Laurell Hamilton: A Shiver of Light

I was descended from a handful of fertility deities, but I guess I really hadn’t understood what that meant. I mean, there was fertile and then there was being able to get pregnant while you were already pregnant. I started to laugh, and the laughter turned into happy tears. One of my daughters had wings; maybe she would be able to fly?

THEY SAY YOU have no sense of smell when you dream, but I woke to the scent of roses and had a moment of wondering why the dim hospital room smelled like wild roses in the noon warmth of a summer meadow. The room was almost in darkness except for night lights underneath a shelf and one near the only inner door, which led to a bathroom. But I saw a pale, fluffy cloud across the room from where I lay in the bed. Galen was asleep in a chair underneath the cloud, which wasn’t a cloud at all, but the massed blossoms of a small fruit tree that had grown behind his chair. I’d seen temporary plants grow like this from too much magic in a place, but to my knowledge we hadn’t done magic. Maybe I’d missed something while I slept, or maybe surprise triplets were magic enough. Galen had one hand inside the plastic crib beside him. I couldn’t tell in the dim light which of the bigger twins lay inside the blanket, but Galen’s hand was resting on the tiny form, as if even in his sleep he had reached out to our child.

It made me smile. Galen might not be the best warrior of my men, and he was a terrible politician, but it didn’t surprise me at all that he would be good at this part.

The sound of movement beside me made me turn and find another plastic crib on its tall wheeled legs beside me. There was a woven basket with little handles for carrying inside the plastic so that Bryluen wouldn’t touch the man-made things that seemed to hurt her. There were wings softly flexing inside the blanket with her, more than just Royal and his sister Penny, who had come to visit his daughter, and her niece.

I smelled roses even more strongly and looked up to find that there were rose vines growing above my bed, like a living canopy of thorns and pale flowers, starlike in the darkness. I smelled the sweetness of apple blossoms now, and knew what kind of tree grew across the room.

I wondered what the nurses thought of the new decorations. There were moths fluttering in the flowers above me, and I could see the movement of them in the blossoms across the room now, but I knew they only looked like moths. Dozens of demi-fey fluttered in the new garden, but they weren’t just sipping nectar and pollen, they were guarding, and they were attracted to this new magic like an ordinary moth drawn to a light.

I glanced to the far side of the room and found Rhys on the couch, asleep on his back with Gwenwyfar across his chest. Her white curls looked so very like his in the dim light. One of her small fists was wrapped around his finger, as if they held each other even in their sleep.

Sholto sat artfully slumping in a chair with his back to the room’s only window. He’d changed clothes since last I’d seen him, because his clothes were dark enough that they blended in with the darkness, leaving his long hair to gleam like a pale yellow curtain around the darkness of the rest of him. His eyes were pale, but I wouldn’t have wanted to guess at their color in this light. Nothing human had yellow eyes like his; they were just some pale color, but not as pale as his white, white skin, which gleamed like Rhys’s and the baby’s hair in the near-blackness of the room.

The wall behind him moved. I had to narrow my vision and concentrate to see that it wasn’t the wall that was moving, but that there was a solid sheet of nightflyers hanging on the wall like giant bats, though even bats wouldn’t be able to hang flat against a smooth modern wall, but then bats didn’t have tentacles with suction on them and the nightflyers did. Their fleshy bodies framed the window and clung halfway across the ceiling. Once they’d chased me like the nightmares they appeared to be, but now the nightmares were on my side, and I knew that while they were in the room almost nothing in this world, or the next, dared to attack us.

A tentacle much bigger than anything the flyers could boast waved at the window behind them all. That let me know that more of the sluagh was on guard outside our room. We had powerful enemies, but we hadn’t needed this much overt protection since we escaped from faerie and came back to California to have the babies.

I had to fight to keep my voice soft, not wanting to wake anyone, but needing to ask, “What’s wrong?”

Sholto blinked at me, and there was a shine to his eyes as if they’d caught what little light there was in a way that human eyes did not reflect. He sat up a little straighter, and I could see the gleam of jewels against the black of his shirt. The necklace covered most of his upper chest. It was a piece that even the Hollywood elite wouldn’t have worn. They were jewels meant for a king, which he was, King of the Sluagh. I’d seen him wear the piece in the high courts of faerie when he was reminding other nobles that he wasn’t just another lordling, or even princeling. Short of wearing his crown he was declaring himself king; the question was, why? Or rather, why now?

My heart sped at the sight of the jewels, because he might bring the sluagh out to warn enemies not to try us, but to dress as a king…. It was a very short list of situations he would do that for.

He smiled almost too faintly for me to see it in the dimness. He spoke quietly, too, the way you do around sleeping people. “Why should anything be wrong, Merry?”

“It shouldn’t, but it is,” I said.

“We are your bodyguards, sweet Merry; becoming fathers does not change that. I merely watch over your slumber, and that of our children, and my fellow fathers.”

“You are wearing court clothes and kingly jewels, something I’ve only seen you do in the high courts of faerie. You don’t waste such finery on the human world, or on me.”

“When you are recovered and the doctors free you of restrictions, I would gladly wear all this to your bed.”

I glanced up at the clinging nightflyers, which he was totally ignoring, as if I couldn’t see them.

“You do know that I see the nightflyers, right?”

He grinned then, and shook his head. “I am not trying to hide them from you.”

“Could you, if you wished?”

He seemed to think about it, and then said, “I believe so.”

“Could you hide them from the queen herself?”

“I do not want to hide them from her,” he said.

I smiled then. “So that is why the show of force. The queen has threatened us.”

He sighed, frowned, and fidgeted in his chair, which he didn’t do often. “I was told not to worry you.”

“Who by?” I asked.

“Doyle—you know it was him, or I wouldn’t have tried so hard to obey him. He is technically the captain of your guard, and when in the Unseelie Court my captain.”

“You are the Lord of That Which Passes Between in the Unseelie Court, but you sit here now as King Sholto, ruler of the darkest part of the Unseelie host. What did our queen do, or say, to warrant this show of force, Sholto?”

“Doyle will be unhappy with me if I tell you.”

“Just Doyle?” I asked.

He smiled again. “No, not just Doyle, but I am not worried about Frost.”

“You think you could take my Killing Frost in a duel, but not my Darkness,” I said.

“Yes,” Sholto said. It was interesting that he didn’t try to equivocate or salve his ego. It was just a statement of fact; he feared Doyle’s prowess in battle, but not Frost’s. “But your using their more fearsome nicknames is also a show of force, my dear Merry.”