24 #2
“We do everything intensely, Olivia. We fight with earnest, we laugh hard, we dance harder. We hate powerfully. We love passionately—” He paused, looking down at our conjoined hands.
His burly fingers flexed a few times, sending a shiver along my body.
“And so I looked down at you, at your face that I feared would never look back at me again, and I resorted to my most primal of states. You were mine and I thought I had let you die.”
“Yours?” My voice was something below a whisper. Frail and uncertain, yet needing to be heard.
“I don’t expect you to understand. I don’t mind that you don’t.
But something shifted, Olivia. I…” His pupils continued to widen, even when he blinked several times to rid himself of the look.
“I see you now, looking at me with your beautiful, wide eyes, your lips that draw full breaths, and I want to do nothing but take you into my arms and never let the world harm you again.”
I swallowed. The heaviness of his words were somehow denser than the oil-water I had drowned in. But I wasn’t afraid of his intensity, or the way that his gaze drank me in.
“I’m not telling you for any reason but this; I am doing all that I can right now, especially as you continue to blink at me that way, to not look at you the way I want to look at you.
To not bury myself in your flesh and draw so much of your scent in that it would satisfy my lungs.
To not—” With a low growl he stopped, palming his forehead and looking away.
“I’m not explaining this very well. But I just…
I needed you to know. Because if you get yourself into trouble again, I might not be so calm and collected.
” With that, he let out a nervous laughter.
That noise, his gleaming eyes, and his mischievous smirk was enough to alleviate the tension between us. But it wasn’t bad tension.
“Anyway,” he hummed, making an effort of sliding an inch away from me. I wanted to tell him to remain close, but something about the feathering of his jaw suggested the distance was for him. “I promised you stories, didn’t I?”
~
So Killian told me stories.
We started over three-thousand years ago, when the first four Kings of Saoghal began to divide up their territory.
King Cillian of Uisge, King Kealan of Cluaineach, King Finnian of Speur, and King Ellery of Choilltean.
The four of them, the first of the pixies to rise to a place of royalty, carved their borders of the natural outlay of the land.
Some took to the sky, others to the sea.
But it was always the two on land, the division between forest and meadow, that never seemed quite settled in the separation between them.
Killian told me of the first few centuries of wars. A battle for a spread of green here, a battle for a spread of tree there. Choilltean and Cluaineach, always at one another's doorstep with a host of soldiers bearing swords and shields, spears and axes, bows and arrows.
Speur often sided with Cluaineach, having little need for the rich canopy with such vast sets of wings. Uisge often found themselves flipping between Choilltean and Cluaineach, depending on which King could offer them the best of allegiances.
Then Killian spoke of the rise of King Ronan, the first King in their history to demand not war but peace.
In order to obtain such a thing, though, King Ronan led his warriors across every inch of Saoghal, shedding blood and leaving bodies in his wake in the victorious promise of peace.
Which he obtained, of course. In the final hours of that war, the four monarchs of four mighty kingdoms met, signing deeds of trade, pacts for a future of stability and quiet between the four kingdoms.
He told me about the night that King Diarmuid decided the throne was no longer his seat to claim, and did what no other monarch had done in Saoghal – he handed it over to his daughter, Queen Róisín.
And on the final night, the day that the deeds and the pacts and the treaties all solidified across Saoghal, Killian spoke of the dangerous power of nectar, of how it led one King not to his Queen's chambers but to another.
He spoke of the night that would forever drive a wedge between Choilltean and Cluaineach, for it was the beginning of the end of the short relationship between the two kingdoms.
Then, how three decades later, King Ronan drove the final stake between himself and his neighbouring folk.
How he laid his claim to his bastard son, his one and only heir, and slaughtered the King and Queen of Cluaineach in his attempt.
Killian told me, without telling me, all about the day that would mark Raegan’s abduction from the sun.
~
Only because the mood was solemn did Killian change gears. He explained how centuries ago there was a night, once a year, where all the fair-folk would gather for an evening of feasting and dancing and drinking. The Aos Sí and the Fairies, the Pixies and the Red Caps, Pookas and Gnomes.
We laughed when Killian announced that there is a semi-annual tournament for a strange sport called Geamannan that somehow involves both sea-creatures and flying-creatures in an assortment of races and obstacle courses.
Somewhere along the way, between story after story, tale after tale, laughter upon laughter, the hours rushed by.
It was only when Shea, what felt like minutes later but in all reality was half-a-day later, entered my room and notified Killian that the meeting was beginning soon, that we realized how quickly the day had passed us by.
“Help me up, won’t you?” I whined to Killian as I tried – and failed – to get out of bed.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Shea snorted as she glared at us from the doorway.
“To the meeting.”
Her next snort was half-scoff, half-laugh as she shook her head. “You’re not coming.”
“Raegan said I —”
“Raegan said specifically to keep you confined here.”
I fisted the sheets beneath me as I whirled my growl to Killian. “I’m coming.”
He looked to me, then to Shea, and back again, all the while his eyes burning from the spinning wheel behind them.
“Oh, quit that Killian.” Shea rolled her eyes. “Go against your Prince’s wishes if you will, but leave me out of it.” At that, she stormed out of the room and left nothing but a swishing dark ponytail in her wake.
“I want to be there, Killian,” I hissed yet again, trying for the third time to rise. “I’ve been at each of the attacks. I deserve to be there.”
Humoured, he watched me try and try again with a twist to his face. “You deserve to be there?” The strangled way in which his words came out suggested how utterly hilarious he thought this was. All I managed as a response was a gargled groan.
“I’m not sure, Olivia,” he sighed. “You heard me before, about how us males aren’t always the most… logical of beings when it comes to our females?”
Our females. I didn’t have the heart to explain to him that I wasn’t one. But I did smile at the sound of being his.
“Let me put this simply,” he continued, a small smile on his face. “Some of us have more humanity in us than others.”
I narrowed my eyes, unsure of what that had to do with anything.
“I consider myself to have more humanity, for example. But there are some, like a certain Prince, that I doubt has any.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“That I wish I was joking or exaggerating when I say that Raegan will turn into something… raw and unapologetic, if he sees you so much as limp.”
“I don’t care,” I huffed, squaring my shoulders. “I’m going. Help me, or don’t. But I am going.”
He stepped around the bed, pausing in front of me before grabbing onto my arm.
“Let’s say, if by some miracle, you managed to get to your feet—” He grabbed onto my other arm and began hoisting me up, setting my feet gently against the ground beneath us.
“And you happened to stumble your way down to the meeting—” He tried letting me go, assessing my wobble, “—then I didn’t really go against Raegan, did I? ”
Finally stood upright, my spine screaming beneath my flesh and my head spinning, I murmured an agreement to his loophole.
Taking my one arm and wrapping it around his, he offered me a sneaky grin before starting to lead us down to the throne room.