Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
About the Author
Copyright
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
A Random House Group Company
www.transworldbooks.co.uk
First published in Great Britain
in 2014 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Laurell K. Hamilton 2014
Laurell K. Hamilton has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473508682
ISBNs 9780593067468 (cased)
9780593067475 (tpb)
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2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
To the fans who let me know
how much they missed Merry and her men.
You finally get to read the next part of the story.
To my husband, Jonathon, partner, friend, lover, who stands by my side and behind the throne. Thank you for holding my coat. To Genevieve, who is both our beautiful maiden and able to grab her own sword and charge into battle. To Shawn, who stood at the battlements when the night was dark and the dragon was fierce. Dragon stew, at last! To Spike, who has entered the fray and proved himself stalwart and true. To Jess, who joined the team this book. To Will, who helped with research on the last book—so nice when friends have expertise that I need. To Pilar, my sister, so glad we’re both happy, at last. Welcome to the family, Fran! To Missy, who keeps reminding me of things I’ve forgotten. To Sherry, Teresa, and Mary, who never give up trying to organize a houseful of artists. And to our dogs, Keiko, Mordor, and Sasquatch, who stayed at my side through all the long nights and early mornings, faithful to me, and their treat drawer.
I feel like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed!
Thus, in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,
Sad memory brings the light
Of other days around me.
—THOMAS MOORE
I WOKE IN the desert, far from home, and knew it was a dream, and that it was also real. I was dreaming, but where I stood was real and whatever happened here tonight, that would be real, too. Stars covered the sky as if electricity had never been invented, so that starlight was enough for me to see my way down the dirt road, with its bomb craters making it almost impossible for anything to drive down it. IEDs had blown the road to hell, partly to kill the soldiers in the armored vehicles that had triggered the bombs, but also to make the road impassable by anyone who came after them. I stood shivering in the cold desert wind, wishing I were wearing something besides the thin silk nightgown that strained over my very pregnant belly. I was only days away from giving birth to twins, and my body was mostly baby now. I moved slowly down the road and found the dirt cool underneath my bare feet. There was a small hut close to the road, and whatever had called me from my bed in Los Angeles was there. How did I know that? Goddess told me, not in words, but in that quiet voice that’s almost always in our heads. Goddess and God talk to us all the time, but we are usually being too loud to hear them; in these dreams that “quiet voice” was easier to hear.
I knew my body was still asleep thousands of miles from here, and I’d never been hurt in any of the dream journeys, but I felt the rocks slide under my feet, and as pregnant as I was, my balance wasn’t good. I had a moment to wonder what would happen if I fell, but I kept walking toward the hut, because I’d learned that until I’d helped the person calling me, the dream would remain, and I would remain in it.
It was my dream, but it would be someone else’s nightmare reality. I was never called unless it was a matter of life and death. Someone who had saved my life, risking their own, and been healed by my hands was nearby and in need; that was always the way it was, who it was. They prayed and I appeared, but only if I was asleep, only in my dreams, so far. I had no idea if some night I would vanish in my real life to be called to someone’s side while I was still awake. I hoped not. The dreams were disturbing enough; if it spread to my waking life, I wasn’t sure what I’d do.
Soldiers prayed, and collected nails that had been used as shrapnel against me, and rubbed them with blood, and fit them onto leather thongs that they had made, and wore them as others wore a cross. The nails had come from my body, as had the blood, but magic had healed me. The Goddess had given me the ability to heal that night, and the soldiers who had taken the nails and worn them had started healing by touch, as well, in the far-off war. Sometimes their need was great enough to bring me to help them find a way out of an ambush, or shelter from a mountain blizzard.
I am Princess Meredith NicEssus, Princess of Flesh and Blood; I am faerie and only part human, but I am not a goddess, and I didn’t like these midnight rambles. I liked helping people, but as I’d gotten more and more pregnant I had worried about the babies, and the men I loved had worried about it, but all they could do was watch over my body until I woke.
