Fflur was enamored of the healing spring. She made me drink a cup of the cool, clear water, and the pain lessened. She stripped me down and bathed the arm in the water. It didn't heal immediately, but the muscles stopped jumping and fighting, and the pain went from a sharp stabbing to a dull ache. I could live with an ache, could sleep with an ache.

The queen's room had been cleaned while we were gone. How the white ladies had gotten rid of all that blood, I didn't know, and perhaps I didn't want to know.

Galen helped me out of the rest of my clothes. His eyes were shiny with unshed tears. He leaned in and touched his lips to my forehead. "I thought I'd lost you today." I reached for him, but he moved away. "No, Merry, I'll do first watch. If you hold me, I'll cry, and that's so unmanly." He tried to make a joke of it, but it didn't quite work. I thought there was more going on than simply worry about what had happened, but I was in no shape to chase him down and make him tell the truth.

Doyle curled his nude body around me in the center of the queen's huge bed. It was larger than a king-size bed. I'd coined the term orgy-size, but never to the queen's face. I was sleepy from a draft that Fflur had given me. She said it would help me sleep and speed the healing. I settled into the first drowsiness of the potion and the velvet warmth of Doyle's body.

Frost kissed my forehead, and it made me blink my eyes open. I hadn't remembered shutting them. "I will help Galen keep watch. There is someone else who needs to sleep next to you right now." There was a look on his face, he wasn't pouting, or being childish. He looked, silly as it seemed for a being centuries old, grown up.

I woke the next moment when someone crawled in beside me, moving carefully around my wounded arm. It was not a body I knew. I couldn't say how I was so certain, but I knew the men who shared my bed - the feel of them, the scent of their skin  - and this was no one I knew that well. I opened my eyes and found Adair's golden-skinned face hovering over mine. "The queen says I am yours if you want me." There was a trembling look in his eyes, fear, uncertainty. Goddess alone knew what mood the queen would be in after our little show. I wouldn't have wanted to be on the receiving end of that mood.

"Stay with us," I whispered, "of course, stay."

He turned away from me and cuddled his body in against mine. A shudder ran through him, and it took me a moment to realize he was crying. The bed moved as Rhys crawled in on the other side of Adair, and Kitto crawled across the foot of the bed, and Nicca and Sage with their wings carefully back. We all touched Adair, letting him know with our hands and our bodies that he was safe. We fell asleep like that in a huge piles of warm bodies and comforting hands.

Two things woke me: Adair whimpered in his sleep, and Doyle went very still on the other side of me. I blinked awake, and his arm around my waist tightened enough to tell me not to move. I stayed frozen in the curve of his body, with Adair making his small helpless noises.

The queen stood at the foot of the bed, staring down at all of us. I could not read her thoughts, only that they were not light ones.

I stroked Adair's naked back until the noises ceased, and he fell back to sleep. I felt rather than saw that Rhys was awake on the other side of him. I think Nicca, Kitto, and Sage were actually still asleep; their breathing was even and deep.

Frost and Galen stood by the bed, behind her, as if they wanted to grab her, but were afraid to. How do you guard someone from the queen? The answer is, you don't, not really.

She looked down at us and spoke softly, as if she didn't want to wake those who slept. "I do not know who to envy more. You with all your men, or your men curled next to you. I have tasted your power and found it sweet, Meredith, very sweet." She turned her head, though I had heard nothing. "Eamon awaits, and the guards I have chosen for the night." She looked back down at me. "You have inspired me to choose more of them for my bed this night."

Adair's body tensed against mine, and I knew that though his eyes were closed, he was awake. He feigned sleep the way a child will: Pretend hard enough and the bad thing will go away.

She gave a throaty chuckle, and he actually jumped, as if the sound had struck him, though I knew it had not. She left the room laughing, but none of us found it particularly funny.

I wondered where Barinthus was, and Usna, and Abloec, and even Onilwyn and Amatheon. They were supposed to be mine now, and that meant I was supposed to protect them. I sent Rhys to ask about them. He came back a little while later trailing them behind him, all of them. Including Hawthorne, Ivi, and Brii. "I asked the queen's permission to bring all your men, and she gave the ones you hadn't fucked yet a choice. They all chose to come in here for the night." He looked both amused and tired.

