Sorcha lay very still, listening to the silence of early morning. The sun would edge over the long hills soon. The new day would begin, and she was still wrapped in Harry’s arms in the sacred hall. They hadn’t gotten much sleep during the night. Every time they’d drifted off, one of them would instinctively reach out to the other, to test the slope of a shoulder with questing fingers, or taste the sweat of exertion on a throat or belly. To begin again the dance of creation. But soon it would be over, for Harry’s whimsy wouldn’t outlast the sun.
“You live in a blessed place, Harry,” she said, her voice so quiet she wasn’t sure he even heard her. “And yet you are so angry. I wonder if you could tell me why?”
For a long while he didn’t answer. She knew he was awake, for he was lazily winnowing his fingers through her hair.
“I’m not angry,” he said. “I’m terrified. We’re living so close to the edge right now that I can see the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. One piece of bad luck would cost us everything.”
“It really is that bad?”
“I wouldn’t be killing myself in the city if it weren’t.”
“But you don’t seem any more comfortable in that house you fight so hard to keep.”
“That’s just because of the nightmares, which, according to you, have been brought by your friends.”
Sorcha wanted to lift her head and gauge his expression. She had the feeling, though, that only the low light and her closed eyes were allowing truth of any kind right now.
“I’m sorry for that, Harry. It’s just that the Dearann Stone is so precious, and didn’t we all think it was here with you?”
“And when you found it, what were you going to do?”
“I told you. Protect it.”
“No, you weren’t,” he said, sounding oddly complaisant. “You were going to walk off with it.”
She fought for courage. “It would have been the only way to protect it, Harry. If you think your nightmares are bad now, you can’t imagine what would happen if the Dubhlainn Sidhe managed to capture the great Stone.”
“I guess we’ll never know,” he said.
Sorcha felt the tears well again, the sense of futility swelling in her. “No,” she said, wishing she didn’t sound so hopeless. “We never will.”
She heard the twitter of the first birds, brave souls to sing out against this cold and emptiness. She knew that now she and Harry would measure their time alone in mortal minutes.
“If you could have anything, Harry,” she said, focusing on the long, elegant fingers that curled around hers, “anything in your dreams, what would it be?”
“That’s not something I ever think of.”
She let her fingers drift down his sternum. “If you did think about it. If there had never been any need for you to go to the city. If…”
“If is a futile word, Sorcha.”
She shook her head. “Then how about pretend, Harry? Could you pretend with me, here, where nobody can touch us? Where we’re safe from the outside and all its problems? What would you do?”
For a long moment he continued to draw his fingers through her hair, and she could feel the tension in his shoulder. But as the peace of the early darkness settled on them like fine dust, he seemed to ease a bit.
“I’d spend all my time with the horses,” he said. “Horses never lie to you. They never make promises they can’t keep or lose themselves in the impossible or…or…”
“Throw good money after bad?”
“Yes.” The word was abrupt, his tone stone cold.
“Were they so very terrible, these parents of yours?”
“I don’t really know,” he said. “They were dead by the time I was nine. I don’t remember much of them or my grandfather.”
She lifted her head to meet him with her compassion. “Ah, I’m sorry, then, Harry. How did you lose them?”
He laughed, a small, wry sound. “I wasn’t the one who lost them, Sorcha. They did that all by themselves. They wandered off and never came home.”
“How?”
“The three of them went down in a hurricane when they were looking for Atlantis.”
“Which ocean?”
He glared at her.
She tried her best to smile. “Well, it might help if you knew it was the correct ocean, don’t you think?”
“I do not. And there is no correct ocean. Just con men more than happy to sell supposed artifacts to gullible believers, right along with pieces of the true cross.”
She considered him for a minute, her fairy heart heavy. “Don’t you believe at all, Harry? In anything?”
“Of course I do. I believe in me. In Phyl and Gran and Ned. In the beauty of a well-made business deal. In the grace of a horse on the move, and the responsibility of being steward of land you pass on to the next generation.”
She laid her head back down, sighing. “I wonder if you’d be thinking differently if your parents had lived longer. If they’d given you a bit of magic with the madness.”
“I doubt it. It’s a child’s obligation to rebel against a parent.”
“Oh, aye,” she said softly. “I imagine it’s so.” Focusing on his hair-roughened chest, she considered Harry’s life. “No matter how disagreeable the parents, it’s still a loss not to have known them.”
