She sounded like the sidekick girlfriend in the standard rom-com flick, asking the heroine to explain again what’s so awful about the obviously delicious love interest. I rolled onto my back and studied the tent ceiling. Rain pattered on the silk in a steady pattern, making the interior cozy. Especially now that I was all warm and relaxed.
“Okay, explain this to me—why does Rogue want my firstborn child? Specifically one he’s sired?”
“Well!” Starling opened her mouth and then slowly closed it again. Cocked her head to the side. “Maybe he needs an heir.”
I turned onto my side and propped my head on my hand. “Okay. Let’s take that as an operating hypothesis.”
She giggled. “Sometimes you say the funniest things.”
“No, really. Let’s say that’s true. Rogue needs an heir. In order to have an heir, he needs a female, preferably willing, cuz that makes everything easier. Now—does he lack for willing females?”
“Oh, Titania, no! Practically every female fae in the land has been throwing herself at Lord Rogue for centuries. You should just see...oh. I played the game wrong.”
“No!” I sat up and punched the pillow in excitement, accidentally ramping it up to a sizzling citron that seared my eyes. I tapped it a couple more times to damp it down to a more soothing level, glad that I’d built this adjustable function into the magic fiber-optic light-up pillows. “You played it correctly. This guy demonstrably does not lack for potential wombs. Why mine?”
“Um...true love?”
I felt myself sag but persevered. “Let’s entertain that variable. Assuming he and I share a true love—completely undefined at this point—why is that necessary for him to have an heir?”
“I don’t know. Here, your hair will dry all snarled. Let me comb it.” Starling staggered up and grabbed a comb, hair oils and another pitcher of wine, which she used to refill my glass.
To hell with it. I could really use a good drunk. “Okay, so we table that. Rogue and I share some kind of emotional/metaphysical connection that makes our hypothetical baby full of awesome. Ow.”
“Sorry—but if you’d let me wash it properly, it wouldn’t have tangled.”
“Let’s stick to the program here.”
“Yes. Game of theories.”
I snorted my wine uncomfortably into my nose at her translation. “So far we’ve set aside the theories that Rogue can’t get laid without blackmail and that only a true-love baby will do. What other reasons are there?”
“Well, you’re human.”
“Yes. And, more specifically, a human not from here. Like your father.”
Her hands slowed in my hair, combing thoughtfully. “Like Daddy, yes.”
I turned to look at her. “Are you a firstborn child?”
She faltered then, her wide brown eyes full of shadows. “No.” She whispered it. “I had a brother. But he...”
“What?” I clasped her hands, knotted together over the comb. “What happened to him?”
She pressed her lips together and leaned forward so our foreheads nearly touched. “Everybody always talks as if he died—except Mother, who won’t talk about him at all. Ever. And sometimes, I think—I mean, I get this feeling that...”
“Yes?”
“That it’s my brother Daddy’s really looking for. His eternal quest.” She laughed it out with bitterness. “Not to pass back through the Veil, but to find the son I’m not.”
“It might not help, but if what I’m thinking is correct, it doesn’t matter that he’s a son. What was salient was that he was first. If you had been first, you might have been the one to disappear.”
“But why?” She looked up, with tears running down her face. “Where did he go?”
“I don’t know.” And I didn’t know how much I should say. “There are tales, back in my world, that the fairies would come and take human children, especially the firstborn, and swap them with fairy babies—changelings, the stories called them.”
“What happened to the fairy babies?”
I paused, having to think. What happened to the changelings was usually not the point of the story. Just the loss of the human child. Fragments came to me of the fate of changelings, boiled alive or exposed to wolves. None of it pretty. Neither were the changelings, though, and in the Faerie where I found myself, everything was pretty. At least on the surface. “I’m not sure. I don’t think they survived in my world.”
“That’s so sad.”
It was sad, when you thought of it that way.
