A Shiver of Light

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  How did I know all this? Galen had told me; he’d apparently won her confidence with all his time in the nursery. She’d never seen a man who loved his children so much, and she’d informed me I was a lucky woman.

  Danika glanced up and said, with a smile, “Ms. Reed, Princess Meredith.”

  “Hello, Danika. Hello, Rita,” I said.

  Maeve said, “Rita, are you all right?”

  I walked farther into the room so I could see Rita more clearly around Maeve’s tall form. Rita kept smiling and rocking Bryluen but never looked up at Maeve. In fact, she didn’t react at all, as if she hadn’t noticed us come into the room.

  “Rita, Rita!” Maeve raised her voice a little.

  “Bree likes ’ita to rock her,” Liam said.

  Maeve waved her hand between Rita’s face and Bryluen’s gaze. The nanny didn’t react. Maeve kept her hand above the baby’s face, completely blocking them both from looking at each other.

  “Rita, can you hear us?” I asked.

  Danika walked toward us holding Gwenwyfar. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Rita!” Maeve said sharply, her hand still held between them.

  Rita startled, almost as if she’d been asleep, her arms starting to unfold as if to drop Bryluen, but she recovered instantly and held the baby closer. The baby started to fuss.

  “What’s wrong? Did I doze off? I’m so sorry, Ms. Reed, I’ve never done that before.”

  Maeve straightened up. “It’s okay, Rita, I know … it’s not your fault.”

  “But I fell asleep with the baby in my arms.” She looked at me. “I am so sorry, Princess, so sorry, I would never …”

  “It’s okay, Rita, honestly,” I said.

  She was completely beside herself, thinking she’d nearly dropped Bryluen because she fell asleep. I waited for Maeve to explain, but she didn’t, and I didn’t either. I wasn’t sure how to explain it, and I definitely didn’t want the media to know that one of the triplets was already so magically powerful that she could bespell people with her gaze. No, that bit of information was not something I wanted in the tabloids.

  Maeve told Danika to take Rita to her room and make her take a short nap. Maeve took Bryluen from her. I took Gwenwyfar from her, so she could escort the still-apologizing Rita away.

  Liam said, “Bree likes ’ita.”

  We looked down at the little boy. “Does Bryluen like Rita better than Danika?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Why does she like her better?”

  He looked very serious, as if he were thinking hard, then said, “’ita plays.”

  “Rita plays more than Danika,” I said.

  He nodded, smiling.

  “Do you and Bryluen tell Rita what to play?”

  “Bree does,” he said, smiling.

  “And does Rita always play the way Bree wants?”

  He nodded solemnly.

  Maeve looked down at the baby in her arms. “Her gaze has a weight to it, Meredith.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can resist it, but she just seems such a beautiful child. It’s peaceful to look at her.”

  “It’s a compulsion, isn’t it?”

  Maeve nodded, face very serious, as she looked at me. “We’ll interview some nonhuman nannies. I’ll call the agency and see if they have any available. If they don’t have any, then we should ask in the larger fey community.”

  “Agreed, and until we find someone, Rita shouldn’t help take care of the triplets anymore,” I said.

  Bryluen started to fuss, and Maeve rocked her back and forth. The baby quieted almost immediately, big eyes growing sleepy. “None of the humans should be around her much, Meredith.”

  “How did you know that Bryluen likes to be rocked that way, side to side, not up and down?”

  Maeve stared down at the tiny baby. “I … I don’t know. I just knew that’s what she wanted.”

  “Can you stop rocking her?” I asked.

  Maeve stopped, and Bree started to fuss; more rocking and the fussing stopped again. “She cries every time I stop.”

  “Try stopping anyway,” I said.

  Maeve tried, but eventually she started again. “No, I can’t stop, not for long.”

  We stared at each other and for the first time I was afraid of Bryluen, because magic usually gets more powerful with age. She was only a week old; what would she be like in a few years?

  “Maybe none of us should take care of Bree by ourselves,” I said, softly.

