all right, Agent Cooper, truth is truth.”
“All right, then if King Sholto isn’t coming by boat, how is he going to walk here?”
“Magic,” I said, and went back to staring at the edge of the water.
“Can you elaborate, please?”
I smiled, and thought about it. “Do you know what his title is as lord among the sidhe?”
“He’s the Lord of That Which Passes Between,” Cooper said.
“Exactly,” I said.
“What does that mean, Princess?” Becket asked, and he sounded impatient now.
I sighed, and shivered for a minute even in the borrowed jacket. “The edge of sea and shore is a place between, which means he can use it to travel to me.”
“You said he was going to walk; do you mean he’s going to walk onto the beach like magic?” Cooper asked.
“Not like magic, it is magic.”
“You mean literally ‘oooh’ magic?” Becket said, making a finger-waving gesture when he said “oooh.”
“Exactly,” I said, smiling. I liked Becket. He made me remember that I missed being around people who weren’t sidhe, or fey, or familiar with the high courts. It was a more formal world, and I’d been surrounded by people who had lived in it for centuries, and it had made me lose some sense of myself that wasn’t sidhe, or even brownie. I’d forgotten that being human could be fun, and that though I’d hated being exiled to Los Angeles without any way to interact with another sidhe, and losing all of faerie had been like a living death, I’d found a part of my humanity that had gotten lost at the Unseelie Court. I’d grown up with a house full of sidhe and other fey, but I’d gone to school with humans—American humans—and our neighbors had been the same. I hadn’t realized until this last year that being raised outside faerie had given me more of a connection to my human grandfather’s culture, and having the ambassador and his men in the house had made me realize I’d gotten sucked right back into the culture of the courts. It was a different culture than either the Seelie or Unseelie, but it was still not a human way of looking at things. The soldiers who had visited hadn’t helped me understand that, because they’d come more as priests and priestesses seeking answers. That hadn’t been normal enough to make me realize that I was in danger of losing something important. My human great-grandfather had been a good man, from every story I’d ever heard. He’d been a Scottish farmer who had been special enough to fall in love with the family brownie, not a type of fey known for their beauty. I didn’t want to lose that part of my heritage again. I’d actually begun to wonder if I needed to work at the Grey and Hart Detective Agency just to remember that I was more than a faerie princess. I was a person, I was Merry Gentry, or had been for three years until the queen had sent Doyle to these Western Lands to find me and bring me home. Now I had sidhe lovers, and faerie had come to us. I had almost everything I’d been homesick for, plus three children, and the magic of the Goddess returned, but in all that wonder I didn’t want to forget that I was part human, too, and part brownie. I wanted to find a way to honor all those parts of me, and share that with our children.