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MIDNIGHT GHOSTS

S he was reading a novel in her room, unable to sleep for worrying about tomorrow’s threatened Magic Lesson The First—which was apparently best undertaken after the night’s rest that she wasn’t getting—when a loud crash startled her to full awareness.

She glanced around wildly, heart thumping, but the sound had come from somewhere deeper inside the house.

“Skymallow?” she whispered.

The house opened her door.

Taking the hint, she put the book down, slipped a dressing gown over her nightgown, and went in search of the disturbance. Had more elsterfae or something similar gotten into the house?

Further intermittent bangs and thuds punctuated the quiet as she tracked the source to the library. A blur of motion caught her eye as she opened the door, and she shouted in protest before she’d figured out what she was seeing.

Mal froze. He was clinging to the top of a shelf, claws holding him in place, about to drop a stack of books.

That had been the source of the thuds. His pupils were huge, and there was a restless energy about him, which she supposed there had to have been if he’d been running from one end of the library to the other at this hour of night.

The light of the full moon flooded in through the stained-glass window, casting the room in anaemic shades.

“What in Panthea are you doing?” she demanded.

“Preparing for tomorrow,” he said. His unblinking gaze had the same intensity as a kestrel spotting prey, and he was panting, presumably from hurling himself about like a mad thing.

“And it needed to be done right now?” she asked, amused.

“No, I just—” He let go of the shelf and landed carefully back at floor level. The pulse in his throat beat above the crumpled ruin of his neckcloth. “Sometimes I can’t sleep, and the full moon exacerbates it,” he confessed. “I’m sorry for disturbing you.”

“You are reminding me very much of the palace cats right now,” she couldn’t help observing. “They often chase ghosts at midnight, in between singing the songs of their people.”

He pulled himself up, ears high and indignant. It should not have filled her with the urge to pet them. “I am not a cat,” he informed her with great dignity.

“No; if you were, I could simply offer you a saucer of milk to soothe you, couldn’t I? How do you feel about chamomile tea?” She held open the door to the library.

His eyes crinkled despite his attempt to remain affronted. “It’s not your job to soothe me, princess.”

“No, but I can’t sleep either and Tristan Storm isn’t proving adequate distraction tonight,” she admitted.

He chuckled. “I don’t know whether to be flattered that you prefer me to that idiot.”

“He’s not an idiot! He’s merely romantically tormented ,” Gisele told him primly, defending her romantic hero even though she privately agreed that Tristan’s actions were frequently idiotic.

Mal gave her a swift, unreadable look, and a strange emotion flashed through the bond, amusement with a bitter edge.

They went down to the kitchen, where Skymallow happily lit the stove so Gisele could boil a kettle.

Mal continued to watch her with unsettling intensity as she set about making tea, his pupils still unnaturally engorged. “Do you miss it?” he asked abruptly.

She paused with the kettle in hand. “Miss what?”

“Home.” He coloured. “Forgive me; it’s a foolish question. Of course you must miss it.”

She carefully poured two cups. “I miss my family, especially the children. Little Maryna—that’s my brother Boern’s youngest—will have had her fourth birthday now.

” She sighed and sat down next to him, pushing one of the mugs across the table.

“Not that I would have been able to attend. She used to adore me, but now she only cries whenever we’re in the same room. ”

Mal looked stricken, but she held up a hand before he could open his mouth.

“I’ll take your apology as read; it gets tedious if every conversation ends thus.”

He nodded. “You never speak of your father,” he said, a careful question disguised as a statement.

She narrowed her eyes. “There hasn’t been a particular reason to. What do you want to know? Does he love me? Yes. Does the curse sadden him? Yes. Is he a tyrannical figure in my sad history? No.”

“But?”

She glared at him. “But what?”

He spread his hands. “It simply sounded as if there were a ‘but’ lurking in that list.”

She sighed. “My father is… He loves his family. He adores my mother, in part because she manages the kingdom on his behalf. He doesn’t like conflict and unpleasantness, you see. And I have represented conflict and unpleasantness since the day I was born.”

“He ignored you?” Mal’s tone was still calmly nonjudgmental, but she felt the blade of his anger before he covered it.

“He didn’t forget about me,” she said with deliberate dryness. Mal flushed, and she relented. “Not exactly. He would give me lavish presents, sporadically. Instruments I didn’t play. Dresses in colours I never wear. Toys for a younger girl.”

“He doesn’t know you.”

One of the most irritating aspects of her Malediction—of which there were many! —was that he could be so oblivious one minute and the next, pinpoint exactly the spot that hurt most and then proceed to prod it .

She glared at him.

He hastily changed the subject, turning his mug in his hands. “You’re an aunt, then.”

“Yes. One nephew and two nieces, so far, all Boern’s. Seyfert has yet to settle down, but he may yet contribute. It’s different for men, I suppose.”

His ears pricked. “How so?”

She cocked her head to the side. “Well, they can father children later than women can mother them, can’t they?”

He blinked, completely at sea. “Can they?”

“I suppose that’s not how it works in Faerie,” she mused.

“How old are you, anyway?” It was a rude question, but they had passed beyond such niceties, and it had been tugging at her.

He was impossible to place, in human terms; he looked as if he could be a weathered twenty-five, or a youthful fifty-five.

Yet he had to be much older than even that.

He spread his hands. “We don’t count time the same way; years move differently in Faerie, and age touches one less the more time one spends here, humans just as much as fae.”

She smiled. “You’re obfuscating.”

His response was to huff. “Oh, very well. I have yet to see out my first century. Young, still, by my people’s reckoning, yet old enough to know better.”

The way he spoke of a century as nothing! She couldn’t help laughing softly. “Not even a century! A veritable spring chicken.”

His mouth quirked in unwilling amusement, the wry crinkle of it rippling through the bond. “What you said before—you want children?”

She sobered. “I think that question is best not dwelt on, since if I did, I’ve likely missed my chance. It’s better not to regret it; I can’t go back and change it.”

He cocked his head, moon-wide eyes seeing too much. They were unbearably lacking in condemnation.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I love my nieces and nephews, but I was never like Alwine—Boern’s wife—for example. She adored babies even before she had any. I always found them a bit… dull.”

Her heart pounded. She had never confessed these thoughts before. Women were supposed to want children, without ambivalence.

Mal offered an encouraging sound.

“And my own mother—well, it wasn’t exactly maternal, was it, promising her firstborn to a strange fairy man?” Gisele tried to make light of it.

“She was under considerable duress at the time.”

She sighed. “It’s not only that. My mother isn’t like Alwine either, not even with Boern and Seyfert.

She loves us, I’m sure,” she added hastily.

“But if it were not necessary to secure the succession, I think she would have been perfectly happy without children. The management of the kingdom largely falls on her shoulders. No one would criticise her for having larger concerns if she were a man.” The guilt of disloyalty made her voice sharpen.

“Children aren’t the only way to find fulfilment in life, even for women, you know. ”

“No,” he agreed softly. “But I understand mourning what-ifs, even as I know I should not be consumed by them.”

All at once, she was aware of how close he sat, of the intimacy of being alone with a man after dark—this man, in particular, whom she was bound to in a very physical way. Her heartbeat fluttered. None of that . She picked up her mug and took it back to the kitchen bench. “I ought to turn in.”

His eyes were still too dark with those too-wide cat pupils, but he stood as well. “Good night, Gisele.”