Fragile Eternity (10 page)

The next week seemed almost normal for Aislinn: things with Seth were right again, Keenan hadn’t pushed her boundaries, and court things seemed calm. She couldn’t continue ignoring Keenan, and it was becoming almost physically painful to stay so much away from him, so Aislinn had decided to simply pretend that the awkwardness of last week hadn’t happened. She might’ve been avoiding being alone with Keenan the past couple of days, but aside from a few very pointed glances when she called Quinn or Tavish into a conversation they didn’t truly need to be a part of…and okay, maybe a few very transparent moments of sudden needs for “girl bonding” with the Summer Girls, Keenan pretended not to notice her evasiveness. He merely waited as she held her faeries to her like a shield. She enjoyed time with them, Eliza especially, but that didn’t explain away her need to go dancing in the park the moment Keenan came too near.

Totally obvious.
It was apparent to everyone, but no one had mentioned it. Aside from Keenan and Seth, no one had enough comfort with her to do so. She was their queen, and right now, that gave her an extra bit of privacy.

They all see that something is up though. They are unsettled by it.
She had promised herself that she would be a good queen. Upsetting them all was not what a good queen should do.

With a bit of a tremble in her hand, Aislinn tapped on the study door. “Keenan?” She pushed it open. “Are you free?”

He had her charts spread out in front of him on the coffee table. Music played softly in the background—one of her older CDs, actually, Poe’s
Haunted
. She’d picked it up at the Music Exchange one afternoon with Seth.

Keenan looked at her and then made a point of looking beyond her. “Where’s your safety team?”

She closed the door. “I gave them the afternoon off. I thought I could be around you…that we could talk.”

“I see.” He looked back at her charts. “You have a good idea here, but we’re not going to get very far with the desert area.”

“Why?” She didn’t bother commenting on his subject change. She wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to talk about it either, but they needed to.

“Rika lives there. She was one of the Winter Girls.” Keenan frowned. “Far too much like Don. She has issues with me.”

“You say that like it’s surprising.” She stood next to the sofa, nearer him than she should be, but she wasn’t going to let whatever weirdness had happened control her.

“It is.” Keenan leaned back on the sofa, propped his feet up on the coffee table, and folded his hands. “They act like I set out to hurt them. I
never
wanted anyone hurt…except Beira and Irial.”

“So they should just forgive and forget?” Aislinn had avoided this topic for months. She’d avoided a lot of topics, but sooner or later they had to sort it all out. Eternity was an awfully long time to let things simmer. “We all lost so many things when you chose—”

“We?” he interrupted.

“What?” She pulled a chair over and sat down.

“You said, ‘
We
all lost so many things.’ You were including yourself with the Summer and Winter Girls.”

“No, I…” She paused and blushed. “I did, didn’t I?”

He nodded.

“I
am
one of them. We, all the ones you chose, lost a lot.” She ducked her head, her hair falling forward like a curtain she could hide behind. “It’s not like I didn’t gain some amazing things too. I get that. Really.”

His expression was unusually closed to her. “But?”

“But it’s hard. Being this. I swear I’m never going to get my feet to stay under me. Grams is going to die. Seth—” She stopped herself from even uttering that sentence. “I’ll lose everyone. I’m not going to die, and they are.”

He lifted a hand as if to reach for her, and then lowered it. “I know.”

She took a couple calming breaths. “It’s hard not to be angry about that. Your choosing me means that I lose the people I love. I’ll be around forever, watching them age and die.”

“It means I lose the person I love too. Donia will only be in my life as long as your heart is elsewhere,” Keenan admitted.

“Don’t.” Aislinn cringed at hearing him say such things so casually. “That’s not fair…to
anyone
.”

“I know.” He was as still as she’d ever seen him. The sun was rising in the oasis she could see in his eyes. “I never wanted it to be the way it’s been. Beira and Irial bound my powers, hid them away. What was I to do? Let summer die? Let the earth freeze until all the mortals and summer fey perished?”

