Tamani had never been so happy to see Avalon as he was coming back through the gate to Japan. After spending time with the Mischa, he wanted nothing so much as a cleansing shower—but simply breathing the air of his verdant homeland was a close second. Avalon was a place of life and connection, in stark contrast to the way the Unseelie witch gloried in death and detachment. What sort of rot would have to take hold of your core to poison your entire being that way? Had it ever even occurred to her, at any point along the way, that she might be doing wrong?
Once the gate was closed, his mind went immediately to Laurel. Finding her, touching her, simply reminding himself that she was alive. They'd been apart just two days, but it felt longer. Much longer. She would be staying at her quarters at the Academy, which was a good distance uphill, but Tamani barely noticed the slope as he counted the steps to reunion.
"I'm afraid you've come all this way for nothing," Yeardley called out as Tamani approached the gate to the Academy grounds. He was clipping leaves off a currant bush with a small set of silver pruning shears, gathering the greens into a stone bowl while a group of young Mixers watched. As Tamani closed the distance between them, the Fall faeries under Yeardley's tutelage turned away from their lesson to gawk. They looked too young to have been at the Academy during the trollish invasion, but they would have heard stories from their older classmates. Inaccurate stories, doubtless, as stories were wont to grow in their retellings. Rather like weeds.
"Laurel isn't here?"
Yeardley shook his head, handing his tools to one of his students and shooing them back toward the Academy. "She said she had something to attend to at home."
Tamani frowned. "Was she able to make much progress with—"
"I suggest you catch the Queen before she's too much farther from the gate," Yeardley interrupted, a strange gleam in his eye. "Laurel wanted you to follow as soon as possible."
"Then I guess I'd better do that," Tamani said, bowing slightly before catching himself and giving a polite nod instead. Moments like that were fewer, ten years on, but there was no particular reason to not bow to Yeardley—Laurel's tutor had proven his worth and worthiness time and again. Snubbing people who demanded obeisance, people like Marion, was easy. The overthrow of the old social order had not yet resulted, however, in any new ways to communicate respect to the people who deserved it.
A puzzle for another day. By the time Tamani got back down to the Gate Garden he was more than a little irritated. He'd considered trying to find Yasmine so she could pretend—as she had so many times—to open the gate, but between his failure at the Manor, the creepy advice from the Unseelie, and the looming threat of the sea fae, Tamani was having a hard time worrying about secrecy. If someone saw something and decided he was a secret Winter faerie, well, it wouldn't be the most outrageous thing whispered about his heroic feats.
Probably.
His phone started pinging the instant he returned to California. Twenty-eight texts in three days—not many if he'd been one of the humans attending school with Rowen, he imagined, but there were only a handful of people who even possessed Tamani's number, and most of them lived in the same house. By his standards, it was an avalanche.
He glanced down, ignoring six messages from Rowen—if something serious had happened there, he wasn't in any position to act on it now. Laurel, meanwhile, had sent him twenty messages over the course of the last twenty hours—updates on where she was going, but nothing about why. Had she discovered a new way for him to deal with the sea fae? Some ingredients were difficult to get in Avalon; she may have come back to gather materials from her personal garden.
Tamani ran along pathways as familiar to him as Laurel's face, exulting in the scent of the crisp autumn breeze and the feel of once more being fleet in a way that would have been impossible anywhere else in the world. Here, every rock and tree and streamlet was known to him, and it felt good to run, to leap, to move as fast as he possibly could on his way to the place he most wanted to be. Avalon was his homeland, but this? This was his home.
Rather than go around to the front of the house, he burst through the back doors. Laurel's name was on his lips when he froze at the sight of her blossom. His knees felt weak as his eyes drank in the long petals, colored every shade of blue from navy to powder, that curved up from her back and hovered just over her shoulders.
Fall was Tamani's very favorite time of year.
He'd known it was coming—the bud on Laurel's back had been quite large when he left for the Manor—but it simply hadn't occurred to him since. In fairness, he'd been a touch preoccupied. Now she turned toward him and smiled. His fingers trembled as he reached for her.
She opened her mouth to say something, but he took advantage and covered it with his own, holding her tight against him and kissing her; parched for her kiss like a sapling in the Sahara. Her arms twined around his neck and all he could think was that they'd spent far too much of the last two months apart. More than the rest of the years they'd been handfasted all added together.
"Goddess, but you're gorgeous," he rasped, before feasting on her lips again, his fingers tentatively stroking the curve where her blossom blended seamlessly into her skin. He started to guide her backward, steering her toward their bed.
"Tamani," Laurel said, scold in her voice.
"I've missed you," he said. "I always miss you, but to come back and have you in full bloom?" He groaned. "You know what that does to me."
He sprinkled her face with kisses, then pulled down the strap of her camisole and tasted the skin at her shoulder as he laid her back on the comforter. "Your mother is here," she hissed.
"So I'll lock the door," he said into the skin at her neck.
"You don't understand," she said, breathlessly.
"Your parents are always here," Tam said with a grin. "Never stopped us before."
