A Shiver of Light Read online

  They both stared up at me so seriously. Gwenwyfar was bigger just at a glance, and one pound made a big difference in newborns, but she was longer, too.

  “So you were the little troublemaker who couldn’t wait to get out,” I said, softly.

  She blinked deep blue eyes up at me, and there were already darker blue lines in her eyes; in a few days we’d see what her tricolored irises would look like. Right now they were baby blue, but if she took after Rhys maybe it would be three shades of blue? Her hair was a mass of white curls. I wanted to touch her hair, feel the texture of it again, but I was out of hands.

  Dr. Heelis was still squatted between my legs, stitching me up. It had all happened too fast. I was numb, not from drugs, but just from abuse of the area. I felt the tugging of what he was doing, but the baby took all my attention—babies.

  Gwenwyfar flailed a small fist as if trying to reach my hair, though I knew it was too early for that, but something caught the light on that small arm like gold, or quicksilver.

  “What is that on her arm?” I asked.

  Rhys lifted her arm out of the blankets and let her wrap one tiny fist around his fingertip, and as he moved her arm we saw a trace of almost metallic lace. It was forked lightning traced like the most delicate gold and silver wire across her arm, almost from shoulder to wrist.

  “Mistral, you need to see your daughter,” Rhys said.

  Mistral had huddled at the edge of the room through everything, terrified and overwhelmed the way some men are, and suffering in the presence of too much technology.

  “There is no way to know who belongs to who,” he said.

  “Come see,” Rhys said.

  “Come, Mistral, master of storms, and see our daughter,” I said.

  Doyle kissed me again and lifted Alastair up to make room for me to hold our daughter. She kept Rhys’s finger in a tight grip, so Mistral came to the other side of the bed. He looked scared, his big hands clasped together as if he were afraid to touch anything, but when he looked down and saw the lightning pattern on her skin he grinned, and then he laughed a loud, happy chortle of a sound that I’d never heard from him before.

  He used one big finger to trace that birthmark of power, and where he touched Gwenwyfar tiny static bolts danced and jumped. She cried, whether because it hurt or scared her I didn’t know, but it made him jerk back and look uncertain.

  “Hold your daughter, Mistral,” I said.

  “She didn’t like me touching her.”

  “She’ll need to start controlling it; might as well start now, and who better to teach her.” Rhys handed Gwenwyfar to Mistral while he was still protesting.

  Without a baby to distract me, I was suddenly aware that I was getting more stitches than I’d ever had in my life, in a part of my body where I’d never wanted any stitches.

  “How is Bryluen?” I asked, and I looked to the incubator where our smallest baby lay. There were too many doctors, too many nurses huddled around her. I had concentrated on the two babies I had; I’d known that there was a third baby only an hour before it all started, but somehow seeing her, so tiny, with her curly red hair, body almost as red as her hair, as my hair, I wanted to hold her, needed to touch her.

  Dr. Lee came with her black hair peeking out of her scrubs, but her face was too serious. “She’s five pounds; that’s a good weight, but she seems weeks younger than the other two developmentally.”

  “What does that mean?” Doyle asked.

  “She’s going need to stay on oxygen for a few days and be fed fluids. She won’t be able to go home with the others.”

  “Can I hold her?” I asked, but I was scared now.

  “You can, but don’t be alarmed by the tubes and things, okay?” Dr. Lee smiled, and it was totally unconvincing. She was worried. I didn’t like that one of the best baby docs in the country was worried.

  They wheeled her over, and five pounds might be a good weight, but comparing it to the six and seven that Alastair and Gwenwyfar had made her look tiny. Her arms were like little sticks too delicate to be real. The tubes did look alarming, and the IV in her little leg didn’t look like birth, it looked more like death. The aura that blazed around the other two babies was dim in this tiny spark of a baby.

  Frost stood on the other side of the tiny incubator with tears shining unshed in his gray eyes. We’d had no third name, so he’d wanted Rose, after a long-lost love and a long-lost daughter. Bryluen was Cornish for “rose.” It had seemed perfect for our tiny red-haired daughter, but now I watched the fate of those earlier lost roses in Frost’s face and it tightened my chest, and made me afraid.

