Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices #2)(229)

Cristina sat down slowly on the scattered cushions. She smoothed her skirt down, tucking her legs under her.

"Please," she said, holding out her hand to indicate the cushion across from hers, as if she were inviting him to tea. He lowered himself onto it like a cat settling, fur ruffled with tension. "The answer is," she said, "that I don't know. I don't know what I am to Mark, or he to me."

"How can that be?" Kieran said. "We feel what we feel." He gazed down at his hands. They were faerie hands, long-jointed, scarred with many small nicks. "In the Hunt," he said, "it was real. We loved each other. We slept by each other's sides, and we breathed each other's breath and we were never apart. It was always real. It was never false." He looked at Cristina challengingly.

"I never thought that. I always knew it was real," she said. "I saw the way Mark looked at you." She looped her hands together to keep them from shaking. "You know Diego?"

"The very handsome stupid one," Kieran said.

"He's not stupid. Not that it matters," Cristina added hastily. "I loved him when I was younger, and he loved me. There was a time when we were always together, like you and Mark. Later he betrayed me."

"Mark spoke of it. In Faerie he would have been killed for such disrespect of a lady of your rank."

Cristina wasn't entirely sure what Kieran thought her rank was. "Well, the result was that I thought that what we'd had was never real. It hurt more to think that than it did to think that he'd simply stopped loving me-for I had stopped loving him that way too. We had grown out of what we had. But that is a natural thing and happens often. It is much more painful to believe that your love was always a lie."

"What else am I meant to believe?" Kieran demanded. "When Mark is willing to lie to me for the Clave he despises-"

"He didn't do it for the Clave," said Cristina. "Have you been listening to anything the Blackthorns have been saying? This is for his family. His sister is in exile because she is part faerie-this is to bring her back."

Kieran's expression was opaque. She knew family meant little to him in the abstract; it was hard to blame him for that. But the Blackthorns, in all their concrete realness, their messy and honest and total love for each other . . . did he see it?

"So do you no longer believe your love with the Rosales boy was a lie?" he said. 

"It was not a lie," she said. "Diego has his reasons for what he's doing now. And when I look back, it is with pleasure at the happiness we had. The bad things can't matter more than the good things, Kieran."

"Mark told me," he said, "that when you went into Faerie, you were each made a promise by the phouka who guards the gate that you would find something you wanted there. What was it you wanted?"

"The phouka told me I would be given a chance to bring the Cold Peace to an end," said Cristina. "It is why I agreed when it was decided to cooperate with the Queen."

Kieran looked at her, shaking his head. For a moment she thought he considered her foolish, and her heart sank. He reached to touch her face. The glide of his fingers was featherlight, as if she had been brushed by the calyx of a flower. "When I swore fealty to you in the Court of the Queen," he said, "it was to annoy and anger Mark. But now I think I made a wiser decision than I could have imagined."

"You know I'll never hold you to that oath, Kieran."

"Yes. And that is why I say you are nothing like I thought you'd be," he said. "I have lived in this small world of the Wild Hunt and Faerie Courts, yet you make me feel the world is bigger and full of possibility." He dropped his hand. "I have never known someone so generous in their heart."

Cristina felt as if her face were on fire. "Mark is also all those things," she said. "When Gwyn came to tell us you were in danger in Faerie, Mark went to get you immediately regardless of the cost."

"That was a kind thing to tell me," he said. "You have always been kind."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because you could always have taken Mark from me, but you didn't."

"No," Cristina said. "It is as you told Adaon-you would not want Mark's love if it did not come freely. Neither would I. I would not pressure or influence him. If you think I would, and that it would work if I did-then you don't know me at all. Nor Mark. Not as he really is."

Kieran's lips parted. He didn't speak, though, because the Sanctuary doors had opened, and Mark had come in.

He was all in black and looked exhausted. The red ring around his wrist drew Cristina's eye; involuntarily, she touched her own wrist, the healing skin of the binding wound.