A Shiver of Light

CHAPTER FOUR

THEY SAY YOU have no sense of smell when you dream, but I woke to the scent of roses and had a moment of wondering why the dim hospital room smelled like wild roses in the noon warmth of a summer meadow. The room was almost in darkness except for night lights underneath a shelf and one near the only inner door, which led to a bathroom. But I saw a pale, fluffy cloud across the room from where I lay in the bed. Galen was asleep in a chair underneath the cloud, which wasn’t a cloud at all, but the massed blossoms of a small fruit tree that had grown behind his chair. I’d seen temporary plants grow like this from too much magic in a place, but to my knowledge we hadn’t done magic. Maybe I’d missed something while I slept, or maybe surprise triplets were magic enough. Galen had one hand inside the plastic crib beside him. I couldn’t tell in the dim light which of the bigger twins lay inside the blanket, but Galen’s hand was resting on the tiny form, as if even in his sleep he had reached out to our child.

It made me smile. Galen might not be the best warrior of my men, and he was a terrible politician, but it didn’t surprise me at all that he would be good at this part.

The sound of movement beside me made me turn and find another plastic crib on its tall wheeled legs beside me. There was a woven basket with little handles for carrying inside the plastic so that Bryluen wouldn’t touch the man-made things that seemed to hurt her. There were wings softly flexing inside the blanket with her, more than just Royal and his sister Penny, who had come to visit his daughter, and her niece.

I smelled roses even more strongly and looked up to find that there were rose vines growing above my bed, like a living canopy of thorns and pale flowers, starlike in the darkness. I smelled the sweetness of apple blossoms now, and knew what kind of tree grew across the room.

I wondered what the nurses thought of the new decorations. There were moths fluttering in the flowers above me, and I could see the movement of them in the blossoms across the room now, but I knew they only looked like moths. Dozens of demi-fey fluttered in the new garden, but they weren’t just sipping nectar and pollen, they were guarding, and they were attracted to this new magic like an ordinary moth drawn to a light.

I glanced to the far side of the room and found Rhys on the couch, asleep on his back with Gwenwyfar across his chest. Her white curls looked so very like his in the dim light. One of her small fists was wrapped around his finger, as if they held each other even in their sleep.

Sholto sat artfully slumping in a chair with his back to the room’s only window. He’d changed clothes since last I’d seen him, because his clothes were dark enough that they blended in with the darkness, leaving his long hair to gleam like a pale yellow curtain around the darkness of the rest of him. His eyes were pale, but I wouldn’t have wanted to guess at their color in this light. Nothing human had yellow eyes like his; they were just some pale color, but not as pale as his white, white skin, which gleamed like Rhys’s and the baby’s hair in the near-blackness of the room.

The wall behind him moved. I had to narrow my vision and concentrate to see that it wasn’t the wall that was moving, but that there was a solid sheet of nightflyers hanging on the wall like giant bats, though even bats wouldn’t be able to hang flat against a smooth modern wall, but then bats didn’t have tentacles with suction on them and the nightflyers did. Their fleshy bodies framed the window and clung halfway across the ceiling. Once they’d chased me like the nightmares they appeared to be, but now the nightmares were on my side, and I knew that while they were in the room almost nothing in this world, or the next, dared to attack us.

A tentacle much bigger than anything the flyers could boast waved at the window behind them all. That let me know that more of the sluagh was on guard outside our room. We had powerful enemies, but we hadn’t needed this much overt protection since we escaped from faerie and came back to California to have the babies.

I had to fight to keep my voice soft, not wanting to wake anyone, but needing to ask, “What’s wrong?”

Sholto blinked at me, and there was a shine to his eyes as if they’d caught what little light there was in a way that human eyes did not reflect. He sat up a little straighter, and I could see the gleam of jewels against the black of his shirt. The necklace covered most of his upper chest. It was a piece that even the Hollywood elite wouldn’t have worn. They were jewels meant for a king, which he was, King of the Sluagh. I’d seen him wear the piece in the high courts of faerie when he was reminding other nobles that he wasn’t just another lordling, or even princeling. Short of wearing his crown he was declaring himself king; the question was, why? Or rather, why now?

My heart sped at the sight of the jewels, because he might bring the sluagh out to warn enemies not to try us, but to dress as a king…. It was a very short list of situations he would do that for.

He smiled almost too faintly for me to see it in the dimness. He spoke quietly, too, the way you do around sleeping people. “Why should anything be wrong, Merry?”