"This is different!" She placed a palm in the middle of Tamani's chest and pushed him away, sounding both firm and serious. Tamani froze.
"What?"
Laurel smiled sweetly. "Your mother's here because our sprout has decided it's time."
***
It took three more days, but each morning when Tamani woke he would run to the garden box, thrilled at each new sign of progress. A sprout could spend as many as four seasons in its penultimate maturation phase, unchanged from month to month, so the final week before blossoming felt like a mad rush forward.
"It'll be today," Rhoslyn finally pronounced after examining the sprout the third morning.
Laurel's hand was wrapped around Tamani's, but when his mother's words sank in she squeezed so tightly he flinched. "Today!" Laurel said, turning to him with sparks flashing in her eyes. "A Fall faerie!"
She laughed, the sound lifting the corners of Tamani's mouth. He was ... stunned. The moment was here, and this child—his child, his son or daughter—would be one of the powerful, one of the rare. Once, it would have meant something very close to nobility in Avalon. In some ways it still did.
"What are the chances?" Tamani asked, pulling Laurel close.
Oddly, she sobered. "Possibly high, actually."
"Really?"
She nodded. "There's something called a non-Fisherian sex ratio, where a species makes up for a drop in one sex, by producing more of that sex, to balance the population. I wondered if something similar might apply to us here."
"Oh?" Tamani said, failing utterly to understand. Mixers did that, sometimes—and Laurel was a professor at a human university, besides. It was usually endearing, when it wasn't completely maddening.
"It's not common, but it's the only hypothesis I have to explain season distribution." She never referred to them as castes, though that was what Tamani understood her to be talking about. "If the fae are non-Fisherian organisms with regard to seasons rather than sex, it would explain a lot."
Tamani thought about this for a few seconds, then gave up. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
Laurel looked over at Rhoslyn, who just smiled and shook her head. Clearly this was a topic the two women had already discussed. "In non-Fisherian organisms, if, for example, half of the female population was wiped out, the remaining organisms would suddenly start giving birth to significantly more females than before."
"To replenish the population," Tamani said. "It makes sense."
"Except it doesn't," Laurel countered. "There's no logical reason for these species' reproductive systems to somehow sense that the population ratios have changed, and to stimulate them to make up for it. But it happens."
"Glad we got you that advanced anthropology degree," Tamani said with a grin.
"You're missing the connection."
"I absolutely am."
Laurel paused, seeming to need a few seconds to collect herself. When she spoke again, her voice was shaky. "No population in Avalon was decreased as drastically as the Fall faeries."
Oh. Tamani reached out and stroked her hand. Even a decade later, Laurel mourned the huge number of Mixers Klea had decimated in one day during her attack on the Academy. If they hadn't been smart—and had David to assist them—it would have been an almost complete annihilation. "So you think evolution is helping to make up for that?"
"It's the only answer that fits. And I wasn't the one to notice. It was your mother."
They turned to Rhoslyn, whose eyes remained fixed on the sprout. "I'm retired, but I still help the Gardeners when they need an experienced hand. Since the war, more than one seedling in ten have opened in the fall. It used to be more like one in fifty."
Tamani's eyes widened. "That's actually fascinating."
"And so," Laurel said with a smile and gestured toward the garden box, "our little Mixer." She hesitated, then said more quietly, "Do you mind?"
Tamani didn't hide his grin as he leaned over and kissed Laurel's forehead. "I couldn't care less."
The pod gave a distinct wriggle and Rhoslyn sucked in a breath. "Here we go," she said softly.
Tamani's mother had already warned them that watching a faerie pod open was much like watching a bird hatch; one could cheer the little one on, but helping them from their gestational prison would only result in a weakened baby—one that might not survive. Still, Tamani was surprised by how hard it was to keep his hands at his sides and not to wrench open the pod so they could see their new child.
Judging by the bruises Laurel was surely leaving on his arm, she felt the same.
But after a long, tense silence, the seal around the end of the pod gave way and a blanket of lavender petals unfurled. Laurel let out a loud, oooh! but they still couldn't quite see inside the protective petals. They held their breaths as one and, slowly, a nest of black curls pushed its way through the purple petals. Rhoslyn wordlessly reached for Laurel's hands, and even though Laurel looked both confused and afraid, she let Rhoslyn cradle both her hands over her own and help extend them toward the end of the pod. And with Rhoslyn's fingers showing hers what to do, Laurel reached out and caught the tiny sprout as it slid from the pod.
With her fingers curved protectively around the small, naked sprout, Laurel held the little body up where both she and Tamani could see it. A tiny, perfect face turned toward them, eyes squinting in the sunlight. Laurel and Tamani held utterly still as the sprout's eyes went back and forth between them, finally settling on Laurel. "Mama?"
Laurel gathered the little baby girl to her chest and burst into tears as Tamani wrapped his arms around them both.
***
Yaaaaaaay! I've been so looking forward to writing this chapter!!! Hope you liked it too.:) Don't forget to vote and don't forget I have a new book coming out next month!!