“Did you always know?” Niall stared at the faery he’d finally started to figure out the past handful of years.
Again Irial shrugged.
Niall half-fell into the chair Irial had offered when he’d arrived. “So you shagged the woman who would have been the Summer Queen if Keenan had found her, and she had yourchild?”
Again Irial shrugged.
“We suffered over a hundred more years of winter because you felt likehiding the queen?”Niall wanted to throttle him, simply squeeze until Irial had sense in him, but as such a thing was neither possible nor wise—and the events were all in the past—he simply stared at Irial.
After a few moments, Irial stood and walked away. Niall wasn’t wrong, and Irial was sure that from the outside it probably seemed like a heinous thing he’d done. It wasn’t that simple, though.
Thelma was special.
He didn’t risk the wrath of both Summer and Winter casually. Admittedly, such a thing wasn’t out of character for him, but he wasn’t foolish.
Except when it comes to love.
He turned the door knob, feeling a sharp edge of the glass knob, a memento from when he’d thrown a few things in anger. Just inside the room, Irial paused. The last time he stood here was the day after Thelma left. The room had still smelled of her perfume. Her sheets had smelled the same.
He’d brought her beignets and coffee, as they had shared the first time they had a meal together, and for the first time in centuries, Irial was truly happy. He had been well aware of her mortality, of the fact that loving her as he’d allowed himself to do could only end badly. He’d been equally aware that the then-weak Summer Court and the over-strong Winter Court would both have him skinned alive if they knew that the missing Summer Queen was nestled in his sheets.
What he hadn’t know was that Thelma would leave so soon.
“You weren’t trying to thwart Summer, were you?” Niall’s voice came from the doorway to the room.
Irial had heard his steps, known that the first wave of anger would pass once Niall tasted Irial’s feelings.
“Iri? I was rash,” Niall said, not quite an apology, but they’d never been much for such words.
Irial shrugged. When he’d met Niall, Irial could taste every feeling, every glorious bit of desire, of hope, of joy. It was a skill unique to the Dark King. He romanced Niall, Thelma, Leslie, and then Niall again with the unfair ability to taste what they felt. He negotiated with kings and queens with that same gift. It had made him formidable. And still he lost more often than made sense. Sometimes knowledge—or love—was not enough to overcome fears or doubts.
“I hadn’t planned to love her,” Irial admitted, back still to Niall. “Or you. Or Leslie. I’m terrible at it, you know?”
“No,” Niall corrected. “You are terrible at dealing with the fears that come with loving, not atbeingin love.”
Irial walked over to the bathtub, a claw-footed indulgence that Thelma had thought the single most remarkable part of the house. . . other than books. She’d read the way most mortals breathed or slept, as if death himself would come if she went too long without words.
“I had a child,” Irial repeated. The letters that had been delivered the week prior, the strange missives from the past that had been all addressed to him but never sent, had finally arrived a century late.
Irial turned to face Niall. “My daughter wrote to me, and Thelma saved each letter. She wrote, too.”
Memories of the past crowded in as Irial tried to contain the massive well of loss, of anger, of confusion that threatened to swallow him.
They stood, awkwardly in silence, until Leslie joined them. Her hand was shaking when she held up a letter.
“This was delivered to the house,” she said. Before he could panic much at the thought of Leslie unprotected, she added, “Chela brought it to me.”
Irial opened it and pulled out a single page of spidery handwriting.
Father,
I grew up hearing of you. I wrote letters as soon as I could write—at Mother’s order. Mother wrote as well, but she often wept when she did. I don’t know how things ended, but I know that she never married. As I grew older, never quite aging as children should, we moved a lot. We stayed clear of fey things, and she often spoke in terrified words of the Summer King . . . and of my father, a beautiful man who saved her.
What she failed to tell me, of course, was that the man who saved her was also the Dark King. I knew your name, but not what role you filled in that world. Had I known, I would not have written.
When the Summer King—the same faery that you saved my mother from—came to my door for my daughter, Moira, I tried to figure out how to find you. I discovered then that my beloved grandfather, agood faeryin a sea of monsters, was the king of the worst of fey. Still I was prepared to reach you, but Moira died, and she left behind a child. No tale my mother told was enough for me to risk that love had blinded her, that you were as awful as I feared.
I believe you are already acquainted with your great granddaughter, Aislinn.