  Maeve went to the crib with the most pink on it. It had been purchased while I was in the hospital, and Kitto had let the clerk talk him into pink ribbons and little lambs. She was able to lay Bree down, but the moment she started fussing Maeve moved to pick her up.

  “Don’t pick her up,” I said, and I held Gwenwyfar closer to me.

  Maeve turned away, but the baby began to cry and she turned back.

  Liam was at the crib now. “Pick her up, Mommy, she wants up.”

  Maeve picked Liam up and held him so he could see into the crib better. She was able to walk away with the toddler in her arms, but he wasn’t happy.

  “Mommy, pick Bree up, not me!” He started to push to be put down. She let him down and he ran to the crying baby. She turned to go in that direction, too.

  “Pick Alastair up,” I said.

  She went to my quietly sleeping son and lifted him slowly. He slept through it, though the dogs began to whine around her feet, especially his puppy.

  Maeve turned to me. “I can resist her demands now.”

  Liam had his tiny hand through the crib bars and had her hand in his. “Up, Bree. Up, Mommy!”

  Maeve and I looked at each other. “She’s only a week old, Meredith.”

  “I know.”

  “If it gets worse, stronger …”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Why does holding the other babies act as charm against it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “There have been stories of some being so beautiful from babyhood on that all that saw them were entranced, but I thought that was an exaggeration; now I’m not so sure.”

  “Do we have anyone here who was that compelling, this young?”

  She held Alastair close, and thought. “Aisling. Stories tell how people loved him even as a baby.”

  “I saw one of our women claw her own eyes out, so he couldn’t control her with his beauty.”

  “A human woman?”

  “No.”

  “Lesser fey?”

  “No, sidhe.”

  Maeve shivered, so violently that Alastair protested with a small cry. His puppy came and whimpered at her feet. “Did it work?” she asked.

  “Did what work?”

  “Did scratching out her own eyes stop him from having power over her?”

  “She was able to stop answering questions truthfully, but she was still besotted with him, still magically infatuated. He told her the last sight she would ever see, ever remember, was his face, and she wept. She wept into her hands all blood and gore.” I raised Gwenwyfar so I could smell the top of her head, that clean, pure smell that seemed to make everything all right.

  “He was forbidden to use his charms in battle; it was deemed too horrible to make your enemy love you,” Maeve said.

  “I didn’t really understand what his power was. I mean, I knew the stories, why he was veiled, but I didn’t really understand until it was too late. I agree, some things are too terrible to use.”

  “You wield the hands of flesh and blood, Meredith. They are two of the most horrifying powers the sidhe have ever commanded. How can it be more terrible than that?”

  “It’s not lust, but love, obsession that he causes. She screamed when she saw him, when they kissed, as if it were the most horrible sight in the world. I never want to order anything done that causes that sound from another person.”

  “She was part of a group that was trying to kill you and the men you love, M
eredith; you had no choice.”

  “It’s pretty to think so, but in the end there are always choices, Maeve. People decide what lines they will not cross, I just found another one, that’s all.”

  “You look haunted, Meredith.”

  I nodded. “I don’t feel bad about much that I’ve done, or had others do, but that one bothers me.”

  Maeve came and used one arm to hug me to her, so that she encircled the babies and me in her arms. “I am sorry for that then, Meredith, truly sorry.”

  I realized I was crying, and wasn’t sure why; maybe it was postbaby hormones, or maybe the thought that my wonderful babies, my children, might have frightening magic hadn’t occurred to me. Most magic didn’t manifest in the sidhe until puberty, but both girls had already shown power. Gwenwyfar with her lightning birthmark that actually caused a sort of static shock sometimes, and Bree with this, whatever this was. I held Gwenwyfar and pressed my head against the sweetness of Alastair’s dark hair, and wept while Maeve Reed, the Golden Goddess of Hollywood, held me. In the end, faerie princess or box office queen didn’t matter as much as being two women, two mothers, two friends. Maeve joined me in the tears, and I doubted she could have said why she was crying either.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I LEFT MAEVE in the nursery to make sure Bryluen didn’t bespell the nannies, and went in search of the fathers who were doing the most baby duty. I wanted to know if they’d had any problems, or noticed that Rita was being manipulated by our baby daughter. The guards were doing weights, weapons practice, and hand-to-hand, in separate groups, so I went to the weight room first. It was easier to ask questions there.

