“I just realized that I’m going to be a mother.”
“Aye, you are.”
“I hadn’t thought about anything beyond getting pregnant.”
She smiled at me. “It will be a few months before ya have to worry about mothering.”
“Is it ever too soon to worry?” I asked.
Sholto had come to stand on the far side of the bed from Gran. Doyle and Rhys were looking at the thread. Doyle was actually sniffing it rather than using his hands. I’d seen him do that to magic before, as if he would trace it back to its owner like a hound on a scent.
Sholto took my hand in his, and I didn’t pull away, but I saw Gran’s face harden. Not good. I looked at him, and what I saw in his face reassured me. I’d expected him to look arrogant or angry, and to have that directed at her. I’d expected that he took my hand to prove to Gran that she couldn’t stop him from touching me. But his face was gentle, and he was gazing at me.
He gave me a smile as gentle as any I’d seen on his face. His triple yellow eyes with their individual lines of gold were soft, and he looked like a man in love. I was not in love with Sholto. I had only been alone with him twice, both times ending in violent interruptions, neither of them our doing. We didn’t really know each other yet, but he looked at me as if I were the world, and it was a good, safe place.
It made me uncomfortable enough that I dropped my eyes so he would not see that my look did not match his. I could not give him love in my face, not yet. Love, for me, was made up of time and shared experience. Sholto and I had not had that yet. How strange to be with his child, and not to be in love with him.
Was this how my mother had felt? Married, bedded, but not in love, then to suddenly find herself pregnant with the child of a stranger? For the first time ever, I had some sympathy with my mother’s emotional ambiguity toward me.
I had loved my father, Prince Essus, but perhaps he had been a better father than husband. I realized in that moment that I truly knew nothing of how my father and mother had interacted. Had their tastes in bed been so different that they had no middle ground? I knew their politics were opposite poles.
I held Sholto’s hand, and had one of those adult moments when you realize that maybe, just maybe, your hatred of your parent is not completely justified. It was not a comfortable feeling to think of my mother as the wronged party instead of my father.
It made me look up at Sholto. His white-blond hair had begun to escape from the ponytail he’d worn to rescue me. He’d used glamour to make his hair look short, but the illusion might have been harmed if someone had become tangled in his nearly ankle-length hair. Strands of his hair trailed around a face as handsome as any in the courts. Only Frost had had a more masculine beauty. I pushed that thought away and tried to give Sholto his due. The tentacles had ripped his t-shirt apart. It clung like a lace of rags around his chest and stomach. Shreds of the cloth were still tucked into his jeans, with their belt, and the heavy collar was still intact, so it, along with the sleeves, kept it all in place, but the chest and stomach revealed were lovely, the skin pale and perfect. The tattoo that decorated him from just under the breastbone to his belt looked like someone had drawn one of those sea anemones, done in shades of gold, ivory, and crystal, with edges of blue and pink, soft colors, like the sun caressing the edge of a seashell. One thicker tentacle had been drawn so that it curled up over the right side of his chest, looking as if the tentacle had been frozen in mid-movement, so that the tip was close to the darker paleness of one nipple. I wasn’t certain, but I was pretty sure that the tattoo had changed. It was almost as if the tat was literally formed by what the tentacles were doing when he froze them into art.
I knew that the slender hips, and everything else that was held inside his jeans, was lovely, and that he knew what to do with it.
He lifted my hand, and his face wasn’t soft now. It was thoughtful. “You look like you are weighing and measuring me, Princess.”“And well she should be,” Gran said.
Without looking at her, I said, “He spoke to me, not to you, Gran.”
“So you would take his side over mine already?”
I did look at her then. I saw the anger in her eyes, and a covetousness that wasn’t her, but might be my cousin. It was as if Cair had put her desire to possess into the spell, her jealousy given magical form. Subtle, and nasty. Not unlike my cousin, come to think of it. Magic was often like that, colored by the personality of the maker.
“He is my lover, the father of my child, my future husband, my future king. I will do what all women do. I will go to his bed, and his arms, and we will be a couple. It is the way of the world.”
