A Shiver of Light

“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 captain of the guard,” Galen said.