"You may include him in the contest to win your heart, or you may exclude him from the running. It is your decision."

I nodded and stood up straight, no hunching like some kind of wounded rabbit. "Thank you for that, Auntie dearest."

"Why does that fall from your lips like the vilest of insults."

"I mean no insult."

She waved me to silence. "Do not bother, Meredith. There is little affection lost between us. We both know that." She looked me up and down. "Your clothing is acceptable, though not what I would have chosen."

I smiled, but it wasn't a happy smile. "If I'd known I was going to be named heir tonight, I'd have worn the Tommy Hilfiger original."

She laughed and stood with a swish of skirts. "You can purchase an entire new wardrobe, if you like. Or you can have the court tailors design one for you."

"I'm fine as I am," I said. "But thank you for the offer."

"You are an independent thing, Meredith. I've never liked that about you."

"I know," I said.

"If Doyle had told you in the western lands what I planned for you tonight, would you have come willingly, or would you have tried to run?"

I stared at her. "You're naming me heir. You're letting me date the Guard. It's not a fate worse than death, Aunt Andais. Or is there something else you haven't told me about tonight?"

"Pick up the stool, Meredith. Let's leave the room neat, shall we?" She glided down the stone steps to walk toward the door in the opposite wall.

I picked up the stool, but didn't like that she hadn't answered my question. There was more to come.

I called after her before she got to the small door. "Aunt Andais?"

She turned. "Yes, Niece." There was a faintly amused, condescending look on her face.

"If the lust charm that you placed in the car had worked and Galen and I had made love, would you have still killed him and me?"

She blinked, the slight smile fading from her face. "Lust charm? What are you talking about?"

I told her.

She shook her head. "It was not my spell."

I held my hand up so the silver ring glinted. "But the spell used your ring to power itself."

"I give you my word, Meredith, I did not put a spell of any kind in the coach. I merely left the ring in there for you to find, that was all."

"Did you leave the ring, or did you give it to someone to put in the coach?" I asked.

She would not meet my eyes. "I put it there." And I knew she'd lied.

"Does anyone else know that you plan to rescind the order of celibacy where I'm concerned?"

She shook her head, one long black curl sliding over her shoulder. "Eamon knows, but that is all, and he knows how to keep his own counsel."

I nodded. "Yes, he does." My aunt and I looked at each other from across the room, and I watched the idea form in her eyes and spill across her face.

"Someone tried to assassinate you," she said.

I nodded. "If Galen and I had made love and you hadn't lifted the geas, you could have killed me for it. Galen's fate seems to be incidental to it all."

Anger played across her face like candlelight inside glass.

"You know who did it," I said.

"I do not, but I do know who knew that you were going to be named coheir."

"Cel," I said.

"I had to prepare him," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"He did not do this," she said, and for the first time there was something in her voice—the same protest you'll hear in any mother's voice when defending her child.

I simply looked at her and kept my face blank. It was the best I could do, because I knew Cel. He would not simply give up his birthright on the whim of his mother, queen or no.

"What did Cel do to anger you?" I asked.

"I tell you, as I told him, I am not angry with him." But there was too much protest to her voice. For the first time tonight Andais was on the defensive. I liked it.

"Cel didn't believe that, did he?"

"He knows what my motives are," she said.

"Would you care to share those motives with me?" I asked.

She smiled, and it was the first genuine smile I'd seen on her tonight. An almost embarrassed movement of lips. She wagged a gloved finger at me. "No, my motives are my own. I want you to choose someone for your bed tonight. Take them back to the hotel with you, I don't care who, but I want it to begin tonight." The smile was gone. She was her royal self once more, unreadable, self-contained, mysterious and absolutely obvious all at the same time.

"You never have understood me, Aunt."

"And what, pray, does that mean?"

"It means, Auntie dearest, that if you had left off that last order, I would probably have taken someone to my bed tonight. But being commanded to do it makes me feel like a royal whore. I don't like it."

She settled her skirts so the train glided behind her and walked toward me. As she moved, her power began to unfold, flitting around the room like invisible sparks to bite along my skin. The first two times I jumped, then I stood there and let her power eat over my skin. I was wearing steel, but a few knives had never been enough for me to withstand her magic. It had to be my own newfound powers that kept it from being so much worse.

