“So what happens?” Aline said. They stood at the edge of the bluffs, overlooking the highway and the sea. “If Magnus starts turning into a demon. What happens?”
Her eyes were red and swollen but her back was straight. She had talked to her father, who had told her only what he knew: That guards had come in the early morning to take Jia to the Gard. That Horace Dearborn had promised no harm would come to her, but that “a show of good faith” was necessary to reassure those who had “lost confidence.”
If he thought it was all lies, he didn’t say so, but Aline knew it was and had called Dearborn every name in the book to Helen the minute she had hung up the phone. Aline had always known an impressive number of curse words.
“We do have the Mortal Sword,” said Helen. “The one from Thule. It’s hidden, but Jace knows where, and what to do. He won’t let Alec do it himself.”
“Couldn’t we—I don’t know—try to capture the demon? Turn it back into Magnus?”
“Oh, honey, I don’t know,” Helen said wearily. “I don’t think there’s any coming back from being turned into a demon, and Magnus wouldn’t want to live like that.”
“It’s not fair.” Aline kicked a good-size rock. It sailed off the edge of the bluffs; Helen could hear it tumbling down the slope toward the highway. “Magnus deserves better than this garbage. We all do. How did everything get like this—so bad, so fast? Things were all right. We were happy.”
“We were in exile, Aline,” Helen said. She wrapped her arms around her wife and rested her chin on Aline’s shoulder. “The cruelty of the Clave tore me from my family, because of my blood. Because of what I cannot help. The seeds of this poison tree were planted long ago. We are only now watching it begin to flower.”
*
The sun had set by the time Mark and Kieran began their watch. Mark had hoped to be paired up with Julian, but for some reason Emma had wanted to go with Clary and they’d ended up oddly matched.
They walked for a while in silence, letting the dusk settle into darkness around them. Mark hadn’t talked to Kieran about anything significant since they’d come back from Faerie. He had wanted to, ached to, but he had been afraid of making a confusing situation even worse.
Mark had started to wonder if the problem was him: if his human half and his faerie half held contradictory ideas about love and romance. If half of him wanted Kieran and the freedom of the sky and the other half wanted Cristina and the grandeur and responsibility of earthbound angels.
It was enough to make someone go out into the statue garden and bang their head repeatedly against Virgil.
Not that he’d done that.
“We might as well talk, Mark,” Kieran said. A bright moon was rising; it illuminated the dark ocean, turned it to a sheet of black-and-silver glass, the colors of Kieran’s eyes. The night desert was alive with the sound of cicadas. Kieran was walking beside Mark with his hands looped behind him, deceptively human-looking in his jeans and T-shirt. He had drawn the line at donning any gear. “It does us no good to ignore each other.”
“I have missed you,” Mark said. There seemed no point in not being honest. “Nor did I intend to ignore you, or to hurt you. I apologize.”
Kieran looked up with a surprised flash of silver and black. “There is no need to apologize, Mark.” He hesitated. “I have had, as you say here in the mortal world, a lot on my mind.”
Mark hid a smile in the dusk. It was irritatingly cute when Kieran used modern phrases.
“I know you have as well,” Kieran went on. “You were fearful for Julian and for Emma. I understand. And yet I cannot keep myself from selfish thoughts.”
“What kind of selfish thoughts?” Mark said. They were near the parking lot, among the statues Arthur Blackthorn had paid to have shipped here years ago. Once they had stood in the gardens of Blackthorn House in London. Now Sophocles and the others inhabited this desert space and looked out on a sea far from the Aegean.
“I believe in your cause,” Kieran said slowly. “I believe the Cohort are evil people, or at least power-hungry people who seek evil solutions to the problems their fears and prejudices have created. Yet though I may believe, I cannot help but feel that no one is looking out for the welfare of my homeland. For Faerie. It was—it is—a place that possesses goodness and marvels among its dangers and trials.”
