Where Light Meets Shadow (14 page)

Kieran slept for two days after
the healing, barely waking to eat. Alban registered dimly in his awareness,
fussing and worrying over him, and once even Toryn made an appearance.

“He’s just exhausted,” he heard
Toryn tell Alban. “He’s not used to healing as you are, and that was a healing
such as even I would not have been able to accomplish.”

At the end of the second night,
Kieran woke from one of the queen’s dreams. Alban stood next to his bed, tears
gleaming in the moonlight, and Kieran was too weak to do anything but pull the
blankets back so Alban could climb in next to him.

He stirred again as dawn’s first
rays turned the room golden, and lay basking in the warmth of the prince beside
him for a few moments before reaching out to shake him awake.

“All will be well,” Alban
murmured sleepily. “I have spent most of the past days in this room, watching
over you as you slept. No one will find it amiss that I fell asleep here.”

Kieran knew he should protest.
What if Alban’s father walked in? But he was feeling entirely too content at
the moment. Too easy to close his eyes and let Alban’s head rest once more on his
shoulder. A good thing he was not more awake, or he’d be tempted to quite a bit
more than a soft kiss to Kieran’s hair before slipping back to sleep again.

The knock to Alban’s door woke
Kieran, brought him to tense alertness despite the prince’s earlier assurances.
After a pause, another knock came, this time to his own door. He froze in place
like a rabbit in a hawk’s shadow.

“Just leave the tray,” Alban
called softly. “I’ll be out for it in a moment.”

“Very good, my prince.” The
answer came through the closed door with polite, incurious inflection.

Kieran let out the breath he had
been holding. “Really, we should not take such chances.”

Alban smiled down at him. “Are
you not supposed to be the reckless one, O my Fool?”

His heart swelled at the possessive
response, though he knew it was just a manner of speaking. “And you are
supposed to be responsible, Prince of Light.”

A shadow passed over Alban’s face
and was gone so quickly that Kieran couldn’t be sure he’d seen it. “Maybe I’m
tired of being responsible. I’ll go get our breakfast.”

Over their buttered scones and
tea, Alban seemed strangely pensive. “I only wish she’d leave you alone.”

The statement came so completely
out of the mist that Kieran nearly dropped a scone into his tea. “What? Who?”

“Your queen. Haven’t you noticed
that the nightmares get worse anytime you let up on your pursuit of the bardic
healing to help her?”

“What? That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it? I wonder.”

“She has been in a state of
living death almost as long as I have been alive.”

“Regardless,” Alban replied in a
tone that said he was far from convinced but not interested in taking the
argument further. “If the nightmares that you have been experiencing, that we
have been experiencing together, are any indication of her inner world, I wouldn’t
wish that kind of suffering on anyone.”

“That was the idea behind my
interest in bardic healing,” Kieran confessed. “But it requires both of us. I
don’t see how else to make it work.”

“It requires both of us, yes. But
I wonder, would it require both of us, or even either of us, to be in the
presence of your queen? The dreams seem to imply some sort of a link between
yourself and the queen.”

“Can such a link be used for
healing?”

“For a healing of the body,
probably not. For a healing of the mind, maybe. Most mind-healing takes place
through a link. Not the sort of link we have, but a lighter healing link that
doesn’t require the same level of compatibility. For that sort of link,
distance theoretically shouldn’t matter.”

“Would you do this for me? For
us?”

“I would. I know you refuse to
believe this, but my family has never wished your queen ill. We were not the
ones to start the war.”

No, you only provoked it.
But Kieran had grown weary of that argument.

“How would we proceed?” Kieran
asked instead. “Any link I may have with the queen is likely accidental and
definitely beyond my control.”

Alban shook his head. “I don’t
know. Let me think on it. Shall we go down to the stables to visit your mare? I
would guess you could do with some fresh air and exercise.”

The trip down to the stables no
longer seemed so long and arduous. Soon, very soon, he would be able to travel,
and then he would no longer have an excuse to linger with Alban. The thought of
leaving his enemies’ stronghold no longer cheered Kieran as it once would have.

He harped a little in the
afternoon, just reacquainting his hands with the strings, not yet ready to
actively commit once more to working on the bardic healing. Alban mind-linked
with him all the same, and Kieran did not question him for it, though he knew
he shouldn’t let Alban become so attached to him. Or let himself become so
attached to Alban, but he was less concerned for himself.

That evening, Sheary hosted a
party in Kieran’s honor. Though embarrassed by the attention, he could scarcely
refuse. Sheary never allowed his wine cup to go completely empty, and so Kieran
lost track of how much wine he drank. He slept soundly that night and did not
dream.

The dream he had the next night
more than made up for it. Even after Alban woke him, he could still feel the
aching hollowness.

“The link,” Alban whispered to
him. “Take up your harp. Let’s try this.”