  Doyle took my hand in his, and asked, “Dr. Lee, is it just her size that makes you believe she’s developmentally behind the other two?”

  “No, it’s her test scores. She’s just not as engaged as the other babies are, very much as if she’s simply a few weeks behind them. We’ll use the technology to make up for what she didn’t get inside you.”

  “And she’ll be all right then?” I asked.

  Dr. Lee’s face fought between cheerfully blank and something less pleasant. “You know how this works, Princess; I can’t say that with absolute certainty.”

  “Doctors never guarantee things, do they?” I asked.

  “Modern doctors do not,” Doyle said.

  “But then modern doctors aren’t likely to be executed for saying they can cure the princess and then failing,” Rhys said. He came with a smile to help cheer the gloomy bunch of us. Galen was normally cheerful, but not about our little Rose; Frost was usually the gloomiest man in my life, and Doyle was a serious person. I’d just given birth to triplets. I was allowed to be worried.

  Dr. Lee looked at him as if she didn’t find his joke funny at all. “Excuse me?”

  He grinned at her. “Trying to lighten my partners’ moods; they are determined to think the worst.”

  “Look at her,” Galen said, motioning at the tiny, tiny infant.

  “Remember what my specialty is,” Rhys said. “She doesn’t shine as bright as the others, but neither does she have a shade around her. She is not dying. I would see it.”

  Doyle’s hand tightened on mine, and he said, “Swear it, by the Darkness That Eats All Things.”

  Rhys looked very serious then. “Let me swear it on the love I bear Merry, our children, and the men in this room, the men and women who are waiting for news at the home we have all built. Let me swear on the first true happiness I have known in lo these long, dark centuries, our little Rose will not die here like this; she will grow strong and crawl fast enough to frustrate her brother.”

  “You see this in the future truly?” Frost asked.

  “Yes,” Rhys said.

  “I don’t understand anything you’re talking about, but did you threaten our lives if the baby doesn’t live?” Dr. Lee asked.

  “No,” Rhys said. “I just wanted to remind my family here that modern medicine can do wonders that even magic could not do once, and to have faith. The bad old days are past; let us enjoy the new good days.”

  Doyle and I both held our hands out to Rhys, and he came to take them both. He laid a kiss on mine, then did the same to Doyle. “My queen, my liege, my lover, my friend, let us rejoice and chase despair away from this day, as we chased it from each other this year past.”

  Galen went around and hugged Rhys from the back, which turned Rhys laughing to hug him back. It made us all laugh a little, and then the nurses were putting the tiniest of babies in my arms. She was so light, birdlike, and dreamlike. It reminded me of holding one of the demi-fey, those of faerie that look like butterflies and moths, but who feel more like the hollow bones of birds when they land and walk upon you.

  Bryluen had tubes coming out of her nose trailing to her oxygen, and an IV in her tiny leg, like the one in my arm. Even with Rhys’s reassurance, she looked injured. She was loosely wrapped in one of the thin blankets, and everywhere her skin touched mine she burned as if with fever.

  Bryluen
started to cry, a high-pitched, thin, and piteous sound that only the very youngest infants make. I knew something was wrong just by her cry. I couldn’t explain it, but something the doctors were doing wasn’t the right thing for this one.

  “Doyle, help me unwrap this blanket. She doesn’t like it.”

  He didn’t question it, just helped me unwrap Bryluen, and it was as we lifted her gently that my hand crossed her bare back and found something unexpected. I raised her against my shoulder, one hand firm to support her head, and the other her lower body, so that I could see what my hands had felt.

  Scales graced almost the entire back of her body, trailing down into the tiny diaper. They weren’t the rainbow scales of a snake like Kitto had on his back, but more like the wide, delicate scales on a butterfly or moth wing, except these were impossibly large, bigger than any natural butterfly on the planet.

  Doyle traced one big, dark finger down the brilliant pink-and-seashell shine of the scales that trailed like a cape from her thin shoulders to sweep down her miniature waist and be lost underneath the diaper.

  “They’re wings,” he whispered.

