A Shiver of Light Read online

  “We all got to know the babies,” Galen said with a smile.

  I had a little trouble getting Alastair to let go of his nice, warm meal—me—and he fussed as Galen picked him up, but he didn’t cry.

  Gwenwyfar was crying full-out. Rhys picked her up and he and Galen passed each other as Gwenwyfar came to feed beside her sister, and Alastair got to be bottle-fed by Sholto.

  Gwenwyfar settled onto my other breast across from her sister with a little sigh of contentment. Did babies really come into the world knowing that much of who they were and what they wanted? Gwenwyfar already had a strong preference for Mommy, as opposed to the bottle.

  I realized that the room was quiet, full of contented noises, which meant Alastair was taking his bottle. I looked across the room to where Rhys and Galen had both been working with Sholto to help him bottle-feed. Sholto had a little smile on his face, and he had relaxed, so that Alastair fit in the crook of his arm and the bottle was at a good angle. The baby was drinking hard and steady, his tiny curled fist on one side of the bottle as if he were already trying to help hold it. I knew that part was accidental, but it was still amazing to me. I guess everyone thinks their babies are wonderful and precocious.

  “Alastair takes the bottle easier,” Galen said.

  Sholto glanced up. “You had trouble feeding the girl, too?”

  “I got her to take the bottle, but she doesn’t like it as well, and she let me know that.” He turned and grinned back at the bed and his reluctant daughter.

  Rhys said, “She has strong preferences, our Gwenwyfar.”

  “Already?” I asked.

  “Some babies come like that,” Rhys said with a smile.

  I stared down at my two daughters, and I just liked the phrase my two daughters, and smiled. I could feel that the smile was silly and almost an “in love” type of smile. I had expected to love the babies, but I hadn’t expected to feel like this. I was still sore and aching in places that had never hurt before, but it was okay, and long moments like this made me forget that anything hurt. There is power and magic in love, all kinds of love.

  Royal came to the other side of the bed by Bryluen. He was wearing an oversized hospital gown turned so the open back let his wings be free, and a pair of surgical scrub pants. It made him look even daintier than he was, and somehow less like he belonged.

  “May I feed one of the babies?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  Rhys was already moving across the room, with the last bottle that the nurses had brought. He didn’t apologize but let Royal settle onto the edge of the chair that Galen had used. Royal couldn’t sit back too far, because of his wings. I wondered if people with wings got backaches from always having to sit without a back support.

  Bryluen didn’t look so small in Royal’s arms. There was a fit there; was it just that the sizes matched better, or was it the happy smile as he gazed down at the baby?

  “She’s looking right at me,” Royal said in a voice that held wonder.

  “She keeps her eyes open more than the other two,” Rhys said.

  I wasn’t sure about the other men, but Rhys and Galen had spent my nap learning the ins and outs of our children. I liked that a lot.

  I fitted my bra back over one breast and looked down at Gwenwyfar. “So, you’re already demanding what you want?”

  The baby didn’t even open her eyes, just continued to feed happily. I held her closer and leaned over so I could lay a kiss on her white curls. The top of her head smelled amazing, clean and like baby lotion, even though I was almost certain no one had put lotion on her. Did baby lotion smell like newborn babies, or was that just my imagination?

  “They smell so good,” Royal said; he’d bent over Bryluen’s hair just as I had over Gwenwyfar.

  “They do,” I said.

  I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and saw that Sholto had bent over Alastair. “The smell is clean and somehow calming.” He sounded surprised.

  “Have you never held a baby before?” Rhys asked.

  “Not one that was this … human,” he said.

  “You know these aren’t antenna buds,” Royal said; he was rubbing his cheek against Bryluen’s hair, apparently, over the little black beginnings of her antennae.

  “What are they then?” I asked.

  “Something harder. I think they’re tiny horns,” he said.

  “Did you say horns?” Sholto asked.

  “I think they are,” Royal said, “but I’m certain they aren’t antennae.”

