He grinned then, and shook his head. “I am not trying to hide them from you.”
“Could you, if you wished?”
He seemed to think about it, and then said, “I believe so.”
“Could you hide them from the queen herself?”
“I do not want to hide them from her,” he said.
I smiled then. “So that is why the show of force. The queen has threatened us.”
He sighed, frowned, and fidgeted in his chair, which he didn’t do often. “I was told not to worry you.”
“Who by?” I asked.
“Doyle—you know it was him, or I wouldn’t have tried so hard to obey him. He is technically the captain of your guard, and when in the Unseelie Court my captain.”
“You are the Lord of That Which Passes Between in the Unseelie Court, but you sit here now as King Sholto, ruler of the darkest part of the Unseelie host. What did our queen do, or say, to warrant this show of force, Sholto?”
“Doyle will be unhappy with me if I tell you.”
“Just Doyle?” I asked.
He smiled again. “No, not just Doyle, but I am not worried about Frost.”
“You think you could take my Killing Frost in a duel, but not my Darkness,” I said.
“Yes,” Sholto said. It was interesting that he didn’t try to equivocate or salve his ego. It was just a statement of fact; he feared Doyle’s prowess in battle, but not Frost’s. “But your using their more fearsome nicknames is also a show of force, my dear Merry.”
“Why do you say, ‘my dear Merry,’ as if it’s not true?”
“Because I am no longer certain that any of the babies are mine.”
I frowned at him. “Goddess showed me that you were one of the fathers.”
“Yes, but She did not show me, and I see none of my father’s bloodline in any of the triplets.”
His father had been a nightflyer like those that clung in alien layers to the wall and ceiling of the room. He wasn’t the product of rape, either, but of a highborn sidhe woman wanting a night of perverted pleasure. To be willing to sleep with the monsters of the sluagh was one of the few things that even the Unseelie Court saw as perverse. As Doyle had been the Queen’s Darkness for centuries, and Frost her Killing Frost, so she had nicknamed Sholto her Perverse Creature, but where I could call the other two men by those pet names, I could not do the same for Sholto. He had hated being called her Perverse Creature and feared that someday as Doyle was simply her Darkness, so he would become her Creature, or just Creature.
Sholto looked as handsome and perfect as any of my sidhe lovers, but once he had not. Once, from about midchest to just above a truly beautiful groin, had been a nest of tentacles identical to those on the underside of the nightflyers that clustered around him. Magic and the return of the blessings of Goddess and Her Consort, the Gods that had long withheld their favors from the sidhe, who had been worshipped as deities themselves, had given Sholto the gift of being able to turn the tentacles to a tattoo. Before that he had been able to hide them visually with glamour, that magic that faerie used to trick the eye of mortals, but it had been an illusion, a trick, and the first time I’d touched him with the mass of tentacles touching me, I hadn’t been able to work past it for sex. Now Goddess had given him the body that the rest of him promised, and I’d learned that all those extra bits had pleasures of their own that no more humanlike body could give. I went to his bed joyfully now, and he valued that I loved all of him physically with no squeamishness. I was the only other sidhe lover he’d ever had, because the rest of the courts feared him as proof that the noble blood was wearing thin and we would all be monsters someday, as they feared my mortal blood as proof that their immortality would be the next to vanish.
“I think you’re overly sensitive about your father’s genetics, and you might want to ask yourself if your new ability to make your wonderful extras into a true tattoo might affect the children, too.”
His face grew serious as he thought about my words. He was a serious man as a general rule, and thought about, or even overthought, most things.
“You may be right, but I don’t seem to feel the connection to the babes that others of your lovers feel.”
“Have you held any of the babies?” I asked.
“All of them,” he said. “I felt nothing except that I was afraid I would drop them. They are so small.”
Galen’s voice came thick with sleep, and soft as if he were whispering to not wake the babe beside him. “I was afraid I’d drop them, too, but I worked through it. Once I got over feeling like I didn’t know what I was doing, it was wonderful.”
“I did not find it so,” Sholto said.
“You didn’t stay and take care of them, the way most of us did. I think because they didn’t come out of our bodies, fathers have to work harder at feeling connected.”
Galen sucked at court politics, and at a lot of stuff that the other men in my life were good at, but most of the men wouldn’t have had that insight. It was a good insight.
“I hadn’t thought about how hard it might be for all of you to feel connected to the babies,” I said.
Galen smiled. “You’ve felt connected to them for months, but then you have been holding them more intimately than we ever can.”
Sholto asked, “Are you saying that you did not feel connected to the babes at first either?”
“Not like I do after having held them, cuddled them, and helped give bottles. There was a moment when Alastair looked up at me with those dark eyes, so like Doyle’s eyes, but that was okay, he was suddenly my son, too.”
Rhys’s voice came even and quiet. I think he was trying not to wake the baby sleeping on his chest. “I had the same moment with Gwenwyfar. She’s obviously Mistral’s daughter, but now she’s mine, too.”
“Wait,” I said. “I thought we decided to call her Gwennie, when I went to sleep.”
“She liked Gwenwyfar better,” Rhys said, matter-of-factly.
“Gwennie wouldn’t stop fussing, but the moment Rhys called her Gwenwyfar she stopped,” Galen said.
I frowned at him. “She’s too young to know the difference.”
He smiled and gave a small shrug. “She made a tiny bit of lightning when Mistral first touched her, Merry. Is her preferring a name any less amazing than that?”
I couldn’t argue with his point, but I wanted to.
“Gwenwyfar has your hair,” Sholto said. “None of them have anything of mine.”
“We don’t know that yet,” I said.
“They’re too new,” Galen said. “Give them a few weeks to find out what they are, who they are.”
Sholto shook his head. “I had thought about having an heir to my throne. I have been a good enough king that the host might allow our kingship to become heredity, as well as choice of the people, but not if none of them are descended from the host.”
I hadn’t thought about the fact that we had more than one throne to sit someone on, and suddenly Sholto’s worries about his father’s genetics didn’t seem so silly.
“You’re saying that it was your extra bits that helped make the sluagh comfortable making you their king,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “They will not take a completely sidhe king or queen.”
“Bryluen is not completely sidhe,” Galen said.
“She is demi-fey, and perhaps goblin, but those wings are nothing that flies with my people.”
I wondered if he’d meant to make the modern Americanism It doesn’t fly with me, but I thought it more likely he’d meant it literally.
“Galen is right, Sholto. The babies haven’t been here a whole day yet; they’ll change how they look and who they look like as they get older.”
“They won’t change that much,” Sholto said.
“You might be surprised how much babies change as they get older,” Rhys said.
“That’s right,” Galen said. “You’ve had children before.”
“Yes,” Rhys said. Gwenwyfar moved restlessly on his chest, and he rubbed her back, laid a soft kiss on her curls. It was all done almost automatically. I knew that it had to have been centuries since he’d had other children—did parenting skills stay with you forever once you’d learned them? Or was Rhys just more of a natural father than I’d expected? I wanted to ask him but wasn’t certain how to ask it without implying that I hadn’t expected him to be this good with the babies.