A Shiver of Light by Laurell K. Hamilton Page A

see the potential heirs to Unseelie thrones and her beloved brother’s grandchildren. I understand that, and if she weren’t a sexual sadist and serial killer we’d allow it, but what in the name of all that is holy makes Taranis think he has the right to see our children?”
    Rhys came nearer the bed. “He’s still claiming that one or all of them are his, Merry.”
    I shook my head. “I was pregnant when he raped me. They are not his.”
    “But you were only weeks pregnant, not showing at all. He’s maintaining that you were with child only after he … was with you,” Rhys said, but I didn’t like the long hesitation before he finished his sentence.
    “What is he really saying, Rhys?”
    “He’s made it a ‘he said, she said’ sort of thing.”
    “We knew he’d deny the rape, but we have forensic evidence that he did it. The rape kit came back …” I couldn’t even say it. Taranis, the King of Light and Illusion, ruler of the Seelie Court, the golden court of faerie, was my uncle. Technically he was my great-uncle, brother of my grandfather, but since the sidhe do not age, he didn’t look like a grandfather.
    “He’s saying that it was consensual, but we all knew he would.”
    “He’s probably come to believe his own lie,” I said.
    “Taranis will not believe that you refused him in favor of the monsters of the Unseelie Court,” Sholto said.
    “He’s the monster,” I said.
    Sholto smiled, and bent and laid a gentle kiss on my forehead. “That you mean that, when speaking to me, means a great deal to me, our Merry.”
    I looked at his face as he stood back upright. “He raped me while I was unconscious, Sholto, and he’s my uncle. That was monstrous.”
    “I’m sorry, Merry, but one of the reasons that Taranis is making a case is that you don’t remember. He’s saying that you consented and then passed out, but he didn’t realize you were unconscious until it was too late,” Rhys said.
    “Too late to stop? Too late to not have sex with his own niece? Too late for what, Rhys?” I was almost yelling.
    Gwenwyfar stopped nursing and started to fuss, as if she hadn’t liked me yelling. I spoke in a calmer voice, but I couldn’t control how I felt. “Rhys, you said ‘make a case’; is he actually trying to get legal visitation with the babies?”
    “He was, but our lawyers countered, and now Taranis is pushing for genetic testing of the babies. He’s so sure that one or all of them will be his, I think he believes his own delusion now.”
    “He’s always believed his own magic more than he should,” Sholto said.
    “Once his illusions could become real,” Rhys said.
    “That was a very long time ago.”
    “If the genetic tests come back negative for him, then I think his days as King of the Seelie Court are over,” Rhys said.
    “If we can prove that he knew he was infertile a hundred years ago but didn’t step down from the throne, they may execute him,” Galen said, and there was a hardness in his voice that I’d never heard before.
    I looked past the other men to my green knight. “You want them to kill him, don’t you?”
    “Don’t you?” he asked, and his green eyes held a bleak rage that was so not like him, but truth was truth.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Good,” Galen said, and that one word wasn’t good at all. The tone was very bad, very sure of its anger.
    “If the ruler of court is infertile, then it condemns the entire court to be childless; no true king would stay on the throne under those circumstances,” Rhys said.
    “Or queen,” Galen said.
    We all looked at him.
    “That’s why she agreed to step down if Merry had a child, because she’d tried all the modern fertility treatments and was still childless.”
    “She had a son,” I said, softly. Holding my own child in my arms made it seem like I should add out loud that I’d killed that only son. He’d been trying to kill me and the men I loved, but I’d still killed him, and his death seemed to