Caress of Twilight--chapter 13

So we had Market Days here in town. I thought it was all just fresh tomatoes, citrus and watermelon, so I've never gone. Actually there was one lone fruit stand (...selling tomatoes, citrus, watermelon and the world's hardest avacadoes. I could kill someone with them long before I could make guacamole.) and a whole bunch of fad blingy clothing stands. The fad last year was glittery belts and purses with silver and turquoise on them. The fad this year is shawls with big silver pendants hanging off them, and blinged out flip-flops. And I don't mean sequines. I mean rinestones. On a pair of big foam sandels that will break the first time you wear them out. There were the Hot Sauce Venders and the Silver Jewelry venders, and I was about to find an internet-friendly part of the feild to sit in when I found the alpaca farm people.

They had felt shawls and mats and hats and gloves and one lone little baggie of brown roving that, I swear to god, called to me from across the entire field. I've spent the last two days in a wonderful fluffy brown haze and my poor little charkha is about to explode. I will definately have to replace the drive cord in a couple days.

I stopped playing to blog this. Feel sympathy for me.

I said yesterday that if you can't see the potential awesome of a fertility crisis of the gods Faerie plotline, I'd disown you. I won't go that far if you can't see how this book should have been edited, but I will be sorely disappointed. This is the primary plotline for this story. Maeve Reed wanting a kid.

This could have been huge. Specifically because if Maeve gets preggers AND goes public with her accusation of Taranis's infertility, shit would go down. She'd have the wherewithall to either trigger civil war or to get back in with the Seelie court, AND she could provide Merry with the leverage to get protection of her person out of Taranis--keep her safe or I'll tell the whole world you're shooting blanks. Merry could use the goblins to keep them both safe from Taranis's guard, and Taranis's guard could keep her safe from Cel. Meanwhile Cel and Taranis could be plotting something else together. It could be like the Faerie Inception, only instead of dreams within dreams its death plot within death plot.

This will never happen. However, if you want to read something kind of like this, go find any of Julian May's books. I recommend the Piloscene epoch if you want to see what LKH could have done with Celtic mythology (the old gods are Aliens. I hate that plotline--I think it's really racist to say that the gods of another culture are actually aliens that built all that culture's wonders, just because we can't imagine a person from 4,000BC understanding math well enough to build the pyramids--but OH MY GOD I love that series) or the Ironcrown books for just pure plot-in-plot-in-plot-in-"who's supposed to be killing who now?" level awesome.

Or just say "fuck it" and read the Jack the Bodiless books. :D

So what really happens? Merry assumes that Maeve means she wants to have sex with her men. Because of course her men are the only men in the entire world worth fucking.

Merry agrees to have the conversation in private, though that means just that the boys go stand under a nearby tree. Maeve wants them to go further away. Merry says "They're my bodyguards. No." and then there's a confusing conversation about magic, and how Maeve's power awakened Merry's power and she's not sure she can "do that again", when I don't remember anybody doing anything to begin with. The only magic Merry has, other than the power of glowworm, is the ability to turn people into screaming basketballs of inside out flesh. Scary as fuck, yes. But this didn't happen in this book, yet.

Maeve promises that nothing will hurt Merry on purpose. Merry forces her to promise that nothing will happen to her or her men while she's on Maeve's property, and Maeve is pissed, but agrees. I actually like this part, because that's how Faeries are supposed to be. Every conversation and promise should end up like you wished on the monkey's paw.

Then they waste time talking about Maeve joining the Faerie court before Rhys and Marie come out of Maeve's house. Rhys looks good, Marie looks like she just took a tumble in a hay bin. Merry asks what the fuck is going on and...is it just me or are there a lot of M names in this book? Anyhoo, then Maeve tries to get Merry into a bikini.

Let me remind you, there's a Christmas tree in Maeve's perfectly decorated living room. So either she has a mystical connection to Christmas trees, which she probably shouldn't as Christmas trees started as a pre-Christian German custom and would have more to do with Odin/Wotan than anything Celtic, or it is December.

I do not think you're going out in a bikini in fucking December, even in Los Angeles. I say this because we've just had an incredibly mild winter--January was in the 70Fs all month--and we still had most of our clothes on during Christmas.

Merry finally puts everything together and expositions that Maeve is trying to make sure Merry and at least one of her men are birth-defect free, becasue Maeve wants Merry to preform a fertility rite.

Merry also notices that Marie looks very uncomfortable, and decides its because she's disappointed that she and Rhys didn't actually screw. Now, me, I'd figure it's because Marie's boss just told her to have sex with a total stranger and just about anybody I know would have issues with that, but that's just me.

At one point Merry comments on how Maeve smells like cigarettes and alcohol and how it's kind of sickening. Yeah, the woman's pretty obviously medicating, and while I think it's hugely incautious of her to be drinking when she actively wants a kid--and to be drinking reguarly enough for a fifth of scotch to not affect her, because the detox on that is going to suck--it's also hugely insensative of Merry to be nausiated by the symptoms of obvious psychological misery simply because they gross her out.

And then, because Merry is grossed out and offended  about the birth-defect inspection without their consent--which they have every right to be pissed about--she goes on a long rant about how the Seelie sidhe give birth to deformed children and throw the deformed off on the Unseelie court, and that's why the court is known for being full of deformed people, and then Merry forces Maeve to promise to tell her the true reason she was thrown out of court, which we already know because they already told us, and then Merry hopes that Maeve had a deformed kid, and that the deformed kid got thrown into the Unseelie Court, and that Maeve is being haunted by this hypothetical deformed kid that Merry has assumed she has.

End of chapter.

You're a piece of shit, Merry. Really.