A Caress of Twilight

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “I made it clear that I found her lovely,” Rhys said.

  “But you did not take advantage of her.”

  “I am Princess Meredith’s lover. Why should I look elsewhere? I showed your assistant the amount of attention she deserved, no more, no less.” The humor was gone from his face now, and he seemed almost angry.

  Maeve petted the woman’s hand and sent her into the house. Marie very carefully avoided looking at Rhys. I think she was embarrassed. Maybe she didn’t get turned down often, or maybe Maeve told her it was a sure thing.

  I stood. “I’ve had enough games, Maeve.”

  She reached toward me, but I was out of reach. “Please, Meredith, I meant no offense.”

  “You sent your servant to seduce my lover. You tried to seduce me, not out of plain desire, but out of a desire to gain control over me.”

  She stood in one swift motion. “That last is not true.”

  “But you do not deny sending your servant to seduce my lover.”

  She took off the big sunglasses so I could see how confused she was. I was betting it was an act. “You are Unseelie Court, and all manner of temptations are open to you.”

  It was my turn to be confused. “What does my court have to do with anything? You have insulted me and mine.”

  “You are Unseelie Court,” she said again.

  I shook my head. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You would not try on the swimsuits,” she said, voice soft, eyes downcast.

  “What?” I asked.

  “If Marie had seen him nude, then she would have known his body was pure, except for the scars.”

  I frowned harder. “What in the name of the Lord and Lady are you babbling about?”

  “You are all Unseelie Court, Meredith. I have to be sure you are not … unclean.”

  “You mean deformed,” I said, and I didn’t even try to keep the anger out of my voice.

  She gave a small nod.

  “Why should our bodies, whatever they look like, make any difference to you?”

  “I told you what I want, Meredith.”

  I nodded, and I was nice enough not to blurt out her secret in front of everyone, though heaven knows she hadn’t earned the courtesy.

  “If anyone who aids me in such an endeavor is impure, then …” She sort of nodded at me, trying to get me to finish the sentence in my head.

  I leaned into her and hissed, more than whispered, “The child will be deformed.”

  No amount of glamour could hide the smell of cocoa butter, liquor, and cigarette smoke in her hair and skin. A sudden wave of nausea rushed over me.

  I backed away from her and would have fallen if Rhys hadn’t caught me, steadied me. “What’s wrong?” he whispered.

  I shook my head. “I’m tired of being here with this woman.”

  “Then we leave,” Doyle said.

  I shook my head again. “Not yet.” I half clutched Rhys’s arm and turned back to Maeve. “You tell me why you were exiled. You tell me the whole truth here and now or we walk away from you forever.”

  “If he knew I told anyone, he would kill me.”

  “If he finds out I was here, talking to you, do you really believe he’ll wait to find out if you told me?”

  She looked frightened now. But I didn’t care.

  “Tell me, Maeve, tell me or we walk, and you’ll never find anyone else outside of faerie who can help you.”

  “Meredith, please …”

  “No,” I said. “The great pure Seelie Court, how they look down on us. If a child is born deformed, then it is killed, or was, until you all stopped having children. Then even the monsters were precious. Do you know what happened to the babies after a while, Maeve? Do you know what happened in the last four hundred years or so to deformed Seelie children? Because, make no mistake, inbreeding catches up, even with the immortal.”

  “I don’t … know.”

  “Yes, you do. All that bright, shining throng know. My own cousin was kept because she was part brownie. You didn’t throw her out, because brownies are Seelie—not court, but creatures of light. But when the sidhe themselves breed monsters, the pure, shining, Seelie sidhe, breed deformities, monstrosities, then what happens, where do they go?”

  She was crying now, soft, silver tears. “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. The babies go to the Unseelie Court. We take in the monsters, those pure Seelie monsters. We take them in, because we welcome everyone. No one, no one is turned away from the Unseelie Court, especially not tiny, newborn babies whose only crime was to be born to parents who can’t study a genealogical chart well enough to avoid marrying their own fucking siblings.” I was crying, too, now, but it was anger, not sorrow.

