Ironside (23 page)

Luis opened the tin of ashes and dumped them. The wind caught some and lifted them into the air, while the rest filled the hole. Corny wasn’t sure what he’d thought they would look like, but the dust was gray as an old newspaper.

“Happy New Year, baby brother,” Luis said. “I wish you could drink with us tonight.”

Roiben stood by the water, swigging out of a bottle of champagne. He’d loosed his salt white hair and it covered most of his face.

Kaye walked over to him, pulling out a noisemaker from her pocket and sticking it in her mouth. She blew and the long checkered paper tongue unfurled with a squeak.

He smiled.

Kaye groaned. “You really are a terrible boyfriend, you know that?”

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.”

“Is that likely?”

“I must confess to a good deal of self-loathing.” He smiled.

“I was thinking of opening a coffee shop,” Kaye said quickly. “In Ironside. Maybe help people with faerie problems. Like Luis does. Maybe even help faeries with faerie problems.”

“You know I just made a very advantageous bargain predicated on the fact that no faery wants to live in the city.” He sighed and shook his head as if he’d just realized that arguing with her was useless. “What will you call your coffee shop?”

“Moon in a Cup,” she said. “Maybe. I’m not sure. I was thinking that maybe I could move out of my grandmother’s—spend half my time working in the shop and half my time in Faerie, with you. I mean, if you don’t mind me being around.”

He smiled at that and it seemed like a real smile, with no shadows at the edges. “Like Persephone?”

“What?” Kaye leaned in and skimmed her hand under his coat, tracing the vertebrae of his back. His breath hitched.

Roiben let his hand fall lightly, hesitantly, across the wings of her shoulders. He sighed like he’d been holding his breath. “It’s a Greek story. A human one. The King of the underworld—Hades—fell in love with a girl, Persephone. She was a goddess too, the daughter of Demeter, who controlled the seasons and the harvests.

“Hades stole Persephone away to his palace in the underworld and tempted her with a split-open pomegranate, each seed shining like a ruby. She knew that if she ate or drank anything in that place she would be trapped, but somehow he persuaded her to eat a mere six seeds. Thereafter, she was doomed to spend half of each year in the underworld, one month for one seed.”

“Like you’re doomed to spend half your time dealing with the Bright Court and half with the Night Court?” Kaye asked.

Roiben laughed. “Very like.”

Kaye looked at the far shore, where fireworks still heralded the New Year above the jagged teeth of buildings, and then toward where Corny and the others blew noisemakers and drank cheap champagne from plastic goblets.

She slid out of Roiben’s arms and whirled on the sand of the beach. The wind blew off the water, numbing her face. Kaye laughed and spun faster, gulping the cold briny air and smelling the faint firework smoke. Pebbles crunched under her boots.

“You still haven’t told me,” he said softly.

She stretched her arms out over her head, then came to an abrupt halt in front of him. “Told you what?”

He grinned. “How you managed to complete the quest. How you claimed to be able to lie.”

“Oh. It’s simple.” Kaye lay down on her back on the snowy beach, looking up at him. “This is me,” she said, her voice full of mischief as she reached out with one long-fingered hand. “See? This is me lying.”