  I had two guards with me, because I went nowhere without them since Taranis had kidnapped me. I couldn’t complain about the extra security, but it meant that some of the guard had to miss the workouts at times. Saraid and Dogmaela paced just behind me and to each side. Saraid’s hair was as glitteringly gold as Frost’s hair was silver; her eyes were blue with a white starburst around the pupil, as if someone had drawn a shining white star in the middle of the blue of her iris. Dogmaela’s more ordinary yellow hair seemed pale compared to the glittering braids that Saraid could boast, and her eyes, three rings of green and gray, seemed almost human-normal, but they were both tall and slender with fine muscles showing in their bare arms. Saraid was six feet even, and Dogmaela two inches shorter at five-ten. Her yellow hair flowed free, held back from her face by a metal helmet that was so not modern, but if no one made her wear modern equipment Dogmaela had a habit of reverting back to more familiar things. She did keep her sidearm, a modern Beretta .45, and according to Doyle she was one of the most accurate with a pistol. She liked her helmet and her familiar sword at her side, but she’d embraced the modern weapons wholeheartedly. Except for the color of her hair and eyes, Saraid looked like a very modern Hollywood model/actress in skinny jeans tucked into knee-high boots, and a tailored mannish suit jacket that didn’t quite hide the sword she had strapped to her back, but distracted the eye from the two guns and extra ammunition that fit along her long, slender torso.

  The women stayed outside the door, as the other guards had stayed outside the nursery. Rhys and other guards were inside the weight room, and that meant that the workout areas were one of the safest places in the house and grounds.

  There was a big sign over the door to the weight room. It read, IF YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO USE A MACHINE, ASK FOR HELP. DO NOT BREAK THE MACHINES! THIS MEANS EVERYONE: SIDHE, RED CAPS, GOBLINS, DEMI-FEY, EVERYONE!

  I knew Rhys had made the sign after one of the Red Caps had stripped all the cables out of one machine, and one of the newer sidhe guards had damaged another, all in the same week. I could hear his voice without even going through the doorway, not the words he was speaking, but the rhythm of his voice. The room had been a ballroom back in the day when houses had them, because it was the only room with ceilings tall enough for the Red Caps, since they averaged between seven and thirteen feet tall. Maeve had let us buy what Rhys felt was needed for training the guards, so the once-elegant ballroom was filled with state-of-the-art padding, enough free weights to make Mr. Universe happy, and a forest of machines. The latter were mostly mysterious to me, because they’d been purchased after I got pregnant. I’d never spent a lot of time with weights, but I’d been forbidden to use anything but the lightest hand weights for so long that it was like a foreign land to me now. The machines were all taller than me, with interchangeable handles, pulleys, and attachables, and I had no idea what most of them did. I wasn’t the only one overwhelmed by Rhys’s fully equipped room.

  “How can you use all this cold iron?” a woman’s voice protested. I could glimpse Rhys through the maze of machines, but the woman was sitting down and I couldn’t tell from her voice who it was, over the machines’ mechanical clatter and the clink of the weights.

  I nodded to the guards as I walked past. I’d learned that etiquette in the weight room meant you didn’t say hello when someone was lifting, unless they spoke first. If they were into the zone of their workout, just having to talk too much could throw them out of it. Rhys had explained all this to me. I’d never lifted weights seriously enough to experience a “zone,” but I trusted Rhys to know what he was talking about.

  Most of the guards in the room were the newer ones who had only come from faerie in the last few months, but they were all tall and slender, with a play of muscles under their mostly pale arms, long legs moving the leg press machine easily. I didn’t usually still feel like the short ugly duckling, but seeing them in the tank tops and shorts, or even just sports bras for some of the women, I suddenly felt far too round, and much too short, and just awkward as I walked across the special padded floor in my three-inch heels. I’d felt pretty good about myself until that moment, and then it was as if all the childhood years of being told I wasn’t sidhe enough came spilling back. No one had said anything, or even lifted an eyebrow at me; sometimes it’s just the inside of your own head that is the problem.

