“Multiple births are always a physical challenge, but for someone as petite as you, Princess Meredith, it can be more uncomfortable. We will do everything to make you as comfortable as possible.”
“How about if Dr. Kelly just tells us why he’s here?” My voice rose a little as if I were fighting not to yell at someone, and maybe I was. I just hurt, and I was just so tired of it all. One of the babies moved, rolling in their sleep, or maybe playing, I didn’t know, but it was still an odd sensation for something to move inside me that wasn’t me. It wasn’t a bad feeling, but it was … odd.
Dr. Kelly was having trouble concentrating because he could see that Mistral’s eyes were streaming with storm clouds, and a slight movement of wind, as if his irises were a tiny television set forever to the Weather Channel.
“Would Dr. Kelly be able to concentrate on his job if Mistral put his sunglasses on?” Galen asked.
Dr. Kelly startled, and said, “I’m so sorry, I was staring, I … I just … I’m terribly sorry.”
Doyle said one word in his deep, thick voice: “Mistral.”
Mistral fished a pair of expensive sunglasses out of his pocket and slid them on. They were silver, metal frames with mirrored lenses that reflected everything like a silver mirror. They looked incredibly sexy on him, but for right now, more importantly they hid his distracting eyes.
“Better?” Mistral asked.
“I do apologize, Prince … Lord … Duke Mistral, I just … I’m new to the team and …”
Mistral had surprised me by having a title of duke in his own right. We’d been told to trot out our titles for humans, so we had, but it threw the Americans who weren’t used to titles.
“It’s okay, Kelly,” Dr. Heelis said, “it took all of us a few visits to adjust to the … view.”
“Not to be rude, but why do we need yet another doctor?” Doyle asked.
Dr. Heelis folded his arms on the table, his hands very still; I’d come to recognize it as part of his “it will be all right, I’m here to reassure you” pose. It usually meant something was wrong, or might be wrong. So far the pregnancy had been remarkably problem free for twins, but we’d had several meetings where Heelis had reassured us as things happened that could have been scary but turned out not to be. Some potential problems that he’d wanted us to know about had fixed themselves with a combination of modern medicine and luck, or maybe it had something to do with me being descended from five different fertility deities. It meant I’d been able to carry twins with much less difficulty than most women, but it was also probably the reason we were now looking at triplets. That was really a little more fertility than I’d wanted.
“When I informed the other members of our team that Princess Meredith was having triplets, they all agreed that Dr. Kelly would be a good addition to our pool of knowledge.”
“Why?” Sholto asked, and he seldom spoke in these meetings.
They all turned and looked at him, and then most looked away, except for Heelis, who managed to hold the weight of everyone’s gaze without flinching; there was more than one reason he was in charge.
“King Sholto.”
Sholto gave a nod to acknowledge his title, and as a sign for Heelis to proceed, which he did.
“First, I know that you were all hoping for a vaginal birth, and we were willing to try with twins, but triplets means it’s a cesarean birth.”
I must have looked unhappy, because Heelis looked at me. “I am sorry, I know you felt quite strongly about avoiding surgery, but with triplets we just can’t risk it, Princess; I am sorry.”
“I figured as much when we saw the third baby,” I said. I leaned forward in my chair trying to find a more comfortable position, but there really wasn’t one. Doyle changed hands so he could still hold my hand and also rub my back. Frost mirrored him and they rubbed my back as if they were hands from the same man instead of two different ones. They’d been best friends and battle buddies for hundreds of years; it meant they seemed aware of each other physically without having to look. It meant they could rub my aching back without bumping into each other’s hands, and when the doctors lifted the moratorium on sex, they’d be able to prove that they mirrored each other there, too, again. The last insult had been the “no sex” rule starting a few months ago.
I held on to their hands tighter; it helped distract me from how uncomfortable I was. I wasn’t sure why the idea of a cesarean birth bothered me, but it did.
“You do understand that too much could go wrong as the babies all crowd toward the birth canal,” Heelis said.
I nodded.
“Whatever will keep Merry and the babies from harm is what we want,” Frost said.
The doctor smiled at him. He liked Frost and Galen best for long eye contact, probably because their eyes were the closest to human-normal, gray and green.
