A Shiver of Light

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Liam yelled, “Sorry, baby!”

  Alastair finally woke up and joined the girls crying. Liam’s nursemaid offered to take him from Rhys, but Liam wrapped his arms around Rhys’s neck and started to cry. “No, don’t want to go!”

  Maeve glided gracefully into the hallway, calling above the crying, “What happened?”

  Galen said, “Liam poked Bryluen in the eye, by accident.” He had to raise his voice, too.

  Maeve went up to Rhys and he started to hand the boy to her, but Liam clung to Rhys, screaming, “No! No!”

  Maeve stopped trying to get him from Rhys, and once he settled back into Rhys’s arms he stopped yelling, tears still wet on his face as he gave a petulant face to his mother. She had been in Europe filming for most of the last five months and had been home for only three days. Liam called her Mommy, but he didn’t always act like she was Mommy.

  Maeve couldn’t keep the hurt out of her face for a moment, and then she smiled brightly.

  Rhys said, “Liam, go to your mommy.”

  “No, baby room,” Liam said, very serious, very certain of what he wanted and what he didn’t.

  “I think he wants to go to the nursery and watch the babies,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” Maeve said. “I flew in for his first birthday and then had to leave again.”

  “You shouldn’t have to support us all, if it means you’re apart from your son,” Doyle said.

  “For centuries we were just like the human nobility; no one saw their own children. They were all raised by nannies and caretakers,” Maeve said.

  “But you are not content with that,” Frost said.

  Maeve shook her head, and tears sparkled in her eyes. She shook her head a little more vigorously, and then managed a voice that held nothing but good cheer. “I’ll join you in the nursery in a few minutes.” Then she walked back out the way she’d come and left us with Liam and the babies. At least they’d quieted, and we weren’t listening to high-pitched newborn cries echoing off the marble walls.

  “It’s not right that she’s sacrificing her time with Liam for us,” Galen said.

  “Agreed,” Frost said.

  “Yes,” Doyle said.

  Rhys was drying the tears off Liam’s face. “He doesn’t mean to hurt her feelings.”

  “I know,” I said. Liam had spent much of the last few months falling asleep across my ever-growing stomach, so that at the end he’d looked like the arch of a rainbow, but his nannies couldn’t get him to settle down like I could. He’d put his little hand on my stomach and say, “Babies,” as if he’d been waiting for them to finally come outside and be able to play.

  I wasn’t sure what to do with the fact that Liam had bonded with our little family group while Maeve was away. I wasn’t even sure there was anything to be done, but it seemed like a topic for a family discussion. We actually had family meetings to discuss the complicated intricacies of our happy home. Most of the time it really was happy, but with this many people involved it didn’t just stay happily-ever-after without a lot of discussion and work. I was learning that happily-ever-after was the beginning of the next chapter, not the end of the story.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  THAT NIGHT I dreamed. It seemed to be just a dream, not Goddess-sent or prophetic, but a dream like millions of people everywhere have every night. It began well, with my father getting to meet my babies, his grandchildren, but in the way of dreams, what is comforting begins to disturb. It’s nothing you can put a finger upon, but the wonderful begins to unsettle you, and you know something is wrong with what you’re seeing, you just don’t know what yet … but you will.

  In all the long years since my father’s death I had never once dreamed of him, and yet there he stood, tall and handsome with his fall of black hair loose around his legs like a curtain of black water, flowing and moving as he held Bryluen in his arms. The wind played in his hair but didn’t tangle it, the way it did for Doyle and Frost. They’d said the wind liked them, and the wind in my dream liked my father.

  It was strange, but I never forgot he was dead, even in a dream with him smiling down at me. He was dead and this wasn’t real, could never be real again.

  “Meredith,” he said, smiling, “she is beautiful, my little girl.”

  “I wish you were here to hold your grandchildren for real, Father.”

