"Captain Doyle gave me some hair."

I looked past Gran at Doyle. "How did you just happen to have a lock of his hair with you?"

"I told you of the dream, Meredith."

"So what?"

"We exchanged locks of hair, to give to you as a token. He had mine and would have given it to you to remember me if I had been chosen. I gave a few strands of the lock to the doctors for comparison."

"Where were you hiding it, Doyle? You had no pockets as a dog."

"I gave it to another guard for safekeeping. One who did not travel into the Golden Court with us."

Just saying it that way meant he'd planned on the possibility of none of them surviving. It didn't make me feel any better to hear that. We had all survived, but the fear was still there deep inside me. The fear of loss.

"Who did you trust to hold such a token?" I asked.

"The men I trust most are in this room," he said in that dark voice that seemed to match his color. It was the kind of voice that the night itself would use, if it were male.

"Yes, and by your earlier words, you planned for failure as well as success. So you left the locks of hair with someone you didn't take inside the Golden Court."

He came to stand at the foot of the bed, not so near Gran. Doyle was aware that he had been the Queen's Darkness, her assassin, for centuries, and many folk of the court were still nervous around him. I appreciated that he gave Gran room, and I approved of him sending Galen to fetch her. I wasn't certain there was another guard among my men whom she would have trusted. The rest had been too much like enemies for too long.

I studied his dark face, though I knew that his face sometimes didn't help me at all. In the beginning he had let his emotions show around me, but as I'd come to read his face better he'd schooled that face. I knew that, if he didn't wish it, I would gain nothing from his face but the pleasure of looking at it.