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Donia motioned for her to continue. “Who?”
“He . . . the faery . . . the . . .” The Scrimshaw Sister shook her head. “I’m sorry, my Queen. He’s in the garden. I can bring . . . him if you . . . I didn’t think.”
“No,” she said firmly. “I find peace in my garden. That has not changed.”
Cwenhild nodded, and Donia went to her garden. Once there, she understood Cwenhild’s inability to answer her question. The faery who waited for her could no longer be named by the title they had always known him by. Keenan sat in the center of her garden, peacefully waiting on her favorite bench—and his sunlight was gone.
The snow in her garden didn’t bur
n away as it fell near him. Instead, it collected on his no-longer-sunlit skin. The copper of his hair was unchanged, but the glints of sunlight were replaced by a sheen of frost. He looked up. “I’ve never felt at peace here, you know.”
“What happened?” She stared at him. The sunlight that he had wielded as a weapon, as an extension of himself, as a part of his very being, was gone. He was still fey, but he was not filled with light.
He slid over and patted the bench beside him. “Would you sit with me?”
“What have you done?” The cold air from her lips didn’t steam away as it touched him.
Keenan smiled tentatively. “Changed.”
“I can see that.” Without meaning to, her hand lifted as if to touch the glitter of frost on his skin. She lowered her hand almost guiltily.
And he sighed. “I’ve given my sunlight to the Summer Queen. I am not of that court anymore.”
“Is it . . . real?”
He nodded. “I came here as soon as I was . . . free.”
For a moment, she looked at him, the faery who’d stolen her mortality, whom she’d been willing to die for, whom she still dreamed of—and she couldn’t help but marvel at him. After all the things she thought she knew about the world, this was new. He was new.
Yet he was still the faery she’d known, and as they sat there, she realized that she needed to tell him about the loss that had left her in sorrow. “Keenan?”
He looked at her, and she said softly, “Evan’s . . . gone.”
“Gone how?”
“Bananach kill—”
“When?” Keenan’s no longer summer-green eyes widened. Icy blue filled them, reminding her of the other side of his heritage.
The side that makes him able to sit in the winter garden so comfortably.
“When I left the loft,” she admitted. “Bananach was waiting for me. The Hounds came; my guards came. Including Evan, we lost just over a dozen faeries.”
As calmly as she could, she told him all she knew, all that had happened. She did not weep on his shoulder, although the temptation was there.
“She’s taken Irial, Evan, and . . .” Keenan exhaled a cloud of frost, but didn’t seem to notice that he’d done so.
He belongs to my court. He is the last Winter Queen’s son.
Donia was speechless at the revelation, and at his seeming obliviousness to it. He was never as unaware as he appeared, though; he was merely skilled at disguising the things that he would rather not share.
For several moments, they sat in silence, and then he looked at her with now winter-blue eyes and said, “I have no right . . . to be here or to touch you. I know that.”
“You don’t have the right to touch me,” she agreed, but she wanted him to claim the right to do just that. He’s hurt me. He’s failed me. He’s promised things he couldn’t do.
“I want to hold you, not just because you are hurting but because I can now,” he admitted. “May I?”
He held open an arm, and she slid closer. Cautiously, she leaned her head against his shoulder. The rightness of it, the way her body felt against his, filled her with a sense of completion that she’d never known.
