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They sat there together for several moments in silence until he said, “I am sorry for your loss.”
“And yours.” Donia lifted her head and looked at him. “He was your faery first.”
“I was relieved that he came to you when you became queen.” Keenan kept his arm around her. His fingers were curled around her shoulder still, holding her to him as if afraid she’d flee. “I knew he would keep you safe the way I hadn’t.”
She couldn’t stop herself: she reached up and ran her fingers through Keenan’s hair. It felt different, not sharp enough to hurt, but soft. There was no pain, no steam, no clash—so Donia continued trailing her fingers over his changed body.
He closed his eyes. He stayed perfectly still as she caressed his cheek and traced her fingertips across his jaw. In several decades, she’d only had one Winter Solstice, over a year ago, in which she could touch him without pain to either of them.
“You’re not a king now. What does that make you?”
His lips curved in a smile, and he opened his eyes to stare directly at her. “I have absolutely no idea. I’ve not offered fealty to anyone. Yet. I would. I would offer anything I have to the right queen.”
“Oh,” she breathed.
“I don’t belong in the Summer Court, not now, not ever again.” He ran his fingers through the snow that had accumulated on the bench on the other side of him. “When I was a child, I could exhale frost into the air, and then melt it in the next breath.”
He knew. He wasn’t oblivious, but he wasn’t hiding it either. At least not from me. Keenan carried his other parent’s heritage, had buried it under sunlight for centuries. “I didn’t tell anyone. My mother knew, but she didn’t tell anyone either.”
“You are of my court,” Donia said, her words as much a question as a statement. “You are heir to the throne I hold.”
“No. I don’t want your throne, Don; I only want you.” Keenan stared into the snow-covered garden. “My mother told me that she’d loved only once. She would’ve done anything for him, but he betrayed her. She didn’t recover from that.”
Donia moved away from him. In the midst of everything going on, on the edge of war, with faeries defecting and faeries dying, Keenan was sitting in her garden telling her about his childhood.
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” she told him.
Several moments passed, and he said, “I am going to see Niall. I need to help him if I can. After that”—he stood and turned to face Donia—“I will be back. I’m a solitary faery now, strong enough to be . . . whatever you are willing to let me be. You see what I am. Both summer and winter lived inside me as a child. I chose one because my father was slain and his court needed me, but I’ve left the Summer Court. Once Niall is well again, I will swear fealty to you, or I will remain solitary. I will be your
subject, your servant, solitary but not of your court. Whatever it takes to have the chance at being yours, truly and forever—that’s what I want.”
He bent down and pressed his lips to hers. Then he said, “I am my mother’s son in some things, Donia. I would’ve tried to be loyal to my queen if I had to, but she knew—and you know—that she was never first for me. I know I don’t deserve you. I never have, but I want to find a way to be worthy of you.”
“Keenan, I don’t—”
“Let me say this.” He knelt in the snow that drifted around the bench. “When I told you I wanted to try, I spoke the truth. When I turned away, it was for my former court, and when I tried to make another faery love me, it was for that court. I’ve lived for my whole life trying to bring the Summer Court back to the strength it once was. In all of those years, in centuries, I’ve only wished myself free of duty because of one reason. You.”
“What if—”
“Please?” he begged. “The only thing that stood between us was a court that is no longer my concern. Tell me what vow you want me to offer you, what promise. Anything.”
Donia thought back to the times when he’d looked at her with that same raw hope—and the times she had felt that hope. They’d been in this moment so many times. This time is different. She felt it, knew it the same way she’d known they would fail before.
She took a breath, exhaled slowly, and then told him, “If you fail me, I’ll kill you. I swear it, Keenan. If you fail me, I’ll rip your heart out with my own hands.”
“If I fail you, I’ll cut it out for you.” He stared up at her. “Let me love you, please? Tell me you’re saying there’s still a chance, Don?”
She couldn’t breathe around the pain in her chest. “Tell me I’m the only one.”
“You are the only one. I love you,” he swore. “I have loved you for years, and if I could’ve, I would’ve made you my queen. You know—”
She leaned down and kissed him, stopping his words,
and tumbled to the snowy ground and into his arms. It wasn’t Solstice, but that didn’t matter anymore. He was here, in her garden, in her life.
Mine.
For now and for always.
