Islanders didn't glow. Neither did Fey, to Matthias's knowledge. But he knew less about Fey than he wanted to. He always believed he should understand his enemy.
"Holy Sir?"
Matthias whirled, his heart already in his throat.
An Aud stood at the door, blankets piled high. "Should I remake the bed, Holy Sir?"
"Please," Matthias said, although he doubted he would be getting any more sleep this night. "And when you're through, I would appreciate it if you could start a fire as well."
"As you wish, Holy Sir." The Aud went into the bedroom. Another Aud knocked on the door.
"You want someone on the balcony, Holy Sir?"
Matthias nodded. He half felt like checking the Auds for weapons, but he knew better. No one would dare attack him with his own guards. Still, he would play it as safe as he could. He would remain on guard until he figured out the best way to protect himself.
The Aud left his bedroom and two more stationed themselves in the hallway. The Aud on the balcony closed the doors behind himself and sat in one of the chairs in the shadows. Matthias pulled the tapestries, and closed the doors to the hallways. He couldn't bear to let the Auds watch him pace in fear.
And he was frightened. Whoever the green man was, he had accomplished his mission.
He had frightened Matthias very badly.
But Matthias wouldn't stay frightened for long.
THIRTY-FOUR
The tapestries were pulled back, letting the early morning sunlight into the nursery. Arianna cooed in her crib. The wet nurse had just left, and Sebastian's nurse had just finished feeding the lump. The fire had gone out in the night, but the coals were still warm.
Another morning in the palace.
Even though Solanda was in her cat form, she ignored the warmth. Instead she had gone to the window and let the cool breeze ruffle her fur. Three stories below her, the garden glistened in the early morning dew. She licked her whiskers, remembering how, years before, the cooks used to leave out milk for the cats.
Those days were gone now. Long gone. She hadn't even left the nursery since Arianna was born.
She didn't dare.
And still no one trusted her. The nurse never left Solanda alone with the baby. So Solanda had to spend her time in the nursery with the lump of clay Nicholas insisted on calling a son. She had tried to tell him, but he hadn't listened. He insisted on believing that Jewel would have known if the lump was not her son. Jewel hadn't known. Fey couldn't see everything.
If he wanted to remain loyal to his dead wife, fine. Let Rugar keep Nicholas's real son. It didn't matter to Solanda. All that mattered to her was keeping Arianna alive. She would stay as far from the Islander King as she could. She didn't need to get involved in his life. If he couldn't see that what he called a child was nothing more than an animated hunk of stone, then he probably couldn't see other things.
Solanda didn't need to be mixed up in that. She would take care of Arianna and nothing more.
She glanced over her shoulder at the baby. From her perch on the sill, she could see into the crib. Arianna's pudgy baby hands were grasping at air, her laughter making Solanda purr. These quiet moments were rare, and they made Solanda uneasy.
Arianna was proving to be a difficult child, more difficult than Solanda had imagined. Solanda hadn't left her side since she was born. Thankfully, the nurse was afraid of Solanda's Shifting, so any order Solanda gave her the nurse would fulfill.
She fulfilled the orders faster when Solanda gave them as a cat.
But the nurse also threw Solanda out of the baby's crib when she was in cat form. Old superstitions died hard. The nurse believed that cats would suffocate babies. Maybe real cats would. But this child was more Solanda's than anyone else's. She wouldn't harm a spot on Arianna's delicate body.
So far, Arianna had Shifted twice since her Birth Shift.
Neither time had she done so in response to stress, which frightened Solanda.
No. It seemed Arianna was playing.
The first Shift had been major. One moment the little girl was staring at the ceiling with her tiny eyes open. The next she was a puddle of water in the crib. Shifters did not survive as water outside of the womb. Solanda had had to reform the baby herself, using Shifting techniques she hadn't thought of since she was a little girl.
The nurse had not seen that one.
But she had seen the second.
Arianna had grown a tail, just like Solanda's. It was even calico, like Solanda's tail, with the same markings on the end. Solanda had unswaddled her, and found that tail and fur had ended at the baby's bottom. Arianna had added it so that her tiny fingers had something to hold.
Partial shifts weren't supposed to be possible, but Arianna was clearly testing the limits of the possible.
Arianna had her own realm of possible.
And that scared Solanda. All Fey followed a predictable pattern of maturation. And, as Solanda's mother used to say, such a thing was a blessing. Imagine a Doppelgänger infant, grabbing anything that came its way, slaughtering it, and then taking its form. Or a Foot Soldier stripping the skin off anything it touched. Or even a Domestic creating a blanket out of thin air, and then suffocating in it. The chaos would have been enormous. The Fey would never have survived over the generations.
Only the great magicks leaked into childhood. An occasional Visionary had a single important Vision before puberty. A Shaman sometimes healed a parent. Enchanters had binding powers from the womb.