Still, the Goddess had work for me, and that was that, so I walked carefully over the smooth dirt and the rough stones, and felt the call, my call, as if I were truly some kind of deity able to answer prayers. Really I thought I might be more like a human saint; there were tales of saints being able to translocate through time and space. I’d done some reading on them, especially the Celtic ones, and there were some really odd stories. Quite a few saints had been Celtic deities that the human Church had adopted. The early Church had preferred to make friends of the local deities, rather than make war; it was so much easier to convert people when they could keep their local saint’s day celebrations.
Some saints had appeared in people’s dreams, or to lead people to safety, or even to fight in battles, when other witnesses knew they were asleep or wounded. None of the old stories talked about a pregnant faerie princess, but then the Church usually sanitized all the old tales.
The wind spilled my hair around my face in a mass of blinding red curls, though the color must have been more brown than scarlet in the starlit night. I could see nothing but the spill of my own hair for a moment, but when the wind cleared there was a figure in the doorway of the hut.
I didn’t recognize her at first, and then the very darkness of her skin let me know that underneath the desert camouflage it was Hayes. She was the only female African American among my soldiers.
I went to her smiling, and she smiled back, as she began to slide down the edge of the doorsill. I wanted to be next to her, and I just was, without having to walk the distance. Dream rules worked sometimes in these journeys; sometimes they didn’t.
I knelt beside her, having to grip the doorway to get to my knees. I was heavy enough with child that it was debatable whether I could stand again, but I had to touch Hayes, see what was wrong.
Her hand fell away from her neck and I caught the dull glint of the nail she’d been holding on to with its leather thong necklace. It was my symbol. I took her hand in mine and it was slick with blood. They had to touch the nail with blood to call me; that had been true every time.
“Hayes,” I said.
“Meredith, I prayed and here you are. Wow, you’re huge. Must really be twins like the news said?”
“It is. Where are you hurt?” I asked.
She patted her side with her other hand. Her armored vest was there, but it was wet, and even as I searched for the wound fresh blood welled out. I knew it was fresh because it was warmer than the stuff that had cooled in the night air.
“It’s deep,” she said, voice pained, as I tried to find the wound through her clothes and gear.
“What happened?” I asked. I wasn’t sure that talking was good for her, but having something to think about while I found the wound and figured out what to do about it was better than just thinking about the fact that she seemed to be bleeding to death. Wasn’t it? I’d been answering prayers for only a few months and I still felt out of my depth. I trusted Goddess to know what She was doing, but me, I wasn’t so sure about me.
I prayed as I found the wound. It was almost as wide as my palm, and blood was welling out of it. Something that held a lot of blood had been punctured. I’d had human anatomy in college, but for the life of me, or for the life of Hayes, I couldn’t seem to think what organ was on this side of the body. I didn’t know what had been damaged, but I knew she was going to die if I couldn’t help her.
“We were just supposed to take some supplies up to a school, but they ambushed us. The cutest little boy stabbed me, because I hesitated. I couldn’t kill a child, or thought I couldn’t, but they killed Dickerson, and Breck, and Sunshine, and then he tried to kill me, and suddenly he wasn’t a child anymore, he was just another murdering bastard.” She started to cry, and that made her groan with pain.
I prayed for guidance. I was trying to hold pressure on the wound, but without a medical kit, or the Goddess granting me the ability to heal with my hands, I couldn’t save her. And then I realized that she, Hayes, had healed other wounded with her hands, because she’d told me so when she was on leave last time; had that only been two months ago?
“Heal yourself, Hayes,” I said.
She shook her head. “I killed that little boy, Meredith. I killed him. I killed him, and I can’t forgive myself. We killed the men before everyone but me died, but the boy … he couldn’t have been more than ten. My little brother’s age. Jesus, Meredith, how could I kill a kid?”
“He tried to kill you, Hayes, and if you don’t heal yourself, he will have killed you.”
“Maybe I deserve to die.”
“No, Hayes, no you don’t.” I kept pressure on the wound to try to slow the blood loss while I helped her forgive herself, because I knew now that was why I was there.
She cried harder, and that made the wound hurt more and gush hot around my hands. She slipped lower in the doorway. She was going to bleed to death in front of me.
“Goddess, please, help me to help her.”