  Sholto looked down at the baby in his arms. He smiled down and said, half to the baby and half to Galen, “I hate to disturb you, but can someone else finish feeding him?”

  “Happy to,” Galen said. He took Alastair out of Sholto’s arms like he’d done it forever. I wondered if he’d sit in Sholto’s chair, but he didn’t. Galen moved to the couch to finish giving Alastair his bottle. Would the nightflyers have cared if Galen had sat where their king had sat, or would it have made Galen uncomfortable to be surrounded by them? Most of the sidhe, of both courts, were afraid of the sluagh. We were meant to be, otherwise they weren’t a threat, and they so were that.

  Sholto walked over to Royal. He offered, “Do you want to feed her?”

  “No,” Sholto said, and knelt beside them. His hair pooled around his legs so that he was lost in a cloak of it, except for the black of his boots. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but Rhys was watching him closely.

  “I think they are horns,” Sholto said.

  I could see his shoulders moving even through the mask of his hair. He exclaimed, “Blood and fire, it can’t be!”

  I hugged Gwenwyfar tighter and asked, “It can’t be what?”

  Sholto turned, still on his knees, so that I got a just a glimpse of that handsome face framed by all that hair. “The wings do not feel like butterfly scales, or moth.”

  “They’re like butterfly wings fresh out of a chrysalis, before blood pumps them into full shape,” I said.

  “They may look like pink and crystal gossamer, but they feel leathery, more like bat, or reptile,” Sholto said.

  I frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  He smiled, and it was that rare one that made his face look younger, as if it were a glimpse of what he might have been like if his life had not made him so hard.

  “Horns and leathery wings are sluagh, Merry.”

  In my head I thought, Goblins have horns, but I didn’t say it out loud. The horns and wings could be his genetics; we really didn’t know. If his throne hadn’t been potentially on the line, it wouldn’t have mattered, but to rule the sluagh you had to be part sluagh, just as to rule the Unseelie and Seelie courts you had to be descended from their bloodline. Every court in faerie was like that; you had to be the type of fey to rule that type of fey. Since I’d thought we’d given up all plans for any of our children to be on any throne, I hadn’t worried about it.

  Sholto’s throne was not normally an inherited one. You were elected to it, chosen by the people. It was the only rulership in all of our lands that was democratic. I hadn’t known he would look down at our babies and begin to dream of a royal bloodline for his people. Funny, what fatherhood means to different men.

  “If it’s sluagh, then it can’t be demi-fey,” Royal said, and he looked sad.

  “We have a geneticist who’s going to be testing the babies. We won’t really know without that,” I said.

  The men all did another of those looks, almost looking at each other, and avoiding my eyes.

  I hugged Gwenwyfar to me, for my comfort this time. “What were those looks about? You told me my aunt wants to see the babies and we’re guarding them and the hospital, because she’s still insane and too dangerous to come, but that look just now says there’s more you haven’t told me.”

  “Have you always been able to read us this easily, or have you grown more observant?” Sholto asked.

  “I love you all in my way; a woman pays attention to the men she l
oves.”

  “You love us,” Rhys said, “but you’re not in love with all of us.”

  “I said what I meant, Rhys.”

  He nodded. “It was diplomatically worded.” His tone was mild, but his face unhappy.

  “Rhys,” Galen said.

  The two men exchanged a long look, both their faces serious. Rhys looked away first. “You’re right, you are so right.”

  Since Galen hadn’t said anything out loud, I wasn’t sure what he was so right about. It was as if the men had had a conversation that I hadn’t heard and were still saying bits of it. I could ask, or …

  “I’m sorry that you’re unhappy with me, but you aren’t going to distract me from my question. What else has gone wrong, besides my aunt?”

  “Some of us love you more than you love us; it’s an old topic,” Rhys said.

  “Stop changing the subject, and trying to distract me with emotional issues we’ve already discussed. It must be something bad for you to bring this back up again, Rhys,” I said.

  He nodded, and sighed. “Bad enough.”