  He laid a gentle kiss on Bryluen’s forehead and then raised his face, frowning slightly. “What is in her hair?”

  I came closer, and he lowered the baby enough for me to spread her red curls and show the tiny horn buds. He startled, and if I hadn’t been standing close he might have dropped her, but I took Bryluen in my arms and moved back. I thought, I need to put her in her cradle, and one appeared.

  “I thought she was the one, she looks so like us, but if she has horns she can’t be ours.”

  I laid Bryluen in the cradle and looked up at my raven-haired father with his tricolored eyes, completely different from Bryluen’s large blue ones. He looked nothing like me, or the baby. It had saddened me as a child that I hadn’t looked more like my father.

  “What do you mean she looks like us? She looks nothing like you, Father.”

  He held Alastair in his arms now. The black hair did look more like my father, and all newborns look slightly unfinished so that people can see what they want to see in their features. I think it’s a way of making everyone feel included, like the baby belongs to everyone.

  He leaned over Alastair and frowned. “Is he spotted like a puppy?”

  “Yes,” I said, and went to take my son from his arms. He didn’t fight when I took Alastair. I put him in the cradle behind me. Bryluen wasn’t there, she was safely away, and even as I thought it, Alastair vanished from the cradle, too.

  I knew he would be holding Gwenwyfar when I turned back, and he was; he was unwrapping her from the blanket she was swaddled in, but she hadn’t been swaddled when we put her down for the night. She hated to be confined like that, and as if my thinking it had caused it, she started to cry, flailing small sturdy arms, tiny hands in fists as if she would fight the world.

  He ran his big fingers through her hair.

  “She doesn’t have horns, if that’s what you’re looking for,” I said.

  He lifted Gwenwyfar free of the blanket and looked at the skin that the onesie left bare. “She looks sidhe,” he said.

  My pulse was beating too fast as I moved to take my daughter from him. He let me do it, I think because she was crying. She quieted in my arms, and I moved back to lay her in the crib. She vanished, and I knew that they were safe. I didn’t think they’d been in the dream for real, but just in case I’d wanted them safely away, because I knew that whoever this man looked like, he wasn’t my father.

  I thought, This isn’t real, it’s just a dream. That should have been enough to shatter the dream. I waited for it to unravel and to wake up in my bed sandwiched between Frost and Doyle, but the dream held.

  I had never tried to break a dream with magic, but now I reached outward, tentatively, and found that I could feel the edges of the dream almost like a plastic film that I could press against. Press against, but not break.

  “So it is true, you are able to travel through dream.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said, but my pulse was in my throat. Something was terribly wrong.

  “You travel in your dreams to help your soldiers,” he said.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You cannot lie to me in dream, Meredith. Your soldiers wear your sign.”

  In the final battle with my cousin, Prince Cel, I had been protected by the National Guard, and all of them who had been wounded, or had been touched by my blood, seemed to be able to call upon me when I slept. If they were in danger of their lives they could call me to them, and the Goddess gave me the means to show them to safety or bring them the help they needed. Some of them wore the nails that had been part of the shrapnel in the bomb my cou
sin had set to kill me. They had tied leather cords around the nails and wore them like a talisman, and through those nails they could call me. The black coach of faerie that had been a limousine when I was first called home was now in the desert, a black armored vehicle of whatever kind was needed. It traveled without a driver and went where it was needed, because I had told it to help them, and somehow it did. The coach had always been wild magic, never fully understood or fully controlled by anyone, but it had listened to me.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  He walked toward me looking as my father would if he had never known pain, never been wounded, never died, but the smile was wrong. It was his face, but it wasn’t my father’s smile.

  I backed away, so that his outstretched hand wouldn’t touch me. “Who are you?”

  He held out his hand. “Come to me, Meredith, but take my hand, and we can step out of this dream.”

  “And where will we appear once the dream is finished?” I asked.

  “Someplace wonderful.”

  I shook my head. “Liar.”

