Queen of Air and Darkness (The Dark Artifices 3)

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.

“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.