Second Night #3
His smile was soft and a little bit sad.
“She had a laugh that could light up a room and a way of listening that made you feel heard, a kind of intensity that felt like standing in warm sunlight. Not just with me, but with everyone. People would open up to her, tell her secrets that they hadn’t intended to share.
A useful trait for a royal, but it wasn’t something she did for that reason.
It was simply how she was. My father was more reserved, but he had his own quiet strength, a well of deep self-certainty. They complemented each other.”
“How did they meet?” The way Tāwhiri spoke of his parents made them sound larger than life, as if he were repeating a story someone else had told him. It made me sad for the boy he’d been when they’d died, that he’d never had the chance to know them on more equal footing.
“An agreement negotiated between the Golden Wood and my mother’s land.
Political reasons. She set off not even knowing what he would look like, ‘based on the way he turned a sentence’, she liked to say.
” His hand went to touch one of his antlers.
“These are from him. He was in velvet when Marama saw him for the first time, and she used to call him Fuzzy-head. It was an in-joke between them.”
“Do you shed them like a deer too?” I asked before I could help it. It was deeply impolite to comment on a fae’s belua aspects. As if pretending some fae didn’t have them would make everyone pure sidhe.
He paused and studied me with an inscrutable expression. “Yes. Not for a while yet though, this season.”
“Oh. That’s … good to know,” I said. I had a suddenly inappropriate desire to touch them and knitted my fingers together to stop it.
“Is it?”
“It’s fine,” I amended. “Antlers are not important.”
I’d amused him again. It belatedly occurred to me that I should probably have praised his horns for their size and prowess, but it was too late now, so I asked him to tell me more about the Golden Hall instead.
Subject successfully changed, I investigated a plate of tiny savoury pikelets topped with swirls of soft cheese.
“Is it not my turn to ask you questions, according to the rules of polite conversation?” he asked just as I was mid-bite.
I swallowed hastily. The brief taste brought my appetite roaring to life, and I eyed the rest of the pikelets. “It would be much more polite to let me eat all of these first.”
He smiled, dark eyes twinkling. It was an extremely charming look, and I was fairly sure he knew that. It didn’t stop my heart from giving an extra-hard thump.
“I see,” he said solemnly. “Far be it from me to be impolite, then.”
He told me about the labyrinth of tunnels that riddled the palace complex, and how he’d learnt to fly by jumping off the old ruins hidden between gnarled trees.
I could picture him, a serious child, determined not to display any skill publicly until he was sure he’d perfected it.
It sounded lonely, growing up roaming these halls with an unbridgeable distance between him and any other playmates.
It also sounded oddly familiar, to be alone even when surrounded by others.
Pikelets now consumed, I found myself telling him of my stepsisters.
He listened with his head tilted to one side, as if I were the most fascinating person he’d ever met, his eyes softly curious, and more spilled out than I intended.
How it felt to be part but not-part of a family, to feel never quite good enough, to ache to bridge the distance.
I cut myself off belatedly before I revealed any more. Tāwhiri had his mother’s same dangerous gift for listening, I thought warily.
“I’m sure you’d be happy with either of my sisters,” I added out of a misplaced sense of fairness.
“Rose would marry you for your library in a heartbeat, and Acantha would love being a queen. She’d be good at it too; she’s always had the sort of confidence you need to carry people along with you. I imagine that’s useful for queen-ing.”
Had I gone mad? Why would I try to talk him out of this?
He made a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat, and his liquid gaze took on an intensity that made my heart race. I blushed and then remembered the illusion. He was gazing hungrily at a woman who didn’t exist. All my warm, shivery feelings sucked away into the cold night.
“And you? Would you like being a queen?” he asked.
I looked down at my hands and thought of the court’s envious gaze upon me.
Yes, said a part of me I wasn’t sure what to make of.
It wasn’t as if I had Acantha’s strength of character, or the kind of confidence that could sway crowds, even if I had secretly revelled in that brief moment of power on the dance floor.
But it hadn’t been real, had it? How would the court have reacted if I hadn’t been under an illusion?
“I don’t think I would know how,” I said eventually.
“Someone told me most people get better at things with practice.”
I laughed. “Well, you are getting better at conversation.”
He grinned. “Thank you.” There was that look in his eyes again that made my heart flutter traitorously.