The suggestion took him the way
Grace often took him when he played. Without conscious will, he picked up the
harp and put his hands to the strings. Alban took him into the link, deep and
then deeper, until without thought he knew everything Alban knew about healing.

An odd feeling filled the air, a
sense of anticipation, as if the storm of dark emotions from the dream had
given way to a soft morning fresh with the promise of spring.

Kieran started with an ancient
Leas healing tune from the book, one that he had been trying to master for a
week. This time his fingers found their way through it the way water from a
spring danced easily around and over mountain rock on its way to the sea.
Ornamentation came without conscious thought, lilting in imitation of the
lark’s song in the morning, warming and deepening with the memory of a fresh,
fair lass he’d lain with in a sunny meadow.

He passed from playing the harp
to being played by it.  Kieran’s heart swelled to bursting. He could
scarcely feel his own fingers on the strings, and yet the music they pulled
from his heart and his harp was everywhere, everything, permeating even the air
in his lungs until he thought he would die of it. Yet he felt no fear, only
awe. Kieran’s life would be perfect if he could die so, if he could never come
back from this music into the tawdry world. The universe was his at that
moment. He felt no common drive to control, only to bask, to join, and most of
all to play, to keep playing. Tears rolled down his face, his lips pulled back
from his teeth in a rictus of ecstasy.

It would be terrifying, if he had
a place left in his soul for fear, but the music had taken it all. It was his
slave, his master, it mattered not which, so long as he could be with it. He
wanted to be in this place forever, where there was no guilt, no failure, no
past, no longing. Only the music.

Somewhere, far off, he felt his distant
queen waking.

#

Alban felt the moment in which
the link between Kieran and the queen severed, even as he heard Kieran tie off
the tune in a final coda. In that same moment, whatever power drove Kieran left
him, and Alban barely caught the harp as it slipped from his nerveless hands.
He set it aside as Kieran slumped back to the bed.

Alban wasn’t really sure what he
had expected. He wasn’t even sure he expected it to work. But Kieran had been
like something out of legend, and the Scathlan queen was awake for good or ill.

His own part in the bardic
healing took the last of his strength, and yet he sat by Kieran’s bedside,
watching over his sleep, haunted by the queen’s words to Kieran sent through
the link.
Come home to me, bard. Come home to me and serve.

It didn’t surprise Alban that
Kieran would not wake for breakfast. He left a plate of scones on the bedside
table, in case the Scathlan rose later while he was gone, and went to face his
father.

Yes, Father had not opposed
Kieran’s intent to wake his queen. But the intent was not the same thing as
using an experimental healing technique involving them both, without first
consulting his father and asking for his specific permission. Alban had acted
on reckless impulse last night. His Fool must be rubbing off on him.

He came to his parents’ table
just as they were finishing breakfast.

“Good morning, dear,” Mother
greeted him. “You are not taking breakfast with your bard? I hope the two of
you have not quarreled.”

A smile pulled at his lips at his
mother’s acceptance of Kieran’s place in Alban’s life. “No. Kieran is just
sleeping in.”

“He shouldn’t still be suffering
exhaustion from Sheary’s healing,” Father said. “Perhaps I should check on
him.”

The concern in his father’s voice
gave Alban hope. “Not from Sheary’s healing, but the one we did last night.” He
took a deep breath for courage, and told his father what they had done.

He didn’t tell him that the queen
was calling Kieran home. To put that into words would make it too real, and he
didn’t want his father to hear his voice shake.

“I see,” his father said when he
finished.

Alban had expected anger,
disappointment,
a
lecture at least. His father’s
dispassionate, two-word reply left him without a planned response.

“I suppose I should not be
surprised that the Scathlan persuaded you to proceed without so much as an
advance word to me.”

“You can’t blame Kieran. It was
my idea.”

“I can blame whomever I like. You
were never this irresponsible before he came into your life. Though what you
hope to gain, I can’t begin to guess. You know you can’t keep him.”

Yes, Alban knew. He thought about
it every day.

His father pinched the bridge of
his nose. “If he chose to stay, I would allow it. After he saved Sheary, I
could in good conscience do nothing else, despite the problems it would cause.
I would allow it, if he would forsake his people to stay with us. But you know
he will not.”

Alban knew it down to the core of
his soul.

Father sighed. “So the Scathlan
queen has woken. Nothing can be done to change the fact. I can only hope your
stray will wander back to his home soon so you will return to your senses.”

Alban lowered his head under the
weight of his father’s disapproval, and left his parents’ rooms despite his
mother’s pleas that he stay and at least eat something. He returned to his own
rooms, pausing only briefly outside Kieran’s door to hear whether the bard
stirred. But Kieran’s room was silent.

He hadn’t slept much himself last
night, and so he crawled back into bed. Drained, he still stared at the ceiling
for a long time before falling into a restless sleep.

