A Shiver of Light

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.