A look of deep hatred came over her face, and it was almost as if the expression were not hers. I clung more tightly to Sholto’s hand, and had to fight the urge to wiggle a little farther away in the bed from this woman, because though it was Gran, there was something in her that wasn’t.
Galen moved up beside us. “The expression on your face, Gran, it doesn’t look much like you.”
She looked at him, and her face softened. Then that other looked out of her true-brown eyes for a moment. She looked down, as if she knew she couldn’t hide it.
“And how do ya feel, Galen, that you share her with so many?”
He smiled, and true happiness was shining in his face. “I’ve wanted to be Merry’s husband since she was a teenager. Now I will be, and we’ll have a child together.” He shrugged, spread his hands. “It’s so much more than I ever thought I’d have. How can I be anything but happy?”
“Do ya not wanne be king in yer own right?”
“No,” he said.
She looked up then, and the other was in her eyes, sharp and pure, and uncomprehending. “All of you want to be king.”
“As her only king, I would be a disaster,” Galen said simply. “I am not a general to lead armies, or a strategist for politics. The others are better at all that than I am.”
“You mean that,” she said, and the voice didn’t sound very much like Gran at all.
I didn’t fight the urge to wiggle closer to Sholto and Galen then, and farther away from Gran and the stranger’s eyes. Something was wrong with her, in her.
That strange voice said, “We could let her keep you, let her be queen of the Unseelie. You would be no threat to us.”
“No threat to whom?” Doyle asked. There was no sight of the thread now. I didn’t know if they’d destroyed it, or just hidden it. I’d been too caught up in Gran’s strange state to notice. It wasn’t good that I hadn’t noticed, but the world had narrowed to the stranger in my grandmother’s eyes.
“But you, Darkness, you are a threat.” There was no accent now. There were simply well-spoken words, and because it was Gran’s throat saying it, the words still sounded vaguely like her, but a person’s voice is made up of more than just their larynx and mouth. There is a piece of yourself in your voice, and the words she spoke now belonged in someone else’s mouth.
She glanced across the bed at Sholto. “Shadowspawn and his sluagh are a threat.” Shadowspawn was a nickname that even the queen rarely said to his face. A lesser fey, even my grandmother, would not have risked such an insult to the King of the sluagh.
“What have they done to her?” I asked. My voice was soft, almost a whisper, as if I were afraid that if I spoke too loudly, it would tip the tension building in the room. Tip it over, and spill it into something bloody and awful and irrevocable.
Gran turned to Doyle, one hand spread wide. It was one of those moments that seem frozen in time. It is the illusion that you have all the time in the world, when in fact you have milliseconds or less to react, to survive, to watch your life be destroyed.
He reacted in a blur of movement that I couldn’t follow. He was simply a dark blur, as the power burst from Gran’s hand—a power that she had never possessed. White-hot light burst forth, and for a moment the room was illuminated in eye-searing brightness. I could see Doyle caught against that light, moving her arm, her body, away from the bed, away from me. I had an almost slow-motion view of the white light cutting across the front of his body.
There was a shuddering scream from near the window as the white light hit the giant tentacles still in the opening. The bed moved. It was Galen throwing himself on top of me, as a living shield. I had time to see Sholto leap over the bed, and go to join the fight, then all I could see was Galen’s shirt. All I could feel was his body above mine, tensed for a blow.
CHAPTER FIVE
THERE WAS ONE TERRIBLE SCREAM, A SOUND OF SUCH DESOLATION that I pushed at Galen, tried to move him away. I had to see. Doyle had been an immovable wall; Galen moved, but not away. His body was softer, less certain of itself, but I was just as trapped. I might have forced him to move if I’d been willing to hurt him badly enough, but I was unwilling to hurt more of the people I cared for.
Galen took a breath that broke in a sob. I heard Rhys’s voice. “Goddess, help us!”
I pushed harder at Galen’s chest. “Move, move, damnit, let me see.”
He turned back to me, pressing his face against my hair. “You don’t want to see.”
I’d been frightened before; now it was panic. I screamed at him. “Let me see, or I will hurt you!”