As Donia stared down at War through the dingy window, the amoral, single-minded faery stood, eyes closed, and smiled.
Behind her, Evan tapped lightly on the door. “Donia?”
He entered, filling the dusty room with the woodsy scent that clung to him. “Aaaah, you see already that she is here.”
Donia didn’t look away from the window as Evan came to stand at her back. “What does she want of us?”
“Nothing we want to give her.” Evan shivered.
Donia didn’t think that having her faeries, even her Head of the Guard, around was a wise move. War would overcome any solitary guard—and often entire platoons—without effort. It was better to not set temptation before her. It was better to avoid contact entirely, but that wasn’t an option today.
Donia said, “I’ll see her alone.”
Evan bowed and left as Bananach came racing up the stairs.
Once in the room, the raven-faery settled herself in the center of the rug. She sat cross-legged as if at a campfire—dressed in bloodstained fatigues, perfumed with the scent of ashes and death—and patted the floor. “Come.”
Donia watched the more-than-slightly-mad faery carefully. Bananach might appear friendly in this moment, but War didn’t come calling for no reason. “I’ve no business with you.”
“Shall I tell what business I have with you then?” Bananach gestured around the room, and screams rose from the silence that reigned over Donia’s domain. Faery and mortal voices intertwined in a raucous cry that forced tears to Donia’s eyes. Smoky faces hovered and blinked out in the room. Bleeding corpses trampled by faery feet appeared—only to be replaced by grotesque misshapen limbs reaching through windows. Those images gave way to montages of past battles in fields where the grass was stained red and homes burned. Flickering among these were glimpses of mortals sickened by plague and famine.
“Lovely possibilities come to us.” Bananach sighed as she looked at the stark corners of the room where her rendered images flashed to almost-life. “With you on my side, so much can be done sooner.”
The red-stained grass vanished as a new image appeared: Keenan stretched out under the faint image of Donia. They were on the bare floor where they’d once made love. As Donia watched, she saw herself on the floor entangled in Keenan’s arms. The image wasn’t real, but it gave her pause.
He was frostburnt; she was blistered.
She spoke to him, said words she had said over and over, words she’d once swore never to tell him again. “I love you.”
He sighed a name not hers. “Aislinn…”
Donia rose.
“I can’t do this, Keenan,” she whispered. Snow squalls rolled into the room.
He followed her, pleading forgiveness yet again. “Don…I didn’t mean…I’m sorry….”
Her illusory doppelgänger buried her hands in Keenan’s stomach, stabbing him.
He fell.
Sunlight flared, briefly blinding her even though it was illusion.
“You are just like Beira,” Bananach’s words came out as a sigh. “Just as tempestuous, just as ready to give me my chaos.”
Donia couldn’t move. She sat staring at the shimmering vision of herself with hands red with Keenan’s blood.
“I worried, feared you’d be different.” Bananach crooned the words. “Beira took so much longer to reach the point of striking the last Summer King. Not you.”
The red-handed Donia stood over Keenan, watching him bleed. He had rage in his eyes.
“That hasn’t happened.” Donia called every reserve of Winter’s calm to the forefront. “I have not hurt Keenan. I love him.”
Bananach crowed. It was an ugly sound, breaking the peace of Donia’s home. “A thing I am grateful for, Snow Queen. If you were cold inside, you wouldn’t have the cruelty of Winter that we need to get things in place.”
“Why tell me this?”
“Tell you what?” Bananach’s head tilted in small increments until the angle of it was grotesque.
“If you tell me what it will take to start your war, why would I do it?” Donia crossed and uncrossed her ankles. She stretched, briefly letting her eyes drift shut as if she was nonplussed by the horrors Bananach brought in her wake. It wasn’t very convincing.
Battle drums rose like a wall of thunder around them. Screams pierced the rhythms of that drumming. Then the sound ended abruptly, leaving only the melancholy music of bagpipes, purer for the chaos that had preceded them.