  “We cannot lie outright, Meredith; you know that.”

  “Drop this guise and show me your true face.”

  “Take my hand.”

  “Drop this disguise and perhaps I will.”

  He stepped closer to me, hand still held out toward me. “Who do you want me to be?” he asked.

  “Show yourself as you truly are, and stop tormenting me with my dead father’s face.”

  “I thought the sight of Essus would comfort you,” he said, and frowned as if he didn’t understand, and maybe he didn’t.

  “You were wrong; show me your face.” My voice was strident, not with anger, but fear.

  “If you let me hold you now, it will be as if Essus were here to embrace you one last time. I can give you that, Meredith; my powers have returned. The Goddess has blessed us both again.”

  “The Goddess gives Her power where She will. I do not question it, but one man’s blessing is another’s curse; drop this illusion and show me …” I stopped, because the moment I said illusion, I knew; Goddess and Consort help me, but I knew.

  One moment I was staring up into the face of my dead father, and next it was Taranis, the King of Light and Illusion. He was all red and gold of hair, his eyes like green petals of some exotic flower, tall and commanding, and truly one of the most handsome men to ever grace the high courts of faerie.

  “Come, Meredith, embrace me as one of the fathers of your children.”

  I screamed.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  HE GRABBED MY wrist and started to pull me to him, but I thought, I need something to hold on to, and my other hand found smooth wood to grip, a carved banister leading up to nowhere, but it was a handhold, and I made my choice that I’d let him break my arm before I let go.

  “Meredith, I’d never hurt you.”

  “You raped me!”

  “Lies, Meredith, all lies. I saved you from the Unseelie monsters. You have a babe that grows horns, and another spotted like a dog, but our daughter is perfect. They are twisted of body, and it is a miracle you have survived.”

  His eyes began to glow as if every green petaled layer of his iris were turning to green flame, and I was falling into that flame. I wanted to touch his hair, colored like all the brilliance of a fiery sunset. My hand loosened on the banister behind me, and then a single rose petal fell and landed on the mound of my breast. I was not a victim.

  He held my wrist; so be it. I opened my hand and laid my palm against his skin and called one of my hands of power. His skin began to writhe as if it were turning liquid where I touched him.

  He yelled and let me go. “What is this?”

  “The hand of flesh is my hand of power, as my father carried it before me.”

  Taranis’s arm began to roll up on itself, as the bones and muscle began to spill out to the surface, turning inside out, and spreading up his arm.

  “Stop this!” he yelled, but even as I watched, the flowing skin had stopped just short of his shoulder. If he’d laid the arm against other bare skin it would have spread, but he had jerked away quickly enough that it hadn’t turned his entire body inside out. The hand of flesh could do that, and had. It had been one of the worst things I’d ever seen, but I was half sorry it hadn’t done just that to Taranis.

  “This is dream; you don’t have this power outside of dream.” He was staring at his arm, and the horror on his face as he looked up at me made part of me … happy.

  “You knocked me unconscious and nearly killed me before you mounted me last time. I was too hurt to fight back.”

  “This is not real!” He yelled it at me.

  “I don’t know, uncle dear; perhaps when you wake up your arm will be healed, or perhaps it will be a reminder to you to stay away from me, my babies, and everyone I hold dear, because if you ever touch me by force again, in dream or reality, I will destroy you, Taranis.”

  “It isn’t real,” he said, but his voice was uncertain.

  “For your sake, I hope not,” I said. “Honestly, for my own sake, I hope it is.”

  “I saved you, Meredith; why do you hate me?”

  I wished for a sword, and one was in my hand. The hilt was cool and perfect. You had to look close to see the carved tiny bodies melting into each other as the only warning for what might happen if you touched the sword. It was Aben-dul, once my father’s centuries before I was born, and it fit my hand as it had the first time it appeared to me in reality. It had never just appeared in my hand before, but this was a dream—anything was possible.

