A Shiver of Light Read Online Free Page A

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.