The door at the far end of the white marble hallway opened, and Liam Reed, all of thirteen months old, saw us and grinned. Suddenly the hallway didn’t look stately, or cold, or like people in ball gowns should be gliding down it; it just looked like home.
If you’ve ever wondered why toddlers are called toddlers, all you had to do was watch one who was new at walking. Liam toddled toward us with one of the human nannies chasing behind. He was still unsteady after a month of walking, but he was getting quicker at it. He came staggering toward us as fast as he could, saying, “Babies, babies, babies!” He had a huge grin on his face and was just so excited. He’d been that way since we brought the triplets home. Kadyi, Nicca and Biddy’s daughter, who had just started sitting up last week, was apparently not “baby” enough for Liam anymore, because he was fascinated with the newborns.
Liam was as blond and blue-eyed as his mother, Maeve Reed, pretended to be for the human media, and so far he was just a really pretty baby with straight golden blond hair and big, pretty, very human-looking blue eyes. His skin was the pale constant gold of Maeve’s, like a pale but perfect suntan, easily passing for human.
Rhys scooped him up and said, “You want to see the babies?”
“Babies!” Liam said, at the top of his voice.
Gwenwyfar and Bryluen both protested with tiny cries. Galen and I started patting and rocking them automatically. It had been only a few days, but for a chance to sleep I’d learned to do what I could to soothe them. Only Alastair stayed quiet and deeply asleep in Sholto’s arms as we walked toward the nursery.
Rhys held Liam up so he could see Gwenwyfar first. “Baby!” Liam said, again at the top of his voice.
Gwenwyfar started to cry.
“Shhh,” Rhys said, “remember use your quiet voice.”
Liam turned a solemn face to Rhys, then leaned over Bryluen and said much more softly, “Baby.”
I smiled and moved her so that Bryluen could look back at Liam. He reached out very gently and touched her curls, tracing the tiny horn buds, which he seemed fascinated with, and almost-whispered, “Pitty.” Which meant pretty.
“Yes, Bryluen is very pretty.”
“Bree-lu,” he said, trying to wrap his toddler words around her name. He’d been trying for three days and that was the closest he’d managed.
I smiled at him. “That’s right, Liam. This is Bryluen.”
“Bree-lu-non.”
“Bryluen,” I said.
He screwed his face up into a picture of concentration and then blurted out, “Bree!”
We all laughed, and I said, “Bree will do.”
Liam smiled up at all of us, and then gazed back down at Bryluen, and said, happily and still a little too loud, “Bree!”
She stared up at him with those big, solemn eyes. He reached down and tried to pat her cheek but missed and poked her in the eye. Bryluen started to cry.
Liam yelled, “Sorry, baby!”
Alastair finally woke up and joined the girls crying. Liam’s nursemaid offered to take him from Rhys, but Liam wrapped his arms around Rhys’s neck and started to cry. “No, don’t want to go!”
Maeve glided gracefully into the hallway, calling above the crying, “What happened?”
Galen said, “Liam poked Bryluen in the eye, by accident.” He had to raise his voice, too.
Maeve went up to Rhys and he started to hand the boy to her, but Liam clung to Rhys, screaming, “No! No!”
Maeve stopped trying to get him from Rhys, and once he settled back into Rhys’s arms he stopped yelling, tears still wet on his face as he gave a petulant face to his mother. She had been in Europe filming for most of the last five months and had been home for only three days. Liam called her Mommy, but he didn’t always act like she was Mommy.
Maeve couldn’t keep the hurt out of her face for a moment, and then she smiled brightly.
Rhys said, “Liam, go to your mommy.”
“No, baby room,” Liam said, very serious, very certain of what he wanted and what he didn’t.
“I think he wants to go to the nursery and watch the babies,” I said.
“It’s okay,” Maeve said. “I flew in for his first birthday and then had to leave again.”
“You shouldn’t have to support us all, if it means you’re apart from your son,” Doyle said.
“For centuries we were just like the human nobility; no one saw their own children. They were all raised by nannies and caretakers,” Maeve said.
“But you are not content with that,” Frost said.
Maeve shook her head, and tears sparkled in her eyes. She shook her head a little more vigorously, and then managed a voice that held nothing but good cheer. “I’ll join you in the nursery in a few minutes.” Then she walked back out the way she’d come and left us with Liam and the babies. At least they’d quieted, and we weren’t listening to high-pitched newborn cries echoing off the marble walls.
“It’s not right that she’s sacrificing her time with Liam for us,” Galen said.
“Agreed,” Frost said.
“Yes,” Doyle said.
Rhys was drying the tears off Liam’s face. “He doesn’t mean to hurt her feelings.”
“I know,” I said. Liam had spent much of the last few months falling asleep across my ever-growing stomach, so that at the end he’d looked like the arch of a rainbow, but his nannies couldn’t get him to settle down like I could. He’d put his little hand on my stomach and say, “Babies,” as if he’d been waiting for them to finally come outside and be able to play.
I wasn’t sure what to do with the fact that Liam had bonded with our little family group while Maeve was away. I wasn’t even sure there was anything to be done, but it seemed like a topic for a family discussion. We actually had family meetings to discuss the complicated intricacies of our happy home. Most of the time it really was happy, but with this many people involved it didn’t just stay happily-ever-after without a lot of discussion and work. I was learning that happily-ever-after was the beginning of the next chapter, not the end of the story.
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.