“Sometimes, though, they disappeared too. Or maybe they just eventually grew up and learned to masquerade as regular humans. Blend in.”
Starling nodded, solemn. “I think a lot of us do that. Figure out how not to be quite so weird to everyone else as we get older.”
She had a point. Changelings, at some level, all of us.
“At any rate, my working theory is that these firstborn children—” hell, maybe they were all half-human/half-fae; entirely possible that this element would be left out of the tales, given that no one would want to ’fess up to cavorting with fae on the sly, “—hold some kind of intrinsic value.”
“But what?”
“I can tell you who probably does know.” I pointed a finger at Starling. “Our beloved Lord Rogue. And, possibly, your own mother.”
Starling gaped at me. I suddenly understood why mothers were wont to tell their children to close their mouths so they didn’t look like goldfish.
“Why would my mother know?”
“Think about it. If it’s true your father is off searching for your brother, it’s because he believes he’s alive and not dead. And if your mother allows you to believe your brother is dead, rather than speak the truth, doesn’t it follow that she knows what’s become of him?
“Further, this desire for firstborn children belongs entirely to the fae, at least this mysterious version of it. It’s not the humans seeking out fae for interbreeding and swapping out babies. Your mother is the fae in that relationship. Tell me—how did the two of them hook up? You said your dad got here ‘the usual way’—what way is that?”
Starling busied herself with tidying up and I didn’t stop her. I always preferred to be actively doing something while processing an unwieldy batch of information too.
“He called himself ‘an Irish cliché.’ He’d been out to the local pub, having a pint or two, and got drunked up, so much so that he forgot his horse and wandered home.”
His horse? With a sinking feeling I wondered just how long ago this had happened.
“Daddy loves to tell a story.” Starling sighed with affectionate impatience. “So it changes every time. But he usually says the stars were singing a sweet song that led him to a soft green hill. He lay down to rest his head a spell and woke up on the same hill, only here, instead.”
How well I knew that particular hill. Only I had started out at Devils Tower. Many gates going to one place? It bore thinking about. Later.
“And then how did he meet your mother?”
Starling frowned, shaking out the cloak and hanging it up thoughtfully. “He had adventures. He’s got no magic, like you have, but he’s very good at quests and such. My mother was imprisoned in a tower in the Glass Mountains by a dragon and—”
I choked on my wine. “No way!” Her mother—the crisp, efficient Blackbird, my seneschal—did not match my mental image of a damsel in distress.
“Oh yes. She had very long, glossy black hair, dark as the River Styx, and the dragon loved to use it to floss his teeth. Also, she made excellent bait. The young lords would come to rescue her, the dragon would eat them and then—”
“Floss his teeth with her hair. Got it. Talk about needing extra-strength conditioner.” I waved for her to continue when she cocked her head. Stopped myself. “Wait, how did the dragon eat the fae lords if they’re immortal?”
She rolled her eyes. “Because dragons are above all magic.”
“Ah, right.” I needed to ask Larch wh
ere he’d packed my vial of dragon blood. Surely that would come in handy. “Keep going.”
“There’s not much more to tell. Daddy defeated the dragon, rescued Mother and they wed. Happily ever after.”
“How did he defeat the dragon?”
“Oh, he’s exceedingly bold and courageous.”
“Uh-huh. So, you’re telling me some mortal Irishman with a penchant for forgetfulness and Guinness succeeded where innumerable immortal fae nobles did not?”
“Well, and because he was her—”
“Let me guess. Her true love.”
Starling nodded but lacked her usual beaming certainty on the topic.
“If they’re such true-lovers living happily ever after, why is it that he’s off questing and she’s working in Rogue’s castle, running the household?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Starling—in my world, people who love and marry then live together and work as a team, a partnership in life.” Of course, half a dozen counter-examples popped into my head, but still, the concept was there. “The rescue and wedding shouldn’t be the end of the story—it’s the beginning.”