I smelled roses and I knew the Goddess was with me, and then I felt/saw/knew that she would be standing over us. To me she was a cloaked figure, because Goddess comes to us all in different ways, or all ways.
Hayes looked up and said, “Grandma, what you doing here?”
“You let this woman heal you, Angela May Hayes. Don’t you fight her.”
“You don’t know what I did, Grandma.”
“I heard, but Angela, if a boy is old enough to pick up a weapon and kill you, then he’s not a child anymore, he’s a soldier just like you are, and you did what you had to do.”
“He was Jeffrey’s age.”
“Your brother would never hurt anyone.”
“Jeffrey was a baby when you died, how do you know?”
I felt the smile like the sun coming through clouds after a storm. You couldn’t help but smile when the Goddess smiled. “I keep watch over my babies. I saw you graduate from college. I’m so proud of my angel, and I need you to live, Angela. I need you to go back home and help your mama and Jeffrey and all the rest, do you hear me, Angela?”
“I hear you, Grandma.”
“You have to get better; you’ll be my angel for real one of these days, but not tonight. You heal and go home to our family.”
“Yes, Grandma,” she said.
The blood slowed and then stopped pouring out. I hadn’t done anything, but Angela Hayes had, and the Goddess had, and Hayes’s grandmother had.
“I think I’m better,” Hayes said, and grabbed my hand with hers. “Thank you, Meredith, thank you for bringing my grandma to talk to me.”
“The Goddess brought your grandmother,” I said.
“But you brought the Goddess.”
I held her hand tight and said, “The Goddess is always there for you; you don’t need me to find Her.”
Hayes smiled and then frowned. “I see lights.”
I glanced down the road and saw a line of armored vehicles of all kinds coming over the hill, their lights cutting the thick starlight so that the night seemed both more black and less at the same time.
“They talk about a red-haired Madonna that appears when people need her. No one seems to know it’s you but us.” I knew she meant the other soldiers.
“It’s better that way,” I said.
She gripped my hand tight. “Then you better go before the trucks get closer.”
I touched her face and realized I still had her blood on my hands, so I left the bloody imprints of my fingertips on her skin. “Be well, be safe, come home soon,” I said.
She smiled, and this time it was bright and real. “I will, Meredith, I will.”
The dream broke while I was still holding her hand. I woke in my bed in Los Angeles with the fathers of my babies on either side of me. My hands and nightgown were covered in blood, and it wasn’t mine.
YOU’D THINK, AFTER a goddess had sent me halfway around the world to save a life and brought me back to my own bed, that my life would be full of magic, and it was, but it was also full of normal things. That’s what no one tells you: that even when Deity takes a hand in your life, and you answer their call, your ordinary life doesn’t go away. I was still pregnant and it had not been a trouble-free pregnancy. If you are following Deity’s plan for you, it isn’t always the easy path; sometimes it’s the hard one. So why follow? Because to do any less is to betray your own abilities and gifts, and the faith that Deity has in you. Who would do that willingly?
Ultrasound pictures are grainy, black and white and gray, and really not all that clear, but it’s a way to get the earliest picture of your unborn child. We had quite a little album of the blurry images at thirty-four weeks into the pregnancy, but the latest one … it was the money shot, because it showed something the other ones hadn’t: We were having triplets.
The twins, as we’d begun to call them, were still floating in front of the picture, but it was as if they were petals of a flower finally opening up enough to show a third baby, shadowy and much less distinct, but very there. The third baby was visibly smaller than the other two, which wasn’t uncommon, Dr. Heelis, my main obstetrician, assured us.
We were all sitting in the conference room at the hospital now, because Dr. Heelis had been joined by Dr. Lee, Dr. Kelly, and Dr. Rodriguez. They each had their specialties in gynecology and delivering babies, or something else needed as a precaution. I hadn’t gained most of the extra medical specialists since they spotted the third baby; they’d been my team almost from the beginning of my pregnancy, because I was Princess Meredith NicEssus—legal name Meredith Gentry, because Princess looks so pretentious on a driver’s license. Dr. Kelly was the new face, but then what was a new doctor compared to a whole new baby?