And Shifters chose their form before the age of three.
Or died.
But the Shifting rarely happened when a newborn was playing. Shifting happened under stress or in moments of great fear. A child didn't learn to control Shifting until after it learned to speak and walk.
Solanda was already tired. She didn't know how she would feel when Arianna reached her terrible twos.
So far the baby had attempted to Shift each day of her life. She had only been successful twice, if Solanda didn't count the birth shifts.
Those scared her the most. One Shift at birth was all she had ever heard of. And then one Shift back. Never four Shifts. Not in all the Fey history. Never four.
The breeze had a bit of humidity and smelled faintly of the river. Solanda's stomach growled. What she wouldn't give for fresh fish, held between two soaking paws, her muzzle buried in its flesh, eating it scales and all.
She was beginning to fear such luxuries were far in her future. This morning, after the nurse had awakened her, she daydreamed about a rat getting loose in the nursery. Even tough, filthy rat would provide some sport, some fresh meat.
But she would have none of that now.
And she didn't dare leave Arianna alone.
Not even to find out how to care for her.
No Fey would come here to help her either. They were so afraid of the Islanders that the Shaman would have let Jewel's daughter, the Black King's Great-Granddaughter, survive on her own rather than place a guardian with her.
Perhaps the Shaman thought Nicholas up to the task.
But he panicked each time he heard of one of Arianna's Shifts. Solanda couldn't imagine how he ever would have cared for one.
More likely, the Shaman had Seen that Solanda would care for Arianna. That probably was part of the Shaman's plan.
"There," the nurse said in that sickly sweet Islander baby talk. "Tis a good boy ye are, Sebastian."
Tis a good boy ye are, Sebastian, Solanda mouthed to the air. How could it be anything but good? The lump made no conscious choices. And here the nurse was praising it for eating its breakfast. Of course it ate its breakfast. It tried to keep up appearances. That was part of its mandate. The Wisps had given it that much. But they hadn't given it the ability to live this long.
Someone else had been giving it that.
Both Rugar and the Shaman believed that Jewel's love had kept the thing alive. But the more Solanda stared at it, the more she wondered. Jewel was dead. Nicholas seemed a bi
t cool toward it, although he did speak to it. The nurse cradled it like her own, but she had no blood ties to the real child, so her affection shouldn't matter.
Someday Solanda would discover how the lump kept moving. But not this day.
Solanda reached out her front paws and stretched, first pressing her belly toward the ground, then arching her back. The breeze was still a bit chilly to sit in long.
She leapt from the sill to the table, then picked her way across the toys various nobles had brought for the baby until she reached the edge of the crib.
"Now, none a that!" the nurse cried. She left the lump beside the dying fire and hurried toward the crib. "I will na ha yer filthy fur in with me girl."
"First of all," Solanda said, refusing to Shift into her Fey form, "I am not filthy. I bathe constantly. Secondly, this child is not your girl. She is mine, and I would do nothing to harm her."
Arianna grasped the nurse's finger. "Twas not sayin that, mum," the nurse said, refusing to look at Solanda. "Tis not right, though, fer a babe ta breathe fur."
"You don't know what's right and what isn't right for a child like her," Solanda said.
The nurse wrapped her own fingers around Arianna's tiny hand. "Tis true, mum, I dinna know. But I figure she's like most babes, weak n helpless n needin love."
Solanda tilted her head. The phrase intrigued her. Weak and helpless and needing love. No one ever spoke of Fey children that way.
"N with her ma gone, she needs even more. Her da will na be able ta see her much as she needs. Someone's gotta care for her." The nurse stroked Arianna's dark head with one hand.
"I care for her," Solanda said. "I'm going to train her how to be a proper child. I will be working with you. You'll be tending her physical needs."
"Beg pardon, mum, but at her age them needs is most important."
The woman was insufferable. And she had learned a way of speaking to a cat. She could talk just fine if she didn't look at Solanda.
"Then serve those needs," Solanda said. "But when she needs to know how to survive in the world, she'll come to me."
"Ah, tis only right, mum. Ye got special ways, ye do. And so does she, poor thing."
"Poor?" Solanda straightened, resting most of her weight on her front paws. Her tail was twitching.
"Oh, mum. I dinna mean no harm. Tis sorry I am. Tis just they been squabblin bout her from the moment she come into the world, and her being loose dinna help, I think."
"Loose?" Solanda asked. She was half intrigued with the way this woman's mind worked, and half appalled.
"Well, what do ye call it, mum?"
"She Shifts."
"Aye, but na like ye. Ye become something. She just changes."
The description was accurate, Solanda supposed, if a person only understood Shifting from the outside. What Arianna was doing was what most children tried after they had chosen their shapes. They tried to Shift to make pieces of the Shape, getting that perfect and then attempting another piece. When they had all the pieces right, they then tried to Shift into the whole.
