Queen's Ring

The queen's ring was a sidhe relic, a heavy silver octagonal,  not perfectly round; as if it had molded to all of the fingers it had encircled over the millennia. It was a plain, almost mannish style. Inside the ring were engraved the words: "For if my love comes not to me, dark and dismal my life will be" in an ancient form of Gaelic. It magically adjusted itself to fit whatever finger wore it. It sometimes refused to be removed.The ring reacted to any fertile mate the hand wearing it touched.

Andais had long ago taken the ring as a spoil of war from the body of a dead Seelie warrior. Once it made Andais utterly irresistible to any male it reacted to; as Meredith put it; "like a besotted schoolboy." Once the ring was a matchmaker, it could indicate a fertile pair, not just from touch, but across a room. The man and the woman would then fall hopelessly in love and live happily ever after - hence the nickname for the ring: the happy-ever-after ring. Once, the queen would throw balls and invite eligible sidhe and touch each woman while she wore the ring, "...almost always someone would step forward...they would fall on each other...be huge with child...marry...and be the perfect match."

The ring also provided a kind of protective magic about chosen couples, providing a happy ending and prohibiting tragedy. When magic began to fade, however, the matchmaking balls failed, and chosen partners died. At the Battle of Rhodan, almost two hundred sidhe married to their chosen love matches died. It was the first time in their history that anyone chosen by the ring had been denied a happy ending.

Once Andais' true love, Owain, had been killed in battle, she used the ring to fill her bed and make other sidhe elf-struck; unable to live without her touch. Even that power lessened over time.

Andais eventually gave the ring to Meredith, both as a sign that she was her heir, and to see how many of her Ravens it reacted to. She wanted Meredith to sleep with as many as possible until she was made pregnant.

Evidence that the old powers were returning, however, came when the ring selected Biddy as Nicca's perfect mate while Meredith was wearing it in Mistral's Kiss. It did the same thing for Crystall and Dilys in Swallowing Darkness indicating the pair would produce two children eventually.