I was the only faerie princess to be born on American soil, but not for much longer. One of the babies was a girl. My daughter would be Princess Gwenwyfar. We were still negotiating on the rest of her names, since we wouldn’t know until DNA testing who her father was; I’d narrowed it down to six.
All six of them sat on either side of the long oval conference table, strung out like strong, handsome beads on the string of my love.
Doyle, Darkness, sat on my left. He was everything his name promised: tall, handsome, and so dark he was black. Not the way people’s skin was black, but like a dog’s skin and hair could be so black that it had blue and purple highlights in the sun. In the dimmer light of the conference room his skin was just unrelieved blackness, as if the darkest night had been carved into flesh and made real. His ankle-length hair was back in its usual braid so that his pointed ears with their edging of silver earrings showed. If he’d hidden the ears no one would have known he wasn’t pure-blooded Unseelie sidhe, but he made sure the one sign that he wasn’t pure sidhe showed most of the time in public. I’d never asked him why, but it was a constant slap in the face to every other sidhe who could hide their mixed heritage. He’d stood at the side of the Queen of Air and Darkness for over a thousand years with his less than pure genetics, flaunting them, and the glittering throng had feared him, because he had been the queen’s assassin and captain of her guards. No one lived that Doyle was sent to kill. Now he was my Darkness, the Princess’s Darkness, but he wasn’t my assassin. He was my bodyguard, and he’d guarded my body well enough that I was pregnant with his child. That was some good guarding.
Frost, the Killing Frost, sat on my right. His skin was as white as mine, as though the luster of pearls had been made flesh, but whereas I was five feet even, Frost was six feet of muscle, broad shoulders, long legs, and just one of the most beautiful men in all of faerie. He wore only the upper part of his hair back, leaving the rest of it to fall around his body like a silver veil through which you could glimpse his gray suit, black shirt, and silver tie with black fleur-de-lis done small on the silver. The barrette that held the thickest of his hair back so that if there was a fight it would be out of his eyes was carved bone. It was very old, and he would never tell me what kind of animal it had been carved from. There was always the implication that it had been something that I would have considered a person.
Frost had been Doyle’s second-in-command for centuries, and that hadn’t changed, but now they were both my lovers, and potential fathers of the babies I carried. The three of us had found love, that true love that they write songs and poems about, but this fairy tale didn’t have a happily-ever-after ending, not yet. As I sat there with my hands folded over the round tightness of my belly, I was scared. Scared in the way that women had been for centuries. Would the babies be all right? Would I be all right? Triplets? Really? Really? I didn’t know how to feel about it yet, it was too new. I’d been happy about twins, but triplets—how much more complicated had the pregnancy and our lives just become?
I prayed to the Goddess for safety, wisdom, and just a calm center from which to listen to the doctors and the plan. I smelled roses, and I knew she’d heard me, and I knew it was a good sign. I hoped it was a good sign. I knew that sometimes bad things happened for good reasons, but I really, really wanted this to be one of the good things, period, with no caveats.
Doyle squeezed my hand, and a moment later Frost did the same. The men I loved more than anyone in the world were with me; it would be all right. The other men that I loved, but maybe not quite so much, were looking at the doctors and glancing at me, trying to be reassuring and not show that they were worried, too.
Galen was failing to hide his worry, but his face had always been a mirror for his heart. His pale skin had a faint green cast to it to complement the darker green of his short curls. He still had one long, thin braid, which was all that was left of his once-knee-length hair. A cream T-shirt made of silk embraced the lean muscles of his chest and upper body, an apple-green suit jacket that was his only concession to dressing up. The rest of his outfit was jeans, pale blue with holes worn through, giving tantalizing glimpses of bare flesh as he moved. The jeans were tucked seamlessly into brown tooled cowboy boots, which were new, and not his choice. We all represented the high court of faerie and we had to dress accordingly when we were likely to be photographed, and any trip to the hospital had the paparazzi out in droves.