  “Where did that come from?” And now he was afraid, and that made me fiercely happy.

  “You can stop me from leaving this dream, but you can’t stop me from creating what I need inside it.”

  “You shouldn’t be able to do that,” he said.

  “You said it yourself, uncle: I have traveled through dream to soldiers who held relics of my blood and pain. The Goddess comes to me in my dreams. I hold my father’s hand of power and a sword of Unseelie grace, but I am Seelie as well as Unseelie. I hold the wonders and nightmares of both courts inside me, uncle dearest.”

  “Stop calling me that; I am the father of your baby.”

  I wrapped both hands around the sword and only the fact that I carried the hand of flesh kept me safe from the magic of the blade, and got into the stance that I’d learned so long ago. I hadn’t kept up my sword practice, because I’d realized as a teenager I was never going to choose a blade as my weapon in a duel, and I was never going to challenge anyone to a duel, and so long as they challenged me I chose the weapons, but I knew how to hold a sword. I knew enough to bleed him unless he killed me first, but I’d blasted the arm that held his hand of light; if I was lucky, I’d crippled his magic. If I’d been certain the sword would work here as it did in the real world, I could have used my hand of flesh without touching him, but I wasn’t sure enough to risk using it as anything but a sword.

  “I was pregnant when you raped me, you psychotic bastard! Now break us both free of this dream, or I swear by the Summerlands, and the Darkness that Swallows the World, I will do all in my power to kill you, uncle dearest.”

  “Do not call me that, Meredith; you are my queen and will be my wife.”

  I started forward, doing a feint with the sword. He jerked back, his wounded arm useless at his side. “Come, uncle, let us embrace and I will finish what I began with your arm.”

  He vanished from the dream, and a second later I woke in bed with Doyle and Frost looking down at me. Doyle was pinning my arms down across my body, because the sword Aben-dul was still in my hands.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  MERRY, MERRY, DO you know who we are?”

  “Doyle, Frost,” I said, my pulse so hard in my throat that it choked my voice down to a whisper.

  Frost smoothed my hair back from my face and asked. “Do you know where you are?”

  “We are in Lo
s Angeles, in Maeve’s house, in our bedroom.”

  Frost smiled down at me. “Do you remember that we love you?”

  I smiled up at him. “Yes, that I always remember.” Just gazing up into his face and answering that question helped slow my frantic heartbeat and chase away the last clinging terror of the nightmare.

  Doyle’s deeper voice turned me to look at him. “If you remember that, then relax your arms, so that I know you will not strike out with the sword you hold in your hands.”

  I realized that my arms were tense underneath his, as if I meant to use Aben-dul once I was free of the strength that held me down. I fought to relax my arms, but it was as if the thought of not being ready to strike when the need arose frightened me, as if I expected Taranis to appear in the room once I was unarmed. There was a chance that even accidentally touching someone who did not carry the hand of flesh would turn them inside out. I didn’t want to hurt my lovers, but … The fear wasn’t rational.

  Normally, I would have said that with Doyle and Frost beside me I was utterly safe, but Taranis had nearly killed Doyle with his hand of power. If he still had a hand of power. If the damage I had caused in dream had truly happened to him in reality, then he might have lost his greatest weapon, because often when our hands were damaged, the hands of power went with the injury. Or sometimes the magic became so wild that it wasn’t safe to use, like a fire that you meant to use to cook your dinner, but that got out of hand and burned down the house instead.

  “Some thought has gone through your eyes, our Merry,” Doyle said.

  “I had a dream,” I said.

  “It was not a Goddess-sent dream,” Frost said, “because when you cried out in your sleep we were both able to wake and watch over you.”

  “And there are no flower petals raining down from nowhere,” Doyle said.

  “But though we awoke,” Frost said, “we could not rouse you, as if it had been a dream from the Goddess.”

  “If it was not the Goddess, then what held you so tight to this dream?” Doyle asked.