Second Night #4
I took off the mask because I couldn’t bear this anymore. It lay starkly white against the stone. I leaned down and removed my glass slippers one by one, setting them carefully on the stone with matching clinks.
“You should kiss me,” I said without looking up.
There was a shocked silence from the other half of the tower.
“You can talk about it in this bloodless manner all you like, but marriage isn’t just a balanced list of advantages and disadvantages.
Children don’t spring fully formed out of the ground, you know.
” I spoke to my feet, babbling a bit, but determined to make my point now I’d gotten up the courage to start.
“We have to have some degree of physical compatibility. I know I’m not much to look at, but if you can’t bear to touch me without some pure-blood sidhe illusion, then better to know that now, before—”
Cool fingers beneath my chin, tilting my face up.
“My own illusions don’t work on me,” he said, and kissed me.
I don’t have words for how it was, that first time. Word and thought had been knocked clean out of me, as if language itself had ceased to have meaning.
I’d read about kisses and listened avidly to Acantha’s salacious gossip on the subject. Speculated interestedly late at night in the privacy of my attic. None of that had prepared me for the raw physicality or the way my body would react, suddenly a stranger to me. A wild, sensual stranger.
He tasted of nixie wine, his tongue leading a dance far more intimate than the one from the ballroom earlier.
My hands dug into the lapels of his coat, pulling him closer.
The heat of him blazed against me, and I wondered what his bare skin would feel like beneath all the layers of clothing and was simultaneously shocked at myself for wondering such a thing.
My thoughts ran fever-hot, unable to form into anything longer or more complicated than more, closer, yes.
His arms wrapped around me, and then his wings, filling the space with the spice-scent of feathers. The movement startled me enough to pull back. I stared at him, breathless and thrumming, as dazed as a punch-drunk kererū.
My only comfort was that Tāwhiri seemed just as affected, even though I suspected he’d kissed a great many more people than I.
His eyes were a bit wild, his long hair messy where I’d buried my hands in it.
The newly rebellious bit of myself that seemed to hold all kinds of previously unknown ambitions and desires said, smugly: good.
We drank each other in under the starlight. My lips felt swollen.
He swallowed, and my gaze latched onto the way it made his throat move. “Are you satisfied we have some degree of physical compatibility?”
“Yes,” I said faintly, and then wished I’d said I needed further convincing. Could I kiss him again anyway?
His expression didn’t invite further kissing expeditions. It instead suggested complicated thoughts involving higher mathematics were happening behind it. Had I done something wrong? Was he now having kissing-based doubts about this bargain?
After long moments of searching my face, he pulled an envelope from his pocket. “This is for you.”
I took it, still addled from the kiss, but his next words brought me to full alertness.
“It’s from your mother. Your birth mother.” He looked … embarrassed? “After what you said yesterday, I went to your kingdom and searched for a pregnant scullery maid from the palace many years ago, sent to marry a farmer.”
My mind was a vast, empty blankness. “My mother. She’s alive,” I said.
I knew time passed differently in Faerie, though it wasn’t predictable.
It might have been a day or a hundred years since I’d been taken.
I’d always preferred to think the latter.
It had felt less painful to believe that door firmly closed.
He rubbed the base of his antlers, an oddly nervous gesture.
“Yes, and happy, I believe. She’s a grandmother now, surrounded by her family.
The farmer she married—whether they loved each other to start with, I know not, but they cared for each other deeply before he passed. It was clear in how she spoke of him.”
I sat down hard in the nest of cushions, holding the envelope like it might bite. Surrounded by her family, he’d said.
“I told her you had grown into a daughter any mother might be proud of and asked her to write you your name. I haven’t read it,” he added quickly. “You do not need to read it now, if it is too much—”
I opened the envelope. The letter was written in a strong hand.
To my beloved daughter, Ella Dufrene.
I stopped reading, my heart stuttering. “My name is Ella.” The syllables formed strangely on my tongue.
“Ella.” His deep, velvety voice caressed the name.
“Say it again,” I said, my fingers holding the letter so tight it started to crumple. I forced them to unclench.
“Ella,” he repeated.
I shivered and read the rest of the letter, coming unmoored as I did.
“She loves me,” I said when I looked up, words spilling out of me as twenty years of bottled-up hurt came unstopped all at once.
“She tried to stop Lord Bloodthorn from taking me. She never gave me up willingly. I was wanted. I was wanted.”
I hugged the letter to my chest, blinking rapidly.
Tāwhiri inclined his antlers. “I believe it. I said I wished to make you a queen, and she said queens were all very fine, but if it wasn’t what you wanted, she’d hunt me down and use my feathers for pillow stuffing.”
I gave a soft, disbelieving laugh.
“Ella.” Tāwhiri took half a step towards me. “Forgive me—I should not have sprung this on you without warning.”
I took a harsh gulp of breath. I had a name, a name unbound by debt and shame. “No. I’m not upset. I’m … happy.” And bitterly sad, grieving a life I hadn’t even known to grieve. It changed things, knowing my mother hadn’t willingly bargained me away. “Thank you.”
His eyes were soft, and I pretended a sudden interest in the nearest cushion-tassel.
He’d gone to a lot of trouble over this, visiting the mortal realm and hunting down my mother based on one stray comment.
It was the nicest thing that anyone had ever done for me, but it made me uneasy at the same time. Gifts never come for free, in Faerie.
“What happens if you don’t announce a bride tomorrow night?” I asked the cushion tassel.
Tāwhiri drew in a long, slow breath. “I will be forsworn.”