“Of course, that’s what everyone here wants.” He did that reassuring smile that he must have practiced in the mirror, because it was a good one. It filled his own eyes with warmth, and just seemed to exude calm.
“But my question remains unanswered,” Doyle said. “Why is Dr. Kelly here?”
“He has the most experience with birth delay of multiples.”
“What is birth delay?” I asked.
“With a cesarean birth we might have the option of delivering the first two babies but leaving the third, smaller one in utero for a week or two. It’s not a given, but often smaller size means certain systems might not be as developed, and this would give more time for the baby to grow in the perfect self-sustaining environment of the womb.”
I just blinked at him for a few seconds. “Are you actually telling me that the triplets might have different birthdays by weeks?”
He nodded, still smiling.
“And if we can’t delay the third baby’s birth, what then?”
“Then we’ll deal with whatever issues may arise.”
“You mean we’ll deal with whatever is wrong with the babies, especially the smaller … triplet.”
“We don’t like the word
wrong
, Princess, you know that.”
I started to cry. I don’t know why, but for some reason the thought of having two babies delivered and leaving the third inside me to cook a little bit longer just seemed wrong, and … I wanted it over with; I just wanted our babies to be all right and to be on the outside of me. I was tired of being pregnant. I couldn’t see my feet. I couldn’t tie my own shoes. I couldn’t fit behind the wheel of a car to drive myself anywhere. I felt helpless and bloated like a tiny beached whale, and I just wanted it over. Even though nothing had actually gone wrong, the doctors had still warned us about every awful possibility, so that my life had become a list of nightmares that never happened while the babies grew inside me. I was beginning to think I’d had too many good doctors and too much high tech, because there were always more tests, even though in the end all the tests told us was what wasn’t wrong. Or maybe they’d missed something and it was all going to go wrong. They’d missed a whole third baby; how could I trust any of them anymore? All the months of confidence building and trust in my doctors was in ruins. I was having triplets. The nursery was done, but we had only two cribs, two of everything. We weren’t ready for triplets. I wasn’t ready.
I was screaming quietly into Doyle’s shoulder while everyone ran around trying to calm the crazy pregnant woman when my water broke.
HIS NAME WAS
Alastair, and he fit in my arms as if he’d been carved from a missing piece of my heart. He blinked up at me with huge liquid blue eyes set like shining sapphires in the pale, luminescent skin of his face. His hair was thick and black, and one tiny, slightly pointed ear was as black as his hair. The curled tip was almost lost in the midnight straightness of his hair. The other ear was like a carved seashell, shining mother-of-pearl set in the velvet of his hair.
All the exhaustion, all the pain, the panic of finding that Gwenwyfar was too far into the birth canal for a c-section, and her brother, Alastair, came so close behind her there was no time, and it was all lost on the wonder of tracing that tiny ear down through Alastair’s hair to find that the black of the one ear trailed down onto the side of his neck, like a spot on the side of a puppy’s ear.
Doyle was still in his surgical scrubs, pink against his shining black skin. He traced the side of Alastair’s neck and said, “Do you mind?”
It took me a moment to understand the question, and then I blinked up at him, like I was waking from a dream. “You mean the spot?”
I smiled up at him, and whatever he saw made him smile back. “He’s beautiful, Doyle; our son is beautiful.”
I got to see what very few had ever seen: The Darkness cried as he turned our tiny son gently in my arms so that he could show me a black star-shaped mark on his tiny back. It was a five-pointed star, almost perfect, taking up the middle of his back.
Alastair made a protesting sound, and I turned him back so I could see his face. The moment he had eye contact again, he quieted and just studied my face with those solemn blue eyes.
“Alastair,” I said, softly. “Star, our star.”
Doyle kissed me softly, and then kissed his son’s forehead. Alastair frowned at him.
“I think he’s already competing for Mommy’s attention,” Galen said from the other side of the bed. He had Gwenwyfar wrapped in a blanket, but she was already pushing at it with all the strength of her small legs and arms.
“She doesn’t like being swaddled,” Rhys said, and took her from Galen’s so-careful arms, and began to unwrap her from the careful swaddling the nurses had done.
“I’m afraid I’ll drop her,” Galen said.
