Rhys had gone to the huge bank of windows that looked out over the pool. He gave me a view of his lovely backside, but his arms were crossed and his shoulders hunched with his anger.

"But just as you can negotiate for no damage done to your body, you can negotiate on the sex of your partners. There are some even among the goblins who are simply too heterosexual to be interested in exploring the possibilities. If you'd negotiated, then no male could have touched you."

Frost made some small movement, as if he wanted to go to Rhys. He gave me a look that wasn't entirely friendly.

Rhys's voice brought us back to him. "Do you delight in reminding me that my worst nightmare was my own doing? That if I hadn't been an arrogant sidhe who couldn't be bothered learning about any people but my own, I might have known that I had rights among the goblins. That even the victims of torture have rights." He turned, and rage filled his single blue eye with light. That circle of sky blue, the ring of winter sky, and that brilliant line of cornflower around the pupil blazed. The separate colors literally glowed with his rage, and a faint milky light began to flit behind his skin. His power raised with his anger.

There was a time when I'd feared Rhys when he was like this, but I'd seen his anger too often to fear it. As Frost with his pouting, so Rhys with his anger; it was just a part of them. You accepted it and moved on.

If Rhys had suddenly blazed to life like some pale sun, then I'd have been worried. But this was a small display; it meant nothing.

"You're still being arrogant about their culture, Rhys. You act as if what they did to you is nothing that could ever have happened in the high courts of the sidhe. If the Queen of Air and Darkness bid it, or the King of Light and Illusion wanted it, it would be done. And the sidhe have no laws protecting the victims of torture. You're just tortured. The goblins may do more torture, maiming, and rape than the sidhe, but they've got more laws in place to protect the people who end up on the wrong end of the punishment. You get fucked over by the sidhe, and they fuck you any way they want to. So you tell me, Rhys, which race is the more civilized?"

"You cannot compare the sidhe to the goblins," Frost said, his voice dripping with that arrogance that has been more than one sidhe's undoing. I guess if you've been the ruling class for a few thousand years, you forget what it's like to be ruled.

"You can't honestly mean that you prefer the goblins' world to ours," Rhys said, and his surprise was overcoming his anger.

"I didn't say that."

"What did you say?" he asked.

"I'm saying that this attitude the sidhe have that nothing and no one is as good as they are isn't necessarily so. My father used to say that the goblins are the foot soldiers of the sidhe armies. That without the goblins as our allies the Unseelie would have been destroyed by the Seelie centuries ago."

"The goblins and the sluagh," Rhys said.

The sluagh were the nightmares of the Unseelie court. They were all that was most frightening, most monstrous. All fey, sidhe or no, feared the sluagh. They were the Unseelie's version of the wild hunt, and there was nowhere you could hide, no place you could run to, that sluagh would not find you. On rare occasions it had taken years, but the sluagh never give up unless called off by the Queen of Air and Darkness. The sluagh were the queen's big scary gun. It is said that even King Taranis himself fears the sound of wings in the dark.

"Yes, the sluagh, those of our kind that most sidhe would rather not admit even belong in faerie, let alone that we could share a bloodline or two."

"We are not related to those creatures," Frost said.

"Their king, Sholto, is half-sidhe, Frost. You've seen him. His mother was Unseelie sidhe."

"Him, perhaps, but not the rest."

I shook my head. "The sluagh are the Unseelie, Frost, more than the sidhe themselves. Our one strength as a court is that we take in anyone. The Seelie Court keeps rejecting anyone who isn't good enough for them, and that has been the Unseelie's strength for centuries. We take in the fey they don't want. It's what makes us different from them; better, I think."

"What do you want from us?" Rhys asked, and he wasn't so much angry now as puzzled.

"Kurag is like a schoolyard bully. He only continues to pick at you because he gets such nice reactions from you. If you could act as if it didn't bother you, then he'd tire of the game."

Rhys hugged himself tighter. "It isn't a game to me."

"It is to him, Rhys. It's wonderful that you've overcome your feelings enough to sit beside me when I speak with the goblins, but truthfully, I spend so much time worrying about your feelings that I'm not as focused as I need to be."

"Fine," he said, "I won't go in with you. Consort knows, I'd rather not have to see his ugly face."

"When you're not there, Kurag spends time asking after you. He keeps asking, Where's my delicious guard? The pale one."

"I didn't know he did that," Rhys said.

I shrugged. "He does."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Doyle said it would just upset you, and there wasn't anything you could do about it." I closed the distance between Rhys and me, laid a hand on his crossed arms. "I disagree. I think you're stronger than Doyle knows. I believe that you can swallow this hurt, and help me turn the tables on Kurag."

He looked suspicious. "How?"

I dropped my hand from his arm. "Never mind, Rhys." I turned toward the hallway.

"No, Merry, I mean it. How could I help you negotiate with... him?"

"Doyle's right, if I lose most of my swimsuit it will make it easier to negotiate with Kurag. He's a terrible letch."

Rhys shrugged. "And where do I come in?"

"Put on a robe and flash some of that gorgeous white flesh if Kurag gets stubborn. If you could keep your temper, no matter what he said, you beside me like this would distract him, not because of sex, but because all goblins love the taste of sidhe flesh. One of the things the goblins hated the most about making peace with the sidhe was that they couldn't eat us anymore."

"You ask too much," Frost said.

I looked at that handsome, arrogant face and shook my head again. "I haven't asked anything of you, Frost."

"How can you ask Rhys to sit there and let a goblin think of him as food? It is beneath us."

"If Kurag agrees to lengthen the alliance, I'll be beneath a lot of goblins." I'd said the last almost to be cruel. I was tired of hearing how much they hated my plan.

Frost's face showed the disgust he felt. "The thought of any sidhe woman giving herself to goblin men is repulsive. The thought of a princess of the blood, and a future queen, lying with them is beyond anything I have words for. Even Queen Andais has never stooped so low to gain the goblins' favors."

"Kitto is half-goblin and half-sidhe, and for better or worse I brought him into his powers, full-sidhe powers, through sex. No one thought that any goblin half-breed could be full-sidhe."

"Their blood is not pure enough," Frost said.

"I may hate it," Rhys said, "but Kitto's magic is the magic of our blood. I've seen him glow with it." He looked suddenly tired. "Kitto's not even half bad for a goblin."

"Merry," Frost said, and took a step toward me. "Merry, please don't do this. Don't say that you will bring over more of the goblin half-breeds. You have not seen them. Few of them are as fair as Kitto. Most are much more goblin-like than sidhe-like."

"I know, Frost."

"Then how can you offer yourself?"

"First, I want the alliance lengthened, at almost any cost. Second, the sidhe have been dying out for centuries, but if Kitto can be full-sidhe, then maybe other half-sidhe could be brought into their full powers. It would mean that the Unseelie Court would suddenly be stronger than it has ever been."