She put her hands on her hips, a gesture very much her mother’s. “Well then! If living together is the key to preserving True Love, why do you refuse to move into Rogue’s castle?”
“Because—” I unclenched my jaw, “—he is not my true love, nor am I his. There is no such thing.”
“But you just said—”
“I said love. Period. Plain, old boring love. Nothing magic about it. Love, as a verb, where you actually have to put some effort into it, not waltz around in a glittery cloud of happiness and light.”
“Aha!” She pounced on my words. “So you do believe in love, the effort kind. Thus if you try to love Rogue, you will.”
I put the cool wineglass to my forehead. “I should never have taught you logical thinking.”
She giggled.
“No. Don’t be all pleased with yourself. This is what I’m trying to explain here—I don’t want to try to love him, because I don’t believe he has my best interests at heart. Nor those of my potential child. If I love him, I’ll lose the power to resist him. I can’t ever be that again.” My voice cracked, and unshed tears clogged my throat.
“I don’t think that’s how it works.” Starling looked sympathetic, sat down and took my hand. “Don’t cry, Gwynn. You’re just tired is all.”
“I’m not crying.” I wiped my eyes, to be sure. “But I am tired.”
“Rest, then. Larch is standing watch. You’re safe.”
“What I’d really like to do is talk to your father and get the straight story from him.” I rubbed my aching temples. “But I don’t see how that’s possible if I’m stuck here.”
“Well, that might be difficult with no one knowing where he is.”
“Maybe Blackbird knows more than she’s let on.”
“If she does, you’d have to go to her, as well. I’m not asking her. And it’s not like she’ll come anywhere near Falcon, if you’re thinking along those lines.”
I had been contemplating that, wondering if I could summon her to attend me. I was getting as high-handed as Rogue. And, dammit, I’d forgotten to mention to Starling that he’d be showing up before long. “By the way, Rogue will be sleeping with me at night—new deal.”
“Really?” Starling drew the question out with a suppressed squeal and plucked the empty glass from my hand.
“Don’t get excited. I’ll explain later.” The emotional break had tipped the scales, and the need to sleep dragged at me. I barely heard her humming a happy tune and I fell into oblivion.
* * *
When I awoke from the short nap, I blessedly had the tent to myself. The rain continued to fall in the same soothing pattern. The light from outside that gleamed through the clever raised flaps remained the same steady silver. Outside, the camp noise continued at its usual level. Since the mixed fae population seemed to be constantly active—I suspected some species were nocturnal and others might not truly sleep at all, much like insects—music played and various groups cavorted, celebrating today’s “victory.” No telling how far nighttime might be.
I’d love to have a clock of some sort, but a few things stopped me from wishing one up. First, I wasn’t entirely certain how a mechanical clock worked. Oh, I know—gears, cogs and springs and all, but how did you know what size to make them, so they kept the right time? There was a reason I hadn’t become an engineer. Second, if I wished up a fully functioning clock, wouldn’t it be the kind I knew, set to follow earth’s rotation? I wasn’t sure how time flowed in Faerie.
Which led to my third hesitation. Fear.
I had this sneaking suspicion that some days lasted longer than others, and that time here ebbed and flowed more like tides than going in an orderly progression. I thought sometimes of light-deprivation experiments, which caused sleep cycles to alter and fragment. Marquise and Scourge, the sadistic teachers who taught me to control my magic, had deliberately broken my sense of time and self. Sleep-deprived, then sleep-fragmented, starved—nothing of my old cycles remained after that nearly half a year in their tender care. If I conjured a clock to track time in Faerie, it would likely be something out of Alice in Wonderland, with spinning hands and random alarms ringing. Some things you just didn’t want to know, really.
I wanted to believe that six years would proceed at a normal pace. We clung to our small bits of denial like life rafts.
So I foraged for food from the small buffet always laid out for me and carried the plate to my workbench. There seemed to be no point in getting dressed, since I was in for the evening and, especially given the nightgown beneath, the robe provided the best anti-Rogue coverage, should he pop up anytime soon.