“No.” The reasonable part of her understood. She knew that there weren’t many choices other than the ones he’d made, but she still hurt inside. Logic didn’t undo sorrow or fear or any of it, not really. She’d just found Seth, and he was already drifting out of her grasp.
He’ll die.
She thought it. She couldn’t say it, but she thought it more than once in a while. Years from now, centuries from now, she’d still be this, and he’d be dust inside the earth.
How can I not be angry?
If she weren’t a faery, she wouldn’t be facing a future without Seth.

“So what would you have done differently, Aislinn? Would you have let the court die? If Irial bound
your
powers, could you shrug it off and let humanity and
your court
wither and die?”

In Keenan’s eyes she could see a dying star, a dark orb with a few desperate pulses of flickering light. As she stared, speechless, she saw tiny stars all around that dying sun; they were already lifeless in a growing void. She didn’t mean to love her court; if he’d told her months ago that she’d feel like this toward them, she wouldn’t have believed him. She’d felt a fierce protectiveness toward them, though, from the moment she became their queen. The Summer Court needed to grow stronger. She was trying to take what little experience she had and her research of politics and governments to help them grow stronger. She was trying to slowly press back against the imbalance that Donia’s court still held. Her court, her faeries, the well-being of the earth—these were more than choices. She believed in them. Feeling as she did now, could she have done differently had she been in his position? Could she have let Eliza die? Could she watch the cubs all freeze to death?

“No. I wouldn’t have,” she admitted.

“Don’t think for a moment that I wanted what has happened to the Winter Girls and the Summer Girls.” He moved then, leaning forward on the edge of the sofa, and caught her gaze. “I’ve spent longer berating myself for what I’ve had to do than you will ever know. I wanted”—he looked at her as more stars, barely flickering in the void, formed in his
eyes—“each one to be
you
. And when they weren’t, I knew I was condemning them to a slow death if I didn’t find you.”

She sat silently.
He was my age when this started. Making those choices. Hoping.

“I’d give them all back their mortality if I could, but even that wouldn’t repair what they’ve lost.” Keenan started stacking the papers on the coffee table. “And even if I could make them mortal again, I wouldn’t be willing to risk offering that same thing to
you
for fear of it remaking Beira’s curse, so even then I’d be left with the weight of knowing that I’ve taken the mortality of the one who saved me. You’re my savior, and I can’t make you happy.”

“I’m not—”

“You are. And it puts us in something of an awkward relationship, doesn’t it?”

“We’ll get it sorted out,” she whispered. “We have forever, right?” She tried to lighten her tone, to soothe him. This wasn’t the conversation she wanted to have at all, but it was the one they’d needed to have for a while now.

“We do.” He had resumed the motionless posture he’d had when the conversation began. “And I’ll spend it doing whatever I can to make you happy.”

“That’s not what I was…I mean…I’m not looking for you to do something to ‘make up’ for what had to be. I just…I’m scared of losing them. I don’t want to be alone.”

“You aren’t. We’ll be together for eternity.”

“You’re my
friend
, Keenan. That thing that happened
the other day? It cannot happen. It shouldn’t have happened.” She was so tense, muscles clenched so tightly that she couldn’t relax her body to unfold her legs from underneath her. “I need you…but I don’t love you.”

“You wanted me to touch you.”

She swallowed against the lie she wanted to whisper and admitted, “I did. Once you reached out your hand, I didn’t want anything else.”

“So what do you want me to do?” He sounded unnaturally calm.

“Don’t reach out.” She bit down on her lip until she could feel her already cracked skin bleed.

He pulled his hand through his copper hair in frustration, but he nodded. “I will try. That’s all I can say and still be truthful.”

She shivered. “I’m going to talk to Donia tonight. You love Donia.”

“I do.” Keenan looked as confused as she’d felt. “That doesn’t change what I feel when I see you or think of you or am near to you. You can’t tell me you don’t feel the same way.”

“Love and desire aren’t the same.”

“Are you saying that all I feel is simple desire? Is that all you feel?” His arrogance was back, as surely as it had been when they first met and she was rejecting his advances.

“It’s not a challenge, Keenan. This isn’t me running.”