“Perhaps I want you not to stab the kingling.” Bananach grinned. “Perhaps that would stop my lovely destruction…. Your action can lead to the same upheaval Beira’s killing Miach caused.”
“Which action?”
Bananach snapped her jaw with a decisive clack. “One of them. Perhaps more.”
Donia winced as the illusory figures continued their conflict. Her doppelgänger was struck again and again by a sun-and-rage-filled bleeding Summer King. Then, the scene looped back to the moment where Keenan said Aislinn’s name, but this time Donia struck him until he stretched motionless on the floor.
“There are so many lovely answers to your question, Snow.” Bananach crooned the words. “So many ways you can give us bloody resolutions.”
Again the scene unfolded.
She spoke to him, said words she had said over and over, words she’d once swore never to tell him again. “I love you.”
He sighed. “I love you, but I can’t be with you.”
Donia couldn’t look away.
Once more the scene began.
She spoke to him, said words she had said over and over, words she’d once swore never to tell him again. “I love you.”
He sighed a name not hers. “Aislinn…”
“I can’t do this, Keenan,” she whispered. Snow squalls rolled into the room.
He struck her. “It was just a game….”
This time they both struck out at each other until the room was filled with steam. In the steam, corpses appeared again, growing seemingly more solid as the moments passed. In the center of the carnage, Bananach stood like the gleeful carrion crow she was.
“Why?” It was the only word left to Donia. “Why?”
“Why do you freeze the earth?” Bananach paused, and when Donia didn’t reply, she added, “We all have a goal, Winter Girl. Yours and mine are destruction. You accepted this when you took Beira’s court as your own.”
“That’s not what I want.”
“Power? Him to suffer for hurting you?” Bananach laughed. “Of course it’s what you want. All I do is find the threads in your actions that will give me what I want. I see them”—she waved at the room—“none of these are my possibilities. They are all yours.”
CHAPTER 13
The next week seemed almost normal for Aislinn: things with Seth were right again, Keenan hadn’t pushed her boundaries, and court things seemed calm. She couldn’t continue ignoring Keenan, and it was becoming almost physically painful to stay so much away from him, so Aislinn had decided to simply pretend that the awkwardness of last week hadn’t happened. She might’ve been avoiding being alone with Keenan the past couple of days, but aside from a few very pointed glances when she called Quinn or Tavish into a conversation they didn’t truly need to be a part of…and okay, maybe a few very transparent moments of sudden needs for “girl bonding” with the Summer Girls, Keenan pretended not to notice her evasiveness. He merely waited as she held her faeries to her like a shield. She enjoyed time with them, Eliza especially, but that didn’t explain away her need to go dancing in the park the moment Keenan came too near.
Totally obvious. It was apparent to everyone, but no one had mentioned it. Aside from Keenan and Seth, no one had enough comfort with her to do so. She was their queen, and right now, that gave her an extra bit of privacy.
They all see that something is up though. They are unsettled by it. She had promised herself that she would be a good queen. Upsetting them all was not what a good queen should do.
With a bit of a tremble in her hand, Aislinn tapped on the study door. “Keenan?” She pushed it open. “Are you free?”
He had her charts spread out in front of him on the coffee table. Music played softly in the background—one of her older CDs, actually, Poe’s Haunted. She’d picked it up at the Music Exchange one afternoon with Seth.
Keenan looked at her and then made a point of looking beyond her. “Where’s your safety team?”
She closed the door. “I gave them the afternoon off. I thought I could be around you…that we could talk.”
“I see.” He looked back at her charts. “You have a good idea here, but we’re not going to get very far with the desert area.”
“Why?” She didn’t bother commenting on his subject change. She wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to talk about it either, but they needed to.
“Rika lives there. She was one of the Winter Girls.” Keenan frowned. “Far too much like Don. She has issues with me.”
