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Corny leaned into their caresses, butting his head against a phooka's palm. His skin felt hot and oversensitized. He groaned.
Long fingers tugged at his gloves.
"Don't do that," Corny warned, but he wanted them to. He wanted them to caress every part of him, but he hated himself for wanting it. He thought of his sister, following a dripping kelpie boy off a pier, but even that didn't curb his longing.
"Come, come," said a tall faery with hair as blue as the feathers of a bird. Corny blinked.
"I'll hurt you," Corny said languorously, and the faeries around him laughed. The laughter wasn't particularly mocking or cruel, but it hurt all the same. It was the amusement of watching a cat threaten the tail of a wolf.
They slid off the gloves. Decayed rubber dust flaked from the tips of his fingers.
"I hurt everything I touch," Corny said dully.
He felt hands at his hips, in his mouth. The soil was cool against his back, soothing when the rest of him was prickling with heat. Without meaning to he reached out for one of the faeries, feeling hair flow across his hands like silk, feeling the shocking warmth of muscled flesh.
His eyes opened with the sudden knowledge of what he was doing. He saw, as from a great distance, the tiny pinholes in cloth where his fingers touched, the blackberry stains of bruises blooming on necks, the brown age spots spreading like smeared dirt across ancient skin. They didn't even seem to notice.
>Kaye turned, letting the thin skirt whirl around her. "I like my dress.”
"Nice. All that green really brings out the pink of your eye membranes.”
"Shut up." Picking up a twig from the ground, she twisted up her hair with it like she'd done with pencils in school. "Where's Luis?”
Corny pointed with his chin. Turning, Kaye spotted him leaning against a tree, chewing on what was probably the last of the protein bar. Luis glowered as he shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of a long brown jacket, clasped with three buckles at his waist. Kaye's damp purple coat hung from the branch of a tree.
"I guess we're supposed to go to the party like this," Kaye called.
Luis sauntered closer. "Technically, it's more of a revel.”
Corny rolled his eyes. "Let's go.”
Kaye headed toward the music, letting her fingers run through the heavy green leaves. She plucked a great white flower down from one of the branches and pulled off one bruised petal after another.
"He loves me," Corny said. "He loves me not.”
Kaye scowled and stopped. "That's not what I was doing.”
Shapes moved through the trees like ghosts. The laughter and music seemed always a little more distant until suddenly she was among a throng of faeries. Crowds of folk danced in wide and chaotic circles or diced or simply laughed as though the breeze had carried a joke to their ears only. One faerie woman crouched beside a pool, conversing intently with her reflection, while another stroked the bark of a tree as though it were the fur of a pet.
Kaye opened her mouth to tell Corny something but stopped when her eye was caught by white hair and eyes like silver spoons. Someone threaded through the crowd, cloaked and hooded, but not hooded enough.
There was only one person Kaye knew with eyes like that.
"I'll be right back," she said, already weaving between a damp girl in a dress of woven river grass and a hob on crude mossy stilts.
"Roiben?" she whispered, touching his shoulder. She could feel her heart speeding and she hated it, she hated everything about how she felt at that moment, so absurdly grateful she would have liked to slap herself. "You fucker. You could have told me to go on a quest to bring you an apple from the banquet table. You could have sent me on a quest to tie a braid in your hair.”
The figure drew back its hood, and Kaye remembered the other person who would have eyes like Roiben's. His sister, Ethine.
"Kaye," Ethine said. "I had hoped I would happen on you.”
Mortified, Kaye tried to smile but it came out as more of a grimace. She couldn't believe she had just blurted things she wasn't sure, in retrospect, that she wanted even Roiben to hear.
"I have only a moment," Ethine said. "I must bring the Queen a message. But there is something I would know. About my brother.”
Kaye shrugged. "We're not exactly speaking.”
"He was never cruel when we were children. Now he is brutal and cold and terrible. He will make war on us whom he loved—”
