A Shiver of Light

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 br**sts 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?

CHAPTER FIVE

I SEEMED TO have enough milk for all three babies but was short a breast, so whichever baby wasn’t feeding cried, which made the others fussy. The nurses brought bottles and were thoroughly scandalized that Royal was naked. They brought him a set of surgical scrubs to wear when he was big, after we explained the problem. Rhys took Gwenwyfar to Sholto in his chair with the nightflyers shifting restlessly around him.

“No,” Sholto said, holding his hands up as if to keep the baby at bay.

“Yes,” Rhys said, and put the baby in the other man’s arms so that he had to hold her, or risk having her fall. Sholto held her as if she were made of glass and would break, but he did hold her.

“Hold the bottle like this,” Rhys said.

Bryluen and Alastair were content, feeding deeply, and that near-magical endorphin rush came over me so that it was comforting to me to feed them and make them feel comfortable. I wondered if cows felt that way around milking machines, or just around their calves.

Gwenwyfar started to cry, and it was high and told some part of my brain I hadn’t even known was there that she was little, but that part of me also knew instinctively that she wasn’t as little as Bryluen. How did just the sound of their cries tell me that?

“You’re too tense,” Rhys said. “She’s picking it up.”

“See, she doesn’t like me.”

Galen sighed and came beside my bed. “May I take our boy? He’s more easygoing than Gwenwyfar.”