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Although Morrígan had started out by making me put my questions on hold long enough to have a good cry, my mind was still an obstacle course of problems and issues, and I still had to talk to her about them. She had invited two experts along for me to consult as well. Rather than allowing idle talk with them to distract me, I had to ask the questions that the Fairy Queen summoned them to help answer.
I was now deep enough in the water to cover my bosom, leaving only my head and shoulders visible, so I stared up at the sky and spent several minutes explaining the situation in detail to Diurhimath and Briareos, showing them Mother’s pendant, and telling them exactly what the gods were asking me to do. From the pool, the moonless sky’s stars weren’t visible through the misty spirit barrier, but the barrier itself gave off a soft glow, the reflection from magical plants and other sources surrounding us, so I just watched the shifting vapors and spoke for a while.
Diurhimath’s response didn’t surprise me too much. He grew angry for my sake, having returned to thinking of me as a juvenile Elder. Like a typical soldier, he complained about how the ‘higher ups’ never think carefully enough about how their instructions will impact the rank and file.
I think he forgot I was one of those higher-ups, but I appreciated his concern for my sake.
Then he noted, “Your Highness, I have to defer to others for your main question. But I can confirm that Princess Deharè, whom I had the pleasure to meet with several times recently, had a spiritual strength easily equal to the officer class of Elders. Perhaps you in your prime were stronger; I never had the pleasure of meeting you during the age of our race, but I imagine you to have been so. But Her Highness was far beyond a common Elder like myself in that day.”
I nodded. I did not doubt that he was correct.
He continued, “Even once that strength is reduced to its embryonic seed, it will be too heavy a soul for the young of any modern race. Far above that of any newborn fairy or monster. Perhaps she could survive as the whelp of a particularly powerful ancient dragon, or one of the other transcendent races of the primeval age, but the few survivors are hidden and mostly in hibernation. We wouldn’t be able to arrange for one of those to just conveniently bear a child.”
A random thought turned into words before I could stop it. “What about a dragonkin?”
Morrígan laughed. “So you’ve met the secret guardian of your kingdom?”
“Yes, but…” I frowned. How could I even ask her? It had just been a stupid impulse thought. “Never mind that. It’s not like the woman has any reason to agree to it.
“A dragonkin?” Diur considered it, then shook his head. “Their juveniles are about on par with fairy juveniles.”
Briareos mused, “The basic problem is that Deharè has been far more than a fairy from the beginning.”
“Far more, how?” I wondered.
“Deharè was effectively a demigoddess herself, being the child of two demigods with extraordinary parents. Oberon is the child of an Elder, fathered by Oranos, and Lâra is the child of Eurybia, fathered by an extraordinary fairy. But in addition, Deharè lived for thousands of years and grew far stronger during that time, so even if you could persuade her parents to re-enact her conception, it would be a longshot.”
“And it isn’t going to happen,” Morrígan said with a dour tone. “My husband stands permanently condemned in Lâra’s mind. She will never let him touch her again.”
I turned a puzzled frown toward her. She raised an eyebrow.
“You don’t know what happened?”
I shook my head. “I only know that Mother never calls His Majesty ‘Father’. And Grandmother only refers to him as ‘that man’.”
Morrígan squeezed her lips together, looking annoyed, but nodded. “Well, they have good reason. It can’t truly be considered entirely his fault, but… he was the root cause of your eldest sister’s death. And if he had controlled his lusts properly, as he does now, the tragedy would have never happened.”
My mind immediately went several confused directions, trying to parse what she’d just said. His lusts? My eldest sister? I didn’t like how that added up.
She shook her head. “I don’t know what you are imagining, but I’ll just tell you. Your eldest sister Adia was a fairborn child your mother gave birth to when she was slightly under two hundred years old. Back then, your mother was a typical fairy, who let the human kin raise her daughter. She only dropped in occasionally to teach the child magic. So we, here in Tëan Tír, never met the child.”