  “I give you my oath that I and Frost and Rhys are pure of body. Does that make it easier? Does that help? If you just wanted to sleep with the men, you wouldn’t have cared if you saw me in a swimsuit, but you did care. You want a fertility rite, Maeve. You need me, and at least one man.”

  I was too angry to know if anyone besides Maeve had heard what I said, or understood what I’d said. I just didn’t care.

  I pushed away from Rhys, my anger carrying me forward to spit the words in her face. “Tell me why you were exiled, Maeve, tell me now, or we leave you as we found you. Alone.”

  She nodded, still crying. “All right, all right, Lady guard me, but all right. I’ll tell you what you want to know, if you swear to me that you’ll help me have a child.”

  “You swear first,” I said.

  “I swear that I will tell you the truth about why I was exiled from the Seelie Court.”

  “And I swear that after you have told me why you were exiled from the Seelie Court, I and my men will do our best to see that you have a child.”

  She rubbed at her eyes with the heels of her hands. It was a child’s gesture. She seemed thoroughly shaken, and I wondered, had one of those poor, unfortunate babies belonged to Conchenn, goddess of beauty and spring? And had the thought of giving up the only child she might ever have haunted her? I hoped so.

  Chapter 14

  “A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, THE HIGH KING OF FAERIE, TARANIS, was ready to put aside his wife, Conan of Cuala. They’d been a couple for a hundred years and had no children.” Her voice had fallen automatically into the singsong of the storyteller. “So he was putting her aside.”

  I loved a good story told in the old ways, but I wanted out of the sun, and I wanted not to be here forever. So I interrupted. “He did put her away,” I said.

  Maeve smiled, but not like it made her happy. “He asked me to take her place as his bride. I refused him.” She was just talking to me now, the singsong lost. It might not have been as pretty, but straight conversation would be quicker.

  “That’s not a reason to be exiled, Maeve. At least one other has turned down Taranis’s offer before, and she’s still a part of the glittering throng.” I sipped my lemonade and watched her.

  “But Edain was in love with another. My reason was different.”

  She wasn’t looking at me, or Kitto, or anyone, I think. She seemed to be staring off into space, maybe looking at the memories in her own head.

  “And that reason was?” I asked.

  “Conan was the king’s second wife. He had been a hundred years with this new wife, yet there was no child.”

  “And?” I took another long drink of lemonade.

  She took a long swallow of rum and looked back at me. “I told Taranis no because I believe he is sterile. It isn’t the women but the king who is incapable of making an heir.”

  I spit lemonade all over myself and Kitto. He seemed frozen with the lemonade running down his arm and sunglasses.

  The maid appeared with napkins. I took a handful, then waved her off. We were talking about something that no one should hear. When I could talk without sputtering, and Kitto and I were both relatively dry, I said, “You told Taranis this to his face?”

  “Yes,” she said.
/>   “You’re braver than you seem.” Or stupider, I added in my head.

  “He demanded I tell him why I would not have him as husband. I said I wished to have a child and I didn’t believe that he could give me one.”

  I just stared at her, trying to think about the implications of what she’d said. “If what you say is true, then the royals could demand the king make the ultimate sacrifice. They could demand he allow himself to be killed as part of one of the great holy days.”

  “Yes,” Maeve said. “He forced me out that same night.”

  “For fear that you would tell someone,” I said.

  “Surely I am not the only one to have suspicions,” she said. “Adaria went on to have children with two others, but she was barren for centuries with our King.”

  I understood now why I’d been beaten for asking about Maeve. My uncle’s very life hung in the balance. “He could just step down from the throne,” I said.

  Maeve lowered her glasses enough to give me a withering look. “Do not be naive, Meredith. It does not become you.”

  I nodded. “Sorry, you’re right. Taranis would never believe it. He would have to be forced to accept that he was sterile, and the only way to do so would be to bring him up before the nobles. Which means you’d have to find a way to convince enough of them to vote your way.”