Over dinner that night, Kieran
was quiet and uncommunicative. When Alban tried to link with him while he
harped, he subtly resisted all but the shallowest of links.

It would be tonight then. He had
hoped for more time.

He didn’t protest when Kieran
sent him from his room early, pleading fatigue even though he had slept away
most of the day. Alban went on a brief errand of his own, then returned to his
room and sat in a chair by the door, not reading the book open on his lap. The
clock struck midnight, and he began to think that he had been wrong.

Then he heard Kieran’s door open
and close.

#

Kieran paused at the top of the
stairs to adjust the strap of the harp’s travel case more securely across his
shoulders. He felt far from confident that he was up to the long journey, but
the pull of the queen’s conscious farspeak was stronger than her unconscious
dreams, and the pull of his duty to his people stronger still.

Not to mention that he didn’t
think he could bear another night like the last one with Alban, pushing him
away from any knowledge of his plans to leave, feeling through the mind-link
the hurt the rebuff caused.

The sound of a door opening
behind him broke the stillness. He whirled to face Alban.

“Leaving without saying
good-bye?” Moonlight came through the window behind Alban, silvering his fair
hair so that he looked like a song come to life.

Kieran couldn’t quite meet his
eyes. “I thought it for the best.”

“I mean that little to you?”

Alban’s voice held accusation,
which Kieran could live with, and pain, which he could not.

“You mean that much.” Kieran let
his own voice carry all the emotion he dared not put into words.

“Stay, then. Father would allow
it.” It was both a plea and a challenge.

Kieran stepped closer to him.
“Would you stay, if our situations were reversed?”

Alban frowned and looked away.
“That’s not fair. I have responsibilities.”

“As do I.”

Silence fell, counted in
heartbeats.

At last Alban spoke, “If your aim
is to avoid notice until you are well gone, I would not leave at this hour. The
sentry at the gate will surely find it suspicious and will hold you until he
can consult Father. If you leave just before the dawn, it will be easy enough
to convince him that you merely wish to watch the sunrise from Teague’s Rest.
Especially as I will accompany you that far.”

“You would do that for me? But I
couldn’t allow my departure to come between you and your father.”

“Kieran, I would do anything for
you. And as for my father, you have caused a rift already. And will cause
further, as I refuse to hide from him that I knew of your leaving in advance.
Or that I heard your queen calling you home. Or that I sensed in her mind, in
those moments before the link severed, her hatred of my people and her desire
for revenge.”

“Why would you help me, then?”

“When have I done anything else?”

Kieran let out a deep breath.
“All right, then. What shall we do until then? I doubt either of us will be
able to sleep.”

“I. . .” Alban shook his head.
“Nothing.”

Kieran closed the distance
between them and put his hands on Alban’s shoulders. “What? I should think
there is nothing we cannot say. In the mind-link, we have been as intimate as
two people can be.”

Alban gave him a tight, ironic
smile at odds with his usual gentle, open demeanor. “Intimate. Interesting
choice of words. This is our last night together. Will you lie with me?”

Breath left Kieran in a gust of
surprise. “I’m not sure that would be a good idea.”

Alban pulled back. “Why not?
Because of my lack of experience? I assure you that my healer’s knowledge would
more than make up for any lack of practical—”

“Not that,” Kieran said, unable
to bear Alban’s virgin insecurity.

Even if the reason Alban guessed
was partly true, though not in the sense that the prince meant, it was not the
only reason. The idea of taking Alban’s innocence, the responsibility it
implied, frightened him as much as it aroused him.

“You are not attracted to me?”

An easy escape came to him, an
easy lie, but he could not voice it. “How can you think that?” Kieran came
forward, taking Alban’s hands. “You are the most beautiful person I have ever
known. Not just your face and form—and I could write songs about your face and
form. I have seen your very soul, when we healed together, and you are—” He
laughed. “You rob a bard of words. What right has someone like me to touch
someone like you?”

“The right belongs to whom I
choose. I choose you.”

Kieran shook his head. He wanted
this too much, and it could not be.

Alban stroked a thumb over the
back of Kieran’s hand. “You forget, I saw you as you saw me. And what I saw was
beautiful to me.”

“You are a Leas and I am a
Scathlan.”

“Does that matter to you still?”
The confidence in Alban’s voice said he knew that it didn’t, at least not in
the sense it once would have.

Another bid for reason. “Our
people—”

“Forget our people.” Alban’s
voice was ardent now. “Does it matter to you?”

“No. Not anymore,” he said
softly. “Not for a long time. But you are a prince and I a mere bard.”

Alban squeezed his hands. His
small smile that said he realized that Kieran’s arguments were growing weaker.

“You who have twined souls with
me,” Alban said. “Do you think that could matter to me?”

“But I am leaving before the sun
rises.”

