Kaye turned, letting the thin skirt whirl around her. "I like my dress.”
"Nice. All that green really brings out the pink of your eye membranes.”
"Shut up." Picking up a twig from the ground, she twisted up her hair with it like she'd done with pencils in school. "Where's Luis?”
Corny pointed with his chin. Turning, Kaye spotted him leaning against a tree, chewing on what was probably the last of the protein bar. Luis glowered as he shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of a long brown jacket, clasped with three buckles at his waist. Kaye's damp purple coat hung from the branch of a tree.
"I guess we're supposed to go to the party like this," Kaye called.
Luis sauntered closer. "Technically, it's more of a revel.”
Corny rolled his eyes. "Let's go.”
Kaye headed toward the music, letting her fingers run through the heavy green leaves. She plucked a great white flower down from one of the branches and pulled off one bruised petal after another.
"He loves me," Corny said. "He loves me not.”
Kaye scowled and stopped. "That's not what I was doing.”
Shapes moved through the trees like ghosts. The laughter and music seemed always a little more distant until suddenly she was among a throng of faeries. Crowds of folk danced in wide and chaotic circles or diced or simply laughed as though the breeze had carried a joke to their ears only. One faerie woman crouched beside a pool, conversing intently with her reflection, while another stroked the bark of a tree as though it were the fur of a pet.
Kaye opened her mouth to tell Corny something but stopped when her eye was caught by white hair and eyes like silver spoons. Someone threaded through the crowd, cloaked and hooded, but not hooded enough.
There was only one person Kaye knew with eyes like that.
"I'll be right back," she said, already weaving between a damp girl in a dress of woven river grass and a hob on crude mossy stilts.
"Roiben?" she whispered, touching his shoulder. She could feel her heart speeding and she hated it, she hated everything about how she felt at that moment, so absurdly grateful she would have liked to slap herself. "You fucker. You could have told me to go on a quest to bring you an apple from the banquet table. You could have sent me on a quest to tie a braid in your hair.”
The figure drew back its hood, and Kaye remembered the other person who would have eyes like Roiben's. His sister, Ethine.
"Kaye," Ethine said. "I had hoped I would happen on you.”
Mortified, Kaye tried to smile but it came out as more of a grimace. She couldn't believe she had just blurted things she wasn't sure, in retrospect, that she wanted even Roiben to hear.
"I have only a moment," Ethine said. "I must bring the Queen a message. But there is something I would know. About my brother.”
Kaye shrugged. "We're not exactly speaking.”
"He was never cruel when we were children. Now he is brutal and cold and terrible. He will make war on us whom he loved—”
It startled Kaye to think of Roiben as a child. "You grew up in Faerie?”
"I don't have time for—”
"Make time. I want to know.”
Ethine looked at Kaye for a long moment, then sighed. "Roiben and I were brought up in Faerie by a human midwife. She'd been stolen away from her own children and would call us by their names. Mary and Robert. I misliked that. Otherwise, she was very kind.”
"What about your parents? Do you know them? Love them?”
"Answer my question, if you please," Ethine said. "My Lady wants him to duel instead of lead the Unseelie Court into battle. It would prevent a war—which the Unseelie Court is too depleted to win—but it would mean his death.”
"Your Lady is a bitch," Kaye said before she thought better of it.
Ethine wrung her hands, fingers sliding over one another. "No. She would accept him back. I know she would if he were only to ask her. Why won't he ask her?”
"I don't know," Kaye said.
"You must discern something. He has a fondness for you.”
Kaye started to protest, but Ethine cut her off.
"I heard the way you spoke to me when you supposed me to be him. You speak to him as to a friend.”
Kaye shook her head. "Look, I did this declaration thing. Where you get a quest. He pretty much told me to fuck off. Whatever you think I know about him or can tell you about him, I just don't think I can.”
