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“Is it fine?” Rogue’s thoughts brushed mine. “Or will you be frustrated by it and brood with your mind hidden?”
“Welcome to marriage with a human woman. How about if we agree I get to stew about it a little bit, but I’ll make an effort to be gracious overall and look forward to increased freedom in the future—will that suffice?”
He smiled, very slightly. “I would also ‘stew’ in your position. We are not so different in that way.”
“And in others?” I had to ask.
“I do not sleep, no, not unless injured.”
I nodded, letting myself assimilate that, though I’d suspected as much. “How about food? You’ve eaten with me, but do you need to?”
“No.” Rogue looked somber. “Does that bother you?”
“Some.” I rolled my shoulders, loosening them. “So you just pretended to, for my sake?”
“Not to deceive you, no. I enjoy it, but as with many fae, my true sustenance comes from magic. Eating, however, is a ritual of trust. So is sharing a bed. In many ways, I’d say it means more to me to do those things with you because I choose to, rather than it being necessary.”
“An interesting point.”
He cocked his head slightly, listening, thoughts touching mine like a kiss. “And the part you’re not saying?”
Gah. I stretched my fingers, enjoying the freedom of movement, my restored humanity. “So, there’s this thing. In my culture, people tell stories of human women impregnated with alien babies. Monster babies.”Changelings.
“As I’ve done to you.”
“Well, we did it to each other, but yes—it feels strange, not knowing who—”or what,“—the child will be.”
“Something we cannot know until it is born.”
“I know. You asked.”
“I did. And you have another question.”
Fine. “Do you ever think about it, Rogue? We are different species. Have you thought through that I’m human and mortal? That I’ll become an old woman and eventually die.”
He came to me and, lacing our fingers together so we stood palm to palm, looked into my eyes. The connection between us throbbed like a heartbeat, a commingling of my one-two rhythm with his waltz beat, each a counterpoint to the other.
“None of that matters. A moment with you or an eternity—neither is more valuable than the other. Should everything end now, I would call myself blessed.”
My heart rolled over. “You do know how to say the right things.”
“Besides,” he added, glancing at my belly with a wicked glint in his eye, “the way you think this word ‘species’ means being able to interbreed. And we’ve certainly done that.”
And wasn’t that just the cherry-topper?
It puzzled me still, the ways our physiologies intersected and how they diverged. It shouldn’t be possible for us to interbreed. Nor for a fae woman like Blackbird, who was not mammalian-born, to give birth to a half-human child in a fully mammalian style. For a while I’d joked to myself that the fae all fruited on the vine, except even fruit had navels. In a rational world, higher organisms could not reproduce in a way other than the way in which they themselves were conceived. Lower organisms, however, could “choose” to reproduce either by recombining genes with another individual or by essentially cloning themselves. Parthenogenesis. Though theoretically possible in humans, it had never been documented—beyond those seeking to rationalize virgin birth stories.
Still, there seemed to be enough similarities among particularly the lower-tier fae to suggest parthenogenesis. That could be just my foreigner’s eye, leading me to believe they all looked the same. Funny that I’d been ruminating on the development of the embryo or fetus within me. One aspect of fetal development I did understand was that ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny. In other words, a human child went from a single cell and developed into an increasingly complex organism by following the same path as evolution, from amoeba to fish to monkey to human, in essence.
Could it be that this shift in reproduction among the immortal noble fae represented a sort of evolutionary leap? It would be working at an extraordinarily accelerated rate, a saltational evolution producing the very essence of the “hopeful monsters” the thesis predicted. I pressed my palm to the round ball of my belly. A changeling child as the hopeful monster.
Rogue’s eyes, shades darker than the brilliant sky framing him, but no less bright, glittered as he listened in on my thoughts without commenting.
“I want to ask you a question you maybe can’t answer,” I said, stepping away and opening my grimoire to the new section in Rules of Magic: Changelings.
“No, I did not grow on a tree like an apple.”
“I’m totally writing that down.”
