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“Say I did agree to marry you. How would that work?”
“We would pledge our troth before the Golden Wood—”
“No. After that. What about children? Would you want them? Half-human children, inheriting the Golden Wood?” Had he really thought this through?
Tawhiri spread his wings. “I am not pure sidhe, my lady. My mother was a bird-woman, and I can name a dozen other fae races in my family tree. There is even some human in the mix already. I have always attributed the strength of my house’s bloodline to that diversity.”
I hadn’t known Tawhiri had a human ancestor. It was a reassuring answer, but it also completely avoided the thing that had prompted me to ask in the first place. Children required certain prerequisite activities.
“So, you’d want children, then? With me.”
The heat returned to his gaze. “I…yes. One day. Is that something you would want?” His voice sounded huskier than normal.
I took off the mask because I couldn’t bear for him to keep looking at me like that. It lay starkly white against the stone.
I turned around. “You should kiss me.”
There was a shocked silence from the other half of the tower.
“You can talk about it in this bloodless manner all you like, but marriage isn’t just a balanced list of advantages and disadvantages. Children don’t spring fully formed out of the ground, you know.” I spoke to my feet, babbling a bit, but determined to make my point now I’d gotten up the courage to start. “We have to have some degree of physical compatibility. I know I’m not much to look at, but if you can’t bear to touch me without some pure-blood sidhe illusion, then better to know that now, before—” Cool fingers beneath my chin, tilting my face up.
“My own illusions don’t work on me,” he said, and kissed me.
I don’t have words for how it was, that first time. It was as if word and thought had been knocked clean out of me, as if language itself had ceased to have meaning. I’d read about kisses and listened avidly to Acantha’s salacious gossip on the subject. Speculated interestedly late at night in the privacy of my attic. None of that had prepared me for the raw physicality or the way my body would react, suddenly a stranger to me. A wild, sensual stranger.
The only comfort was that it affected Tawhiri just as strongly, even though I suspected he’d kissed a great many more people than I. We parted, breathless, drinking each other in under the starlight. My lips felt swollen, my whole body set thrumming.
He swallowed, and my gaze latched onto the way it made his throat move. “Are you satisfied we have some degree of physical compatibility?”
“Yes,” I said faintly.
He wrestled with something for long moments, searching my face before he pulled an envelope from his pocket.
“This is for you.”
I took it, still addled from the kiss, but his next words brought me to full alertness.
“It’s from your mother. Your birth mother.” He looked…embarrassed? My mind was a vast, empty blankness. “After what you said yesterday, I went to your kingdom and searched—a pregnant scullery maid from the palace many years ago, sent to marry a farmer.”
“She’s alive,” I said. I knew time passed differently in Faerie, though it wasn’t predictable. It might have been a day or a hundred years since I’d been taken. I’d always preferred to think the latter. It had felt less painful to believe that door firmly closed.
“Yes, and happy, I believe. A grandmother, now, surrounded by loving family. The farmer she married—whether they loved each other to start, I know not, but they cared for each other deeply before he passed. It was clear in how she spoke of him.”
I sat down hard in the nest of cushions, holding the envelope like it might bite.
“I told her you had grown into a daughter any mother might be proud of and asked her to write you your name. I haven’t read it,” he added quickly. “You do not need to read it now, if it is too much—”
I opened the envelope. The letter was written in a strong hand.
To my beloved daughter, Ella
I stopped reading, my heart stuttering. “My name is Ella,” I said. The syllable formed strangely on my tongue.
“Ella,” Tawhiri said.
“Say it again.”
“Ella,” he said obediently in his deep, velvety voice.