  She shook her head. “No, Meredith, I cannot be the only one who suspects. His death would restore fertility to our people. All our power descends from our king or queen. I believe that Taranis’s inability to father children has doomed the rest of us to be childless.”

  “There are still children at court,” I said.

  “But how many of them are pure Seelie blood?”

  I thought for a second. “I’m not sure. Most of them were born long before I came along.”

  “I am sure,” she said. She leaned forward, her entire body language suddenly very serious, no flirting involved. “None. All the children born to us in the last six hundred years have been mixed blood. Either rapes during the wars of Unseelie warriors, or ones like yourself that are very mixed indeed. Mixed blood, stronger blood, Meredith. Our king has doomed us to die as a people because he is too proud to step down from the throne.”

  “If he stepped down because he was infertile, the other royals could still demand he be killed to ensure the fertility of the rest.”

  “And they would,” Maeve said, “if they discovered that I told him of his little problem a century ago.”

  She was right. If Taranis had simply not known, then they might have forgiven him and allowed him to step down. But to have known for a century and have done nothing … They would see his blood sprinkled over the fields for that.

  The murmur of voices made me turn around. A new man was speaking pleasantries to the men around the umbrella table. He turned toward us smiling, flashing very white teeth. The rest of him was so unhealthy that the artificially bright smile seemed to emphasize the sallowness of his skin, the sunken eyes. He was so eaten away by illness that it took me a few seconds to recognize Gordon Reed. He’d been the director who took Maeve from small parts to stardom. I had a sudden image of his body rotted away and those teeth the only thing left untouched in his grave. I knew in that instant that the macabre vision was a true seeing, and he was dying.

  The question was, did they know?

  Maeve held out her hand to him. He took her smooth golden hand in his withered one, laying a kiss on the back of that perfect skin. How must he feel to watch his own youth fade, to feel his body die, while she remained untouched?

  He turned to me, still holding her hand. “Princess Meredith, so good of you to join us today.” The words were very civil, very ordinary, as if this were just another afternoon by the pool.

  Maeve patted his hand. “Sit down, Gordon.” She moved to give him the lounge chair, while she knelt on the pool edge, much like Kitto had earlier. He sat down heavily, and a momentary flinching around his eyes was the only outward sign that he hurt.

  Maeve took off her sunglasses and kept looking at him. She studied what was left of the tall, handsome man that she’d married. She studied him as if every line of bone under that sallow skin was precious.

  That one look was enough. She loved him. She really loved him, and they both knew that he was dying.

  She laid her face on that withered hand and looked at me with wide blue eyes that shimmered just a little too much in the light. It wasn’t glamour; it was unshed tears.

  Her voice was low, but clear. “Gordon and I want a child, Meredith.”

  “How—” I stopped; I couldn’t ask it, not in front of both of them.

  “How long does Gordon have?” Maeve asked for me.

  I nodded.

  “Six …” Maeve’s voice broke. She tried to regain herself, but finally Gordon answered, “Six weeks, maybe three months at the outside.” His voice was calm, accepting. He stroked Maeve’s silky hair.

  Maeve rolled her face to stare at me. The look in her eyes wasn’t accepting, or calm. It was frantic.

  I knew now why, after a hundred years, Maeve had been willing to risk Taranis’s anger to seek help from another sidhe. Conchenn, goddess of beauty and spring, was running out of time.

  Chapter 15

  IT WAS DARK BY THE TIME WE ARRIVED BACK AT MY APARTMENT. I would have said home, but it wasn’t that. It had never been home. It was a one-bedroom apartment originally intended for only one person. I wasn’t even supposed to have a roommate in it. I was trying to share it with five people. To say we were a little cramped for space was a terrifying understatement.