She actually surprised a small smile out of him. She could hear it in his voice. “Are your parents so disagreeable, then, Sorcha?”
She smiled back, and it was just as wry. “She is Mab, Harry. Queen of the Tuatha de Dannan. Sure, queens have little time for their offspring, unless they’re happening to blacken the family name or interfere with the ruling of the clan.” She shrugged, laying her hand across the steady beat of his heart. “She was as good a parent as a queen can be, I imagine. I always knew she was there. I’ll say that for her.”
“And your father?”
“Is not my business to know.”
She could tell he was staring at the top of her head. “You’re joking.”
She shrugged. “Sure, it’s the way of our queens. Their consorts are theirs to choose and theirs to discard. And my mother the queen has been inordinately fond of the discarding.”
For a long moment there was nothing but the sound of the waking birds; then Harry made a small huffing sound, and his fingers returned to her hair. “Huh. And here I thought having an imperious grandmother was tough.”
“Ah, sure your gran is a lovely woman altogether, Harry. And my respect for her has just risen quite a lot, knowing she had you to raise. Don’t I have the sneakin’ suspicion that you weren’t all that easy to teach.”
“I was a righteous prick,” he admitted ruefully. “Still am, sometimes. But a person can only stand so much of the world of fairy tales before he’s forced to object.”
“And so you dedicate yourself to reason.”
“Exactly.”
The birds had multiplied, more than any she’d heard around the house. Even these mortal birds knew a holy place, it seemed.
“What is your perfect world, then, Harry? When you close your eyes and imagine yourself with your horses, where is it?”
This time she was met with a long silence, with a stiffening of every muscle in Harry’s body. She was afraid that he would bolt. That he would run from the answer she knew he refused to allow.
“I don’t,” he said starkly.
“Oh, aye,” she whispered. “I think you do. Is it so terrible because you don’t believe in the world on your walls, or because you know you can never go there?”
“Don’t,” he said, even the planes of his body unrelenting.
“Because it hurts?”
“Because it’s a fantasy.”
“If it were,” she said, “I don’t think it would plague you so. It’s not just an image in your mind, Harry. It’s a memory.”
He jerked away, but she held on to him. She made him stay right where he was.
“Don’t be absurd,” he snapped. “It is the fanciful paintings of a delusional man. It’s all bollocks.”
“And yet you can’t stay away from those walls, can you?”
“How did you…?” He went silent, and she knew he was appalled at his inadvertent admission.
She began to stroke his skin, calming and nurturing so the truth wouldn’t be so difficult. “Because I find myself in those rooms without knowing how, as if there is a lodestone there. Those aren’t my fairy hills he painted there, you know. Not my home. I think, maybe, your ancestor described the southern mountains where the Dubhlainn Sidhe hold court. And yet, they are fairy hills, fairy horses, fairy flowers. And every time I see them, I ache so fiercely for home it almost brings the tears, and fairies have no place for tears. And I’ve seen the land of faerie. I’ve been there. I know, sure, there’s always a chance I can go home. But to see those hills and not know why I was hurting so…I can’t imagine it.”
She felt the pain rise in him then, a tide of red that filled the little room. She rose up and kissed Harry, a long, gentle, healing kiss that led to more kisses, that led to quiet murmurs and surprised gasps, and finally the sweet agony of completion.
“I don’t…I don’t believe in any of it,” he insisted finally, his voice already sounding harsher.
“Of course you do,” she said gently, easing back into his embrace, her heart still thundering with the exquisite flight of climax. “If you didn’t, you never would have allowed Lilly up on that horse. Sure, you wouldn’t have let her anywhere near me.”
Silence, throbbing with the staccato beat of his heart, with the stiff restraint he’d donned again. With the waking of the morning around them, still too early for the sun, but unfurling along a thousand coverts and meadows.
“Let’s pretend again,” she said. “For only now, and only here, to never be taken past that door. Here, where it’s safe. Your wildest dream, Harry. The one you haven’t even told your cousin, who knows you better than any. What would it be, Harry?”
She’d thought her voice held pain. She couldn’t imagine the wasteland that echoed in Harry’s. “To walk out of this world into the one on the walls.”
The words seemed to propel him up. He lurched to his feet, away from her, and began searching around for his clothes.
Sorcha kept her eyes closed. “Ah, I was afraid of that.”
