Page 39

DARK REMINISCENCE

N either of them spoke until the coloured lights of the Golden Hall had disappeared into the darkness behind them.

After several aeons, it was Mal who finally broke the silence. “The diviner refused to help me,” he said heavily, and Gisele had a startled moment of realising she’d completely forgotten that was why they’d attended the ball in the first place.

Mal misinterpreted her silence as reproof. “I could not persuade her, not even for the offer of a heart-wish. I thought that would work. I’m sorry. I know we’d pinned all our hopes on this. I’ll find another way to free you, I promise.”

“Oh.” She didn’t know how she felt. Or rather, she did, but it was wholly related to their recent non-kiss and not at all to the topic of diviners, even though the latter really ought to be her priority.

At least her arousal had now faded, replaced by annoyance—mostly at herself for being so preoccupied by such a trivial thing.

Trivial, and yet it itched at her. Why had Mal recoiled from her with that edge of horror?

It didn’t matter! If Mal was too conflicted by his own desires to want to act on them, why should she agonise over it?

Dreams were only that. If he didn’t want her in reality, there was nothing to do but accept it, and never mind the why.

She was too old to find mind games exciting, and she’d spent her life trying to please other people and never quite succeeding.

She was therefore going to stop obsessing about it immediately .

After several more aeons containing only the sound of wingbeats and her own mortification, she asked, “So, Prince Avern was who you were running from when you came to my kingdom?”

“Don’t say his name. He might try to trace it. But yes. What did he say? Did he know I was there?” Mal asked, his voice distorted by his gryphon form and the rush of wind.

She wove her fingers further into his feathery mane. “He didn’t see you, but I think he suspected something. He seemed to sense the connection between us—he said I felt familiar. He might have recognised your eye, too.”

Mal swore. “He always was good with bindings,” he said bitterly.

There was a hint of something in the way he said it… and something much more than a hint in how Avern had spoken of him.

“He was… someone to you?” she hazarded.

The cold starlight fell upon them. “Once, I thought I loved him. I thought he loved me.”

“He sounded as if he might still think of you that way,” she admitted grudgingly, remembering the melancholy in the prince’s expression.

She felt Mal’s shiver beneath her, which was deeply disconcerting. “I told you what losing my true name did to everyone else who knew me before.”

Her hands tightened in his mane. “They lost their love for you. But why would Av—the prince—be different?”

“Because he did not love me. He loved what I could do for him.” His voice was grim.

“What happened?”

The air rushed past, creating a strange cocoon in the darkness.

She could feel his tension, the reluctance to revisit old wounds.

She wasn’t sure if his feelings were transferring to her more intensely because there was little else to distract her, up here, or if the bond had strengthened yet again.

What is he sensing from me? she wondered.

“If it makes you feel any better about sharing, I’ve had my own measure of unhappy romance.

My first lover acted as if I were embarrassingly na?ve for assuming the act meant that he loved me.

” It was easier to admit this than she’d thought, to the glittering emptiness of the night sky.

Darkness created a false impression of safe distance.

Mal’s growl quivered through them both. “He was a fool.”

“In fairness, so was I,” she said with the hard-won knowledge of all the years since.

Mal’s negation of her statement was immediate and forceful. “You were not foolish to want to be loved.”

Wasn’t she? Life had taught her that love was unreliable.

Her parents loved her. So did her brothers, she was sure.

It hadn’t made any difference. She might not have ever been on the receiving end of romantic love, but she’d watched it in others at court, and it didn’t seem to prevent disappointment.

Her father had loved her mother, and it had not saved her from the old king’s wrath.

Even Mal’s history with Avern was one of love being, in the end, insufficient. To pin your hopes to love was foolishness, even if she could not help—foolishly—wanting it.

But that wasn’t the sort of thing she could say to inspire Mal to share further confidences, and for once she didn’t want to deliberately try to wound him with the harshest version of her life. “My point was that I’m hardly in a position to judge youthful romantic mistakes,” she said instead.

