A Shiver of Light

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THAT NIGHT I dreamed. It seemed to be just a dream, not Goddess-sent or prophetic, but a dream like millions of people everywhere have every night. It began well, with my father getting to meet my babies, his grandchildren, but in the way of dreams, what is comforting begins to disturb. It’s nothing you can put a finger upon, but the wonderful begins to unsettle you, and you know something is wrong with what you’re seeing, you just don’t know what yet … but you will.

In all the long years since my father’s death I had never once dreamed of him, and yet there he stood, tall and handsome with his fall of black hair loose around his legs like a curtain of black water, flowing and moving as he held Bryluen in his arms. The wind played in his hair but didn’t tangle it, the way it did for Doyle and Frost. They’d said the wind liked them, and the wind in my dream liked my father.

It was strange, but I never forgot he was dead, even in a dream with him smiling down at me. He was dead and this wasn’t real, could never be real again.

“Meredith,” he said, smiling, “she is beautiful, my little girl.”

“I wish you were here to hold your grandchildren for real, Father.”

He laid a gentle kiss on Bryluen’s forehead and then raised his face, frowning slightly. “What is in her hair?”

I came closer, and he lowered the baby enough for me to spread her red curls and show the tiny horn buds. He startled, and if I hadn’t been standing close he might have dropped her, but I took Bryluen in my arms and moved back. I thought, I need to put her in her cradle, and one appeared.

“I thought she was the one, she looks so like us, but if she has horns she can’t be ours.”

I laid Bryluen in the cradle and looked up at my raven-haired father with his tricolored eyes, completely different from Bryluen’s large blue ones. He looked nothing like me, or the baby. It had saddened me as a child that I hadn’t looked more like my father.

“What do you mean she looks like us? She looks nothing like you, Father.”

He held Alastair in his arms now. The black hair did look more like my father, and all newborns look slightly unfinished so that people can see what they want to see in their features. I think it’s a way of making everyone feel included, like the baby belongs to everyone.

He leaned over Alastair and frowned. “Is he spotted like a puppy?”

“Yes,” I said, and went to take my son from his arms. He didn’t fight when I took Alastair. I put him in the cradle behind me. Bryluen wasn’t there, she was safely away, and even as I thought it, Alastair vanished from the cradle, too.

I knew he would be holding Gwenwyfar when I turned back, and he was; he was unwrapping her from the blanket she was swaddled in, but she hadn’t been swaddled when we put her down for the night. She hated to be confined like that, and as if my thinking it had caused it, she started to cry, flailing small sturdy arms, tiny hands in fists as if she would fight the world.

He ran his big fingers through her hair.

“She doesn’t have horns, if that’s what you’re looking for,” I said.

He lifted Gwenwyfar free of the blanket and looked at the skin that the onesie left bare. “She looks sidhe,” he said.

My pulse was beating too fast as I moved to take my daughter from him. He let me do it, I think because she was crying. She quieted in my arms, and I moved back to lay her in the crib. She vanished, and I knew that they were safe. I didn’t think they’d been in the dream for real, but just in case I’d wanted them safely away, because I knew that whoever this man looked like, he wasn’t my father.

I thought, This isn’t real, it’s just a dream. That should have been enough to shatter the dream. I waited for it to unravel and to wake up in my bed sandwiched between Frost and Doyle, but the dream held.

I had never tried to break a dream with magic, but now I reached outward, tentatively, and found that I could feel the edges of the dream almost like a plastic film that I could press against. Press against, but not break.

“So it is true, you are able to travel through dream.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, but my pulse was in my throat. Something was terribly wrong.

“You travel in your dreams to help your soldiers,” he said.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You cannot lie to me in dream, Meredith. Your soldiers wear your sign.”

In the final battle with my cousin, Prince Cel, I had been protected by the National Guard, and all of them who had been wounded, or had been touched by my blood, seemed to be able to call upon me when I slept. If they were in danger of their lives they could call me to them, and the Goddess gave me the means to show them to safety or bring them the help they needed. Some of them wore the nails that had been part of the shrapnel in the bomb my cousin had set to kill me. They had tied leather cords around the nails and wore them like a talisman, and through those nails they could call me. The black coach of faerie that had been a limousine when I was first called home was now in the desert, a black armored vehicle of whatever kind was needed. It traveled without a driver and went where it was needed, because I had told it to help them, and somehow it did. The coach had always been wild magic, never fully understood or fully controlled by anyone, but it had listened to me.

“Who are you?” I asked.

He walked toward me looking as my father would if he had never known pain, never been wounded, never died, but the smile was wrong. It was his face, but it wasn’t my father’s smile.

I backed away, so that his outstretched hand wouldn’t touch me. “Who are you?”

He held out his hand. “Come to me, Meredith, but take my hand, and we can step out of this dream.”

“And where will we appear once the dream is finished?” I asked.

“Someplace wonderful.”

I shook my head. “Liar.”

“We cannot lie outright, Meredith; you know that.”

“Drop this guise and show me your true face.”

“Take my hand.”

“Drop this disguise and perhaps I will.”

He stepped closer to me, hand still held out toward me. “Who do you want me to be?” he asked.

“Show yourself as you truly are, and stop tormenting me with my dead father’s face.”

“I thought the sight of Essus would comfort you,” he said, and frowned as if he didn’t understand, and maybe he didn’t.

“You were wrong; show me your face.” My voice was strident, not with anger, but fear.

“If you let me hold you now, it will be as if Essus were here to embrace you one last time. I can give you that, Meredith; my powers have returned. The Goddess has blessed us both again.”

“The Goddess gives Her power where She will. I do not question it, but one man’s blessing is another’s curse; drop this illusion and show me …” I stopped, because the moment I said illusion, I knew; Goddess and Consort help me, but I knew.

One moment I was staring up into the face of my dead father, and next it was Taranis, the King of Light and Illusion. He was all red and gold of hair, his eyes like green petals of some exotic flower, tall and commanding, and truly one of the most handsome men to ever grace the high courts of faerie.

“Come, Meredith, embrace me as one of the fathers of your children.”

I screamed.