“Because it’s insane.”
“Because I believe you. Haven’t I felt it in you from the first, the fact that no matter how hard you try, you simply don’t fit here in this place? Even in these wide open hills.”
“Don’t be absurd,” he said, struggling into those wonderful things they called boxers. “I was born here. It’s my legacy to pass down to my children. To pass down intact, not with bits and pieces bitten off to satisfy the whims and delusions of the people who came before. That’s where I belong. The reason I’m so unhappy is because I have to spend most of my time in the city to make sure it happens.”
“If that were true,” Sorcha said, rising herself to sit on the edge of the well-tumbled bed, “then you would have found ease here with your horses, with your family. Especially with Lilly for, Goddess, isn’t she life’s own gift to you of pure light and joy? But you’re not, Harry. You’re not happy, and that is a sadness too great to bear.”
He swung around on her and froze. It didn’t occur to Sorcha that she was naked, that that might be a distraction. Sure, she’d spent much of her life like this. Evidently mortals didn’t. It was obvious in an instant that Harry was affected.
“Put something on,” he rasped, turning away again.
She looked down, bemused. “Am I unsightly, then?”
He bowed his head and laughed, a harsh bark of a sound. “Just…do it.”
Sorcha reached over to pick up her dress and was struck anew by the difference in mortal textures. She couldn’t say she wasn’t intrigued by the rough edge of their fabrics. She didn’t think she could survive in them, though. They erected too stiff a barrier between her and the goddess. She wondered, head tilted in consideration, what Harry would look like in faerie attire.
Elegant, she thought, instinctively seeing the weave of his colors in her mind, a shimmering array of greens.
“Should I tell you about my home, Harry?” she asked, properly clad and watching out of the corner of her eye for the first edge of the sun to breach the horizon.
He stepped into his trousers and pulled them up. “No,” he said, a curious yearning in his voice. “It wouldn’t do any good.”
“Because you could never go?”
He glared at her. “Don’t be absurd. Of course I can’t go. There is no there to go to.”
“But there is,” she said with a soft smile. “And you know it, so. You’ve known it all along, no matter what you tried to believe. And you could go, if you wanted. I promise you that on the name of the goddess.”
“Ah,” he said with a sharp, disdainful nod, “of course. I’d run away into the mists, just as every one of my ancestors wished they could do, and I’d leave this place to…who, exactly? Creditors? The tax man? Lovely. Then my grandmother would end up in an old folks’ home, eating pap, and the children you’re so fond of would be living in a housing estate somewhere and never see a horse again. The closest Lilly would come to her very own horse would be the kind you slot coins into at the arcade. Brilliant. I think I’ll just go along with you now, shall I?”
“If we could figure a way,” Sorcha said, “if everything were possible, a savior for your estate, a place for everyone where they’d be happy, what then?”
He closed his eyes, standing there in the shadows, and Sorcha thought how unbearably handsome he was, the sharp edge of a knife, a mortal hewn from fairy stone.
“Everything hasn’t been possible since the day I was born,” he said. “This discussion is moot.”
“If you left, who would own the house?”
He sighed, not moving. “Phyl.”
“She’d be an earl?”
A small smile curled the edge of his mouth. “A baroness in her own right, heir to Gran. Theo would be the Earl.”
“Would that be a bad thing?”
His eyes snapped open, and he turned on her again, as if ready to strike. This lovely little hall was simply too small to hold all his pain.
“Would it?” she asked, very, very quietly.
And she saw her answer there in his eyes, the longing, the disbelief, the rage at the responsibilities all those feckless forebears had dropped on his shoulders.
“It’s not possible. The responsibility is mine.”
“So Phyl would lose the house? She’d ruin the horses? She’d shame the barony?”
“You know perfectly well she would do none of those things. She would do an admirable job of stepping into Gran’s shoes. But she shouldn’t have to. Not with the burden of this place to add to it.”
Sorcha nodded distractedly. She could see it, too, she thought. Phyl was a strong woman, with a sharp mind and generous soul. She could make this place bloom in her time. If she had the time. Which, as Harry understood better than a wandering fairy, wasn’t there.
“There must be a way, Harry,” Sorcha said. “I simply can’t believe that we met by chance and will have to part again the same way. We are meant to be together, here in this place. We’re meant to change the future of faerie and mortal alike.”