“You say that like it’s surprising.” She stood next to the sofa, nearer him than she should be, but she wasn’t going to let whatever weirdness had happened control her.
“It is.” Keenan leaned back on the sofa, propped his feet up on the coffee table, and folded his hands. “They act like I set out to hurt them. I never wanted anyone hurt…except Beira and Irial.”
“So they should just forgive and forget?” Aislinn had avoided this topic for months. She’d avoided a lot of topics, but sooner or later they had to sort it all out. Eternity was an awfully long time to let things simmer. “We all lost so many things when you chose—”
“We?” he interrupted.
“What?” She pulled a chair over and sat down.
“You said, ‘We all lost so many things.’ You were including yourself with the Summer and Winter Girls.”
“No, I…” She paused and blushed. “I did, didn’t I?”
He nodded.
“I am one of them. We, all the ones you chose, lost a lot.” She ducked her head, her hair falling forward like a curtain she could hide behind. “It’s not like I didn’t gain some amazing things too. I get that. Really.”
His expression was unusually closed to her. “But?”
“But it’s hard. Being this. I swear I’m never going to get my feet to stay under me. Grams is going to die. Seth—” She stopped herself from even uttering that sentence. “I’ll lose everyone. I’m not going to die, and they are.”
He lifted a hand as if to reach for her, and then lowered it. “I know.”
She took a couple calming breaths. “It’s hard not to be angry about that. Your choosing me means that I lose the people I love. I’ll be around forever, watching them age and die.”
“It means I lose the person I love too. Donia will only be in my life as long as your heart is elsewhere,” Keenan admitted.
“Don’t.” Aislinn cringed at hearing him say such things so casually. “That’s not fair…to anyone.”
“I know.” He was as still as she’d ever seen him. The sun was rising in the oasis she could see in his eyes. “I never wanted it to be the way it’s been. Beira and Irial bound my powers, hid them away. What was I to do? Let summer die? Let the earth freeze until all the mortals and summer fey perished?”
“No.” The reasonable part of her understood. She knew that there weren’t many choices other than the ones he’d made, but she still hurt inside. Logic didn’t undo sorrow or fear or any of it, not really. She’d just found Seth, and he was already drifting out of her grasp. He’ll die. She thought it. She couldn’t say it, but she thought it more than once in a while. Years from now, centuries from now, she’d still be this, and he’d be dust inside the earth. How can I not be angry? If she weren’t a faery, she wouldn’t be facing a future without Seth.
“So what would you have done differently, Aislinn? Would you have let the court die? If Irial bound your powers, could you shrug it off and let humanity and your court wither and die?”
In Keenan’s eyes she could see a dying star, a dark orb with a few desperate pulses of flickering light. As she stared, speechless, she saw tiny stars all around that dying sun; they were already lifeless in a growing void. She didn’t mean to love her court; if he’d told her months ago that she’d feel like this toward them, she wouldn’t have believed him. She’d felt a fierce protectiveness toward them, though, from the moment she became their queen. The Summer Court needed to grow stronger. She was trying to take what little experience she had and her research of politics and governments to help them grow stronger. She was trying to slowly press back against the imbalance that Donia’s court still held. Her court, her faeries, the well-being of the earth—these were more than choices. She believed in them. Feeling as she did now, could she have done differently had she been in his position? Could she have let Eliza die? Could she watch the cubs all freeze to death?
“No. I wouldn’t have,” she admitted.
“Don’t think for a moment that I wanted what has happened to the Winter Girls and the Summer Girls.” He moved then, leaning forward on the edge of the sofa, and caught her gaze. “I’ve spent longer berating myself for what I’ve had to do than you will ever know. I wanted”—he looked at her as more stars, barely flickering in the void, formed in his eyes—“each one to be you. And when they weren’t, I knew I was condemning them to a slow death if I didn’t find you.”
She sat silently. He was my age when this started. Making those choices. Hoping.
