“I’ve seen what the two of you can do. I think it’s worth the risk.” Toryn’s mouth thinned into a frown. “Honestly, I don’t think you can do any damage. If the bardic healing doesn’t help, we’ve lost him anyway.”
“Who?” Alban asked.
“Sheary.”
Kieran shuddered as though someone had drenched him with cold water.
He said nothing as he followed Toryn and Alban to Sheary’s rooms, through the sitting room too large and empty without a group of laughing, drinking Leas and into the bedroom, where Alban’s cousin lay, still in his muddy hunting clothes. The wet gurgle of his breath filled the room. Half of his chest had been stove in, and white bone stood out against bloody torn flesh. Suddenly, Kieran was a child again in the Scathlan infirmary, seeing the wreck of his father’s body.
The room spun, and he put a hand on Alban’s shoulder to steady himself. He found that he couldn’t breathe.
“Kieran?” Alban’s voice came from very far away.
“I can’t do this,” he whispered.
“Then he will die,” Toryn said, calm and implacable.
Laughing Sheary, the first Leas who accepted him without being duty-bound to do so. Even Alban had first seen him only as an unpleasant responsibility.
“No,” he said. “Just give me a minute.” He forced a deep breath, and then another. “All right. All right.”
If ever the Grace worked through his music, let her do it now.
Kieran sat by Sheary’s bed, looking at his face, deathly pale with blue-tinged lips but still less horrible than seeing the ruined chest. He couldn’t let himself think about the scent of blood, of how much it smelled like a slaughterhouse, or he’d lose his nerve once more.
He unwrapped his harp. Alban put his hands on his shoulders and slipped into his mind, braiding their thoughts, merging their souls. He thought Alban would take the lead and he would be drawn along, but the moment he put his hands to the strings the music took him utterly, drew him along, drew them along. Alban’s healing knowledge and talent was there, part of the music in the same sense that the rhythm of his breath and heartbeat was part of the music.
A small part of his rational mind told him that he had lost control as he had promised Alban he never would again, lost control in a most dangerous circumstance. But then he heard Alban. No, you’re doing fine, I’m watching, and the healing is happening like it needs to. Keep going. I’ll pull us back if we are going too far.
He trusted Alban, trusted the music, trusted the Grace that pulsed through him like the blood in his veins. Time ceased to have meaning until he again heard Alban through the link.
You’ve done as much as you could. You saved his life. It’s time to finish the tune.
One last refrain, and then he stilled the strings. When he opened his eyes, Sheary breathed normally and smiled up at him, still pale but alive.
“Kieran,” he whispered. “I was simply dying to hear you play again.”
#
Kieran had been amazing. Alban had no other word for it. It had been like a mirror-image of the day Kieran had called up the storm—breathtaking magic unleashing the powers of light and healing instead of wild destruction. This time Alban had been in the magic with Kieran, his knowledge informing the tune, his talent feeding its power.
He had seen another side to Kieran too. Felt his horror at Sheary’s injuries, his determination that Sheary not die. He had long suspected that the reckless fool masked a deeper, more serious soul. Now that he had seen what had been hidden, he loved Kieran all the more, both the recklessness and the wisdom, and the sorrowful, lonely vulnerability that he had glimpsed last night.
Last night. Alban thought he had felt an answering passion in his kiss, but then Kieran had pushed him away. We cannot. A reminder of the impermanence of whatever this was that they had together. But Kieran had made no secret of his string of one-night liaisons between the Shadowed Lands and here. Did he mean less to Kieran than some random bar maid or farmer’s son?
Healing had drained him; there would be a better time to try to puzzle it out. Kieran fumbled with the wrappings of his harp, too tired to put it away properly. Alban tried to help, but his own hands were clumsy, his limbs weak.
Father pulled him away gently and pressed him into a chair. He then knelt by Kieran’s chair, took the harp from him, and wrapped it.
“I am glad my son found you in the snow, Scathlan. You have more than repaid us for our hospitality.”
Father helped Kieran back to his room. Alban had enough trouble making the trip himself, keeping one hand on the wall the whole way. Father suggested that he rest, and he’d come back for him, but Alban didn’t want to leave Kieran.
At least not until they reached their rooms. Father might be grateful to Kieran at the moment, but he wouldn’t be sanguine about him sharing a bed with his son. Even to sleep, which is all either of them were capable of at the moment.
Sixteen
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.
Seventeen
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.
Ove
r 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.
Where Light Meets Shadow Page 13