“It shouldn’t, but it is,” I said.

“We are your bodyguards, sweet Merry; becoming fathers does not change that. I merely watch over your slumber, and that of our children, and my fellow fathers.”

“You are wearing court clothes and kingly jewels, something I’ve only seen you do in the high courts of faerie. You don’t waste such finery on the human world, or on me.”

“When you are recovered and the doctors free you of restrictions, I would gladly wear all this to your bed.”

I glanced up at the clinging nightflyers, which he was totally ignoring, as if I couldn’t see them.

“You do know that I see the nightflyers, right?”

He grinned then, and shook his head. “I am not trying to hide them from you.”

“Could you, if you wished?”

He seemed to think about it, and then said, “I believe so.”

“Could you hide them from the queen herself?”

“I do not want to hide them from her,” he said.

I smiled then. “So that is why the show of force. The queen has threatened us.”

He sighed, frowned, and fidgeted in his chair, which he didn’t do often. “I was told not to worry you.”

“Who by?” I asked.

“Doyle—you know it was him, or I wouldn’t have tried so hard to obey him. He is technically the captain of your guard, and when in the Unseelie Court my captain.”

“You are the Lord of That Which Passes Between in the Unseelie Court, but you sit here now as King Sholto, ruler of the darkest part of the Unseelie host. What did our queen do, or say, to warrant this show of force, Sholto?”

“Doyle will be unhappy with me if I tell you.”

“Just Doyle?” I asked.

He smiled again. “No, not just Doyle, but I am not worried about Frost.”

“You think you could take my Killing Frost in a duel, but not my Darkness,” I said.

“Yes,” Sholto said. It was interesting that he didn’t try to equivocate or salve his ego. It was just a statement of fact; he feared Doyle’s prowess in battle, but not Frost’s. “But your using their more fearsome nicknames is also a show of force, my dear Merry.”

“Why do you say, ‘my dear Merry,’ as if it’s not true?”

“Because I am no longer certain that any of the babies are mine.”

I frowned at him. “Goddess showed me that you were one of the fathers.”

“Yes, but She did not show me, and I see none of my father’s bloodline in any of the triplets.”

His father had been a nightflyer like those that clung in alien layers to the wall and ceiling of the room. He wasn’t the product of rape, either, but of a highborn sidhe woman wanting a night of perverted pleasure. To be willing to sleep with the monsters of the sluagh was one of the few things that even the Unseelie Court saw as perverse. As Doyle had been the Queen’s Darkness for centuries, and Frost her Killing Frost, so she had nicknamed Sholto her Perverse Creature, but where I could call the other two men by those pet names, I could not do the same for Sholto. He had hated being called her Perverse Creature and feared that someday as Doyle was simply her Darkness, so he would become her Creature, or just Creature.

Sholto looked as handsome and perfect as any of my sidhe lovers, but once he had not. Once, from about midchest to just above a truly beautiful groin, had been a nest of tentacles identical to those on the underside of the nightflyers that clustered around him. Magic and the return of the blessings of Goddess and Her Consort, the Gods that had long withheld their favors from the sidhe, who had been worshipped as deities themselves, had given Sholto the gift of being able to turn the tentacles to a tattoo. Before that he had been able to hide them visually with glamour, that magic that faerie used to trick the eye of mortals, but it had been an illusion, a trick, and the first time I’d touched him with the mass of tentacles touching me, I hadn’t been able to work past it for sex. Now Goddess had given him the body that the rest of him promised, and I’d learned that all those extra bits had pleasures of their own that no more humanlike body could give. I went to his bed joyfully now, and he valued that I loved all of him physically with no squeamishness. I was the only other sidhe lover he’d ever had, because the rest of the courts feared him as proof that the noble blood was wearing thin and we would all be monsters someday, as they feared my mortal blood as proof that their immortality would be the next to vanish.

“I think you’re overly sensitive about your father’s genetics, and you might want to ask yourself if your new ability to make your wonderful extras into a true tattoo might affect the children, too.”

His face grew serious as he thought about my words. He was a serious man as a general rule, and thought about, or even overthought, most things.

“You may be right, but I don’t seem to feel the connection to the babes that others of your lovers feel.”

“Have you held any of the babies?” I asked.

“All of them,” he said. “I felt nothing except that I was afraid I would drop them. They are so small.”

Galen’s voice came thick with sleep, and soft as if he were whispering to not wake the babe beside him. “I was afraid I’d drop them, too, but I worked through it. Once I got over feeling like I didn’t know what I was doing, it was wonderful.”