The last of our happy, but tense, sextet of men were Rhys, Mistral, and Sholto. Rhys was mostly shades of white and cream from the waist-length white curls to the cream-colored suit and pale leather loafers hidden underneath the table. His open-necked dress shirt was pale blue and brought out the tricolored blue iris of one eye; the other eye was lost behind a pale blue satiny eye patch. It brought out the wonderful blues of his remaining eye but didn’t hide the trailing scars that came from that empty eye socket. Goblins had taken his eye centuries before I was born. At five-six he was woefully short for a purebred sidhe, but still taller than my own humble five feet even. I was the shortest royal in either court.
Sholto was all long, straight white-blond hair in a curtain that almost obscured his black suit and white shirt with its high, round collar so no tie was needed. It wasn’t this year’s style, but he was King Sholto, Lord of That Which Passes Between, ruler of the sluagh, the dark host of the Unseelie Court, and he didn’t really worry about this year’s fashions. He wore what he liked, and it usually looked scrumptious on him, or scary, depending on the effect he wanted. The black made his tri-yellow-gold irises very bright, very beautiful, and very alien.
Mistral was the last of my would-be fathers. He was the tallest by a few inches, broadest of shoulders by a fraction, just a very big man, but the bulk of muscle and centuries of warrior training didn’t help him be okay inside a man-made building with too much metal and technology for his fey sensibilities. Lesser fey have more trouble with such things, and Mistral was dealing the least well of any of my lovers with this extended stay in the human world. It showed in the hollow look around his eyes, their color that swimming yellow-green that the sky gets just before a tornado sweeps down from the sky and destroys everything in its path. He’d been a storm god once, and his eyes still reflected his moods as if the sky were still his to command. Centuries ago the true sky would have reflected his anxiety. His own black suit made his gray hair look almost charcoal dark, as it fell around his shoulders and swept below the table edge. He wore a white dress shirt half unbuttoned, tucked into his pants, but fanned open to reveal a hand-stitched linen undershirt. The linen was from his old wardrobe. He’d found that wearing something that felt “normal” against his skin helped him deal better with all this frightening newness.
I sat there surrounded by some of the most beautiful men in all of faerie, feeling like a small, less than beautiful jewel in their midst, but it’s hard to feel glamorous when you’re eight months pregnant with triplets. I hadn’t seen my feet in weeks. My back ached as if someone were trying to saw me in half about a third of the way up. It was the worst my back had hurt, as if now that my body knew it was carrying triplets it didn’t have to pretend to be brave anymore.
“How could all the tests and ultrasounds have missed a third baby?” Galen asked.
Dr. Heelis, tall, with white hair cut short, smiled his best professional smile at us. He had to be sixty, but he looked about a decade younger with his handsome square-jawed face and clear gray eyes behind their silver-framed glasses.
“I won’t make excuses, except that two large babies in a small space just hid the third. It happens sometimes when you have more than twins.”
“Is that why there was that echo with the heartbeats a few weeks ago?” I asked. I shifted in my chair, but there was no true way to be comfortable. If my back had just hurt a little less, or the pressure had let up, I’d have felt better.
“It would seem so,” he said.
“So all those tests that Merry and the babies had to go through were because you couldn’t figure out there was a third baby?” Galen asked.
“We thought there was a heart issue with the twins, and it is possible that what we were picking up was the third baby’s heartbeat.”
“How did you miss this?” I asked, finally. Heelis had built up months of confidence, and now I doubted it all. Or maybe it was just the pain? I shut my eyes for a moment; it felt like someone was sawing my back in half and trying to push the pieces apart at the same time.
“Are you all right, Princess?” asked Dr. Lee, the only woman on the team.
I nodded. “My back hurts from all the weight. I’m tired of being pregnant.”
“It’s normal,” she said, smiling. Her face was square and always pleasant somehow. Heelis exuded confidence, but Lee was calm, like the eye of the storm. I liked her for it, but then probably all her patients did.
“Multiple births are always a physical challenge, but for someone as petite as you, Princess Meredith, it can be more uncomfortable. We will do everything to make you as comfortable as possible.”
“How about if Dr. Kelly just tells us why he’s here?” My voice rose a little as if I were fighting not to yell at someone, and maybe I was. I just hurt, and I was just so tired of it all. One of the babies moved, rolling in their sleep, or maybe playing, I didn’t know, but it was still an odd sensation for something to move inside me that wasn’t me. It wasn’t a bad feeling, but it was … odd.
