I squared my shoulders, made sure my posture was perfect, and kept walking toward Rhys with a smile on my face. My insecurities in that moment were my own.

Of course, I wasn’t the only one who didn’t look like everyone else. There were three Red Caps in the room, too. They were all between seven feet, short for a Red Cap, and thirteen feet, which was almost as tall as they got. The tallest and the shortest were shades of gray, but the middle one was the yellow of aged ivory. I wasn’t close enough to see their true red eyes, but they were Red Caps; the eyes would be scarlet. The yellow-skinned one was Clesek, but I couldn’t recall the names of the other two. They all wore the short, round caps that gave them their name, but right now the caps weren’t red, more brown, the color of dried blood. They were all stuffed into sweat suits that strained to fit over their bodies. It was like trying to find workout clothes for the Incredible Hulk. They’d originally worked out in their undergarments, but Maeve had too many humans working in the house and they were uncomfortable with nearly nude giants striding through the hallways. They were in the far corner using the special free-weight bars that we’d had to get, so they could carry more weight than regular barbells without breaking; I hadn’t even known that there were special bars to hold weights once you got up to four to five hundred pounds and more. The fact that human beings with no fey ancestry needed special bars like that amazed me a little, and made me feel even weaker. I was so not the strongest person in this room, not in any way.

I heard Rhys say, “The metal makes us have to work harder, because not all our magic works.”

The woman’s voice: “It’s harder than I thought it would be.”

“Good,” he said.

The Red Caps saw me and dropped their weights with a clang that vibrated the room as they went down on one knee. They didn’t have to do that during exercise, I’d told them all that, but the Red Caps were very devoted.

I stopped and called out to them. “It’s all right, you don’t have to bow in the weight room, remember?”

“You are our queen, we must show proper respect,” Clesek said. He gave a narrow-eyed stare at the sidhe. “They should show it, too.”

“It’s dangerous in the weight room, Clesek; we discussed this,” I said.

“Which of you dropped it?” Rhys yelled it, as he came striding through the machines wearing midthigh-length compression shorts and a tank top that was more straps than shirt so that the muscled beauty of his upper body was more revealed than hidden by it. The shorts showed off assets, too, but in the gym you were supposed to be paying attention to other things. His hair was back in a ponytail held by multiple hair ties spaced a few inches apart along its length so that it was almost a braid, but not quite.

Since he was six inches taller than me, I didn’t think of him as short, but as he went for the Red Caps, he looked small. It made me wonder how tiny I looked standing next to the biggest of the goblins.

His voice boomed out, filling the room. One of the visiting human soldiers had called it a drill sergeant voice. “You do not drop the weights! If you have to drop the weights, then it’s too heavy for you, and you do what?” He was pressed nearly into the Red Cap’s chest, but his voice thundered through the suddenly quiet room. Everyone had stopped exercising to see someone else get dressed down.

The Red Cap mumbled something.

Rhys did that big voice again. “I can’t hear you!”

“Lower the weights. But it wasn’t too heavy for me. We needed to show respect to Queen Meredith,” the Red Cap said. He looked sullen. His scarlet eyes narrowed in an unfriendly manner, though part of it was the color. Bloodred eyes with no whites in them could make the Red Caps look angry, or at least unfriendly, easily and often.

“But the humans on TV just let the heaviest barbells drop,” one of the other Red Caps said. This one was a gray so pale that he was almost white. He also had one of the most human of faces, not exactly handsome, but not the frightening fanged expression that most of them had once had.

Rhys turned and got up in the face of the second Red Cap. It was almost funny to see the huge Red Cap’s shoulders slump, head ducking, shame-faced at the much smaller man’s angry rant.

I heard one of the sidhe closest to me say, “She’s not our queen yet.”

I turned and found one of the very newest refugees from faerie. Our policy had been to take in any fey who wanted to leave faerie and come to the Western Lands, but a few of the recent sidhe were making me doubt the wisdom of that.

Fenella was just a fraction under six feet tall, with hair that fell like a gold and yellow cloak to her ankles when it was unbound; now it was in two long braids that had been looped back in upon themselves so they glittered as she moved, one moment more gold, the next like sunshine spun into rope, with the beauty of her face shining through the light and jewel-bright glory of her hair. She wasn’t called Fenella of the Shining Hair for nothing. She blinked her tricolored eyes at me. At first you thought her eyes were white with two circles of yellow shades, until you realized that the white around her pupil was actually an incredibly light yellow like winter sunlight, then butter, and the brighter yellow autumn leaves. I’d always thought that her eyes would have looked better with less spectacular hair, or that she needed eyes that were as amazing as the hair.

“Do you have something to say to me, Fenella?” I asked.

“No, Princess, I do not.”

“If you will not say it to my face, then please refrain from saying it behind my back.”