“I did not find it so,” Sholto said.

“You didn’t stay and take care of them, the way most of us did. I think because they didn’t come out of our bodies, fathers have to work harder at feeling connected.”

Galen sucked at court politics, and at a lot of stuff that the other men in my life were good at, but most of the men wouldn’t have had that insight. It was a good insight.

“I hadn’t thought about how hard it might be for all of you to feel connected to the babies,” I said.

Galen smiled. “You’ve felt connected to them for months, but then you have been holding them more intimately than we ever can.”

Sholto asked, “Are you saying that you did not feel connected to the babes at first either?”

“Not like I do after having held them, cuddled them, and helped give bottles. There was a moment when Alastair looked up at me with those dark eyes, so like Doyle’s eyes, but that was okay, he was suddenly my son, too.”

Rhys’s voice came even and quiet. I think he was trying not to wake the baby sleeping on his chest. “I had the same moment with Gwenwyfar. She’s obviously Mistral’s daughter, but now she’s mine, too.”

“Wait,” I said. “I thought we decided to call her Gwennie, when I went to sleep.”

“She liked Gwenwyfar better,” Rhys said, matter-of-factly.

“Gwennie wouldn’t stop fussing, but the moment Rhys called her Gwenwyfar she stopped,” Galen said.

I frowned at him. “She’s too young to know the difference.”

He smiled and gave a small shrug. “She made a tiny bit of lightning when Mistral first touched her, Merry. Is her preferring a name any less amazing than that?”

I couldn’t argue with his point, but I wanted to.

“Gwenwyfar has your hair,” Sholto said. “None of them have anything of mine.”

“We don’t know that yet,” I said.

“They’re too new,” Galen said. “Give them a few weeks to find out what they are, who they are.”

Sholto shook his head. “I had thought about having an heir to my throne. I have been a good enough king that the host might allow our kingship to become heredity, as well as choice of the people, but not if none of them are descended from the host.”

I hadn’t thought about the fact that we had more than one throne to sit someone on, and suddenly Sholto’s worries about his father’s genetics didn’t seem so silly.

“You’re saying that it was your extra bits that helped make the sluagh comfortable making you their king,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “They will not take a completely sidhe king or queen.”

“Bryluen is not completely sidhe,” Galen said.

“She is demi-fey, and perhaps goblin, but those wings are nothing that flies with my people.”

I wondered if he’d meant to make the modern Americanism It doesn’t fly with me, but I thought it more likely he’d meant it literally.

“Galen is right, Sholto. The babies haven’t been here a whole day yet; they’ll change how they look and who they look like as they get older.”

“They won’t change that much,” Sholto said.

“You might be surprised how much babies change as they get older,” Rhys said.

“That’s right,” Galen said. “You’ve had children before.”

“Yes,” Rhys said. Gwenwyfar moved restlessly on his chest, and he rubbed her back, laid a soft kiss on her curls. It was all done almost automatically. I knew that it had to have been centuries since he’d had other children—did parenting skills stay with you forever once you’d learned them? Or was Rhys just more of a natural father than I’d expected? I wanted to ask him but wasn’t certain how to ask it without implying that I hadn’t expected him to be this good with the babies.

Doyle had felt instantly bonded with Alastair, but he hadn’t helped feed and take care of him as much as Galen had. Maybe it was what Galen had said: He hadn’t felt bonded, so he’d worked at it. Doyle had, so he didn’t have to work at it. Or maybe Doyle was just too busy trying to keep the Queen of Air and Darkness from doing something bad to be a baby-daddy right now.

“Did the queen threaten us, or the babies?” I asked.

The men shifted uneasily—Galen looking at the floor, not meeting their eyes; Rhys kissing the baby again and again purposefully not looking at the other men. Sholto glanced at both of them and then back at me. His face was very serious, arrogant, unreadable, which let me know that whatever the queen had done was frightening, or would at the very least upset me.

My heartbeat was in my throat now, and I was frightened. What could the queen have said, or done, to make them not want to tell me? I probably didn’t want to know. I just wanted to enjoy being a new mom and watch the men I loved be fathers, and just enjoy the moment, but my relatives had been ruining the happy moments of my life for as long as I could remember. Why should this be any different?

“One of you talk to me,” I said. My voice was only a little breathy. I gave myself a point for sounding so much calmer than I felt.

