I turned back to Aisling, who still had one hand held up in front of his lower face like some movie harem girl, so that only those blue eyes with their spiral shapes showed. I smiled at him, and he closed his eyes as if in pain. He raised his other hand and hid even his eyes from view.
I realized he was saying, “No, no, no,” over and over again.
Doyle grabbed me and whirled me round to face him. He searched my face with nearly frantic eyes, and whatever he saw there calmed him, because he smiled. We wrapped our arms around each other and kissed. We kissed long and thoroughly, until I could wrap the sun-warmed feel of his body around me like a perfume made of flesh and warmth and love.
We broke the kiss and came away from each other’s lips smiling. “I love you, my Merry.”
“And I love you, my Darkness.”
His smile widened, and he ran his hand along the edge of my hair. “Let us comfort our fallen man.”
I nodded.
We went to him still holding hands. “Aisling,” Doyle said, “Merry is not bespelled by you.”
He just shook his head, hands still covering almost every bit of his face.
Doyle knelt beside him. “I saw your face when Talan struck you and ripped your mask off, and I was not bespelled either.”
“You saw what happened to Melangell,” he murmured through the shield of his hands.
Doyle touched his arm, and Aisling jerked away from the touch. Doyle touched him again.
“Don’t touch me!”
Doyle grabbed both his upper arms and held him tight when the other man tried to flinch away. “Your skin is just skin to me, Aisling, no more or less beautiful than all the sidhe.”
Aisling just kept shaking his head, hiding behind his hands, and whispering, “No, no, no.”
I knelt beside Doyle and touched Aisling’s shoulder. He tried to move away, but Doyle’s grip was too firm. If he wanted to escape from Darkness he would have to fight.
I petted his shoulder the way you’d comfort a friend. “It’s all right, Aisling; I’ve looked into your face and I’m not befuddled, I swear.”
“Look at me,” Doyle said.
“No.”
“Aisling, look at me.”
He lowered the one hand just enough to gaze over it at Doyle. “You have not harmed me, Aisling.”
He closed his eyes and whispered, “You don’t understand.”
Doyle put a hand on either side of Aisling’s face and gave him all the concentration out of those black eyes. “Drop your hands, Aisling, drop them.”
Those spiral eyes were too wide, almost wild like a horse that is about to bolt, but he slowly let the other hand fall away. Doyle held his face between those two, big, dark hands and gazed directly into his face. “You do not have to hide from us, my friend.”
I touched his arm and said, “You don’t have to hide anymore, Aisling, not from us.”
Aisling started to tremble, and then to shake as if he were freezing cold instead of kneeling in the warm sunshine. One single silver tear trailed down from the corner of his eye, and then another, until the tears seemed to be racing down his face. Doyle rose high on his knees and kissed him on the forehead.
Galen came to kneel on the other side of Doyle, and when he moved his hands from Aisling’s face, Galen kissed his forehead, too. “You’re safe,” he said.
I hugged Aisling. “You are safe with us.”
His shoulders started to shake, and then he started to cry almost hysterically. His arm came around me and around Galen on the other side, so that he held all three of us with Doyle in the middle, and we held each other and we held him, and let him cry.
The Red Caps and sidhe who had been about to have a fight all trooped back into the house quietly, faces averted for the most part. Only Jonty risked a look; he nodded at me, and I nodded back. We were left alone in the warm sunlight, with the smell of eucalyptus filling the dream of eternal summer with a crisp, healing scent. We laid everyone’s discarded shirts underneath the shade of the big tree, so we wouldn’t be lying on the scratchy, dry grass, and put Aisling in the center of us, so that we could all touch his bare upper body. We petted and stroked him, not as lovers do, but just to fill the terrible skin hunger that he’d had to deny for so long. Babies who don’t get enough touch will fail to thrive and die, even if they are well fed and otherwise well cared for; touch is so much more important than most people want to admit.
We touched his back and shoulders at first, and then he rolled over and we ran our hands over his chest and stomach. The three of us gazed into the spiral of his eyes, traced his face with our fingertips. I got within inches of him until I could see that the black spiral lines were formed of tiny birds all flying out of his eyes. I remembered that moment in the dead gardens when his body seemed to have exploded into tiny songbirds. I traced the line of his cheek and said, “Have the spirals always been tiny birds?”
“Not in a very long time,” he said, softly.
Galen peeked over the top of his head, so that he was staring at him upside down from inches away. “I don’t remember them ever being tiny birds.”
Aisling laughed, and it filled his face with a joy that I had never seen there; even behind his veil he had been a solemn man.
“It has been longer than your lifetime, Galen, since Aisling had birds in his eyes,” Doyle said.
The happy glow faded around the edges, and then without looking at any of us, he said, “Would you unbind my hair and … touch it, please?”
I glanced at Doyle and Galen. They both nodded, and Galen smiled. We had Aisling sit up so that we could take out the pins that held all those small braids tight to his head. Even with three of us doing it, it took a while to undo all the braids. We ran our fingers through the gold and blond of his hair. It didn’t shine with its own light the way Fenella’s hair did, but it gleamed, catching every bit of light that filtered through the leaves above us.
His hair fell in ankle-length waves, thick and warm, not as soft as Galen’s, or Frost’s, or even Rhys’s, closer to Doyle’s texture. Aisling lay down on his stomach and let us pet and play with all that shining hair until we made a cloak of it fanning out around him.
He gave a deep, contented sigh and rose up on his elbows. “Some of the nobles of the Seelie Court contacted me. They offered me the throne.”
“When?” Doyle asked.
“A few days ago.”
“Why did you wait to tell us?” Galen asked.
“Because I thought you would cast me out, and I have nowhere left to go.”
I smoothed his hair back, piling it into my lap like a pet, until I could see the side of his face. “I would not cast you out for the machinations of other nobles. You have no more control over the different factions within the courts than I do.”
He glanced at me. “You aren’t angry?”
“No,” I said.
“You have two factions within the Seelie Court that want you on the throne.”
“Sir Hugh’s contingent and the king himself, but I know that there are Seelie nobles as there are Unseelie nobles who see me as unfit for either throne.”
“They fear that your mortal blood will steal away their immortality as it did on the dueling grounds.”
“I know that, and honestly for all I know they may be right.”
Aisling looked at me, obviously surprised. “You’re worried about it, too, then.”
“Yes.”
“Will you take the throne then?”
“The Goddess and faerie itself crowned Doyle and me as rulers of the Unseelie Court, but the Seelie sithen did not recognize me when I entered it.”
“You were part of the wild hunt, Merry; you can’t be queen of any court and lead the hunt,” Doyle said.
“You mean ever?” I asked.
He smiled and shook his head. “No. When you ride with the hunt, especially if you are the huntsman, it is your only title. You lay the crown aside to lead it, and pick it back up only if you give up being the huntsman.”
“You were the huntsman once, I remember you said so.”
“I was, but not of the same wild hunt that you and Sholto led.”
“I never saw more than one wild hunt and that was the sluagh,” Galen said.
“As there were once many more faerie mounds, so with the wild hunts,” Doyle said.