Lord of Shadows

“We have to let Kieran think he and Mark are still dating?” said Ty, looking bewildered. Kit felt the whole thing was beyond him as well, but then Henry VIII had beheaded several of his wives for apparently governmental reasons. The personal, the political, and the romantic were often oddly entwined.

“Concealing these things from Kieran isn’t ideal,” said Julian, hands in his pockets. “And I hate to ask you guys to lie. Probably it’s best to avoid the subject. But there’s literally no other way to make sure he actually shows up in front of the Clave.”

Mark sat, running his fingers through his blond hair in a distracted manner. Kit could hear him saying, “I’m all right, it’s fine,” to Cristina. He felt a surge of odd sympathy—not for Mark, but for Kieran. Kieran, who didn’t know that his boyfriend wasn’t really his boyfriend, that he was sleeping in a house full of people who, however friendly they might seem, would lie to him to get something they needed.

He thought of the coldness he’d seen in Julian back at the Shadow Market. Julian, who would sacrifice Kieran, and perhaps his own brother in a way, to get what he wanted.

Even if it was a good thing to want. Even if it was the end of the Cold Peace. Kit looked at Julian, gazing at the parlor fire with fathomless eyes, and suspected that there was more to it.

That where Julian Blackthorn was concerned, there would always be more to it.



16



PASS THE WANDERER



Mark made his way toward Kieran’s room, steeling himself to lie.

Uneasiness and exhaustion had driven Mark from the parlor. The others, equally tired, were scattering to their own bedrooms. Cristina had slipped away without Mark noticing—though he had felt her absence, as a sort of pang in his chest, after she was gone. Diana had decided to leave as soon as she could for Idris, and Julian and Emma had gone to see her off.

Mark had been a little shocked by Emma’s announcement that the pretense of their relationship was over; he knew what he’d said to her, back in Faerie, and that she’d only done as he asked. Still he felt slightly unmoored, alone, with no idea how to look in Kieran’s eyes and tell him untruths.

He didn’t like lying; he hadn’t done it in the Hunt, and he felt uncomfortable with the rhythms of it. He wanted to talk about it with Cristina, but he couldn’t imagine she’d want to hear about his complicated feelings for Kieran. Julian would be focused entirely on what was necessary and had to be done, no matter how painful. And now he could no longer talk to Emma. He hadn’t realized how close their relationship, however false, had brought them in actual friendship; he wondered, now, if he would lose that, too.

And as for Kieran—Mark leaned his head against the wall next to Kieran’s door. The corridors were papered in dulled gold leaf, trailing vines and trellises, cool against his forehead. Kieran was the person he could talk to least.

Not that banging his head on a wall was going to do any good. He straightened up and pushed the door open quietly; the room they’d set aside for Kieran was far away from the rest of the sleeping quarters, up a small flight of stairs, a room that looked as if it had likely once been used for storage. Narrow, arched windows looked out over the flat walls of other buildings. There was a massive four-poster bed in the middle of the room and an enormous wardrobe—though what they thought Kieran could possibly put in it, Mark had no idea.

The coverlet had been pulled off the bed and Kieran was nowhere to be seen. Mark felt a lurch of unease. Kieran had promised Cristina he would stay, in his own way: If he had decided not to honor his pledge to Cristina, there would be trouble.

Mark sighed, and closed his eyes. He felt stupid and vulnerable, standing in the middle of the room with his eyes shut, but he knew Kieran. “Kier,” he said. “I can’t see anything. Come out and talk to me.”

A moment later there were fierce hands on his sides, lifting him, tossing him back on the bed. Kieran’s weight pushed Mark down into the mattress; Mark opened his eyes and saw Kieran propped over him, savage and strange in his gentry clothes. The outline of Kieran’s bandages pressed against Mark’s chest, but otherwise Kieran’s weight was a familiar one. To his body, a welcome one.

Kieran was looking down at him, silver and black eyes like the night sky. “I love you,” Kieran said. “And I have made promises. But if I am to be constantly shamed and sent away, I will not answer for my actions.”

Mark smoothed back a lock of Kieran’s hair. The strands slipped through his fingers, heavy silk. “I’ll make sure they treat you with more respect. They just have to get used to you.”

Kieran’s eyes glittered. “I have done nothing to earn their distrust.”

Oh, but you have, Mark thought, you have, and everyone remembers it but you.

“They helped me rescue you,” he said instead. “Don’t be ungrateful.”

Kieran smiled at that. “I would rather imagine it was only you responsible.” He bent down to nuzzle Mark’s throat.

Mark half-closed his eyes; he could feel his own lashes tickle his cheeks. He could feel the shift of the weight of Kieran on top of him. Kieran smelled like ocean, as he usually did. Mark remembered a hill in a green country, a damp cairn of stones, tumbling with Kieran to the bottom of it. Hands in his hair and on his body when he hadn’t been touched in so long. He had burned and shivered. He shivered now. What was Kieran to him? What was he to Kieran? What had they ever been to each other?

“Kier,” Mark said. “Listen—”

“Now is not the time for talking,” said Kieran, and his lips were featherlight on Mark’s skin, moving along the pulse of his throat, along his jaw, to capture his mouth.

It was a moment that felt stretched out to forever, a moment in which Mark fell through stars that shattered all around him. Kieran’s lips were soft and cool and tasted like rain, and Mark clung to him in the dark and broken place at the bottom of the sky.

He tangled his fingers in Kieran’s hair, curled his fingertips in, heard Kieran exhale harshly against his mouth. His body pressed harder against Mark’s, and then Kieran’s fingers slid against the back of Mark’s neck and knotted in the chain that held his elf-bolt necklace.

It was like being shaken awake. Mark rolled over, taking Kieran with him, so they were lying side by side on the bed. The movement broke the kiss, and Kieran stared at him, half-annoyed and half-dazed. “Miach,” he said. His voice took the word and turned it into a beckoning caress, an invitation to faerie pleasures unimaginable.

“No,” said Mark. “Don’t call me that.”

Kieran inhaled. “There is something wrong between us, is there not? Mark, please tell me what it is. I sense the distance but do not understand its cause.”

“You don’t remember, but we had an argument. About me staying with my family. It’s why I gave you my elf-bolt necklace back.”

Kieran looked bewildered. “But I always knew you might stay with your family. I did not want it, but I must have come to accept it. I remember waking in the Unseelie Court. I do not remember feeling any anger toward you.”

“It wasn’t a bad fight.” Mark swallowed. “But I wasn’t expecting this—you, in my world. All the complications of these politics.”

“You don’t want me here?” Kieran’s face didn’t change, but his hair was suddenly streaked with white where it curled against his temples.

“It’s not that,” Mark said. “In the Wild Hunt, I thought I might die any night. Every night. I wanted everything, always, and risked anything, because no one depended on me. And then there was you, and we depended on each other, but . . .” He thought of Cristina. Her words came to him, and he couldn’t help using them, though it almost felt like a betrayal. Cristina, who he had kissed with joyous abandon for those few moments near the revel, before he had realized what she thought of him . . . someone she would only kiss when drunk or out of her mind . . .