“You’ll get better with practice,” Rhys said, and he grinned down at me and helped slide Gwenwyfar into my other arm, but with a baby in each arm I couldn’t touch them, look at them like works of art that you wanted to see every inch of, explore, and memorize.
They both stared up at me so seriously. Gwenwyfar was bigger just at a glance, and one pound made a big difference in newborns, but she was longer, too.
“So you were the little troublemaker who couldn’t wait to get out,” I said, softly.
She blinked deep blue eyes up at me, and there were already darker blue lines in her eyes; in a few days we’d see what her tricolored irises would look like. Right now they were baby blue, but if she took after Rhys maybe it would be three shades of blue? Her hair was a mass of white curls. I wanted to touch her hair, feel the texture of it again, but I was out of hands.
Dr. Heelis was still squatted between my legs, stitching me up. It had all happened too fast. I was numb, not from drugs, but just from abuse of the area. I felt the tugging of what he was doing, but the baby took all my attention—babies.
Gwenwyfar flailed a small fist as if trying to reach my hair, though I knew it was too early for that, but something caught the light on that small arm like gold, or quicksilver.
“What is that on her arm?” I asked.
Rhys lifted her arm out of the blankets and let her wrap one tiny fist around his fingertip, and as he moved her arm we saw a trace of almost metallic lace. It was forked lightning traced like the most delicate gold and silver wire across her arm, almost from shoulder to wrist.
“Mistral, you need to see your daughter,” Rhys said.
Mistral had huddled at the edge of the room through everything, terrified and overwhelmed the way some men are, and suffering in the presence of too much technology.
“There is no way to know who belongs to who,” he said.
“Come see,” Rhys said.
“Come, Mistral, master of storms, and see our daughter,” I said.
Doyle kissed me again and lifted Alastair up to make room for me to hold our daughter. She kept Rhys’s finger in a tight grip, so Mistral came to the other side of the bed. He looked scared, his big hands clasped together as if he were afraid to touch anything, but when he looked down and saw the lightning pattern on her skin he grinned, and then he laughed a loud, happy chortle of a sound that I’d never heard from him before.
He used one big finger to trace that birthmark of power, and where he touched Gwenwyfar tiny static bolts danced and jumped. She cried, whether because it hurt or scared her I didn’t know, but it made him jerk back and look uncertain.
“Hold your daughter, Mistral,” I said.
“She didn’t like me touching her.”
“She’ll need to start controlling it; might as well start now, and who better to teach her.” Rhys handed Gwenwyfar to Mistral while he was still protesting.
Without a baby to distract me, I was suddenly aware that I was getting more stitches than I’d ever had in my life, in a part of my body where I’d never wanted any stitches.
“How is Bryluen?” I asked, and I looked to the incubator where our smallest baby lay. There were too many doctors, too many nurses huddled around her. I had concentrated on the two babies I had; I’d known that there was a third baby only an hour before it all started, but somehow seeing her, so tiny, with her curly red hair, body almost as red as her hair, as my hair, I wanted to hold her, needed to touch her.
Dr. Lee came with her black hair peeking out of her scrubs, but her face was too serious. “She’s five pounds; that’s a good weight, but she seems weeks younger than the other two developmentally.”
“What does that mean?” Doyle asked.
“She’s going need to stay on oxygen for a few days and be fed fluids. She won’t be able to go home with the others.”
“Can I hold her?” I asked, but I was scared now.
“You can, but don’t be alarmed by the tubes and things, okay?” Dr. Lee smiled, and it was totally unconvincing. She was worried. I didn’t like that one of the best baby docs in the country was worried.
They wheeled her over, and five pounds might be a good weight, but comparing it to the six and seven that Alastair and Gwenwyfar had made her look tiny. Her arms were like little sticks too delicate to be real. The tubes did look alarming, and the IV in her little leg didn’t look like birth, it looked more like death. The aura that blazed around the other two babies was dim in this tiny spark of a baby.
Frost stood on the other side of the tiny incubator with tears shining unshed in his gray eyes. We’d had no third name, so he’d wanted Rose, after a long-lost love and a long-lost daughter.
Bryluen
was Cornish for “rose.” It had seemed perfect for our tiny red-haired daughter, but now I watched the fate of those earlier lost roses in Frost’s face and it tightened my chest, and made me afraid.