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“Seems that I heard you did have a mortal consort at some point—was her name Cecily?”
He stumbled over the next step, hissed in a breath and gave me a hollow look. I thought for a moment he might be physically ill, then remembered it wasn’t possible. “How could you possibly know about her?”
He’d regained himself, spinning me through the dance with expert ease, not allowing either of us pause. His grip, though, tightened in a vise on me, reminding me of the fae’s terrible strength. I readied a defensive wish, just in case. I still couldn’t quite get past his surface mind. Not and keep track of the dance steps, dammit.
“Just something I heard,” I got out and he relaxed his hold slightly, allowing me to at least breathe.
“Is that so, Lady Sorceress?” His flint-gray eyes searched my face and I saw the hardness in him now. “I wonder what game you’re playing with me.”
Might as well lay my cards on the table. “I seek to discover what became of Cecily—and her child.”
His gaze dropped to my bosom and lower. “Is it true then? Do you carry Rogue’s baby even now?”
“What happened to Cecily?”
Fafnir tipped his head, acknowledging the trade of information. “She died.” He said it with bleak finality. “As you mortals are wont to do. She died birthing our child and I…I have never recovered from it.”
“How very sad. Were you with her?”
He started to reply, stopped himself, frowning. And there it was—the oily black rope, the coil of a sea serpent showing through the waves and vanishing again. “Perhaps we need a breath of fresh air.”
“Lead the way.”
We pushed through the mad whirl of dancers and, as soon as we stepped through floor-to-ceiling doors out on to a wide balcony and out of Darling’s influence, I became abruptly aware of my tired body and sore feet. We’d danced for hours already. I would have gone on too, never realizing the drain on my sadly mortal self. No wonder Starling had been so wiped out.
The sharp wind caught me as I stepped outside, tugging at my hair and gown, grasping fingers. I imagined I heard a howling laugh echoing through the roiling clouds that dashed in shreds across the moon. Like everything in Faerie, the moon glowed more luminous, larger and seemed to watch me with a certain awareness. The face of the Man in the Moon on one glance looked as always, on the next, fully intelligent with shrewd awareness. I shivered, wrapping my arms around myself, and wished up a cloak. Not the one Rogue had given me, which was presumably back with the wagon train.
Fafnir regarded the sky, eyes tracking something I couldn’t see. Then a galloping horse flew across the moon, morphing into a fragment of cloud. I stared in wonder.
“The Wild Hunt gathers,” Fafnir observed.
“Excuse me?”
“You don’t know it? It rides through your world also.”
“Um, we really don’t have horses galloping across the sky—sorry to disappoint you.”
He leaned back against the stone balustrade, seeming not to feel the bite of the wind. “You simply saw what you expected. With the dying of the year comes the hunt, gathering up stray mortal souls from your world and this. The autumn winds tear through the skies, now taking form, now vanishing again.”
“How can the hunt move through both worlds—I thought no one could go back and forth through the Veil.”
“The Veil grows thin this time of year and the worlds come closer together. Cecily came through around this time.” He tipped his head back again, watching the sky. “Ah, I miss her still. It’s an unnatural thing, for your kind to mix with ours. Only grief comes of it.”
“Seems like you had some joy and love before the sorrow.”
“What good is a sweet flavor if only the bitterness of regret lingers in your mouth?”
“What do you regret, Lord Fafnir?”
He laughed, a hollow sound. “So many things. Your life is so fresh and new. You cannot possibly understand how regrets pile up like stones, a tomb that crushes but never kills.”
“You’re not much like the other fae nobles I’ve met.”
“No.” He looked at me again. “I was there when Cecily died and yet I do not remember her death. What do you make of that, Lady Sorceress who knows more than she ought?”
“I don’t know what to think of that.”
“Liar,” he said softly. “Who are you protecting—me? You cannot wound me, for I am already the walking dead. Tell me what you know and I shall owe you a favor.”