  Sholto stood up, brushing the knees of his pants automatically. “I’m not in love with Merry, nor do I expect her to be with me. We care for each other, which is more than you usually get out of a royal marriage.”

  “Then you tell me what the three of you, four of you, are keeping from me,” I said.

  Galen held Alastair closer, much as I had with Gwenwyfar. “It’s the other side of your family.”

  “The other side, you mean the Seelie Court?”

  He nodded, resting his cheek against the top of the baby’s thick black hair.

  Sholto came to stand beside the bed and laid a hand over my arm and half cradled Gwenwyfar, because his hand was that big in comparison to the baby. “Your uncle, the King of the Seelie Court, is trying to get permission to see the babies, also.”

  I stared up at him. “My aunt wants to see the potential heirs to Unseelie thrones and her beloved brother’s grandchildren. I understand that, and if she weren’t a sexual sadist and serial killer we’d allow it, but what in the name of all that is holy makes Taranis think he has the right to see our children?”

  Rhys came nearer the bed. “He’s still claiming that one or all of them are his, Merry.”

  I shook my head. “I was pregnant when he raped me. They are not his.”

  “But you were only weeks pregnant, not showing at all. He’s maintaining that you were with child only after he … was with you,” Rhys said, but I didn’t like the long hesitation before he finished his sentence.

  “What is he really saying, Rhys?”

  “He’s made it a ‘he said, she said’ sort of thing.”

  “We knew he’d deny the rape, but we have forensic evidence that he did it. The rape kit came back …” I couldn’t even say it. Taranis, the King of Light and Illusion, ruler of the Seelie Court, the golden court of faerie, was my uncle. Technically he was my great-uncle, brother of my grandfather, but since the sidhe do not age, he didn’t look like a grandfather.

  “He’s saying that it was consensual, but we all knew he would.”

  “He’s probably come to believe his own lie,” I said.

  “Taranis will not believe that you refused him in favor of the monsters of the Unseelie Court,” Sholto said.

  “He’s the monster,” I said.

  Sholto smiled, and bent and laid a gentle kiss on my forehead. “That you mean that, when speaking to me, means a great deal to me, our Merry.”

  I looked at his face as he stood back upright. “He raped me while I was unconscious, Sholto, and he’s my uncle. That was monstrous.”

  “I’m sorry, Merry, but one of the reasons that Taranis is making a case is that you don’t remember. He’s saying that you consented and then passed out, but he didn’t realize you were unconscious until it was too late,” Rhys said.

  “Too late to stop? Too late to not have sex with his own niece? Too late for what, Rhys?” I was almost yelling.

  Gwenwyfar stopped nursing and started to fuss, as if she hadn’t liked me yelling. I spoke in a calmer voice, but I couldn’t control how I felt. “Rhys, you said ‘make a case’; is he actually trying to get legal visitation with the babies?”

  “He was, but our lawyers countered, and now Taranis is pushing for genetic testing of the babies. He’s so sure that one or all of them will be his, I think he believes his own delusion now.”

  “He’s always believed his own magic more than he should,” Sholto said.

  “Once his illusions could become real,” Rhys said.

  “That was a very long time ago.”

  “If the genetic tests come back negative for him, then I think his days as King of the Seelie Court are over,” Rhys said.

  “If we can prove that he knew he was infertile a hundred years ago but didn’t step down from the throne, they may execute him,” Galen said, and there was a hardness in his voice that I’d never heard before.

  I looked past the other men to my green knight. “You want them to kill him, don’t you?”

  “Don’t you?” he asked, and his green eyes held a bleak rage that was so not like him, but truth was truth.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good,” Galen said, and that one word wasn’t good at all. The tone was very bad, very sure of its anger.

  “If the ruler of court is infertile, then it condemns the entire court to be childless; no true king would stay on the throne under those circumstances,” Rhys said.

  “Or queen,” Galen said.

  We all looked at him.