When my mother was less than two centuries old… we were talking about back in the Heroic Age. Back before Durandal got cursed, back before Demon King Orgoth…
“Once she reached adulthood, Adia apparently became obsessed with having a fairborn child herself. The children of fairborns are normally fairy-blooded mortals similar to fairlings. But having a mortal child wasn’t good enough for her. She learned that a fairborn’s baby fathered by a fairy will instead be a fairborn, so she went to Tëan Tír on her own, without her family or your mother knowing, on the hunt for a male fairy to seduce.”
I guessed the rest on my own and felt sick. “She found Oberon?”
Morrígan pressed her lips together. “If she had met him today, he would have taken pains to know exactly who she was before bedding her. Back then, he was… less cautious. And he had a fondness for disguising himself as a common fairy and finding mortal and half-fairy women to play with, so she had no idea who he really was.”
“Ah…” Diurhimath nodded. “If I recall correctly, consanguinity among fairies…”
The Fairy Queen returned his nod. “Without that issue, we probably wouldn’t care, and I imagine incestuous children would be common among us.”
They both knew what they were talking about, but I didn’t. “I understand what you are saying, but how did it lead to… my sister’s death?”
She gave me a side-eye. “You should have learned about the dangers of inbreeding at some point.”
“Well, I know it can cause serious issues for the child, but this is about the mother?”
Diurhimath nodded gravely. “Yes, among mortals, beyond ethics, the danger of birth defects is the primary concern. You only learned it from the mortal perspective, then?”
I nodded. “That’s right.”
Morrígan nodded understanding. “Fate dealt fairies a more severe penalty. Perhaps the universe understood that we would ignore such a concern, and not spare a thought for the impact on our children, if it did not deal more harshly with us.”
She pursed her lips to consider her words, then explained, “For consanguinity of two degrees or less, the aura of an incestuous child lacks sufficient differentiation from its mother’s aura. Without any consanguinity at all, it is already half her own aura, after all. When combined with her father’s, it becomes far too similar. Potentially still too similar, with the grandfather. The mother and child’s auras war with each other within her womb. But fairies are unable to abort their children, naturally or artificially. Once our child is growing within us, we must carry it until our body allows us to deliver it. Even when the pregnancy begins killing us. Unless the fetus dies on its own, we must carry it to term.”
She still had her arm around me, although after I submerged up to my armpits, it became an arm around my shoulder rather than my waist. I could feel the tension in her as she held me.
“Fairborn mothers also face this danger. And your sister Adia lost the fight. The only blessing left to your heartbroken mother was that her premature grandchild survived, and lived a long, healthy life. But your mother and your grandmother never forgave His Majesty, even after this long. Nor has he forgiven himself.”
The heaviness of the story became too much. I had to change the subject.
“What about other demigods? Are there any others still around?” I wondered. “Most of the ones I learned about while growing up have passed away.”
“Well, obviously, there is Tenre,” Morrígan answered, “But… I will be quite honest, Esteemed Mother-in-Law. I think your body has a stronger foundation than hers, even as your are, now. I don’t think Tenre is up to it.”
“How is that possible?” I demanded. “Tenre has been around far longer than Mother, and her mother is a goddess!”
“Even so,” she answered, “She is not as strong as Lâra’s child. Your mother received the divine inheritance of two different gods, Your Highness, and the non-divine grandparents were both extraordinary as well. You were an Elder and the River Lord was once an Elder. He was one of the first survivors to cultivate a true fairy body, spending only a century as a lesser fairy, but if one includes his original life, he’s nearly as old as you, Esteemed Mother-in-Law.”
“He was part of the first generation of Elders born on Huade,” Diurhimath explained. “He is the son of the Twelfth Legion’s commander, so he was also an elite.”