It was Royal who rose into the air on black-and-gray moth wings, with a bull’s-eye spot on the lower wings of scarlet and yellow. His tiny silken loincloth was red, to echo the red in his wings and make you see it more. His wings beat much faster than those of any actual moth, more like the buzzing wings of a dragonfly or bee. Royal was ten inches tall, bigger than any real moth, so he needed wings that were bigger and moved as no moth or butterfly could. He had short curly black hair with delicate antennae coming out of those curls. Bryluen’s hair color was mine, but the antennae were his. But I hadn’t had sex with him until after I was supposed to already be pregnant with the twins. Unless there was some unknown demi-fey genetics in my background, or one of the other men’s, then she had to be partly Royal’s child, but how? I’d accepted it calmly in the moment of wonderment of holding Bryluen, but now I was thinking, not feeling, and it made no sense.

I’d invited Royal and the other demi-fey to the hospital in a fit of postdelivery endorphins and baby intoxication, but now I was sobering up and logic had never been a friend to faerie. We weren’t about logic; in fact, most of faerie defied logic and science. We were impossible; that was sort of the point of fairyland.

I was the first of my kind to go to a modern college in the United States, and my degree was in biology. It was like I’d been driven temporarily mad and now sanity had returned, and I didn’t understand why I’d been so happily sure about Royal and about Kitto. Poor Kitto was out shopping for all the things we needed to turn our twins’ nursery into one for triplets. He’d been so happy, and Bryluen could be his, because he’d been my lover longer than Royal, but … she had wings and antennae, so it had to be demi-fey blood, didn’t it?

One minute Royal looked like the picture from some child’s storybook and the next he stood beside the bed as tall as I was, taller than Kitto, who was only four feet tall, the smallest of my lovers. The moth wings that had been a blur of color when he needed to fly were like some fantastic cape at his back, except this cape flexed and moved with his breath, his thoughts, emotions. Wings could be like the tail on a dog, giving away involuntary things.

He stood unselfconsciously nude, because the little bit of silk he’d worn hadn’t survived the shape change. It wasn’t like the Incredible Hulk’s pants that always magically stayed on; when Royal shifted size, his clothes either shredded or became a mound of cloth for his smaller self to fight free of.

“I will tell you what the queen said.”

“Merry looks pale, as if she already knows all our news,” Sholto said.

“Are you all right?” Galen asked. He stood up and stopped touching Alastair, who waved tiny fists in the air almost immediately, as if only Galen’s touch had kept him still. Maybe he was a cuddly baby and liked skin contact, or maybe it was magic like the tree and the roses?

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What’s wrong, Merry?” Rhys asked. He was sitting up, rubbing Gwenwyfar’s back as she rested against his chest. She was moving fitfully even with the touching.

I didn’t want to say it in front of Royal. I wanted time to think and to be able to discuss it with the other men. I needed time to think.

“Royal, tell me what my aunt has done to frighten everyone.”

“She wants to see her great-nieces and nephew,” he said.

“She wants to visit the hospital?”

“She does.”

I pictured my aunt, the Queen of Air and Darkness, tall, sidhe slender, with her long, straight black hair tangling around her legs, dressed in her signature black, her eyes circles of black and shades of gray with black lines encircling every color so that it always looked as if she’d outlined the iris with eyeliner. It was always a startling and frightening effect, or maybe that last part was just me? Maybe if she hadn’t tried to drown me when I was six, or torment me casually on so many occasions, I would have simply thought her eyes were striking. Perhaps, if I hadn’t seen her covered in the blood of her torture victims, or had so many of them flee to us here in California looking for a sort of political asylum with the wounds of her creativity still unhealed in their flesh, I would have thought her beautiful, but I knew too much about my aunt to ever see her as anything but frightening. “Is she still torturing her court nobles on mad whims?” I asked.

“Last we checked,” Rhys said.

“Then she’s too crazy to be trusted among humans, or near our babies.”

“We agree,” Rhys said. He was rocking Gwenwyfar, gently, but she was moving more. I thought she was working up to a cry, but I was wrong. It was Bryluen who let out a high, thin wail more like the sound that a small animal makes than a baby; just the cry alone said how tiny she was, and how newborn. My body responded to it with milk seeping out of my breasts and soaking through the nursing bra and the gown I was wearing. Well, at least something was working the way it was meant to. I reached for my smallest daughter. I wasn’t sure who her father or fathers were, but I knew she was mine. That was one of the nice things about being the woman: You never had to guess how many kids were yours. Men … did they ever really know before genetic testing existed?