Dr. Kelly was having trouble concentrating because he could see that Mistral’s eyes were streaming with storm clouds, and a slight movement of wind, as if his irises were a tiny television set forever to the Weather Channel.
“Would Dr. Kelly be able to concentrate on his job if Mistral put his sunglasses on?” Galen asked.
Dr. Kelly startled, and said, “I’m so sorry, I was staring, I … I just … I’m terribly sorry.”
Doyle said one word in his deep, thick voice: “Mistral.”
Mistral fished a pair of expensive sunglasses out of his pocket and slid them on. They were silver, metal frames with mirrored lenses that reflected everything like a silver mirror. They looked incredibly sexy on him, but for right now, more importantly they hid his distracting eyes.
“Better?” Mistral asked.
“I do apologize, Prince … Lord … Duke Mistral, I just … I’m new to the team and …”
Mistral had surprised me by having a title of duke in his own right. We’d been told to trot out our titles for humans, so we had, but it threw the Americans who weren’t used to titles.
“It’s okay, Kelly,” Dr. Heelis said, “it took all of us a few visits to adjust to the … view.”
“Not to be rude, but why do we need yet another doctor?” Doyle asked.
Dr. Heelis folded his arms on the table, his hands very still; I’d come to recognize it as part of his “it will be all right, I’m here to reassure you” pose. It usually meant something was wrong, or might be wrong. So far the pregnancy had been remarkably problem free for twins, but we’d had several meetings where Heelis had reassured us as things happened that could have been scary but turned out not to be. Some potential problems that he’d wanted us to know about had fixed themselves with a combination of modern medicine and luck, or maybe it had something to do with me being descended from five different fertility deities. It meant I’d been able to carry twins with much less difficulty than most women, but it was also probably the reason we were now looking at triplets. That was really a little more fertility than I’d wanted.
“When I informed the other members of our team that Princess Meredith was having triplets, they all agreed that Dr. Kelly would be a good addition to our pool of knowledge.”
“Why?” Sholto asked, and he seldom spoke in these meetings.
They all turned and looked at him, and then most looked away, except for Heelis, who managed to hold the weight of everyone’s gaze without flinching; there was more than one reason he was in charge.
“King Sholto.”
Sholto gave a nod to acknowledge his title, and as a sign for Heelis to proceed, which he did.
“First, I know that you were all hoping for a vaginal birth, and we were willing to try with twins, but triplets means it’s a cesarean birth.”
I must have looked unhappy, because Heelis looked at me. “I am sorry, I know you felt quite strongly about avoiding surgery, but with triplets we just can’t risk it, Princess; I am sorry.”
“I figured as much when we saw the third baby,” I said. I leaned forward in my chair trying to find a more comfortable position, but there really wasn’t one. Doyle changed hands so he could still hold my hand and also rub my back. Frost mirrored him and they rubbed my back as if they were hands from the same man instead of two different ones. They’d been best friends and battle buddies for hundreds of years; it meant they seemed aware of each other physically without having to look. It meant they could rub my aching back without bumping into each other’s hands, and when the doctors lifted the moratorium on sex, they’d be able to prove that they mirrored each other there, too, again. The last insult had been the “no sex” rule starting a few months ago.
I held on to their hands tighter; it helped distract me from how uncomfortable I was. I wasn’t sure why the idea of a cesarean birth bothered me, but it did.
“You do understand that too much could go wrong as the babies all crowd toward the birth canal,” Heelis said.
I nodded.
“Whatever will keep Merry and the babies from harm is what we want,” Frost said.
The doctor smiled at him. He liked Frost and Galen best for long eye contact, probably because their eyes were the closest to human-normal, gray and green.
“Of course, that’s what everyone here wants.” He did that reassuring smile that he must have practiced in the mirror, because it was a good one. It filled his own eyes with warmth, and just seemed to exude calm.
“But my question remains unanswered,” Doyle said. “Why is Dr. Kelly here?”
“He has the most experience with birth delay of multiples.”
