Lady Midnight
Page 71

Mark gave his loyalty to Gwyn, and his service, but he did not make friends among the Wild Hunt. They were not Shadowhunters, and he was a Shadowhunter. The others were all of the faerie Courts, pressed into service with the Hunt as punishment. They did not like the fact that he was Nephilim, and he felt their scorn and scorned them in turn.
He rode through the nights alone, on a silver mare given to him by Gwyn. Gwyn seemed, perversely, to like him, perhaps to spite the others of the Hunt. He taught Mark to navigate by the stars and to listen for the sounds of a battle that might echo through hundreds, even thousands of miles: cries of anger and the shouts of the dying. They would ride to the field of battle and, invisible to mundane eyes, divest the dead bodies of precious things. Most of them were paid in tribute to the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, but some Gwyn kept for himself.
Mark slept alone, every night, on the cold ground, wrapped in a blanket, a stone for his pillow. When it was cold, he shivered, and dreamed of runes that would warm him, of the hot blaze of seraph blades. In his pocket he kept the witchlight rune-stone Jace Herondale had given him, though he dared not light it except when he was alone.
Each night as he fell asleep he recited the names of his sisters and brothers, in order of age. Each word was weighted like an anchor, cleaving him to the earth. Keeping him alive.
Helen. Julian. Tiberius. Livia. Drusilla. Octavian.
The days blurred into months. Time was not like it was in the mundane world. Mark had given up counting days—there was no way to mark them down, and Gwyn hated such things. Therefore he had no idea how long he had been with the Hunt when Kieran came.
He had known they were getting a new Hunter; gossip spread quickly, and besides, Gwyn always Turned the newest of them in the same place: a cavern near to the entrance of the Unseelie Court, where the walls were thickly carpeted in emerald lichen and a small natural pool welled among the rocks.
They found him there when they arrived, left for Gwyn to discover. At first all Mark could see was the outline of a boy with a tangle of black hair and a slender body, the chains binding his wrists and ankles pulling it into a strange torsion. He appeared to be all bones and angles.
“Prince Kieran,” said Gwyn as he approached the boy, and a murmur ran through the Hunt. If the newcomer was a prince, he was more exalted than faerie gentry. And what could a prince have done to get himself so brutally exiled from the Court, cut off from family and name, kith and kin?
The boy lifted his head when Gwyn came to him, revealing his face. He was certainly gentry. He had their strange, luminous, almost inhumanly beautiful features, high-cheekboned and black-eyed. His hair had a sheen to it of blue and green among the black, the color of the ocean at night. He turned his face away when Gwyn tried to press the water on him, mixed with blood, but Gwyn forced it down his throat. Mark watched in fascination as Kieran’s right eye turned from black to silver, and the chains fell away from lacerated wrists and ankles.
“You are of the Hunt now,” said Gwyn with a grimness that was unusual. “Rise and join us.”
Kieran was a strange addition to the group. Though his rank as prince had been stripped from him when he was exiled to the Hunt, he still carried an indefinable air of arrogance and royalty with him, which did not sit well with the others. They mocked him, called him “princeling,” and would have done worse if Gwyn had not stayed their hands. It seemed there was someone in the Courts looking out for Kieran, despite his exile.
Mark could not help but watch him. Something about Kieran fascinated him. He soon learned that the prince’s hair changed color depending on his mood, from night black (when he was despairing) to pale blue (when he laughed, which was not often)—always colors of the sea. It was thick and curling and sometimes Mark wanted to touch it and see if it felt like hair or something else, shot silk, a fabric that changed color in the light. Kieran rode his horse—given to him by Gwyn; it was the fiercest Mark had ever seen, black and skeletal, a mount of the dead—as if he were born to it. Like Mark, he seemed determined to ride out the pain of exile and friendlessness alone, rarely speaking to the others of the Hunt, rarely even glancing at them.
Only he looked at Mark sometimes, when the others called him Nephilim and Shadow-spawn and angel-boy and other names much worse. A day came when news spread that the Clave had hanged a group of faeries in Idris for treason. The faeries had had friends among the Hunt, and in a rage, Mark’s fellows demanded that Mark kneel and say the words “I am not a Shadowhunter.”
When he would not, they stripped Mark’s shirt from his body and whipped him bloody. They left him crumpled under a tree in a snowy field, his blood turning the white flakes to red.
When he woke there was firelight and warmth, and he was lying in someone’s lap. Only groggily did he come to enough consciousness to realize that it was Kieran’s. Kieran lifted him in his arms and gave him water and folded a blanket around his shoulders. His touch was gentle and light. “I believe among your people,” he said, “there are healing runes.”
“Yes,” Mark said in a croak, moving only very slightly. Pain from his lacerated skin jolted through him. “They’re called iratzes. One would mend these injuries for me. But they cannot be made without a stele, and my stele was broken years past.”
“That is a pity,” said Kieran. “I believe your skin will be scarred forevermore.”
“What care I?” said Mark, listless. “It is not as if it matters much, here in the Hunt, whether I am beautiful.”
Kieran gave a secret half smile at that and touched Mark’s hair lightly. Mark closed his eyes. It had been years since anyone had touched him, and the feeling sent shivers down through his body despite the pain of the cuts.
After that, when they rode out, they rode out together. Kieran made of the Hunt an adventure for the two of them. He showed Mark wonders that only the Fair Folk knew of: sheets of ice lying silent and silver under moonlight, and hidden glens, blooming with night flowers. They rode among the spray of waterfalls and amid the towers of clouds. And Mark was, if not happy, no longer tortured by loneliness.
At night they slept curled together under Kieran’s blanket, made of a thickly woven material that was always warm. One night they stopped on a hilltop, in a place green and north. There was a cairn of stones crowning the hill, something built by mundanes a thousand years back. Mark leaned against the side of it and looked out over the green country, silvering in the dark, to the distant sea. The sea, everywhere, he thought, was the same, the same sea that broke against the shores in the place he still thought of as home.
“Your scars have healed,” Kieran said, touching one of his light, slender fingers to a torn place in Mark’s shirt where the skin showed through.
“But they are still ugly,” Mark said. He was waiting for the first stars to come out, so he could name his family on them. He didn’t see Kieran draw closer until the other boy was opposite him, his face elegantly shadowed in the twilight.
“Nothing about you is ugly,” Kieran said. He leaned in to kiss Mark and Mark, after a moment of surprise, turned his face up and met Kieran’s lips with his.
It was the first time he had ever been kissed, and he had never thought it would be by a boy, but he was glad it was Kieran. He had never expected a kiss to be so agonizing and pleasurable at the same time. He had wanted to touch Kieran’s hair for months, and now he did, burying his fingers in the strands, which were turning from black to blue edged with gold. They felt like licks of flame against his skin.