A rumbling sigh went through him, again, deeply disconcerting to be sitting on top of.

“I suppose you have the right to know, since he is the reason you ended up dragged into this sorry mess. I told you I was raised by gryphons. When I reached adulthood, they thought it would be good for me to meet other fae more like myself.” He gave a slight chuckle.

“I don’t think they understood that the high sidhe would not consider me the same as them.

Gryphons don’t make that distinction; they simply call us all fae. ”

“High sidhe?”

“Fae without belua aspect in their main form. Like my ears and tail.”

“Without animal parts.”

A note of amusement entered his voice. “That’s not how we think of them, but yes.

Don’t say that to another belua sidhe, though, or you’ll offend them.

” His amusement ebbed. “Anyway, after I left the gryphs, I went to a high sidhe court—DarkSun—and threw myself into learning how it worked. It was overwhelming. Everything I knew about fae courts came from books, which as it turns out is wholly different to the reality. I thought my own power would protect me, and I was wholly na?ve as to the ways it would make me a target.”

She imagined a younger Mal, curious, well-meaning, frequently oblivious, and even less skilled at hiding what he was feeling.

Apprehension filled her. The story that followed did nothing to dispel it.

It came out in careful fragments, and Gisele had the sense of him picking a safe path, avoiding the shards that remained too sharp to voice.

He’d been flattered by the attention of DarkSun’s sophisticated prince. It had been a joy to share his magic with him. At first.

Things had changed. Every step had seemed so reasonable, so necessary. The prince was under huge stresses, fighting to keep his throne amidst cutthroat politics. Mal could help him. Didn’t he want to help him? But it had slowly become more than that.

“I realised I had become simply another tool for his ambition,” Mal concluded heavily. “Terrorising people not to keep him safe but to gain power for him. Innocent people. I told him I wouldn’t do it anymore, that I didn’t want to be used.”

“And that’s when you ran?”

Mal’s laugh was dark and bitter. “Oh, no. He was so contrite, you see. Full of apologies and reassurance. He told me that he loved me, that he only wanted what was best for us. He brought me gifts. He talked and talked until somehow, I was the one being unreasonable and the only thing to do was to help him once again, if I truly loved him. It kept happening, a cycle of arguments and apologies. I kept manifesting nightmares at his behest. If I had been of stronger character, perhaps it would not have taken me so long to wake to the truth of things; he was manipulating me, and I let him, because I wanted so badly to believe in the dream. It took me far too long to realise the dream would never eventuate.” Shame inked through the bond.

How well she knew that emotion, the regret of not taking action sooner, of being a passive passenger in your own life for far too long. But…“If it wasn’t wrong for me to want to be loved, I don’t see how it was wrong for you to want it either.”

A curious blankness in the bond. After a long pause, Mal continued as if she hadn’t said anything.

“When I finally realised the cycle was never going to stop, I attempted to leave. He… wouldn’t let me.

He placed a binding on me, so that I couldn’t physically leave the court. That’s when he put the dismae on me.”

Anger flooded her. Her own imprisonment had never been literal; this was so much worse than that. “I should have trod on his damn feet while we were dancing. I should have broken them.”

Mal’s laugh was startled. “The worst of it was that I know he truly did think it was all for the best. He would do anything to keep his court.”

“He is a monster, then,” she said fiercely, and then had a horrible revelation on the heels of that.

No wonder Mal had recoiled from her; Avern had specialised in bindings , and like it or not, that was what lay between them.

Mystery explained—now leave it be . She swallowed. “How did you escape, in the end?”

“I, ah, feigned submission and then manifested a roomful of nightmares the next time he took the dismae off me. One of the nightmares specifically involved me escaping Avern’s control and wreaking havoc.

I left the court in chaos and ran to the human world.

I knew he’d search for me as soon as he’d regained control.

That’s when I came up with my not-so-clever plan to make myself untraceable.

I was panicked. I thought if I just had time to recover myself, to fortify my own stronghold, I could make it so he could never drag me back even once he found me again. ”