I settled into recording my notes from the conversation with Starling into what I, more than a little sarcastically, called my Big Book of Fairyland. In particular, I wanted to note my new theories on firstborn children. Resolved to discard no avenue of investigation at this point, I even made a section for evidence toward Starling’s “True Love” theory.
I still didn’t believe in it, but I also hadn’t believed wishes could come true in the blink of an eye, so I needed to be willing to entertain a paradigm shift.
Much more likely was that firstborn children tended to be strongest, with the best health. Nice, fresh body to gestate them and all. It wasn’t my field, but I recalled some physiological studies along those lines. It was a particularly cruel joke that I’d always believed I’d have books and databases to access information I didn’t care to memorize. Whatever my neurons had managed to store—which seemed disconcertingly random—was all I had.
A hungry demand invaded my head, along with an image of a mermaid on a plate, just before Darling pushed through the tent flaps. With a prodigious leap, he landed on my pages with wet and muddy paws, slapping me under the chin with a soggy—and somewhat fishy-smelling—tail.
“Hey! Not on my grimoire. This is super-special sorceress work here.” I snatched the book out from under him and set it safely aside.
He sent a disdainful image and purred invitingly, with a cat’s patented combination of contempt and adorable charm. I stroked his tortoiseshell coat and he arched his back agreeably, blinking bright green eyes at me with more intelligence than a cat should have. Something Titania had tossed off the one other time we’d met led me to believe that Darling had once been a fae noble, who she’d trapped into this feline body. He seemed happy as a cat, though. Or maybe those were the limitations of his current brain. He head-butted my hand and sent an agreeable thought when I obediently scratched his ears.
“Did you really get close to one of the mermaids?”
He purred, arch and mysterious. Somehow I really doubted it. Darling insisted, showing me that same picture of a big-bosomed mermaid cuddling him to her naked breasts and cooing what a fierce fighter he must be. I snorted and he batted my hand with an indignant swipe.
; I sat back and watched him start into a vigorous bathing session.
“What’s your vote—should we move into Rogue’s castle?”
He flattened his ears in disdain, splayed his legs to lick his butt, and sent me an image of him striding through a battlefield, tossing monsters aside. The cat had battles on the brain. Plus he wanted a new name. A battle name.
“What if we went on a quest instead?”
Darling paused in the butt-licking and fixed me with a bright green stare, flicking an ear tip in interest. He imagined himself on the prow of a sailing ship, his fur blowing nobly back in the breeze. Perhaps a pirate name?
“I have no idea if we’d need to sail, since I have no idea where we’d look.”
“Well,” Starling said from behind me, making me start, “if you’re thinking of looking for my father, we should go to Castle Brightness first and ask my mother.”
I turned sideways in my chair to better see her. She chewed on her lip, but held her chin high.
“Color me surprised. I got the impression you didn’t care to confront Blackbird over this stuff.”
Her gaze slid down and to the side, looking at something only she could see. “I’ve been thinking about what you said, that if I’d been firstborn, it might be me that...disappeared. And I think I’d want my brother to look for me.”
“Good for you,” I said softly, trailing my hand down Darling’s arched spine. He approved of the plan.
“Yes.” She nodded, a crisp echo of Blackbird. “We ask my mother, find my father and discover what happens to the children.”
“He may not yet know.”
“No, but you can work on Rogue, to find out what he knows too.”
I picked at a sand burr in Darling’s fur, focusing on that. Even it was pretty—a little jewel, with hooked spikes. “He already agreed to help me.”
“He did?”
She sounded as if I’d said Rogue planned to dance naked under the full moon. Probably he already did that. “Yes, he did. Why else would I agree to let him sleep with me every night?”
A sly grin twisted her pretty mouth. “I figured that was his natural charm.”
Rogue’s Possession Page 4