Chapter 17

Silence ensued. Rhiannon hadn't been aware of any angels watching over her at any point in her life and the sight of the huge brilliant feathers had been as much a shock to her as anyone else in the hall. They adjourned the meeting for lunch and after they had eaten Rhiannon went to rest. She didn't sleep per se, but she lay still for an hour and forced her mind to shut down.

At first when she had lay down in the dim quiet room the reality of her life tried to swallow her whole. She didn't want to be a monarch. She wasn't cut out for it. The idea of being at the centre of something so big and having no choice in it, no say, no option but to push through even if she lost who she was, even if it would destroy what made her the person she was . . . ? “No!” she cried out loud, curled protectively around her middle, and instead thought of Rowan, and the fact that he would always love who she had been, and she thought of their own private act of rebellion, for that, she realized, is what it had been. It had been their choice. Theirs. No one else's. Theirs . . . and only theirs. At the end of the day she still had this. At the end of the day there would still be love. So she focused on that until the only thing she was aware of was her breath and her heartbeat and she lay there, not moving, not thinking, and after a time there was a soft knock at the door. “Come in,” she called sitting up slowly and swinging her feet over the edge of the bed. It was her grandmother, Morgana.

Morgana smiled. “Are you feeling better?”

Rhiannon returned the smile halfheartedly, “I can pretend that I am.” She didn't feel like lying just at that moment.

“Do you feel up to a walk in the woods?”

Rhiannon nodded. “Yes, that might help.” She stood and walked to the wardrobe to see if there was something more functional to wear than a silk dress. She pulled out a purple wool skirt, an undyed linen blouse, and a short, light, magenta, felted wool coat with a peplum that was nipped in at the waist and had a very flattering fit. She hung the yellow dress, feeling relief that at least she didn't have to get used to servants helping her dress, and quickly pulled on the more practical clothing along with a pair of dainty, soft, brown leather shoes. She did up the single button on the front of the coat so that it showed off her tiny waist. She knew what the aunts would say about that, but a quick glance in the mirror had her feeling more like herself, free of the circlet, in clothes that were okay to get dirty. She walked out into the sitting room. Nimue was there as well and together the three of them struck out through a rear door and into the forest.

“I decided that it was high time that someone show you how to use your magic properly. Especially now that you're pregnant,” Morgana paused, nimbly navigating the stepping stones across a small stream. “I know that there are very pressing matters afoot, but none of that does anyone any good if you're put in a position of having to use your magic and you hurt yourself again.” Morgana brought them to a quiet mossy spot next to the brook and had them sit. “Now I know that we always speak of the magic as if it's ours and we do, each of us, have our own spark of it, even the humans, but we do not really posses the magic we use, in fact you cannot posses it. The only thing we posses is ability. Some of us more, some of us less. You have more,” she looked at Rhiannon, “and you have a good instinct for it as well, but you need to learn how to let it flow.” Morgana paused, “Now close your eyes and think of reaching deep.”

Rhiannon didn't have to reach far. She could already feel the forest all around her, like a green aurora, floating and cascading. “I can feel it,” she said out loud.

“Can you feel the stream?” Morgana asked.

Rhiannon searched and felt it, cool and soothing like a caress. “Yes,” she answered.

“Now look inside yourself for the life force of your child. It won't be big but it will be bright.”

Rhiannon didn't have to look for it. She didn't need to be told what to look for. She could feel it all the time. She nodded.

“Now look for your own life force,” Morgana told her.

Surprisingly, it was much harder for her to isolate her own life force. It took a few minutes, but eventually she realized that the opalescent nimbus that was playing and dancing amongst everything else, was her. She drew it all in until it was a crystalline shimmer within herself then said, “Okay.”

Morgana took her hand and suddenly there was a grass coloured, effervescent sparkle there. Nimue took her other hand and there was another sparkle, this one blue and gold, autumn leaves on a lake. “Now you have to hold on to your own life force, and that of your child, or they will flow out of you. Nimue and I will help you hold on so that you will know what that feels like. Now relax and let the energy of the forest flow through you. Don't let it build up or try to hold onto it, that will hurt you. You can't contain it you can only allow it.”

Rhiannon tried to do as she was told, understanding now, simply by feel, what had gone wrong when she had crossed between the worlds and healed Rowan, and why she had passed out. She held on tightly to her life force and to the little light deep inside her and let the beautiful green light of the forest flow through her.

“You're holding on tightly enough. Nimue and I are going to let go.”