“I’d give them all back their mortality if I could, but even that wouldn’t repair what they’ve lost.” Keenan started stacking the papers on the coffee table. “And even if I could make them mortal again, I wouldn’t be willing to risk offering that same thing to you for fear of it remaking Beira’s curse, so even then I’d be left with the weight of knowing that I’ve taken the mortality of the one who saved me. You’re my savior, and I can’t make you happy.”
“I’m not—”
“You are. And it puts us in something of an awkward relationship, doesn’t it?”
“We’ll get it sorted out,” she whispered. “We have forever, right?” She tried to lighten her tone, to soothe him. This wasn’t the conversation she wanted to have at all, but it was the one they’d needed to have for a while now.
“We do.” He had resumed the motionless posture he’d had when the conversation began. “And I’ll spend it doing whatever I can to make you happy.”
“That’s not what I was…I mean…I’m not looking for you to do something to ‘make up’ for what had to be. I just…I’m scared of losing them. I don’t want to be alone.”
“You aren’t. We’ll be together for eternity.”
“You’re my friend, Keenan. That thing that happened the other day? It cannot happen. It shouldn’t have happened.” She was so tense, muscles clenched so tightly that she couldn’t relax her body to unfold her legs from underneath her. “I need you…but I don’t love you.”
“You wanted me to touch you.”
She swallowed against the lie she wanted to whisper and admitted, “I did. Once you reached out your hand, I didn’t want anything else.”
“So what do you want me to do?” He sounded unnaturally calm.
“Don’t reach out.” She bit down on her lip until she could feel her already cracked skin bleed.
He pulled his hand through his copper hair in frustration, but he nodded. “I will try. That’s all I can say and still be truthful.”
She shivered. “I’m going to talk to Donia tonight. You love Donia.”
“I do.” Keenan looked as confused as she’d felt. “That doesn’t change what I feel when I see you or think of you or am near to you. You can’t tell me you don’t feel the same way.”
“Love and desire aren’t the same.”
“Are you saying that all I feel is simple desire? Is that all you feel?” His arrogance was back, as surely as it had been when they first met and she was rejecting his advances.
“It’s not
a challenge, Keenan. This isn’t me running.”
“If you gave us a chance—”
“I love Seth. I…he’s my heart. If I could find a way to have him with me for always without being selfish, I would. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t feel a pull to be near you. You’re my king, and I need you to be my friend, but I don’t want a relationship with you. I’m sorry. You knew that when I became your queen. Nothing has changed. It’s not going to as long as I have him, and I want…” She paused. Saying the words she’d been thinking felt so final, but she said it: “I want to find a way to make Seth one of us. I want him with me forever.”
“No.” It wasn’t a reply: it was a king’s command.
“Why?” Her heart thudded. “He wants to stay with me…and I want to—”
“Donia thought she wanted to be with me forever too. So did Rika. And Liseli…and Nathalie…and…” He gestured around the room, empty but for the two of them. “Where are they?”
“It’s different. Seth’s different.”
“So would you have him be as the Summer Girls? Would you see him die if he left you?” Keenan looked angry. “You just finished telling me that you resent me for changing you. So do many, many others for my changing them. No. Do not pursue this.”
“He wants this. We can make it work.” Aislinn heard him voice the same fears she’d had, but she’d hoped that Keenan would tell her she’d worried foolishly, that there was a way.
“No, Ash. He thinks he does, but being changed would put him in thrall to you, make him your subject. He wouldn’t truly want that. Neither would you. I believed the Summer Girls wanted to be with me forever. Many of them believed it too. The Winter Girls believed it enough to suffer for my mistakes. Let it go. Faerie never offers a mortal what they truly seek, and cursing a loved one…” The Summer King looked far older than her in that moment. “It’s not called a curse because it’s beautiful, Aislinn. If you love Seth, you’ll treasure him while he’s in your life and then let him go. If I’d had other choices—”