AllFreeNovel
Share Us
5.Plan strategy for Titania’s surely imminent attack.
6.Check in on Walter for Starling (retrieve scepter from Athena)
7.Explore mass-mind web and perfect skills/add to timeline
8.Add notes to grimoire on recent events.
9.Plan wedding.
Really I needed to write this down, as the priorities were all out of order. It almost made me miss the days whenStay alivetopped the list, for the way it put everything else into perspective. Not that it shouldn’t still be on there. Maybe I’d just gotten back to the point where that was implied and not something to keep at the forefront of my mind. It really irked me to have planning a stupid wedding on the list at all. Maybe I’d take it off and put it on Starling’s list.
And none of this would get addressed if I lolled in bed all day.
I wandered naked down to the bathing room and used the magic chamber pot. No need for indoor plumbing with those handy things, which vanished anything put inside to parts unknown. My hair still had pins in it and stuck out in wild curls, so I brushed it out, leaving Starling’s hair-torture implements in a neat pile. Rogue must have told her to let me sleep or she would have turned up by now. Or she was too far from this room to have her alarm-sense of when I was up and about. Likely both.
Either way, I liked having the quiet and the opportunity to do for myself. I borrowed back a few of the pins, coiled up my hair and took a quick bath, to get the sex-smell off. Toweling dry, I glimpsed myself naked in the full-length mirrors for the first time in what seemed like ages. Did my belly look rounder? I turned sideways and ran my palm over it. I’d never been so skinny that I had a flat abdomen—or, Cosmo-save-me, the daunting concave variety—but I looked more slender than I had since my teens.
The Grueling Journey through the Glass Mountains with Little Food Culminating in Blood Poisoning Diet. It would never catch on.
Despite the slimmer me, my belly rounded out significantly. Plus it felt firm, the hardness of uterine muscle instead of adipose tissue. I had no idea, however, what that indicated for how far along I might be. While some women in my department back at the university had been pregnant at various times, I’d never much hung around for the blow-by-blow conversations on the physical details of the experience. Those seemed to devolve rapidly into horror stories. Mainly I knew some women “showed” sooner than others. Not a big help.
And, though I knew a lot about physiology, particularly fetal and embryonic development as it applies to neural systems, that information all revolved around the internal processes, not how it felt on the outside. Starling possessed even less knowledge. Blackbird, though she’d given birth, according to Starling, didn’t know human bodies.
Mistress Nancy did though. And had sent me her regards.I’ve done a bit of midwifing in my day.She’d said that during our conversation at the Inn of Seven Moons.
Of course, that had been right before she mentioned how she hadn’t been able to save Cecily or her baby from their gruesome fates.
I shouldn’t juxtapose those things, however. Asking her to help me wouldn’t necessarily recreate the same scenario—that was subscribing to false causation, which led to superstitious thinking. Never mind the seeds of doubt Fafnir had planted, that Rogue could no more resist Titania’s hooks than Fafnir had.
Regardless of anything else, I was no Cecily.
I strongly suspected Rogue had planned it that way.
After locating a robe, I went upstairs, took my grimoire to a sort of wide armchair, which had a view of the waterfall, and curled up in it to make my list and notes on all that had occurred. Before I had worked for long, Rogue strode into the room, wearing a long cloak and carrying a basket.
“Good morning, lovely Gwynn.” He dropped a kiss on the top of my head, the scent of fresh air wafting over me, and set the basket in my lap.
“What’s this?” I surveyed the fruit. “Breakfast?” Or lunch, judging by the slant of the sun.
“You said last night that you wanted apples.” He unclasped the cloak and tossed it aside, then fingered the coil I’d forgotten I’d put my hair in. “You have your hair up?”
“To keep it dry. I took a bath.”
“May I take it down then?”
“Sure.” I said it casually, but it moved me somewhere deep inside that he wanted to. This daily intimacy and attention still took getting used to. With gentle pulls, he removed the pins, unwound the twist and spread my hair over my shoulders. Then he sat on the floor, gazing out at the view and leaning his shining head against my knee.
“Fafnir has been captured and the doppelgängers dealt with.” He offered that information much as he’d set the basket of apples in my lap. Buttering me up or making up?
I shivered, though, at the thought of multiple mes running around the castle complex, still dressed in last night’s seductive gown. An eternal walk of shame. Good that he’d taken care of getting rid of them. “Who were they, anyway?”
“Some of Fafnir’s cohorts. They’ve been returned to their proper forms. And Fafnir has been neutralized. He won’t bother you again.” He sounded too satisfied with that. Hopefully that wasn’t as grim as it sounded.
“So, he’s captured, you say?” All these things I didn’t think about upon awakening for my list. Where are my doppelgängers? Did anyone capture the bad guy? No, I took a bath and fretted about the pregnancy.
“Yes. Your Athena found him and he’s biding his time in silver until we’ve decided what to do with him.”
I flinched a little at the mention and Rogue untucked my bare foot from my robe, brought it over his shoulder and kissed the hollow next to my ankle, right below where my silver cuff had once contained me. The touch soothed me.
