His face started to close down, that cold mask building up. "That is not all."
I touched his arm. "Don't pout about this, Frost. I was just thinking that if we are ever attacked on an airplane, it's the one place Doyle won't be at his best. That's all."
I watched him struggle to swallow all that sullenness. It looked like it might choke him, but he was trying. He was trying so obviously that I didn't say what else I was thinking: that if I had been sitting there having some wild fantasy about Doyle, it was none of Frost's concern. I was supposed to enjoy all of them, but I kept it to myself. Frost was trying, and chastising him for being possessive, a very un-fey-like emotion, wouldn't have helped.
I squeezed his arm and let it go. Good for me.
Rhys knelt in front of me. He was wearing his white eye patch with the tiny seed pearls on it. It went with the white silk trench coat, white fedora, and pale cream-colored suit. The only color he wore was an icy pink tie. He looked like a cross between an ice cream man and the ghost of some 1940s detective. He'd even piled all that white curly hair up under the hat. He looked younger without the hair, all soft lines and kissable lips. He was hundreds of years older than I would ever be, but kneeling there, he looked like he'd never seen the wrong side of thirty.
He smiled up at me. "Doyle gave me something to give to you." He glanced behind at their leader, still sitting with his eyes tight shut. He turned back to me with a chuckle. "He knew he'd be indisposed." He pulled a white ring box out of his coat pocket.
The smile that I'd given him faded. "Do I have to?"
"Yes, you do." He suddenly looked a decade older, not a bit less handsome, but the boyishness was gone as if I'd imagined it.
Frost leaned in to add, "It is the queen's ring, Merry, given to you from her. It is one of the symbols that you are her heir. You must wear it."
"I don't mind the ring," I said, "but with the chalice on the plane, I'm a little worried that it might up the magic on the ring as it's done on other things."
The two men looked at each other, and I could tell it was the first time they'd thought of it.
"Damn," Rhys said, "that could be a problem."
Frost looked very serious. "A problem, or a salvation. Once the ring was a great relic of power, not merely a chooser of the queen's fertile lovers."
"Funny," I said, "I keep hearing that the ring is a great relic, but no one, not even my father, would tell me what it did once upon a time." I looked from one to the other of them, and they exchanged one of those glances that said neither wanted to tell me.
"What?" I demanded.
They sighed in unison. Rhys sat back on his knees, the ring box still unopened in his hands. "Once, the ring made the Andais irresistible to any man whom the ring reacted to."
"That doesn't sound bad enough for the looks on your faces. What else?"
They exchanged another glance.
"Drop the other shoe, okay."
"Shoe?" Frost asked.
"She means, just tell her," Rhys explained. He was one of the few guards who hadn't spent the last fifty years hiding in the hollow hills. Rhys owned a house outside the faerie mounds. A house with electricity, a television, and everything. He was probably one of the only sidhe who knew who Humphrey Bogart had been, or who Madonna was.
"You know that moment in all the Cinderella movies where she's at the top of the stairs, and the prince looks up, stunned?" Rhys asked.
"Yes," I said.
"Then he walks toward her like he has no choice."
I nodded. "Yes."
"That irresistible," he said.
"You mean once the ring's reacted to you, you're like some besotted schoolboy."
He sighed. "Not exactly."
"It isn't just the men," Frost said.
I looked from one to the other. "What do you mean?"
Sage tromped up the aisle to us. He was wearing a pair of Kitto's dress slacks and a T-shirt that had had to be ripped up the back to accommodate his wings. His waist was tinier than Kitto's, so he had a belt cinched tight. He wore a pair of Kitto's jogging shoes laced as tight as they would go, because his foot was narrower than the goblin's. He had a blanket wrapped around his upper body, because the jacket ripped up the back wouldn't keep him warm. He needed one of the heavy woolen cloaks that the courts had designed centuries ago for the human-size, or bigger, winged fey. Nicca was also going to be a very cold boy once we landed. But we'd alerted the guards who would meet us at the airport, and they'd have cloaks. Until then, Sage huddled in his blanket as if he could already feel the cold. At his new size he had no clothes that fit him.
"What they are so delicately trying to tell you, Princess, is that once that ring was a matchmaker."
I frowned up at him from my seat.
He sighed. "Oh, to be young again," but he made it sound like a bad thing. "The ring can tell a fertile match, not just from touching bare skin, but from across a room, at first sight. Both the man and woman fell hopelessly in love and lived happily ever after."
"Queen Andais has never struck me as the happily-ever-after type."
"She had control of the ring, Merry, like any good weapon, or tool. She would throw a great ball and invite all the eligible sidhe, and a few of us lesser beings to serve at table or entertain. Then she'd stand near the door, and as each woman came through, she'd touch her with the ring, and almost always someone would step forward. They would fall upon each other like lustful rams, be huge with child within a few months, marry, and be a perfect match. Once upon a time, the ring didn't just pick out which sidhe were fertile. Oh, no, it was the happy-ever-after ring. That's what we used to call it. Where do you think the humans got all that crap from?"