“What is birth delay?” I asked.
“With a cesarean birth we might have the option of delivering the first two babies but leaving the third, smaller one in utero for a week or two. It’s not a given, but often smaller size means certain systems might not be as developed, and this would give more time for the baby to grow in the perfect self-sustaining environment of the womb.”
I just blinked at him for a few seconds. “Are you actually telling me that the triplets might have different birthdays by weeks?”
He nodded, still smiling.
“And if we can’t delay the third baby’s birth, what then?”
“Then we’ll deal with whatever issues may arise.”
“You mean we’ll deal with whatever is wrong with the babies, especially the smaller … triplet.”
“We don’t like the word wrong, Princess, you know that.”
I started to cry. I don’t know why, but for some reason the thought of having two babies delivered and leaving the third inside me to cook a little bit longer just seemed wrong, and … I wanted it over with; I just wanted our babies to be all right and to be on the outside of me. I was tired of being pregnant. I couldn’t see my feet. I couldn’t tie my own shoes. I couldn’t fit behind the wheel of a car to drive myself anywhere. I felt helpless and bloated like a tiny beached whale, and I just wanted it over. Even though nothing had actually gone wrong, the doctors had still warned us about every awful possibility, so that my life had become a list of nightmares that never happened while the babies grew inside me. I was beginning to think I’d had too many good doctors and too much high tech, because there were always more tests, even though in the end all the tests told us was what wasn’t wrong. Or maybe they’d missed something and it was all going to go wrong. They’d missed a whole third baby; how could I trust any of them anymore? All the months of confidence building and trust in my doctors was in ruins. I was having triplets. The nursery was done, but we had only two cribs, two of everything. We weren’t ready for triplets. I wasn’t ready.
I was screaming quietly into Doyle’s shoulder while everyone ran around trying to calm the crazy pregnant woman when my water broke.
HIS NAME WAS Alastair, and he fit in my arms as if he’d been carved from a missing piece of my heart. He blinked up at me with huge liquid blue eyes set like shining sapphires in the pale, luminescent skin of his face. His hair was thick and black, and one tiny, slightly pointed ear was as black as his hair. The curled tip was almost lost in the midnight straightness of his hair. The other ear was like a carved seashell, shining mother-of-pearl set in the velvet of his hair.
All the exhaustion, all the pain, the panic of finding that Gwenwyfar was too far into the birth canal for a c-section, and her brother, Alastair, came so close behind her there was no time, and it was all lost on the wonder of tracing that tiny ear down through Alastair’s hair to find that the black of the one ear trailed down onto the side of his neck, like a spot on the side of a puppy’s ear.
Doyle was still in his surgical scrubs, pink against his shining black skin. He traced the side of Alastair’s neck and said, “Do you mind?”
It took me a moment to understand the question, and then I blinked up at him, like I was waking from a dream. “You mean the spot?”
I smiled up at him, and whatever he saw made him smile back. “He’s beautiful, Doyle; our son is beautiful.”
I got to see what very few had ever seen: The Darkness cried as he turned our tiny son gently in my arms so that he could show me a black star-shaped mark on his tiny back. It was a five-pointed star, almost perfect, taking up the middle of his back.
Alastair made a protesting sound, and I turned him back so I could see his face. The moment he had eye contact again, he quieted and just studied my face with those solemn blue eyes.
“Alastair,” I said, softly. “Star, our star.”
Doyle kissed me softly, and then kissed his son’s forehead. Alastair frowned at him.
“I think he’s already competing for Mommy’s attention,” Galen said from the other side of the bed. He had Gwenwyfar wrapped in a blanket, but she was already pushing at it with all the strength of her small legs and arms.
“She doesn’t like being swaddled,” Rhys said, and took her from Galen’s so-careful arms, and began to unwrap her from the careful swaddling the nurses had done.
“I’m afraid I’ll drop her,” Galen said.
“You’ll get better with practice,” Rhys said, and he grinned down at me and helped slide Gwenwyfar into my other arm, but with a baby in each arm I couldn’t touch them, look at them like works of art that you wanted to see every inch of, explore, and memorize.
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.