  I squared my shoulders, made sure my posture was perfect, and kept walking toward Rhys with a smile on my face. My insecurities in that moment were my own.

  Of course, I wasn’t the only one who didn’t look like everyone else. There were three Red Caps in the room, too. They were all between seven feet, short for a Red Cap, and thirteen feet, which was almost as tall as they got. The tallest and the shortest were shades of gray, but the middle one was the yellow of aged ivory. I wasn’t close enough to see their true red eyes, but they were Red Caps; the eyes would be scarlet. The yellow-skinned one was Clesek, but I couldn’t recall the names of the other two. They all wore the short, round caps that gave them their name, but right now the caps weren’t red, more brown, the color of dried blood. They were all stuffed into sweat suits that strained to fit over their bodies. It was like trying to find workout clothes for the Incredible Hulk. They’d originally worked out in their undergarments, but Maeve had too many humans working in the house and they were uncomfortable with nearly nude giants striding through the hallways. They were in the far corner using the special free-weight bars that we’d had to get, so they could carry more weight than regular barbells without breaking; I hadn’t even known that there were special bars to hold weights once you got up to four to five hundred pounds and more. The fact that human beings with no fey ancestry needed special bars like that amazed me a little, and made me feel even weaker. I was so not the strongest person in this room, not in any way.

  I heard Rhys say, “The metal makes us have to work harder, because not all our magic works.”

  The woman’s voice: “It’s harder than I thought it would be.”

  “Good,” he said.

  The Red Caps saw me and dropped their weights with a clang that vibrated the room as they went down on one knee. They didn’t have to do that during exercise, I’d told them all that, but the Red Caps were very devoted.

  I stopped and called out to them. “It’s all right, you do
n’t have to bow in the weight room, remember?”

  “You are our queen, we must show proper respect,” Clesek said. He gave a narrow-eyed stare at the sidhe. “They should show it, too.”

  “It’s dangerous in the weight room, Clesek; we discussed this,” I said.

  “Which of you dropped it?” Rhys yelled it, as he came striding through the machines wearing midthigh-length compression shorts and a tank top that was more straps than shirt so that the muscled beauty of his upper body was more revealed than hidden by it. The shorts showed off assets, too, but in the gym you were supposed to be paying attention to other things. His hair was back in a ponytail held by multiple hair ties spaced a few inches apart along its length so that it was almost a braid, but not quite.

  Since he was six inches taller than me, I didn’t think of him as short, but as he went for the Red Caps, he looked small. It made me wonder how tiny I looked standing next to the biggest of the goblins.

  His voice boomed out, filling the room. One of the visiting human soldiers had called it a drill sergeant voice. “You do not drop the weights! If you have to drop the weights, then it’s too heavy for you, and you do what?” He was pressed nearly into the Red Cap’s chest, but his voice thundered through the suddenly quiet room. Everyone had stopped exercising to see someone else get dressed down.

  The Red Cap mumbled something.

  Rhys did that big voice again. “I can’t hear you!”

  “Lower the weights. But it wasn’t too heavy for me. We needed to show respect to Queen Meredith,” the Red Cap said. He looked sullen. His scarlet eyes narrowed in an unfriendly manner, though part of it was the color. Bloodred eyes with no whites in them could make the Red Caps look angry, or at least unfriendly, easily and often.

  “But the humans on TV just let the heaviest barbells drop,” one of the other Red Caps said. This one was a gray so pale that he was almost white. He also had one of the most human of faces, not exactly handsome, but not the frightening fanged expression that most of them had once had.

  Rhys turned and got up in the face of the second Red Cap. It was almost funny to see the huge Red Cap’s shoulders slump, head ducking, shame-faced at the much smaller man’s angry rant.