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He nodded. "A surfeit of ballads makes for odd ideas about romance.”
"But things don't work like that," Kaye said, taking the bottle from his hand and drinking from the neck. "Like ballads or songs or epic poems where people do all the wrong things for the right reasons.”
"You have completed an impossible quest and saved me from the Queen of the Faeries," he said softly. "That is very like a ballad.”
"Look, I just don't want you to keep hiding things from me," Kaye said, handing him back the bottle, "or hurt my feelings because you think it's going to keep me safe, or sacrifice yourself for me. Just tell me. Tell me what's going on with you.”
He tipped the champagne so that the liquid fizzed on the snow, staining it pink. "I taught myself to feel nothing. And you make me feel.”
"That's why I'm a weakness?" Her breath came out like a cloud in the icy air.
"Yes." He looked out at the black ocean and then back at her. "It hurts. To feel again. But I'm glad of it. I'm glad of the pain.”
Kaye took a step closer to him. The bright sky silvered his face with light and highlighted the way the points of his ears parted his hair. He looked both alien and utterly familiar.
"I know I failed you," Roiben said. "In the stories when you fall in love with a creature—”
"First I'm a thing, now I'm a creature?" Kaye said.
Roiben laughed. "Well, in the stories it is often a creature. Some kind of beast. A snake that becomes a woman at night, or someone cursed to be a bear until they can take off their own skin.”
"How about a fox?" Kaye asked, thinking of Silarial's story of the thornbushes.
He frowned. "If you like. You're crafty enough.”
"Yeah, let's say a fox.”
"In those stories, one is often asked to do something unimaginably terrible to the creature. Cut off its head, say. A test. Not a test of love, a test of trust. Trust lifts the spell.”
"So you think that you should have cut off my head?" Kaye grinned.
He rolled his eyes. "I should have accepted your declaration, whether I thought it was wise or no. I loved you too much to trust you. I failed.”
"Good thing I'm not really a fox," Kaye said. "Or a snake or a bear. And good thing I'm sneaky enough to figure out a way around your dumb quest.”
Roiben sighed. "Once more I mean to save you, and yet you come to my rescue. If you hadn't warned me about Ethine, I would have done just what Silarial expected.”
She looked down so he wouldn't see her cheeks go pink with pleasure. She stuck her fingers into the pockets of her coat and was surprised to feel a circle of cold metal.
"I made you something," Kaye said, pulling out the bracelet of green braid wrapped in silver wire.
"This is your hair?" he asked.
"It's a token," Kaye said. "Like from a lady to a knight. For when I'm not around. I was going to give it to you before, but I never quite got around to it.”
He ran his fingers over it and looked at Kaye, astonished. "And you made it? For me?”
She nodded, and he held out his hand so she could clasp it on him. His skin felt hot to the brush of her fingers.
Across the water, along the shore, fireworks went off. Streaks of fire ballooned into carnations of light. Golden explosions rained around them. She looked over at him, but he was still looking at his wrist.
"You said it was for when you're not around. Will you not be around?" he asked her when he looked up.
She thought about the owl-eyed faery in Silarial's court and what he'd told her. They say that nameless things change constantly—that names fix them in place like pins. Kaye didn't want to be fixed in place. She didn't want to pretend to be mortal when she wasn't, nor did she want to have to leave the mortal world. She didn't want to belong to one place or be one kind of thing.
"How will you rule both Courts?" she asked instead of answering his question.
Roiben shook his head. "I'll try to keep one foot on each side, balance on the knife edge between both courts for as long as I can. There will be peace so long as I can hold them. Provided I don't declare war on myself, that is.”