“Then give me the remains of the
night.” Alban’s voice filled with passionate urgency. “I am not a maiden that
you might leave with an unwanted child. And I know you have slept with others
that mattered less to you and left without a backward glance. Why not with me?”

“Because you matter more.” Now it
was his turn to squeeze Alban’s hands. “And because I mean more to you. I don’t
want to break your heart.”

“You will. Unless you stay, you
will. At least give me this.”

There could be only one answer.
“Yes.”

Alban pulled him in for a kiss,
then stepped back again, suddenly shy. No matter how much the Leas wanted this,
Kieran knew the first time was always a little awkward.

“Would you be more comfortable in
your room or mine?” Kieran asked.

“I have a better idea,” Alban
said, and took his hand.

Alban led him through the castle,
the fear of getting caught adding even more spice to the adventure. They went
down to the wine cellars where Alban paused to steal two lit torches from their
sconces, handing one to Kieran. Alban then detoured to the armory.

“Alban, are you crazy?” Kieran
whispered fiercely.

“Hush. Do you want your father’s
sword, or not?”

To think he had once thought
Alban incapable of recklessness!

Sword secured, they went through
a small door and down a narrow tunnel.

Kieran was about to protest that
they would run out of time before they reached wherever it was that Alban was
taking them when the tunnel opened up into a small cavern. Alban lit sconces
that had been bolted into the walls, and the walls glittered with crystalline
deposits left by the water that still trickled down in slow flows.

In the center of the cavern, a
deep, round pool steamed, completely at odds with Kieran’s extensive experience
of underground water, which tended to be cold as icemelt.

“The water comes up from the
ground naturally heated. There seems to be some minerals dissolved in it. It is
soothing and oddly buoyant.”

From the stiffness of the words,
Kieran could tell that Alban was still nervous. He had not brought him here on
whim. Clearly he had thought about this, imagined this for some time. Wanted
this for some time. Wanted him.

Kieran had never been more than
someone’s quick tumble. The responsibility of this moment awed him, made him
nearly nervous as Alban.

No. If this was to go well, one
of them had to at least act sure of themselves. And he wanted this to go well
for Alban. Wanted it to be everything Alban had so obviously dreamed of.

“Shall we, then?” Kieran
undressed with forced casualness, as though a soak in the hot water was his
only goal.

Then he slipped into the water,
watching out of the corner of his eye as Alban followed suit, sparing the
prince a direct stare.

Grace, but he was lovely. Slight
yet lithely muscled. The torchlight warmed the elf’s pale skin and glinted like
gold in his pale hair.

He gave Alban time to soak, to
let the relaxation of the hot water work its magic, before holding out a hand
to him. “Come here.”

Alban pushed off from the side
and half-floated over. Kieran caught him by the hand and gently drew him close,
giving Alban time to pull away if he chose. Alban came to him, slowly, shyly.
Kieran stroked his hand across Alban’s shoulders, feeling skin pleasantly slick
from the mineralized water. He took a deep breath to steady himself. He was
already hard.

“May I kiss you?” Kieran asked
softly.

Alban tilted his head up in
answer, and Kieran brushed their lips together gently until Alban opened his
mouth to him. Then he dared more passion, twining their tongues together. Alban
moaned, and it was the most erotic sound he’d ever heard. Kieran pulled Alban
against his chest then, felt Alban’s hardness slick against his stomach.

Kieran pulled his mouth away to
gasp aloud, then attacked Alban’s neck, making him writhe and groan. They were
both close; he could finish this quickly in a torrent of pleasure, but he
wanted more.

He pulled back slightly, letting
the water rush between them. Alban frowned, but Kieran soothed him with hands
sliding up his sides. Kieran bent to tongue Alban’s nipples, adding to the
pleasure while varying it enough to stop the headlong rush to completion. Then
he raised his head, meeting Alban’s eyes.

Alban looked away, suddenly shy.
“I don’t know what to do. I mean I do, in theory, but I feel so stupid.”

Kieran smiled at him. “If you are
still capable of complete sentences, I’m doing something wrong.”

He could take Alban in hand, make
him forget himself in a rush of pleasure. That would be good, that would be
excellent.

He was greedy. He wanted even
more. And he wanted more for Alban.

“Mind-link with me.”

And, oh, Alban did. Tentatively
at first, and then deeper and surer when he sensed that Kieran’s desire matched
his own, when Alban knew that his innocence raised only protectiveness and care
in Kieran. When he knew Kieran was as in awe of him as he was the bard.

They pressed together then, body
and soul. And oh, had he really mistaken Alban’s virginity for innocence? The
Leas used every bit of his healer’s knowledge, and Kieran’s experience barely
allowed him to meet his challenge as they both took the sense of the other’s
preferences and pleasures to send the flame higher and higher, joining so that
Alban’s pleasure became indistinguishable from his own, until completion swept
over them like wildfire.