“You are killing me,” Mark said, laughter bubbling up softly from the depths of his chest.

Kieran chuckled, his hands moving to slip under Mark’s shirt, caress his back, skate over the scars on his shoulder blades. And Mark answered his touch. He stroked his fingers through Kieran’s hair, caressed his face as if mapping the curves of it, let his fingers stray to touch the skin he remembered like the substance of a dream: Kieran’s sensitive throat, collarbone, wrists, the beautiful and unforgotten terrain of what he had thought was lost. Kieran breathed in harsh low moans as Mark slid his hands under the prince’s shirt, stroking his uncovered skin, the silk-hardness of his flat stomach, the curves of his rib cage.

“My Mark,” Kieran whispered, touching Mark’s hair, his cheek. “I adore you.”

Te adoro, Mark.

Mark’s skin went cold; it all seemed suddenly wrong. He dropped his hands abruptly and slid away from Kieran. He felt as if he couldn’t quite catch his breath.

“Cristina,” he said.

“Cristina is not what keeps us apart,” said Kieran. “She is what brings us together. All that we have said, all the ways we have changed—”

“Cristina,” Mark said again, clearing his throat, because she was standing just in front of them.

*

Cristina felt as if her face might actually catch on fire. She had come out to tell Mark and Kieran that she and Aline were prepared to take over on watch, without even once thinking that she might be interrupting them in a private moment.

When she had come around the boulder, she had frozen—it had reminded her so much of the first time she had seen them together. Kieran leaning against Mark, their bodies together, their hands in each other’s hair, kissing as if they could never stop.

I am an awful idiot, she thought. They were both looking at her now: Mark seemed stricken, Kieran oddly calm.

“I’m so sorry,” Cristina said. “I only came out to tell you that your watch was ending, but—I—I will go.”

“Cristina,” Mark said, starting toward her.

“Don’t go,” Kieran said. It was a demand, not a request: There was a rich darkness in his voice, a depth of yearning. And though Cristina had no reason to listen, she turned slowly to look at them both.

“I really think,” she said, “that I probably ought to. Don’t you?”

“I was recently given a piece of advice by a wise person not to remain silent about what I wished for,” said Kieran. “I desire you and love you, Cristina, and so does Mark. Stay with us.”

Cristina couldn’t move. She thought again of the first time she’d seen Mark and Kieran together. The desire she’d felt. She’d thought at the time she wanted something like what they had: that she wanted that passion for herself and some unnamed boy whose face she didn’t know.

But it had been a long time since any face in her dreams had not been either Mark’s or Kieran’s. Since she had imagined any eyes looking into hers that were both the same color. She had not wanted some vague approximation of what they had: She had wanted them.

She looked at Mark, who seemed pinned between hope and terror. “Kieran,” he said. His voice shook. “How can you ask her that? She’s not a faerie, she’ll never talk to us again—”

“But you will leave me,” she said, hearing her own voice as if it were a stranger’s. “You love each other and belong together. You will leave me and go back to Faerie.”

They looked at her with expressions of identical shock. “We will never leave you,” said Mark.

“We will stay as close to you as the tide to the shore,” said Kieran. “Neither of us wishes for anything else.” He reached out a hand. “Please believe us, Lady of Roses.”

The few steps across the sand and scrub grass were the longest and shortest Cristina had ever taken. Kieran stretched out both arms: Cristina went into them and lifted up her face and kissed him.

Heat and sweetness and the curve of his lips under hers nearly lifted her off her feet. He was smiling against her mouth. Saying her name. His hand on her side, thumb gently caressing the inward dip of her waist.

She leaned into him and reached out with her free hand. Mark’s warm fingers closed around her wrist. As if she were a princess, he kissed the back of her fingers, brushing his lips across her knuckles.

Her heart was beating triple time as she turned in Kieran’s arms, her back to him. He drew her hair away from the nape of her neck and pressed a kiss there, making her shiver as she reached out to Mark. His eyes glittered blue and gold, alive with desire for her, for Kieran, for the three of them together.

He let her draw him in and they tangled together as one. Mark kissed her lips as she leaned back against Kieran’s chest, Kieran’s hand in Mark’s hair, trailing down Mark’s cheek to trace the line of his collarbone. She had never felt such love; she had never been held so very close.

A great clamor burst out in the sky above them—a clamor they all knew, though Kieran and Mark knew it best.

They drew apart quickly as the air rushed around them: The sky swirled with movement. Manes and tails whipped in the wind, eyes glowed a thousand colors, warriors roared and shouted, and at the center of it all was a great black brindle horse with a man and woman seated on its back, pausing to look down at the earth below as the sound of a hunting horn faded on the air.

Gwyn and Diana had returned, and they were not alone.

*

Julian had always thought his studio—which had been his mother’s—was the most beautiful room in the Institute. You could see everything through the two glass walls: ocean and desert; the other walls were creamy and bright with his mother’s abstract paintings.

He could see it now, but he couldn’t feel it. Whatever feeling it was that looking at beauty had always raised in his artist’s soul was gone.

Without feeling, he thought, I am dissolving, like royal water dissolves gold. He knew it, but he couldn’t feel that, either.

To know you were despairing but not to be able to feel that despair was a strange experience. He looked at the paints he’d arranged around the plain white cloth stretched over the central island. Blue and gold, red and black. He knew what he ought to shape with them, but when he picked up the brush, he only hesitated.

Everything instinctual about drawing had left him, everything that told him what would make one curve of the paintbrush better than another, everything that matched shades of color to shades of meaning. Blue was just blue. Green was green, whether light or dark. Blood red and stoplight red were the same.

Emma is avoiding me, he thought. The thought didn’t bring pain, because nothing did. It was just a fact. He remembered the desire he had felt in her room the night before and set his paintbrush down. It was strange to think of desire as divorced from feeling: He had never desired anyone he hadn’t already loved. Never desired anyone but Emma.

But the night before, with her in his arms, he had felt almost as if he could break through the dullness that surrounded him, that choked him with its nothingness; as if the blaze of wanting her could burn it down and he would be free.

It was better that she did avoid him. Even in this state, his need for her was too strange, and too strong.

Something flashed past the glass of the studio window. He went to look out and saw that Gwyn and Diana were on the lawn and that several of the others surrounded them: Cristina, Mark, Kieran. Gwyn was handing a glass jar to Alec, who took it and went running back toward the Institute, flying across the grass like one of his own arrows. Dru was dancing up and down with Tavvy, spinning in circles. Emma hugged Cristina and then Mark. Gwyn had an arm around Diana, who was leaning her head on his shoulder.

Relief washed through Julian, brief and cool as a splash of water. He knew he should feel more, that he should feel joy. He saw Ty and Kit standing a little apart from the others; Ty had his head tipped back, as he often did, and was pointing at the stars.

Julian looked up as the sky darkened with a hundred airborne riders.

*

Mark could not help but be conscious of Kieran’s tension as the Wild Hunt began to land all around them, alighting on the grass like dandelion seeds blown by the wind.

He could not blame him. Mark himself felt dizzy with shock and the aftereffects of desire—already those moments with Cristina and Kieran by the boulder seemed like a fever dream. Had it happened? It must have—Cristina was smoothing down her hair with quick, nervous movements, her lips still red from kissing. Mark checked his own clothes quickly. He no longer had faith that he had not ripped off his own shirt and cast it into the desert with the announcement that he would never need shirts again. Anything seemed possible.