  Strangely, we hadn’t talked much on the drive back to work to exchange the van for my car, or afterwards during the drive to the apartment. I don’t know what was bothering everyone else, but seeing Gordon Reed dying, practically before my eyes, had dampened my enthusiasm. Truth was, it wasn’t really Gordon’s dying, but the way Maeve had looked at him. An immortal in true love with a mortal. It always ended badly.

  I’d threaded my way through the traffic almost automatically, the trip livened only by Doyle’s soft gasps. He was not a good passenger, but since he’d never had a license, he didn’t have much choice. Usually I enjoyed Doyle’s little panic attacks. It was one of the few times that I saw him completely unglued. It was strangely comforting, usually.

  Today when we stepped into the pale pink walls of my living room, I didn’t think anything could comfort me. I was, as usual lately, wrong.

  First, there was the rich smell of stew and fresh baked bread. The kind of stew that simmers all day and just gets better. And there is no such thing as bad homemade bread. Second, Galen walked around the only corner in the main room from my tiny kitchen to the even tinier dining area. Usually, I notice Galen’s smile first. He has a great smile. Or maybe the pale green hair that curls just below his ears. Tonight I noticed his clothes. He was not wearing a shirt. He was wearing a white lacy apron that was sheer enough that I could see the darker skin of his nipples, the curl of darker green hair that decorated his upper chest, the thin line of hair that traced the edge of his belly button and vanished inside his jeans.

  He turned his back to finish setting the table, and his skin was flawless, pearlescent white with the faintest tinge of green. The see-through straps of the apron did nothing to hide his strong back and broad shoulders, the perfect length of arm. The one thin braid of hair that still fell past his waist curved over his skin like a caress.

  I hadn’t realized that I had stopped dead just past the door until Rhys said, “If you move a little bit farther into the room, the rest of us can get past.”

  I felt my skin burn as I blushed. But I moved and let the others come past me.

  Galen continued coming and going out of the kitchen, as if he hadn’t noticed my reaction, and maybe he hadn’t. It was sometimes hard to tell with Galen. He never seemed to understand how beautiful he was. Which, come to think of it, might have been part of his appeal. Humility was a very rare commodity in a s
idhe nobleman.

  “Stew’s ready, but the bread needs to cool a bit before we cut it.” He went back into the kitchen without really looking at any of us.

  There had been a time when I would have given and gotten a hello kiss from him. But there was a little problem. Galen had been injured during one of the court punishments just before Samhain, Halloween. I could still see the scene in my mind’s eye: Galen chained to the rock, his body almost lost to sight under the slowly fanning butterfly wings of the demi-fey. They looked like true butterflies on the edge of a puddle, sipping liquid, wings moving slowly to the rhythm of their feeding. But they weren’t sipping water; they were drinking his blood. They had taken bites of his flesh with the blood, and for reasons that only Prince Cel knew, he’d ordered them to pay particular attention to Galen’s groin.

  Cel had made certain that I would not be able to take Galen to my bed until he healed. But he was sidhe, and sidhe healed while you watched, their bodies absorbing the wounds like flowers blooming in reverse. Every dainty bite had vanished into that flawless skin, except the wounds on his groin. He was, for all intents and purposes, unmanned.

  We’d been to every healer we could find, both medical and metaphysical. The medical doctors had been baffled; the witches had only been able to say it was something magical. Twenty-first-century witches hesitate to use the word curse.

  No one did curses; they were too bad for your karma. You do a curse and it comes back on you, always. You can never do truly evil magic, the kind that has no intent but to harm, without paying a price. No one is exempt from that rule, not even the immortal. It’s one of the reasons that a true curse is so rare.

  I watched Galen bustling about the kitchen in his peekaboo apron, careful not to look at me, and my heart hurt.

  I went to him, wrapping my arms around his waist, pressing my body against the warmth of his back. He went very still under my touch, then slowly his hands came up to slide along my arms. He hugged my arms against his body. I cuddled my cheek against the smooth warmth of his back. It was the closest to a hug that I’d gotten from him in weeks. He’d found any interaction painful, in more than one way.