"Your people won't like this about her, will they?" Solanda asked. Her greatest fear was that Arianna would grow up in Islander culture only to have it repudiate her. Sometimes Solanda was tempted to take her to Shadowlands.
Until she remembered Rugar was there.
The Shaman's warning stuck in her mind. She already regretted bringing Coulter to him. Rugar didn't need more power. The way he acted around Jewel's death was reprehensible.
He had always been reprehensible.
She had to remember that.
The lump cried out. The nurse turned, and the lump reached up with its hands. It had done that a lot since Jewel's death. If Solanda hadn't known it was a lump, she would have thought it needed reassurance.
The nurse untangled her hands from Arianna's and went to the lump, picking it up with a grunt. It buried its face in her shoulder and sighed, then sobbed once, and sighed again. The nurse patted its back and cooed at it as if it were a real boy.
Solanda sighed. The mysteries of the nursery. She would lose her mind if she didn't find a way to leave here from time to time. The entire spring would go by without the chance to eat a blade of fresh grass or to dig in the newly turned dirt.
She leapt off the table and walked to her robe, tail high. Then she Shifted, feeling the fur absorb into her body, her limbs stretch, her tail retract. Her Fey form made the room seem even smaller, more confining. And the urges spring gave her in this form were even more uncomfortable. She would have to talk politics with Nicholas soon and discover how he meant to avenge Jewel's death. The sooner the threats to Arianna were gone, the sooner Solanda could go outside.
Whenever she went from cat to Fey she became instantly cold. She grabbed the robe and slipped it on, thankful for its silken warmth. Maybe in a few days, she would get the nurse to bring her Islander clothes. Maybe she would start looking like they did.
Maybe.
The robe would do for now. Nicholas had insisted on it, saying that he couldn't leave a naked woman in the room with his two children.
For a while she had thought it more than that, but then she realized that he didn't see her. He didn't really see anyone except Arianna, and he probably saw her because she was the last tangible part of Jewel he had.
Amazing how he never thought of the lump as a part of Jewel.
Behind her the baby gurgled, then laughed. She didn't think a baby could laugh so young, but Arianna did. She laughed and cooed and appeared to look a person straight in the eye.
The baby laughed again. Solanda tugged on the sleeves of her robe to straighten them, then tied the sash around her waist. Her bare feet were chilled. Maybe after the chamberlain brought up her breakfast, she would insist on a new fire. Then when everyone was gone except the nurse she would stretch out before it and nap.
The baby's giggle stopped mid-sound. Solanda whirled. Arianna was half transformed. Her neck and chest were feline, but her head remained the same.
She was choking.
The kitten-sized air passages couldn't handle the human head. This was Solanda's fault. Already Arianna was watching and mimicking.
She hurried to the crib. The nurse didn't seem to notice. Arianna was thrashing and kicking, her tiny hands pulling at her throat. She wasn't changing back.
"Put that lump down and get over here!" Solanda snapped at the nurse.
"Tis sad he is. The boy knows his ma is gone."
"I don't care. His sister will be dead if you don't help me."
"Lor. Not again."
Solanda grabbed the baby's hands. Her eyes were wide and frightened, her blue pupils almost black. The nurse set the lump down — too slowly for Solanda's taste — and stepped tentatively to Solanda's side.
"I dinna know yer magic," the nurse said.
"I don't care," Solanda said. "you have to hold her still. Completely still. Do you understand?"
"Aye, mum."
The nurse put her hands into the crib, reaching for Arianna's transformed shoulders.
"And don't touch her fur."
"Sorry, mum." The nurse gripped Arianna's waist with one hand, and held the baby's hands with the other. Arianna's feet still kicked. Her face was turning blue.
Solanda stroked Arianna's chin, feeling the ridge that went from fur to skin, and she pushed the skin downward. It did no good. In her panic, Arianna fought.
"Work with me, babe," Solanda whispered in Fey. "Work with me."
But Arianna turned her head from side to side, continuing to thrash.
"I said hold her!" Solanda said in Islander.
"I dinna have enough hands, mum," the nurse said.
Incompetent help. "Then hold her head and body still. Keep her hands off me."
"Aye, mum."
Solanda bit her lower lip. The previous times she had guided Arianna to change on her own. This time that wasn't working. She would have to instigate the Shift herself.
She only hoped she could do
it.
Arianna's tiny tongue protruded from her lips. Solanda grabbed Arianna's shoulders and willed herself to Shift slowly, hands first. Her nails became claws, her hands paws, and fur grew on her skin. Solanda's Shift stirred something inside Arianna and she stopped struggling.
Then Solanda Shifted her hands back to normal.
Arianna's neck and shoulders Shifted with her.
The baby took a deep shuddery breath, then another, and another. The nurse and Solanda leaned against each other for a moment before they realized that they had touched.
Fey 02 - Changeling Page 37
