I became awake suddenly, still nestled between them, in the hollow
light of pre-dawn.  I crawled out of bed as quietly as possible, but
Driscoll sat up and asked where I was going.  Foster snored on.

	I told him I was going to prepare for my talk with Nicholas, but
I'd welcome his advice.  I went to the bathing chamber, and filled a tub
of water for myself and scooted in, while Driscoll gave me fairly good
counsel, in spite of the distraction that was growing in his pants.  I
washed up in a hurry, and got out to aid him in his distraction.

	It struck me, then, that this time it was for real.  No
Faerie-made delusions, no remorse...well, a little remorse, afterwards,
when I realized that I had stolen yet another man from Eris.  I feel
somewhat greedy, somehow, that it takes two great loves to make me happy. 
That doesn't seem quite right.

	****

	"Can you leave?" I asked Nicholas, not sure if the bodyguards
would allow it.

	"Where are we going?"

	"I just want to show you the kingdom I ruled when I was twenty." 
I don't say, "I know it's only a Shadow, and you have the real thing,"
because we both know it, and it's not important.

	I took him to the place where Faerie bones lie in moldering piles
-- dank and mossy skulls in a mound far from the rest of their bodies, to
keep their souls from the afterlife.  It's a gruesome place, just outside
of London, and not all that much time has passed here -- six, seven years
at most, since this battle.  It says a lot about me, I think.  That I keep
it just this way.

	I led him out of there, back towards the town, through the formal
gardens of an abbey, towards the Globe.  I thought:  Amber is my homeland
now, and Rath my retreat, but Foil is the place I knew from birth, and for
all its humble customs, the place I will always think of when I think of
home.  Nostalgia ran me down like a hound with a fox.

	"Yes, after the war, I was driven," I told him, sparing him the
details.  I don't think I slept at all after Beauty was born, and the war
began.  I napped.  In fits and starts, with my sword always drawn and on
the watch.

	But I had Beauty, and occasionally, she brought me back to myself;
for brief, treasured moments, she reminded me that I had been someone else
once, before I was eaten up by hatred for the Faeries -- the damnable
Faeries, who killed children, who made my brother my enemy.

	"She is very good at keeping the counsel of kings," I told him,
watching the dead and burdened expression lighten just a little.

	He thanked me, and we returned to Amber.

	I'm trying, Ahab.

	****

	Mandor had elected to baby-sit Iseult for the day, for better or
worse, so I had time to move the army.  Quartering troops.  Perhaps not
the most exciting part of the job, but there is a certain satisfaction to
getting my people all squared away, and to arranging the puzzle pieces
neatly and efficiently.  There was a time when I thought I raised armies
for necessity, that my true passion was botany.  Well, perhaps my true
passion is botany, but it's been a long time since I messed around in the
drying room, and I think I'm growing to love the army life.  Or at least
my version of it.

	Fiona Trumped me in the middle of all of it, and told me I had a
new sister (half sister, of course).  I went through to see her -- little
Alexandra, with silver eyebrows.  She seemed so tiny, and I realized how
big Pax had gotten.  Except for a brief twinge, I found I still didn't
have a desire to make more, just yet.

	I made it back home, retrieved my younger daughter from
Middlecourt, talked over some things about Foil with Beauty, and told the
immediate family that they had a new aunt or a new sister-in-law, as
appropriate.

	Eventually night fell, and the kids were squared away in bed as
neatly as my troops, and I had no choice but to face the music.  As it
turns out, I think I like the music.

	****

	Morning came, and before breakfast, Fiona Trumped again, and told
me things had gone a little faster than she had first thought.

	Alexandra was ten years old.

	More shocking, Fiona had turned into a hippie.  Or something like.

	Apparently I'm not the only one who has these feelings about
raising children in Shadow, away from it all.  Only problem is, I'm
unwilling to take the kids away from all the grandparents.

	I brought the kids through, and though Hary was significantly
younger than Alexandra, they seemed to get along fairly well. 
Level-headed in the face of Iseult's rages, he is an impressive kid.

	I explained to Mother what had gone on with Foster and Driscoll --
Alexandra picked up from the conversation that I have two husbands now. 
She did not seem to find this odd.  That gave me pause, I'll admit, but it
was also a relief, in a way -- that somewhere people would not be shocked
and appalled.  I also explained "the punishment"  as best I could, and
referred to how Foster had come to think of it.  Suhuy gave me an
interesting look about then, and mentioned how he had "taken an interest"
in Foster.  Again, I was given pause.  Foster didn't seem to have the soul
of an assassin, Suhuy said; I nodded.  I knew.  "But Vetch just wouldn't
give up."  I wondered, briefly, in the back of my mind, how alike Vetch
and Foster might have started out.  I mentioned the first Haris then, and
Suhuy just smiled, and shook his head, and told me to ask Foster.

	A day and a night passed pleasantly, and I felt...strange.  Out of
touch.  This soft Fiona, unpressured, without the fate of the kingdom
hanging over her -- this version of my mother amazed me.  Shades of
Tamaryn...  I sat next to her on a couch in front of a TV, watching a
movie, a bowl of popcorn between us, and I think tears came to my eyes,
for just a moment, thinking of what might have been.

	It's not that Caitt wasn't a wonderful mother to me; it's just
that Fiona *is* my mother, and I never knew her until today.

	****

	That night, I sat in the guest bedroom, legs crossed like a
tailor, and cast my soul outward, towards the trees.