  “That’s why she agreed to step down if Merry had a child, because she’d tried all the modern fertility treatments and was still childless.”

  “She had a son,” I said, softly. Holding my own child in my arms made it seem like I should add out loud that I’d killed that only son. He’d been trying to kill me and the men I loved, but I’d still killed him, and his death seemed to have driven the last of her sanity away.

  “Cel was hundreds of years old, and her only child. She knew she was infertile long before,” Galen said, and again there was a hardness to him that I had never heard or seen in him. People think that becoming a parent will make you soft, more sentimental, and maybe it does for some, but for him it seemed to have helped him find a new strength. I’d wanted him stronger, but I hadn’t understood that perhaps with the extra strength, some softness might be lost, that with every gain, there might be a loss.

  I studied his face, and the other men were doing the same thing. We were all looking at my gentle knight and realizing that maybe he wasn’t that anymore. There were other men in my life that I counted on to be harsh and protective; until that moment I hadn’t realized that I’d counted on Galen for softer things. My eyes felt hot, my throat tight; was I going to cry? Not about the rape and the legal mess, but about losing Galen’s softness? Or maybe I was going to cry about it all, about both, about all three, or maybe baby hormones made you more emotional, or maybe, just maybe, I would cry because Galen wouldn’t anymore.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  DOYLE CAME BACK in while I was still crying, which led to him asking what happened and the other men admitting they’d told me.

  “The last orders I gave were for Merry not to be upset.”

  “First, we are all fathers of her children,” Rhys said, “so as our captain you can order us, but as just another of Merry’s sweethearts you need to give us all room to decide the parameters of our relationship with her and our children.”

  “Are you saying you deliberately went against my orders?” Doyle stalked farther into the room toward Rhys.

  “I’m not stupid,” I said. “I could tell something was wrong and I demanded to know what it was.”

  Doyle didn’t look back at me but continued to loom over Rhys. Galen still had Alastair in his arms as he moved toward the other men.

  “Merry is our princess and crowned by Goddess as our queen; she outranks her own ca
ptain of the guard,” Galen said.

  Doyle’s head turned, ever so slightly, neck and shoulders so tight it looked painful. His deep voice held anger like it was all he could do to contain it. “Are you saying that none of you will obey my orders?”

  “Of course we will,” Galen said, “but Merry is supposed to lead not just us, but all our people. How can we ignore her when she demands something from us?”

  Sholto got up from where he was kneeling by Bryluen. He left her in Royal’s arms. The demi-fey looked frightened and didn’t try to hide it. Sholto joined the other sidhe in the middle of the room.

  “If you were the only king that Goddess and faerie had crowned for Merry, then we would obey you, Darkness, but you are one of many kings.”

  Doyle turned to face the other man. “I have not forgotten that she was crowned to be queen to your king, Sholto.”

  Sholto raised his arm and pushed back the sleeve just enough to show the beginnings of the tattoo that he and I shared. It had been real rose vines that night, and had pierced both our arms, entwining like the rope, or thread, that was used for a regular handfasting, but this “rope” had set thorns into our flesh and wedded our hands together more completely than any mere ceremony could have, and the marks of those vines and roses were painted on our arms.

  “We were handfasted by Goddess and faerie,” Sholto said.

  “And I have no such mark; you have pointed that out more than once over these months,” Doyle said.

  That was news to me. Sholto was the only man to whom Goddess had personally handfasted me, but She had crowned Doyle and me as King and Queen of the Unseelie Court.

  “Maybe the reason Goddess bound Merry to you was that you were the only one who is king in his own right,” Galen said.

  The two men looked at him, as if he’d interrupted a longstanding disagreement. It isn’t always wise to get in the middle of two people who are fighting.

  Galen smiled at them and shifted the baby in his arms, just enough to remind them the baby was there. I didn’t think the movement was accidental; Galen understood that the baby was a free pass from any violence. He was right, but I hoped he didn’t push the idea too far, because he wouldn’t be holding a baby forever, and both Sholto and Doyle had long memories.