"I saw you, although I didn't hear the words. I was in the hill that night." Ethine smiled, but her brow furrowed slightly, as though she were puzzling through Kaye's human phrasings. "Still, one must assume the quest was not an apple from a banquet table nor a braid in his hair.”
Kaye blushed.
"If you thought the King of the Unseelie Court would give you so simple a quest, you must think him besotted.”
"Why wouldn't he? He said that I . . ." Kaye stopped, realizing that she shouldn't repeat his words. You are the only thing I want. It wasn't safe to say that to Ethine, no matter what had happened.
"A declaration is very serious.”
"But... I thought it was, like, letting everyone know we were together.”
"It is far more immutable than that. There is only ever a single consort, and more often there is none. It joins you both to him and to his court. My brother declared himself once, you know.”
"To Silarial," Kaye said, although she hadn't known, not really, not before right then. She remembered Silarial standing in the middle of a human orchard and telling Roiben that he'd proved his love to her satisfaction. How angry Silarial had been when he turned away. "He finished his quest, didn't he?”
"Yes," Ethine said. "He was to stay at the Unseelie Court, as Nicnevin's sworn knight, until the end of the truce. Nicnevin's death ended it. He could be the Bright Lady's consort now if he wanted, if he returned to us. A declaration is a compact and he has fulfilled his side of the bargain.”
Kaye looked around at the revelers and felt small and stupid. "You think they should be together, don't you? You wonder what he saw in me—some dirty pixie with bad manners.”
"You're clever." The faerie woman did not meet Kaye's gaze. "I imagine he saw that.”
Kaye looked down at the scuffed tops of her boots. Not that clever, after all.
Ethine looked thoughtful. "In my heart I believe that he loves Silarial. He blames her for his pain, but my Lady . . . she did not intend for him to suffer so—”
"He doesn't believe that. At best he thinks she didn't care. And I think he very much wanted her to care.”
"What quest did he send you on?”
Kaye frowned and tried to keep her voice even. "He told me to bring him a faery that can tell an untruth." It hurt to repeat it, the words a reproach for her thinking he liked her enough to put feelings above appearances.
"An impossible task," Ethine said, still considering.
"So you see," Kaye said, "I'm probably not the best person to answer your questions. I very much wanted him to care too. And he didn't.”
"If he doesn't care for you, for her, or for me," Ethine said, "then there is no one else I can think of whom he cares for, save himself.”
A blond knight strode toward them, his green armor making his body nearly disappear into the leaves.
"I really do have to go," Ethine said, turning away.
"He doesn't care about himself," Kaye called after her. "I don't think he's cared about himself for a long time."
Corny strolled through the woods, trying to ignore how his heart hammered against his chest. He tried not to make eye contact with any faeries, but he was drawn to their cats' faces, their long noses and bright eyes. Luis's scowl was fixed, no matter what they passed. Even a river full of nixes—cabochons of water beading on their bare skin—did not move him, while it was all Corny could do to look away.
"What do you see?" Corny asked finally, when the silence between them had stretched so long that he'd given up on Luis's speaking first. "Are they beautiful? Is it all illusion?”
"They're not exactly beautiful, but they're dazzling." Luis snorted. "It sucks, when you think of it. They have forever, and what do they do— spend all their time eating and fucking and figuring out complicated ways to kill each other.”
Corny shrugged. "I probably would too. I can see myself with bag after bag of Cheetos, downloading porn, and playing Avenging Souls for weeks straight if I was immortal.”
Luis looked at Corny for a long moment. "Bullshit,” he said.
Corny snorted. "Shows what you know.”
"Remember that cake you ate before?" said Luis. "All I saw was an old mushroom.”
For a moment Corny thought he was joking. "But Kaye ate one.”
"She ate, like, three." Luis said with such glee that Corny started to laugh, and then they were both laughing together, as easy and silly as if they were going to be friends.
Corny stopped laughing when he realized that he wanted them to be friends. "How come you hate the folk?”
