“She wants to see her great-nieces and nephew,” he said.
“She wants to visit the hospital?”
“She does.”
I pictured my aunt, the Queen of Air and Darkness, tall, sidhe slender, with her long, straight black hair tangling around her legs, dressed in her signature black, her eyes circles of black and shades of gray with black lines encircling every color so that it always looked as if she’d outlined the iris with eyeliner. It was always a startling and frightening effect, or maybe that last part was just me? Maybe if she hadn’t tried to drown me when I was six, or torment me casually on so many occasions, I would have simply thought her eyes were striking. Perhaps, if I hadn’t seen her covered in the blood of her torture victims, or had so many of them flee to us here in California looking for a sort of political asylum with the wounds of her creativity still unhealed in their flesh, I would have thought her beautiful, but I knew too much about my aunt to ever see her as anything but frightening. “Is she still torturing her court nobles on mad whims?” I asked.
“Last we checked,” Rhys said.
“Then she’s too crazy to be trusted among humans, or near our babies.”
“We agree,” Rhys said. He was rocking Gwenwyfar, gently, but she was moving more. I thought she was working up to a cry, but I was wrong. It was Bryluen who let out a high, thin wail more like the sound that a small animal makes than a baby; just the cry alone said how tiny she was, and how newborn. My body responded to it with milk seeping out of my br**sts and soaking through the nursing bra and the gown I was wearing. Well, at least something was working the way it was meant to. I reached for my smallest daughter. I wasn’t sure who her father or fathers were, but I knew she was mine. That was one of the nice things about being the woman: You never had to guess how many kids were yours. Men … did they ever really know before genetic testing existed?
CHAPTER FIVE
I SEEMED TO have enough milk for all three babies but was short a breast, so whichever baby wasn’t feeding cried, which made the others fussy. The nurses brought bottles and were thoroughly scandalized that Royal was naked. They brought him a set of surgical scrubs to wear when he was big, after we explained the problem. Rhys took Gwenwyfar to Sholto in his chair with the nightflyers shifting restlessly around him.
“No,” Sholto said, holding his hands up as if to keep the baby at bay.
“Yes,” Rhys said, and put the baby in the other man’s arms so that he had to hold her, or risk having her fall. Sholto held her as if she were made of glass and would break, but he did hold her.
“Hold the bottle like this,” Rhys said.
Bryluen and Alastair were content, feeding deeply, and that near-magical endorphin rush came over me so that it was comforting to me to feed them and make them feel comfortable. I wondered if cows felt that way around milking machines, or just around their calves.
Gwenwyfar started to cry, and it was high and told some part of my brain I hadn’t even known was there that she was little, but that part of me also knew instinctively that she wasn’t as little as Bryluen. How did just the sound of their cries tell me that?
“You’re too tense,” Rhys said. “She’s picking it up.”
“See, she doesn’t like me.”
Galen sighed and came beside my bed. “May I take our boy? He’s more easygoing than Gwenwyfar.”
“You can tell that already?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, and there was something about the expression on his face that made me wonder.
“What did I miss while I slept, besides my aunt wanting to visit?”
“We all got to know the babies,” Galen said with a smile.
I had a little trouble getting Alastair to let go of his nice, warm meal—me—and he fussed as Galen picked him up, but he didn’t cry.
Gwenwyfar was crying full-out. Rhys picked her up and he and Galen passed each other as Gwenwyfar came to feed beside her sister, and Alastair got to be bottle-fed by Sholto.
Gwenwyfar settled onto my other breast across from her sister with a little sigh of contentment. Did babies really come into the world knowing that much of who they were and what they wanted? Gwenwyfar already had a strong preference for Mommy, as opposed to the bottle.
I realized that the room was quiet, full of contented noises, which meant Alastair was taking his bottle. I looked across the room to where Rhys and Galen had both been working with Sholto to help him bottle-feed. Sholto had a little smile on his face, and he had relaxed, so that Alastair fit in the crook of his arm and the bottle was at a good angle. The baby was drinking hard and steady, his tiny curled fist on one side of the bottle as if he were already trying to help hold it. I knew that part was accidental, but it was still amazing to me. I guess everyone thinks their babies are wonderful and precocious.
“Alastair takes the bottle easier,” Galen said.
Sholto glanced up. “You had trouble feeding the girl, too?”
“I got her to take the bottle, but she doesn’t like it as well, and she let me know that.” He turned and grinned back at the bed and his reluctant daughter.
Rhys said, “She has strong preferences, our Gwenwyfar.”
“Already?” I asked.