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“Oh, Titania, no! Practically every female fae in the land has been throwing herself at Lord Rogue for centuries. You should just see…oh. I played the game wrong.”
“No!” I sat up and punched the pillow in excitement, accidentally ramping it up to a sizzling citron that seared my eyes. I tapped it a couple more times to damp it down to a more soothing level, glad that I’d built this adjustable function into the magic fiber-optic light-up pillows. “You played it correctly. This guy demonstrably does not lack for potential wombs. Why mine?”
“Um…true love?”
I felt myself sag but persevered. “Let’s entertain that variable. Assuming he and I share a true love—completely undefined at this point—why is that necessary for him to have an heir?”
“I don’t know. Here, your hair will dry all snarled. Let me comb it.” Starling staggered up and grabbed a comb, hair oils and another pitcher of wine, which she used to refill my glass.
To hell with it. I could really use a good drunk. “Okay, so we table that. Rogue and I share some kind of emotional/metaphysical connection that makes our hypothetical baby full of awesome. Ow.”
“Sorry—but if you’d let me wash it properly, it wouldn’t have tangled.”
“Let’s stick to the program here.”
“Yes. Game of theories.”
I snorted my wine uncomfortably into my nose at her translation. “So far we’ve set aside the theories that Rogue can’t get laid without blackmail and that only a true-love baby will do. What other reasons are there?”
“Well, you’re human.”
“Yes. And, more specifically, a human not from here. Like your father.”
Her hands slowed in my hair, combing thoughtfully. “Like Daddy, yes.”
I turned to look at her. “Are you a firstborn child?”
She faltered then, her wide brown eyes full of shadows. “No.” She whispered it. “I had a brother. But he…”
“What?” I clasped her hands, knotted together over the comb. “What happened to him?”
She pressed her lips together and leaned forward so our foreheads nearly touched. “Everybody always talks as if he died—except Mother, who won’t talk about him at all. Ever. And sometimes, I think—I mean, I get this feeling that…”
“Yes?”
“That it’s my brother Daddy’s really looking for. His eternal quest.” She laughed it out with bitterness. “Not to pass back through the Veil, but to find the son I’m not.”
“It might not help, but if what I’m thinking is correct, it doesn’t matter that he’s a son. What was salient was that he was first. If you had been first, you might have been the one to disappear.”
“But why?” She looked up, with tears running down her face. “Where did he go?”
“I don’t know.” And I didn’t know how much I should say. “There are tales, back in my world, that the fairies would come and take human children, especially the firstborn, and swap them with fairy babies—changelings, the stories called them.”
“What happened to the fairy babies?”
I paused, having to think. What happened to the changelings was usually not the point of the story. Just the loss of the human child. Fragments came to me of the fate of changelings, boiled alive or exposed to wolves. None of it pretty. Neither were the changelings, though, and in the Faerie where I found myself, everything was pretty. At least on the surface. “I’m not sure. I don’t think they survived in my world.”
“That’s so sad.”
It was sad, when you thought of it that way.
“Sometimes, though, they disappeared too. Or maybe they just eventually grew up and learned to masquerade as regular humans. Blend in.”
Starling nodded, solemn. “I think a lot of us do that. Figure out how not to be quite so weird to everyone else as we get older.”
She had a point. Changelings, at some level, all of us.
“At any rate, my working theory is that these firstborn children—” hell, maybe they were all half-human/half-fae; entirely possible that this element would be left out of the tales, given that no one would want to ’fess up to cavorting with fae on the sly, “—hold some kind of intrinsic value.”