I turned away from it, flustered and uncertain. “What’s this telescope about?” I waved at it.
“A telescope is a device that allows one to look at things that are far away. Such as stars.” His expression remained deadpan, but there was a spark of mischief in it. Oh, that wasn’t fair. He was teasing me.
I gave him a quelling look. “Yes, I know. That was me subtly asking if you were planning to do something with it tonight.”
He got to his feet and held out a hand. Cautiously, I took it, and he pulled me up. There was a brief moment where our bodies almost pressed together.
Almost.
He stepped back quickly, ducking his head. “Ah. I’ve already positioned it, so this shouldn’t take long—” He bent and fiddled with the instrument. “There. The Blue Sister is rising.” He gestured for me to step closer.
The telescope was a lovely thing, dark wood and gleaming brass. I bent and gasped at the image, immediately lifting my head to check what I’d seen against the sky. What appeared to the naked eye as a mere pale blue dot was revealed as a detailed disc in the telescope.
“I didn’t think I would be able to see so much,” I said in wonder. “Are those her moons?”
“Yes,” he said. “You can see all three of her children tonight. Sometimes you can see Evidita as well, but he is absent this evening. I … did not pick very romantic subjects, did I?”
Evidita, the unfaithful husband, leaving his wife and children to seek affairs with other divines.
I smiled at him. “If you’d picked the Undying Lovers from the sky, I think it would have been too much on top of all this.” I gestured at the midnight picnic and then bent once more to the telescope to escape the heat in Tāwhiri’s gaze.
“I did think of it, but the Lovers are not out tonight,” he admitted.
“Good to know even a king has his limits.”
I counted the Blue Sister’s tiny moons, none of which could be seen unaided. “Unromantic or not, this is incredible,” I murmured, awed. It felt like magic, even more so because it wasn’t magic at all—just a few simple bits of glass, metal, and wood, bringing the heavens closer.
The image slipped out of focus half a minute later, and Tāwhiri showed me how to adjust the telescope to follow the Blue Sister’s path. His fingers brushed mine, sending a swirl of butterflies through me. Our gazes met, and his eyes heated.
Remember the illusion.
I didn’t want to remember it. I wanted this romantic midnight picnic and the beautiful man looking at me with dark-fire eyes to be real.
I wanted to be the sort of woman who got courted like this for reasons that had nothing to do with politics or pragmatism.
Even though I knew, deep down, that I wasn’t and never would be.
But I let myself pretend, for a little while.
What could it hurt, after all? We talked, of everything and yet nothing that truly mattered.
I grew more intensely aware of him as the night deepened.
The rustle of feathers. The warmth of his body, so close.
The sleek profile of his antlers and the starlight glittering in his hair.
But I couldn’t pretend forever, so eventually I swallowed and raised the topic that perched on the tower between us like an invisible lion-drake.
“Say I did agree to marry you. How would that work?” I faced him head-on.
“We would pledge our troth before the Golden Wood—”
“No. After that. A human queen on the throne? The twelve houses outraged?”
“The court will have to accept my choice. You will be queen, and they will not be able to change it. Do you really care whether they are outraged? They will survive the feeling, I’m sure.
” He said this with the easy confidence of someone who has never lacked power.
It was terribly tempting to be persuaded by it, even though I thought he was being dangerously optimistic about his court’s reaction.
I pressed on. “And what about children? Would you want them? Half-human children, inheriting the Golden Wood?” Heat flushed my cheeks, but I kept my shoulders straight. These weren’t idle questions. Better this mad bargain fall apart now if they couldn’t be answered.
Tāwhiri spread his wings. “I am not pure sidhe, my lady. My mother was a bird-woman, and I can name a dozen other fae races in my family tree. There’s even some human in the mix already. I have always attributed the strength of my house’s bloodline to that diversity.”
I hadn’t known that Tāwhiri had a human ancestor. Did Lord Bloodthorn know? Though I supposed he’d always been willing to overlook ‘undesirable’ traits for the sake of royalty.
It was a reassuring answer, but it also completely avoided the thing that had prompted me to ask in the first place. Children required certain prerequisite activities.
“So, you’d want children, then? With me.”
The heat returned to his gaze. “I … Yes. One day. Is that something you would want?” His voice sounded huskier than normal.