A Shiver of Light Read Free

found love, that true love that they write songs and poems about, but this fairy tale didn’t have a happily-ever-after ending, not yet. As I sat there with my hands folded over the round tightness of my belly, I was scared. Scared in the way that women had been for centuries. Would the babies be all right? Would I be all right? Triplets? Really? Really? I didn’t know how to feel about it yet, it was too new. I’d been happy about twins, but triplets—how much more complicated had the pregnancy and our lives just become?
    I prayed to the Goddess for safety, wisdom, and just a calm center from which to listen to the doctors and the plan. I smelled roses, and I knew she’d heard me, and I knew it was a good sign. I hoped it was a good sign. I knew that sometimes bad things happened for good reasons, but I really, really wanted this to be one of the good things, period, with no caveats.
    Doyle squeezed my hand, and a moment later Frost did the same. The men I loved more than anyone in the world were with me; it would be all right. The other men that I loved, but maybe not quite so much, were looking at the doctors and glancing at me, trying to be reassuring and not show that they were worried, too.
    Galen was failing to hide his worry, but his face had always been a mirror for his heart. His pale skin had a faint green cast to it to complement the darker green of his short curls. He still had one long, thin braid, which was all that was left of his once-knee-length hair. A cream T-shirt made of silk embraced the lean muscles of his chest and upper body, an apple-green suit jacket that was his only concession to dressing up. The rest of his outfit was jeans, pale blue with holes worn through, giving tantalizing glimpses of bare flesh as he moved. The jeans were tucked seamlessly into brown tooled cowboy boots, which were new, and not his choice. We all represented the high court of faerie and we had to dress accordingly when we were likely to be photographed, and any trip to the hospital had the paparazzi out in droves.
    The last of our happy, but tense, sextet of men were Rhys, Mistral, and Sholto. Rhys was mostly shades of white and cream from the waist-length white curls to the cream-colored suit and pale leather loafers hidden underneath the table. His open-necked dress shirt was pale blue and brought out the tricolored blue iris of one eye; the other eye was lost behind a pale blue satiny eye patch. It brought out the wonderful blues of his remaining eye but didn’t hide the trailing scars that came from that empty eye socket. Goblins had taken his eye centuries before I was born. At five-six he was woefully short for a purebred sidhe, but still taller than my own humble five feet even. I was the shortest royal in either court.
    Sholto was all long, straight white-blond hair in a curtain that almost obscured his black suit and white shirt with its high, round collar so no tie was needed. It wasn’t this year’s style, but he was King Sholto, Lord of That Which Passes Between, ruler of the sluagh, the dark host of the Unseelie Court, and he didn’t really worry about this year’s fashions. He wore what he liked, and it usually looked scrumptious on him, or scary, depending on the effect he wanted. The black made his tri-yellow-gold irises very bright, very beautiful, and very alien.
    Mistral was the last of my would-be fathers. He was the tallest by a few inches, broadest of shoulders by a fraction, just a very big man, but the bulk of muscle and centuries of warrior training didn’t help him be okay inside a man-made building with too much metal and technology for his fey sensibilities. Lesser fey have more trouble with such things, and Mistral was dealing the least well of any of my lovers with this extended stay in the human world. It showed in the hollow look around his eyes, their color that swimming yellow-green that the sky gets just before a tornado sweeps down from the sky and destroys everything in its