	Long ago in Foil, the Druids learned the secrets of shifting
shape; they did not warp their bodies to their wills, as I am learning to
do, but instead, moved their minds into other bodies, and thusly lived
other lives in other shapes.

	Can you take this a step further...can you find a shape that never
was, and live in it, just for a while?  Can you find the girl I would have
been if Fiona had not given me to Julian, if I had not been lost to
Shadow?

	Yes...I can almost see her...  She looks like me.  But she is not
me.  She does not dress in restrictive collars.  She does not bind her
chest close, because she does not fight enough to care if her breasts get
in the way.  She does not carry a sword, because she has spent her life
learning other things.  She has never painted herself blue, and she has
never screamed a battle-cry.  She has never raised her sister's child, for
she never had a sister...  She was never loved by Driscoll, for she never
met his Shadow, nor he hers.  She never loved Foster, for her mind was on
other things.

	Is it really her?  Has it all made that much of a difference in
who I am today?  Study her from all angles, this woman who never was; slip
inside her mind, become her...  Look out through blue eyes that never saw
a Faerie raid.  Clench a fist that never hit anyone.  My heart beats; it
is not so cold, but no fires of vengeance ever raged there.  There is joy,
but it is not the joy that is Foster, the joy that is Driscoll, or the
other joys -- Beauty, Haris, Iseult and Pax.  My children.  No -- her
children.

	A flood of tears brought me back from the netherworld I walked.

	There is a book I read once, just because of its name:  "The Book
of Laughter and Forgetting."  There is a passage, that is actually a quote
from another book, that begins:  "Whatever became of laughter?"

	No...wait, that's not it, at all.  Funny I should remember it that
way, though.  No...it begins:  "Laughter?  Does anyone ever care about
laughter?  I mean real laughter -- beyond joking, jeering, ridicule. 
Laughter -- delight unbounded, delight delectable, delight of delights..."

	Rather narcissistic of me to like this passage so much, but
nevertheless, I do.  It's not about me, this exaltation of laughter, but
it's more about taking a concrete thing -- the sound of laughter -- and
redefining it as a way of being.  To look at this meaningless thing and
making it infinitely meaningful.  I feel like I just did this to myself,
in some parallel way.

	"I said to my sister, or she said to me, come let's play laughter
together.  We stretched out side by side on the bed and started in.  At
first we just made believe, of course.  Forced laughs.  Laughable laughs. 
Laughs so laughable they made us laugh.  Then it came -- real laughter,
total laughter -- sweeping us off in unbounded effusion.  Bursts of
laughter, laughter rehashed, jostled laughter, laughter defleshed,
magnificent laughter, sumptuous and wild...  And we laughed to the
infinity of the laughter of our laughs...  O laughter!  Laughter of
delight, delight of laughter..."

	I shed my clothing, and crawled into bed, and slept a dreamless
sleep.

	****

	Back in the bright day of Amber, not much later than when we left,
we trooped down to breakfast, the little blip in time barely noticeable. 
I kissed Foster, and passed the boys to their respective fathers,
muttering -- "We've been gone a day," to both of them.  I sat down with
Iseult, and tried to figure out the meaning behind Foster's expression.

	Apparently he'd Trumped his dad in flagrante delicto, as they say. 
Hee.

	Ariana and I talked Takaran for a bit -- she had scads of
information, and I decided that the next step was to get some of the raw
material to play with.  Though our Miranda lead is...well, dead.  That
kind of sets us back.  Unless she's not dead.  Right.  One last thing she
passed on to me -- what Vetch did to Foster, he didn't think up himself. 
It was all done to him, first.

	Oh....

	Alex caught me with Pax on the way out of breakfast.  He wants my
help in catching some Faeries.  Something about Spikards -- objects of
great power -- and his father's murder.  He showed me the scene, in fact,
that Mum had actually dug out of the past for him.  Something
Faerie-shaped killed his father.  Something Faerie-shaped, but also
Benedict-shaped, and Benedict was missing at the time, and there was
positive proof that Dara had turned at least one of the Elders to her
bidding.

	Drumm was also implicated in the vision -- not in killing, but in
theft.  Drumm...why do I have a feeling our acquaintance is not at an end?

	****

	Alexandra had invited me to her initiation ceremony at Fiona's
urging, so I was prepared to be Trumped a little later in the morning.  I
was not prepared for the goings-on, however.

	Somehow, like the tumblers of a lock finally falling into place,
something clicked in my mind.  I'm uptight.  I'm a prude.  Not just in
sexual matters, but in every matter.  I believe in the rules.  I can't
even tell you what they are, but I believe in them.

	I giggled, then, and thought about the meeting I had had with
myself the night before, and thought some more about Milan Kundera's book
about laughter and giggled some more.

	I don't know if I actually cracked up in that moment -- if it was
a breakdown of some sort, or an epiphany, but I think it was an epiphany. 
I felt like all the walls had come down, and I wasn't afraid of breaking
the rules anymore, and I wasn't afraid of the past, nor of all the
different, more perfect, nameless me's that might have resulted from a
different past.  I loved the present, and I was happy for my sister, that
she had this Fiona for a mother, and that she had this opportunity to grow
up; and happy for myself, because the good and the bad of my life, they've
made me into someone I like to be, after all.

	****

	"When moaning a person chains himself to the immediate present of
his suffering body (and lies completely outside past and future), and in
this ecstatic laughter he loses all memory, all desire, cries out to the
immediate present of the world and needs no other knowledge..."

		-- Milan Kundera _The Book of Laughter and Forgetting_