I had a vague memory of the Stregione in question. He had been the lieutenant of a cohort in one of the later-formed legions. It was hard to imagine my grandfather the River Lord, the surly fairy I met briefly in Atianus, as the same individual, but after ten thousand years and so many difficulties, of course he would have changed.
“But in the end, if Lâra could bear my mother…”
“She bore your mother as an infant fairy,” Diur countered, cutting me off. “I doubt either Lâra or Tenre could bear the reborn Deharè today.”
“So who is available?” Morrígan mused. “If Gaia or Eurybia had time to create avatars, they could bear a strong enough child. A fairy avatar of a goddess would be stronger than a fairy demigoddess. But even borrowing your small world, and persuading some fairy to go there and allow herself to be impregnated and give birth to their avatar, growing that fairy to a sufficient age would take three months of our time at the highest time compression your world can do. Which I think answers your question, how long is too long?”
She reached over between my breasts and took the pendant in her fingertips. “It seems this pendant will not last three months, because I think either Gaia or Eurybia would act to save your mother themselves if they could.”
“Unless they are trying to force the issue on me to have the child,” I glowered.
“You still don’t trust them?”
The question twisted in my heart. I wanted to trust them. I really did.
“If they could do it themselves, they would,” Briareos, silent all this time, declared with a tone of certainty. “Deharè has been a valuable force countering the activities of the demons in this region for too long. The tutelary council has grown to depend upon her presence. Given the opportunity to get her back, even if they have to wait for centuries for her to recover, they would do what they have to do.”
“There are other, lesser goddesses,” Diur noted. “Seven others on the tutelary council, and minor ones as well.”
“No Immortals inhabit avatars at this time. The closest to such a thing are my sisters,” Briareos answered. “But my sisters’ bodies are human, and can only give birth to humans. That’s why they only ever bear their new host bodies or mortal children that can’t be considered demigods.”
He looked at me and mused, “If you found a suitable host mother though, you could clone this child. Have you considered that?”
Morrígan shook her head. “The difficulty of Tiana’s birth is the reason it isn’t possible. And that fact leaves me inclined to believe Gaia is correct about Tiana being the only choice for mother.”
“The difficulty of my birth?” I echoed.
She smiled at me. “It was next to impossible for Deharè to give birth to you. The monstrous part of your physique was completely at odds with her magical flesh. She stayed here with me so I could help her, but in the end, it was her own efforts that made it happen.”
Squeezing my shoulder again, she explained, “By the time she was half-way through her pregnancy, she was casting [Healing] on herself several times a day to prevent you from dying, and she was consuming monster flesh for your nutrition daily, to supply the miasma her body couldn’t give you naturally. And she was hosting a mortal baby in her womb at the time as well, whom she also had to care for, which only complicated matters.”
After a pause, she summarized, “Even without the mortal baby’s presence, only a fairy with Deharè’s constitution could have managed to carry you in the first place, and only by employing her advanced Healing skills and only with the determination she had to keep you, her dear friend’s daughter, alive.”
“Her friend’s daughter?” I echoed, puzzled. “My father was Egon of Pendor.”
I had always had the image in my mind of the Duke of Pendor and my mother as the direst of enemies.
“Indeed, and those two were dearest friends, Esteemed Mother-in-Law,” Morrígan told me, coincidentally countering my thoughts as if she were an Immortal who could hear them. “Deharè would never have had you, otherwise. I know other fairies are different, but your mother only ever had babies for men she loved. She was very inflexible on that issue.”
I shook my head. Her claim was simply too contrary to what I knew. Since the beginning, I have known Tiana’s conception to have been forced upon Mother as a result of Egon’s magic.
Ignoring my confusion, Morrígan offered her verdict on my primary question. “It’s clear then. If we accept Gaia’s claim that only an Elder baby, which can only be your child or your clone, can host Deharè’s soul, then only you can carry such a baby. We aren’t going to find a fairy as strong and determined as Deharè, to repeat what she went through to give birth to you.”