  Frost was on the other side of the bed, leaning over to draw his own large hand gently down Bryluen’s back. “Wings more real than Nicca’s. They are raised above her skin, not like a tattoo.”

  Galen leaned in to touch the miracle of shining proto-wings. “They don’t look like any insect I’ve ever seen,” he whispered.

  Mistral came close with Gwenwyfar held in his arms as if she’d always been there. Frost moved up beside them, touching a hand to Gwenwyfar’s white curls and gazing down at Bryluen. “I have not seen dragon wings on our demi-fey since I was not the Killing Frost, but only little Jackul Frosti.”

  Sholto came closer and said, “They look almost like the wings of a baby nightflyer, but light and jewel-bright instead of dark and leathery.”

  It was when I brushed her tight red curls near her forehead and found the buds of antennae that I understood. “Get the plastic out of her, now!” I held her out to the doctor.

  “Without extra oxygen and feeding tubes she will not survive.”

  “Do you see the wings and the antenna buds? She’s part demi-fey, part sluagh, a part of faerie that doesn’t do well around metal and man-made things. If you keep putting artificial things into her, she will die.”

  “You mean she’s allergic to man-made plastics?”

  “Yes,” I said, not wanting to waste time to explain the unexplainable.

  Dr. Lee didn’t argue but took Bryluen, and she and the nurses began to strip out everything they’d put in. The baby cried piteously as soon as they took her from me, and it made my heart ache to hear it. The other two babies started to cry as if in sympathy.

  Rhys picked Alastair up from the nurse and seemed to know just how to hold him so that the baby just watched everything with dark solemn eyes, as if he understood more than he could say yet. Gwenwyfar just tried to yell loudest no matter what Mistral did.

  “You never mentioned a family allergy this severe,” Dr. Heelis said, and he looked angry.

  “Give her to me, please; it’s important that she just touch natural things,” I said.

  I think they were sending for different things to use on Bryluen and gave her back to me simply as a delay while they rushed around. They gave her back to me nude, because the diaper was man-made, too. I held my tiny naked daughter and could feel that the wings went almost all the way down the back of her body, and they were raised above her skin, part of her, not just a design.

  I didn’t think I had any demi-fey in my genetics, but I knew that the demi-fey could die in the city, fade and just die from too much metal, too much plastic, too much garbage. I gave her the only thing I knew was absolutely natural. I turned her so that tiny rosebud of a mouth could nurse.

  “She’s too small,” one of the nurses said, “she’ll never latch on enough to feed.”

  Bryluen did look impossibly small against my swollen breast, but she latched on tight enough for me to almost say Ow, but it was a good sign. I felt her begin to feed and it was the most amazing sensation. I watched her delicate throat, almost bird thin, swallow convulsively over and over as if she couldn’t get enough. My other breast began to leak in sympathy.

  Mistral handed Gwenwyfar to me, though it took him, Frost, and me to get our other girl into the twin football hold that I’d been practicing for months in preparation for twins. I realized as the two girls settled in to nurse that I needed an extra breast. I had triplets; there was no hold for triplets.

  As if on cue, Alastair began to cry, wanting his share. I had no idea what to do about it, but as I felt Bryluen drink hungrily, strongly at my breast, I was too relieved to worry that much. Gwenwyfar and he could take turns until Bryluen caught up. A nurse handed Rhys a bottle, and just like he’d practiced in class, he fed our son. Alastair didn’t seem to mind that he was sucking on something plastic and man-made. All three babies sank into a happy, satisfied silence, and looking around at the men in my life I knew we might need at least two more fathers to round out my men. I’d had sex with one demi-fey and one snake goblin while I was already pregnant with the twins, so I thought I didn’t need protection. I was already pregnant, as safe as a girl could be, but as I felt the first tiny flexing of those wings on Bryluen’s back, I knew that I needed two more men to come see their daughter.

  I was descended from a handful of fertility deities, but I guess I really hadn’t understood what that meant. I mean, there was fertile and then there was being able to get pregnant while you were already pregnant. I started to laugh, and the laughter turned into happy tears. One of my daughters had wings; maybe she would be able to fly?

  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?