“We’re meant to do no such thing,” he assured her, his shirt clenched in his hand like a battle flag. “I’m going back to work tomorrow, and you…”
Sorcha knew how sad her smile was. “I can’t leave until I find the Dearann Stone, Harry. It was the task that brought me here, and if I don’t accomplish it, all will be lost.”
Why it should be, she didn’t know, but that seemed to be the thing to give Harry pause. “Tell me why.”
She pulled in a breath. “Aye, you do deserve the whole truth, don’t you?”
Focusing on her hands, entwined in her lap, Sorcha told him the truth. Of the three great Filial Stones, of the loss of one and the theft of another, and the imbalance that would begin to betray itself as the days went on in the world of faerie and mortal alike. Of the desperate need for the recovery of the Stone that would bring life back to the world in its prescribed time.
“And the Dubhlainn Sidhe don’t want this to happen?”
She shrugged. “Sure, I’m not at all positive they’re able to think at all right now,” she admitted. “The Dearann Stone has always given balance to their masculine rages and quests for power. Without it, what kind of sense would they have? Do they realize, do you think, that in their quest to gain the greatest power, they have doomed themselves even before they’ve doomed the rest? There will be no life in the land of the Dubhlainn Sidhe. No birth, no regrowth, no warmth. They’ve lived on dreams of revenge for so long that I’m not sure they can see what their revenge will reap.”
He seemed so still all of a sudden. So wary, a wild thing caught in the sights of a hunter. “And this Dearann Stone would change that?”
She lifted her hands to show how empty her palms were. “Ah, now there is a moot point, Harry. You don’t have the Stone, and you don’t know who does. Which means I’ll have to leave very soon and seek it, and hope to pull the Dubhlainn Sidhe along with me. If I don’t, then I’m afraid they’ll stay in your dreams, you and young Theo and, to be frank, Harry, without the Dearann Stone, I don’t know at all how to stop them.”
Fury gathered in his eyes. “Can they be killed?”
Sorcha felt the weight of his words catch in her chest. “It isn’t something to consider, Harry. If you harm one of the fair folk, you gain a curse I am not entitled to lift. And as you said, too many people depend on you to chance such a thing.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “A curse?”
She drew a breath. “Your nightmares would only grow worse, Harry, until they drove you mad.”
“I thought fairies couldn’t force.”
“I’m afraid that this falls under the category of suggestion. And haven’t I had the dreams myself, Harry? So I know how bad they are. You truly can’t imagine how fierce they could grow.”
He shoved a hand through his hair. “Brilliant. So I imagine that everything else we’ve pretended is a moot point, too.”
“Unless I recover the Dearann Stone and get it safely back to the court of the Tuatha, yes. For without its power, we won’t ever see spring again.”
He was shaking his head, his focus on the floor, and Sorcha couldn’t help but hurt. For herself, for him, for his wonderful family. For sweet little Lilly, who truly wouldn’t understand.
“All right, then,” he said, shoving his arms into his shirt and buttoning it up. “I guess it’s time to go.”
Even his posture said it. Their interlude was over, forgotten as if it had never begun.
Except for one thing. In the way of her ancestors, Sorcha knew that before the loss of all life, there would be one more, created in the beauty of this place, and what they’d done and the light of Harry’s eyes. Sometime in the height of the months of summer—sure, she had to believe it would come again—she would have his child.
Did it help or hurt? Was it something she should tell him, when he was still trying to deal with what she was? Soon, she thought, letting him slip a coat over her shoulders in preparation for stepping outside. Soon she would decide whether it would be better for them both for him to know. Better for the babe who even now hovered near enough to join herself to Sorcha’s soul.
“Do you believe, then, Harry?” she asked, because she had to know.
“Of course not,” he said, but his smile was wry. Against his better judgment, he believed. She could tell. “I’d be a laughing—”
Suddenly he stopped, his head lifting. He went perfectly still. She followed the direction of his suddenly hard gaze and wondered what had gone wrong now.
Then she heard it. A distant sound of voices, of pounding, of a horse trumpeting like a charger at the forefront of an army.
She and Harry looked at each other. “What the…”
Again she heard the horse, and suddenly Sorcha recognized it. “It’s Saoirce,” she said, stepping toward the door.
This time Saoirce screamed a pure war cry of fury, and the two of them spun on each other.
“Lilly,” they said at the same time.
They left the door open as they fled down the hill.