"Much," I said.
Sholto took the cup from me, and put it on a tray on the small table beside the chair. There was even a lamp beside the chair, curved up over the back of it. It was a modern lamp, which meant that this room at least was wired for electricity. As much as I had missed faerie in my exile on the West Coast, seeing the lamp, and knowing that I could turn it on with the flip of a switch, was very comforting. There were moments lately when magic seemed so plentiful that a little technology was not at all a bad thing.
"Do you feel well enough to join us at the bed?" the doctor asked.
I thought about it before answering, then nodded. "Yes, I do."
"Bring her, My King, for I need your help."
Sholto helped me stand. I had a moment of dizziness. His hand was very solid in mine, his other hand on my waist. The room stopped moving, and I wasn't certain if that was because of the wine, the magic in the wine, the night, or something about carrying two lives inside my body. I knew that if I was human, truly human, twins were supposed to be hard on the body. But it was very early in the pregnancy, wasn't it?
Sholto led me to the bed, and there was a ramp up to it so that it was on a dais, but with no steps. I wondered if the last king of the sluagh hadn't found steps to his liking. The pure-blooded nightflyers didn't have feet to use steps, so a ramp would work better. Of course, they could fly, so maybe the ramp had been meant for some even older king.
Someone snapped their fingers in my face. It startled me, made me see the doctor's face close to mine. "The wine should have taken care of this distraction. I am not certain she is well enough to help us, My King." The doctor, Henry, looked worried, and I could feel his concern. I realized that he could project his emotions. If he could choose what emotions to share with his patients, it must have made his bedside manner amazing.
"What do you need us to do, Henry?" Sholto asked.
"I have put a poultice on each wound, and it will draw some of the poison out, but all the denizens of faerie are magic. They need it to survive the way humans need air or water. I've long maintained that the reason cold iron is so deadly to faerie is that it negates magic. In effect, the iron in his body is destroying the magic that makes him live. We need to give him other magic to replace it."
"How do we do that?" Sholto asked.
"This is magic of a higher order than I have in my poor repertoire. It needs the magic of the sidhe, and I will never be that." There was a taste of regret to his words, but no bitterness. He had made peace with who and what he was long ago.
"I am not a healer," Sholto said.
The smell of roses and herbs returned. "It isn't healers who are needed, Sholto," I said. "Your doctor is a great healer."
Henry bowed to me. His twisted spine made it a shallow bow, but it was as graceful as any I'd been given. "You are most generous with your praise, Princess Meredith."
"I am honest." The perfume of roses was growing stronger. It was not the heavy, cloying scent of modern roses, but the light, sweet scent of the wild. The herbs added a warm, thick undertone to the scent, as if we were standing in the middle of an herb garden with a hedge of wild roses around it to guard it and keep it safe.
The wall beside the large bed stretched inward, like the skin of some great beast being pushed farther away. When the Seelie or Unseelie sithen moved, it was almost invisible. One moment this size, the next bigger or smaller, or just different. But this was the sluagh sithen, and apparently here we'd get to see the process.
The dark stone stretched like rubber into a darkness more complete than any night. It was cave darkness, but more than that, it was the darkness at the beginning of time before the word and the light had found it, before there was anything else but the dark. People forget that the darkness came first, not the light, not the word of Deity, but the dark. Perfect, complete, needing nothing, asking nothing, simply all there was was the dark.
The scent of roses and herbs was so real that I could taste it on my tongue, like drinking in a summer's day.
Dawn broke in the darkness. A sun that had nothing to do with the sky outside the sithen rose in the distant curve of sky, and as the soft light brightened, it revealed a garden. I would have said it was a knot garden, that time-consuming art of grooming herbs into clean, curved, Victorian lines, but my eyes couldn't quite make out the herbs' shape. It was almost as if the longer you tried to see the plants, and the stone walkway between them, the more your eye couldn't make sense of them. It was like a knot garden based on non-euclidean geometry. The kind of shapes that are impossible with physics the way it's supposed to work, but then there was a sun underground, and a garden that hadn't been there moments before. What was a little nonstandard geometry compared to that?
A hedge bordered the entire garden. Had it been there a second before? I could neither remember it; nor not remember it. It simply was. It was the circle of wild roses, like the one I'd seen in a vision once. That had been a mixed vision, part wonderment and part near-death experience. I fought not to remember the great boar that had nearly killed me before I'd spattered its blood on the snow, because with creation magic what you thought could become all too real.
I thought about healing Mistral. I thought about my babies. I thought about the man standing beside me. I reached for Sholto's hand. He actually startled, looking at me with eyes too wide, but he smiled when I smiled.
"Let us take him to the garden," I said.
Sholto nodded, and bent to pick up the still-unconscious Mistral. I looked back at the doctor. "Are you coming, Henry?"
He shook his head. "This magic is not for me. Take him, save him. I will explain where you are."
Sholto said, "I think the garden will remain here, Henry."
"We'll see, won't we?" Henry said with a smile, but there was regret in his eyes. I'd seen that look in other humans inside faerie. That look that says that no matter how long they stay, they know they can never truly be one of us. We can prolong their life, their youth, but they are still human in a land where no one else is.
I knew what it was to be mortal in a land of immortals. I knew what it was to know that I was aging and the others were not. I was part human, and it was moments like this that made me remember what that meant. Even with the most powerful magic in all of faerie coming to my hand, I still knew regret and mortality.