Mark turned to Kieran in surprise. The stars were brilliant overhead, the way they only ever were in the desert, as if they were closer to the earth here.
The stars will go out before I forget you, Mark Blackthorn.
“I have not heard you talk about Faerie that way before,” Mark said.
“I would not speak of it that way to most.” Kieran touched the place at his throat where once his elf-bolt necklace had rested, then dropped his hand. “But you—you know Faerie in a way others do not. The way the water tumbles blue as ice over Branwen’s Falls. The taste of music and the sound of wine. The honey hair of mermaids in the streams, the glittering of will-o’-the-wisps in the shadows of the deep forests.”
Mark smiled despite himself. “The brilliance of the stars—the stars here are but pale shadows of those in Faerie.”
“I know you were a captive there,” Kieran said. “But I would like to think you came to see something good in it as you saw something good in me.”
“There is much that is good in you, Kieran.”
Kieran looked restlessly toward the ocean. “My father was a bad ruler and Oban will be an even worse one. Imagine what a good ruler could make of the Lands of Faerie. I fear for Adaon’s life and I also fear for the fate of Faerie without him. If my brother cannot be King there, what hope is there for my land?”
“There could be another King, another prince of Faerie who is worthy,” said Mark. “It could be you.”
“You forget what I saw in the pool,” Kieran said. “The way I hurt people. The way I hurt you. I should not be King.”
“Kieran, you have become a different person, and so have I,” Mark said. He could almost hear Cristina’s voice in the back of his mind, the soft way she had always defended Kieran—never excusing, only understanding. Explaining. “We were desperate in the Hunt, and desperation can make people unkind. But you have changed—I have seen you change, even before you touched the waters of the pool. I have seen how kind you were when you lived in your father’s Court, and how you were loved because of it, and while the Wild Hunt cloaked that kindness, it did not erase it. You have been only good to me, to my family, to Cristina, since you returned from the Scholomance.”
“The pool—”
“It is not only the pool,” said Mark. “The pool helped to uncover what was already there. You understand what it means for another to suffer and that their pain is no different from your own. Most kings never understand such a thing as true empathy. Think what it would be like, to have a ruler who did.”
“I do not know if I have that faith in myself.” Kieran spoke quietly, his voice as hushed as the wind across the desert.
“I have that faith in you,” said Mark.
At that, Kieran turned fully to Mark. His expression was open, the way Mark had not seen it in a long time, an expression that hid nothing—not his fear, nor his uncertainty, nor the transparency of his love. “I didn’t know—I feared I had broken your faith in me and with it the bond between us.”
“Kier,” Mark said, and he saw Kieran shiver at the use of that old nickname. “Today you stood up and offered all your powers as a prince and faerie to save my family. How can you not know how I feel?”
Kieran was staring at his own hand, where it hovered at the edge of Mark’s shirt collar. He gazed as if hypnotized at the place where their skin touched, his fingers against Mark’s collarbone, sliding up to brush his throat, the side of his jaw. “You mean you are grateful?”
Mark caught Kieran’s hand, brought it to his chest, and pressed Kieran’s open palm against his hammering heart. “Does that feel like gratitude?”
Kieran looked at him with wide eyes. And Mark was back in the Hunt again, he was on a green hill in the rain, with Kieran’s arms around him. Love me. Show me.
“Kieran,” Mark breathed, and kissed him, and Kieran gave a small harsh cry and caught Mark by the sleeves, pulling him close. Mark’s arms hooked around Kieran’s neck, drawing him down into the kiss: Their mouths slid together and Mark tasted their shared breath, an elixir of heat and yearning.
Kieran pulled back from the kiss at last. He was grinning, the wickedly joyous grin Mark suspected no one else ever saw but him. Holding Mark by the arms, he walked him back several paces until Mark fetched up against the side of a boulder. Kieran leaned into him, his mouth against Mark’s throat, his lips finding the hammering pulse point and sucking gently at it until Mark gasped and buried his hands in Kieran’s silky hair.