Laurell Hamilton - A Shiver of Light

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.