Her eyes narrowed as she came to stand in front of me. With me standing on the small raised platform, we were eye-to-eye. Her magic pushed out from her like a moving wall of force. I had to brace my feet as if I were standing against wind. The small burning bites had turned into a constant ache like standing just inside an oven, not quite touching the glowing surface, but knowing that one tiny shove and your skin would burn and crisp.

"Doyle said your powers had grown, but I didn't quite believe it. But there you stand before me, and I must accept that you are true sidhe, at last." She put her foot on the lowest step. "But never forget that I am queen here, Meredith, not you. No matter how powerful you become, you will never rival me."

"I would never presume otherwise, my lady," I said. My voice was just a touch shaky.

Her magic pushed at me. I couldn't draw a good breath. My eyes blinked as if I were looking into the sun. I fought to stand and not to give ground. "My lady, tell me what you wish me to do and I will do it. I have not offered challenge in any way."

She came up another step, and this time I did give ground. I did not want her to touch me. "Simply by standing in the face of my power you challenge me."

"If you wish me to kneel, I will kneel. Tell me what you want, my queen, and I will give it to you." I did not want to get into a contest of magic with her. I would lose. I knew that. It left me with nothing to prove.

"Make the ring have life on my finger, Niece."

I didn't know what to say to that. I finally held my hand out to her. "Do you want the ring back?"

"More than you will ever know, but it is yours now, Niece. I wish you joy of it." That last sounded more like a curse than a blessing.

I went to the far edge of the table, gripping it to steady myself against the growing pressure of her magic. "What do you want from me?"

She never answered me. Andais made a gesture with both hands toward me and that pressure became a force that shoved me backward. I was airborne for a second until my back met the wall, and my head hit a heartbeat later. I kept my feet through a shower of grey and white flowers on the edge of my vision.

When my vision cleared, Andais was standing in front of me with a knife in her hand. She pressed the tip of it against the small hollow at the base of my throat, pressed the tip of the blade until I felt it bite into my skin. She put her finger against the wound and came away with a trembling drop of my blood clinging to her leather-clad finger. She held her finger upside down so the drop fell quivering to the floor.

"Know this, niece of mine. Your blood is my blood, and that is the only reason I care what happens to you. I do not care if you like what I have planned for you or not. I need you to continue our bloodline, but if you will not help do that, then I do not need you." She withdrew the knife very slowly, drawing it back an inch or two. She laid the flat of the blade against my face, the point dangerously close to my eye.

I could taste my pulse on my tongue, and I'd forgotten to breathe. Looking into her face, I knew that she would kill me, just like that.

"That which is not useful to me is discarded, Meredith." She pressed the flat of the blade into my flesh so that when I blinked the tip of the knife brushed my eyelashes. "You will pick someone to sleep with tonight. I don't care who. Since you have invoked virgin right, you are free to go back to Los Angeles, but you will have to pick some of my Guard to take with you. So look at them tonight, Meredith, with those emerald-green-and-gold eyes of yours, those Seelie eyes of yours, and choose." She put her face next to mine, so close that she could have kissed me. She whispered the last words into my mouth. "Fuck one of them tonight, Meredith, because if you don't, tomorrow night you will entertain the court with a group of my choosing."

She smiled, and it was the smile that touched her face when she had thought of something wicked, and painful. "At least one that you choose must be enough my creature to spy for me against you. If you go back to Los Angeles."

My voice came out the barest of whispers. "Must I sleep with your spy?"

"Yes," she said. The blade point moved a fraction closer, so close it blurred in my vision, and I fought not to blink, because if I did the point would pierce my eyelid. "Is that all right with you, Niece? Is it all right with you that I make you sleep with my spy?"

I said the only thing I could say. "Yes, Aunt Andais."

"You'll choose your little harem tonight at the banquet?"

My eyes weren't fluttering. They were twitching with the need to blink. "Yes, Aunt Andais."

"You'll sleep with someone tonight before you fly back to your western lands?"

I widened my eyes and concentrated on her face, on looking at her face. The knife was a blur of steel taking up most of my right eye's vision, but I could still see, still see her face looming above me like a painted moon.