Barinthus looked down at the bed and shook his head. "Not even this bed will hold us all." He was right, but they managed to get more of them on it than you'd think. When we'd settled down for the night, with more bodies than I'd ever shared a bed with, it was Amatheon's voice coming from somewhere at the foot of the bed that seemed to speak for most of the new guards. "Thank you for sending Rhys to find us."

"You're mine now, Amatheon, for better or for worse."

"For better or for worse," Rhys said from somewhere farther into the room.

"This isn't a human marriage ceremony," Frost said from near the door. He sounded a little disgruntled.

Doyle cuddled in tighter against me, and I relaxed in the curve of him.

"Marriage can end in divorce, or one can simply walk out," Doyle said. "Merry takes her responsibilities more seriously than that."

"So, what," I said from the darkness, "it's for richer or poorer?"

"I don't know about that," Rhys said. "I don't think I'd like being poor."

"Good night, Rhys," I said.

He laughed.

From somewhere near the door Galen said, "In sickness and in health, till death do us part."

There was something both comforting and ominous about those words.

Onilwyn's voice came out of the dark, far enough away that I knew he hadn't managed to find a spot on the bed. "So just like that, you bind yourself to us, to our protection and our fates?"

"To your protection, yes, but not your fate, Onilwyn. Your fate, like everyone's fate, is your own, and no one can take it from you."

"The queen says that our fate is in her hands," he said, in that quiet voice everyone seems to use in the dark as people begin to drift off to sleep.

"No," I said, "I want no one's fate. It is too much responsibility."

"Isn't that what it means to be queen?" he asked.

"It means I have the fate of my people, yes, but individual choices, those are your own. You have free will, Onilwyn."

"Do you truly believe that?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, and put my face into the curve of Adair's neck. He smelled like fresh-cut wood. No one had made him move, and it made me wonder what Andais had done to him besides cutting off his hair.

"An absolute monarch who believes in free will, isn't that against the rules?" Onilwyn asked.

"No," I said, my face buried against Adair's skin, "it's not. Not against my rules." My voice was beginning to drag with that edge of sleep.

"I think I will like your rules," Onilwyn said, and his voice, too, was growing heavy.

"The rules, yes," Rhys said, "but the housework is a bitch."

"Housework!" Onilwyn said. "The sidhe don't do housework."

"My house, my rules," I said.

He and some of the others who were still awake began to protest. "Enough," Doyle said. "You will do what the princess says you will do."

"Or what?" a voice I didn't recognize asked.

"Or you will be sent back to the queen's tender care."

Silence to that, a thick and not very restful silence. "The sex had better be damn good if I'm expected to do windows." I think it was Usna.

"It is," Rhys said.

"Shut up, Rhys," Galen said.

"Well, it's true," he said.

"Enough," I said, "I'm tired, and if I'm going to be well enough to do anything with anyone tomorrow, I need sleep."

Silence then, and the small noises that bodies make as they move under sheets. Ivi's voice came soft and distant. "How good?"

Rhys answered from the door, "Very..."

"Good night, Rhys," I said, "and good night, Ivi. Go to sleep."

I was almost asleep, lost between the twin warmths of Doyle and Adair, when I heard whispering. I knew from the tone that one of them was Rhys, and thought the other was probably Ivi. I could have yelled at them, but I let sleep roll over me like a warm, thick blanket. If I insisted on all of them being quiet at the same time, we'd never get to sleep. If Rhys wanted to regale Ivi with tales of sex, then he was free to do it. So long as I didn't have to listen to the details.

The last sound I heard was a stifled and very masculine laugh. I would learn the next morning that Rhys had attracted quite a crowd for his erotic tales. He swore our most solemn oath that he hadn't lied or exaggerated. I had to believe him, but I vowed never again to let him stay up late telling tales to those who had not shared my bed. If I wasn't careful he'd give me a reputation that no one, not even a fertility goddess, could live up to. Rhys tells me I'm being modest. I tell him I'm only mortal, and how can one mortal woman satisfy the lusts of sixteen immortal sidhe?

He gave me a look and said, "Mortal is it? Are you sure of that?"

The answer, truthfully, is no, but how do you tell if you're immortal? I mean, I don't feel that different. Shouldn't immortality feel different? It seems like it should. Besides, how do you test the theory?