And suddenly she was doing it on her own and it had the same feeling to it as when she was five and her dad let go of her bicycle seat. She could feel all of the life and the magic of the forest flowing through her. This was what she had been unknowingly yearning for five years ago when she had started planting flowers in her yard. She let the flow of energy slow then stop and opened her eyes. It was October but all around them wood violets had bloomed and released their scent. Rhiannon smiled, amazed, feeling as if a missing part of her had returned, and the broken part of her had healed.

“That's better, isn't it?” Nimue smiled.

“Much better,” Rhiannon agreed.

“Let us walk a little.” Morgana said, leading them off deeper into the woods and marvelling at the carpet of violets underfoot. They strolled quietly for a while. Rhiannon watched Morgana and Nimue, their small stature and cobalt eyes making her feel very much related to them. It didn't take long for questions to begin surfacing in her mind. Questions about the things that had been happening to her that she didn't understand because she had been raised by humans. Like her pregnancy. She remembered when she was almost fifteen, she had been listening to the girls at school complain for a few years before it had happened to her, and she had gotten her period. Her mother had talked to her quite a bit about it. It made sense to Rhiannon now, why Fionnuala would have had such an intimate relationship with her cycle. She had come from a world with no birth control. If you wanted to avoid a pregnancy, you had to know your body well. When you were fertile. When you weren't. No rolling on a condom or popping a pill. She remembered her mother telling her, “When you're wet and restless and you think about boys all the time, that is when you can get pregnant. But after when the texture of the wetness changes you are no longer fertile.” Fionnuala had used the proper biological names for the phases of a cycle. Looked everything up and explained it all in a detail far greater than what Rhiannon had gotten even from sex-ed in school. But Fionnuala had also said with the utmost seriousness, “Learn your body and your cycle, but save this way of doing things for when you are with someone you love and trust. A husband, or someone you plan on staying with for the rest of your life. The idea of you getting sick with something terrifies me. I know that you are not the type of girl to have indiscriminate sex but still, in the beginning, until you are both tested always use a condom. Do you understand Kristabell? Save the way I taught you for someone who you love enough to have a child with.”

She had nodded at her mother with big eyes, but had said, “Mum no one is going to love me that much, boys don't like me. I'm strange.” Rhiannon would never forget the look her mother had given her at that moment. It was like a photograph in her mind. Fionnuala had been exquisitely pretty. Strawberry blond curls that she had piled haphazardly on top of her head, ultra fair skin with just enough freckles to be adorable, and pale green eyes surrounded by her pale strawberry blond eyelashes. She was built, and carried herself, like a ballet dancer. Her neck and shoulders were delicate, elegant and so refined. Everybody liked her mother. She had made a killing in tips as a bartender. But that afternoon sitting with Kristabell on her bed in the big pile of pillows together, her mother had looked . . . so sad. She had almost cried. “Oh sweetheart. Oh my love. Don't say that. It's not true. It's just that when someone loves you it will be genuine, not a passing fancy. They will never love you for the wrong reasons.”

Rhiannon looked back and saw what had been a very normal teenaged moment, but the memory had caught her unaware and the sudden desire to have Fionnuala by her brought on a torrent of tears. Morgana and Nimue took her hands quietly and the three of them walked between the towering trees in the cool autumn air until the tears stopped and Rhiannon finally said. “I have an instinct for what I am without an understanding. Now that I know what I am, some things are obvious, but others . . .? I want to make sure that I'm not making assumptions. I don't want to make mistakes, but things keep happening to me and I can't quite make sense of them because I wasn't raised to it.” She hesitated a moment, “Like getting pregnant the other night. If I were a normal human that wouldn't have happened. My cycle is like clockwork, like the moon, dependable. I was expecting my period in a few days. I shouldn't have been able to get pregnant that night but I know that I willed it to happen. In hindsight I know exactly how I opened myself to the possibilities and made myself fertile, because deep down inside I wanted it to happen, but I had no idea that I could do that, or that I was doing it until it had happened and the next thing I know I'm having this incredible dream, and that isn't something I'd expected either, and I'm guessing that it's because I'm Fay, because my mother told me all kinds of interesting things about getting pregnant, and not getting pregnant, but she didn't mention anything about beautiful dreams or getting pregnant any old time just because on some not quite unconscious level I'm longing to have life inside me. I'm not crazy or making assumptions right? It's a Fairy thing isn't it?” she was near tears again.

Morgana smiled, not unkindly. “It is, 'A fairy thing.' As you put it. It is related to our ability to interact with the natural world instead of simply being affected by it. We are not governed as closely by its laws. We are a part of them. We can bend the rules. Some of us, like you, can break them.”

“So you're saying that it's not black and white or night and day. There is no rule that says all Fairy women can do this.”