“If you gave us a chance—”

“I love
Seth
. I…he’s my heart. If I could find a way to
have him with me for always without being selfish, I would. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t feel a pull to be near you. You’re my
king
, and I need you to be my friend, but I don’t want a relationship with you. I’m sorry. You knew that when I became your queen. Nothing has changed. It’s not going to as long as I have him, and I want…” She paused. Saying the words she’d been thinking felt so final, but she said it: “I want to find a way to make Seth one of us. I want him with me forever.”

“No.” It wasn’t a reply: it was a king’s command.

“Why?” Her heart thudded. “He wants to stay with me…and I want to—”

“Donia thought she wanted to be with me forever too. So did Rika. And Liseli…and Nathalie…and…” He gestured around the room, empty but for the two of them. “Where are they?”

“It’s different. Seth’s different.”

“So would you have him be as the Summer Girls? Would you see him die if he left you?” Keenan looked angry. “You just finished telling me that you resent me for changing you. So do many, many others for my changing them. No. Do not pursue this.”

“He
wants
this. We can make it work.” Aislinn heard him voice the same fears she’d had, but she’d hoped that Keenan would tell her she’d worried foolishly, that there was a way.

“No, Ash. He thinks he does, but being changed would put him in thrall to you, make him your subject. He wouldn’t
truly want that. Neither would you. I believed the Summer Girls wanted to be with me forever. Many of them believed it too. The Winter Girls believed it enough to suffer for my mistakes. Let it go. Faerie never offers a mortal what they truly seek, and cursing a loved one…” The Summer King looked far older than her in that moment. “It’s not called a curse because it’s beautiful, Aislinn. If you love Seth, you’ll treasure him while he’s in your life and then let him go. If I’d had other choices—”

Aislinn stood up. “That’s what you expected all along, isn’t it? Him to go away not long after I changed. You knew I’d feel like this toward you.”

“Mortals aren’t meant to love faeries.”

“So agreeing to my terms wasn’t any big deal, right? Seth and I will fall apart and you…you’d just…No.”

Keenan stared up at her, and she thought back to Denny’s comments on experience and age and admitted to herself that Denny had had a very good point. If Keenan didn’t let up, what would that mean for her? He’d spent most of nine hundred years romancing girl after girl. They all succumbed.

And none of them were his queen.

His look was sorrowful, but his words weren’t any gentler. “It’s better to love someone and know they go on to happiness than to destroy them. Cursing someone you love is not a kindness, Aislinn. I regretted it each time.”

“Seth and I are different. Just because Donia’s pushing you away doesn’t mean it can’t work for me. It could still
work for you two. You can sort this out.”

“I wish you were right—or that you accepted that I am. Why do you think Don’s pushing me away, Ash? Why do you think Seth wants to be cursed? They see what you refuse to admit. You and I are inevitable.” Keenan’s smile was rueful. “I’m not wrong, and I won’t help you make a mistake like this.”

She all but ran from the room.

And like she had when she was still mortal, she needed the help of the faery who loved Keenan. Donia’s forgiving him for whatever mistake he made would convince him that love could make things right. Then maybe he’d help her. At the very least, he’d stop pursuing her if he had Donia’s love. Donia
had
to be with Keenan.

Everything will be fine once Donia takes him back.

The trip to Donia’s house was a blur. It wasn’t until Aislinn stood alongside a quiet street on the outskirts of town that she admitted how many kinds of fear she felt—not just of what would happen if Donia rejected Keenan for good, but of what would happen when Aislinn went inside the Winter Queen’s gorgeous Victorian estate. They had a tentative friendship, but that didn’t mean that Donia couldn’t be terrifying. Winter hurt, and Donia’s home was always Winter.

Winter fey moved soundlessly through a thorn-heavy garden; icy trees and sun-capped shrubs made the yard look out of place among its verdant neighbors. As Aislinn had walked down the street, she’d seen dogs lazing on stoops, a
girl sunning herself in languid bliss, and more flowers than she’d seen growing outside in her entire life. Beira’s death and Keenan’s unbinding had brought a balance that was letting life flourish. But in this yard, the frost would never melt; mortals passing on the street would still look away. No one—mortal or fey—crossed the Winter Queen’s frigid lawn without her consent. Consent she’d denied Keenan.
What am I doing here?