Luis turned so that his cloudy eye was to Corny, making it hard for Corny to read his expression. "I've had the Sight since I was a little kid. My dad had it and I guess it got passed down to me. It made him crazy; or maybe they did." Luis shook his head wearily, as though he were already tired of the story. "When they know you can see them, they fuck with you in other ways. Anyway, my dad got the idea in his head that no one was safe. He shot my mother and my brother; I think he was trying to protect them. If I had been there, he would have shot me, too. My brother made it— barely—and I had to put myself in debt to a faery to get him better. Can you imagine how things would be without the fey? I can. Normal.”
"I should tell you—one of them, a kelpie, killed my sister," Corny said. "He drowned her in the ocean about two months ago. And Nephamael, he did stuff to me, but I still wanted ..." His words trailed off as he realized that maybe it wasn't okay for him to talk about a guy that way in front of Luis.
"What did you want?”
In the clearing ahead, Corny spotted a group of faeries tossing what looked like dice into a large bowl. They were lovely or hideous or both at once. One golden-haired head looked uncomfortably familiar. Adair.
"We have to go," he whispered to Luis. "Before he spots us.”
Luis took a quick look over his shoulder as they walked faster and faster. "Which one? What did he do?”
"Cursed me." Corny nodded as they ducked under the curtain of a weeping willow. Neither mentioned that Silarial had promised no harm would come to them. Corny guessed that Luis was as cynical about the parameters of that promise as he was.
A tangle of faeries rested near the trunk of the tree: a black-furred phooka leaning against two green-skinned pixie girls with brownish wings; an elfin boy slumped by a drowsy-looking faerie man. Corny stopped short, surprised. One of them was reciting what seemed to be an epic poem on the subject of worms.
"Sorry," Corny said, turning. "We didn't mean to bother anybody.”
"Nonsense," said a pixie. "Come, sit here. You will give us a story too.”
"I'm not really—," he started, but a faery with goat feet pulled him down, laughing. The black dirt felt soft and damp under his hands and knees. The air was heavy with the rich smells of soil and leaf.
"The drake rose up with wings like leather," intoned a faery. "Its breath set afire all the heather." Perhaps the poem was about wyrms.
"Mortals are so interestingly shaped," said the elfin boy, running his fingers over the smoothness of Corny's ears.
"Neil," Luis said.
The phooka reached over to touch the roundness of Corny's cheek, as though fascinated. A faerie boy licked the inside of Corny's arm and he shivered. He was a puppet. They pulled his strings and he danced.
"Neil," Luis said, his voice distant and unimportant. "Snap out of it.”
Corny leaned into their caresses, butting his head against a phooka's palm. His skin felt hot and oversensitized. He groaned.
Long fingers tugged at his gloves.
"Don't do that," Corny warned, but he wanted them to. He wanted them to caress every part of him, but he hated himself for wanting it. He thought of his sister, following a dripping kelpie boy off a pier, but even that didn't curb his longing.
"Come, come," said a tall faery with hair as blue as the feathers of a bird. Corny blinked.
"I'll hurt you," Corny said languorously, and the faeries around him laughed. The laughter wasn't particularly mocking or cruel, but it hurt all the same. It was the amusement of watching a cat threaten the tail of a wolf.
They slid off the gloves. Decayed rubber dust flaked from the tips of his fingers.
"I hurt everything I touch," Corny said dully.
He felt hands at his hips, in his mouth. The soil was cool against his back, soothing when the rest of him was prickling with heat. Without meaning to he reached out for one of the faeries, feeling hair flow across his hands like silk, feeling the shocking warmth of muscled flesh.
His eyes opened with the sudden knowledge of what he was doing. He saw, as from a great distance, the tiny pinholes in cloth where his fingers touched, the blackberry stains of bruises blooming on necks, the brown age spots spreading like smeared dirt across ancient skin. They didn't even seem to notice.