“There is no rule. The truth is that rules and laws make most of us itch just a little, but as you apparently pointed out yesterday, we do have a certain amount of human blood flowing through our veins.”

“Was that only yesterday?” Rhiannon murmured to herself.

“Time is a strange thing is it not?” Morgana didn't expect an answer.

Rhiannon nodded absently.

“The truth is, I suspect, that even the most Human of women have some connection and interaction with the natural world but they are not, however, raised exploring it in the same way. Unpredictability, chaos, and anarchy have always been qualities inherent in the Fay, along with our predilection for the natural world, and as such I'm afraid that you will have to find your place in it, on your own. There is only so much that I can teach you. I can't tell you what you can and cannot do. I have a suspicion that you have been using your magic in small ways for some time, and that you are realizing this. Now that you know how to hold on and let only the magic flow, practice, carefully. I'm sure you've figured out that if you don't hold on tightly, you will risk your life or your child. It was prudent of you to wait until you were here, and safe, to conceive. I will admit that I am curious as to what made you wait?”

“Just an instinctive fear that somehow, because I didn't understand what was happening to me, that getting pregnant could be bad.”

Morgana looked at her very seriously, “It's a good thing that you listened to that instinct. If you had been pregnant when you healed Rowan in the forest you would have died. Enough of your energy would have been tied up that there wouldn't have been any left to have sustained you until Lugh arrived.”

Rhiannon nodded, feeling pulled down by the gravity of what Morgana had just told her as much as she had been buoyed up by the feeling of coming into her own only minutes earlier.

They continued walking. Nimue would look at her periodically and smile tentatively as they passed by trees like skyscrapers and ferns almost as tall as they were. Green and gold. The smell of leaves dying and decaying. An ending. Rhiannon watched Nimue whose face was so similar to her own. Nimue's face was perhaps slightly more heart shaped with less definition to her cheekbones. Her lips too were more bee stung and her eyes rounder, more soulful, less mischievously solemn than Rhiannon's, but their noses, chins and foreheads were almost identical, and just like Morgana's. Her sister. Different mothers or not, they were still connected. As if sensing Rhiannon's train of thought, or perhaps more than sensing it, Nimue took her hand and for the sake of saying something Rhiannon asked, “Why is this called a stronghold?”

“Here I'll show you,” Nimue said leading them a short way further into the trees. Then she held up her hands. “Can you feel this?”

Rhiannon held up her hands and felt a strange, sticky electric feeling in the air. Nimue took her hand and pulled her through. When they turned around Morgana had disappeared along with all traces of the Fairy settlement. They stepped back through and Morgana reappeared. “Humans and Elves can't pass through it. They are simply deflected. They never even notice it happening to them they simply wander off. When we found you the other night you were just over there.” Nimue pointed to a spot a few metres away. “Rowan was too sick to get you any further but he knows about the barrier and is able to pass through.”

“How do we keep it running?”

“In shifts. Three people at a time. We always have it up.”

They stood then, looking around the forest. It was pristine. Rhiannon reminded herself again of what would be on the other side, in the other world—houses, streets, cars—then looked again at the giant pillar-like trees and the mossy ground. There were huckleberry bushes with bright yellow leaves that glowed in the places where the sun actually reached the forest floor. She looked up at the sun's rays slanting in through the trees and shut her eyes, held on to what was important, and let the magic flow for a moment then gently brought it to a stop. She opened her eyes still looking up and simply drank in the beauty of the forest, when something caught her eye. A flashing fluttering bit of colour drifting down to them. Rhiannon held out her hand and a small, downy, soft, crimson and gold feather came to rest there. The three women looked up. Rhiannon couldn't see anything but she could sense that someone was up there high in the trees, and she didn't think that it was all in her head. “Hello?” she called out. “I know you're up there.” Then, “Are you molting?”

A stifled snort of laughter came from high above. Morgana raised her eyebrows and Nimue clapped her hand over her mouth.

“Why don't you just come down?” Rhiannon called up to the trees.

There was a rustling high in the branches then with great speed a gold and crimson streak flew towards them. Rhiannon didn't have time to be frightened. He was crashing to earth in front of them then straightening up before she'd even had time to blink. He wasn't entirely what she'd expected. The angel was nearly seven feet tall with enormous crimson and gold wings. He had golden hair and eyes and he was stunningly beautiful with perfect skin and a dazzling smile. He carried a long sword, beautifully worked and deadly. All of this she had expected, but she was taken aback by the blue jeans, the tailored black leather vest that left his muscular arms bare, and the black and white Puma trainers.