16
The Unseelie King settles into what passes as an enormous red crushed-velvet chair in what might loosely be called a theater room before a stage so vast the edges furl out into night skies filled with stars. On the left, the Milky Way shimmers. To the right, a nebula stains the sky rainbow-bright.
He rests his head of sorts on a hand of sorts and broods.
His woman retains no memory of him at all.
She knows him only as the Seelie Queen’s greatest enemy and believes that since the Unseelie Prince was unable to kill her, the king himself came to finish the job.
Though she conceals it with defiance, she is terrified of him.
To see his beloved gaze upon him with fear … there are no words. Neither split into dozens of humans, as he must be in order to walk among the tiny, strange, absurdly determined creatures who face such futile odds, nor as a god.
The joy that burned inside him upon seeing her again is ash.
He changes a channel of sorts with a remote of sorts and one of the more interesting cities on one of his more interesting worlds takes the limelight.
It is dying, as he suspected.
No matter, another will come.
But another of her will not come. In all this time, no one has touched him as she has. To have her back again and not have her at all is almost worse than believing her gone. It is as if a replication has risen from the dead, a perfect mirror image, nothing within. Should he take her into the White Mansion? Confront her with the residue of their love?
“Is that Dublin?”
Her voice is beautiful. She had names for him, endearments she called him. He would raze worlds to hear them again.
She stands behind him. Close enough that if she chose she could place a hand on his shoulder, were he not the size of a skyscraper and she the size of a pea. Once, she wore a glamour that met him size for girth, wing for wing, crown for crown. He does not bother to answer. Temple Bar is red, the River Liffey silver. She has eyes. She knows this world.
“Am I prisoner here?”
“You are.” He was never letting her go. He would not turn and gaze fifty floors of wing and blackness down at her. He was uncertain what he might do if he did.
“What are you doing to Dublin? It ails. I feel it.”
He doesn’t want to see that beneath a cloak of ermine fur she’s wearing a diaphanous gown of white that does nothing to conceal her exquisite body, her hair bound in a platinum braid. He would commit genocide on a dozen planets to see her in a gown of bloodred, pale hair spilling to her ankles, joy in her eyes, a smile of greeting.
“I do nothing. They do it themselves.”
“Attend it,” she says imperiously. “My druids are there.”
“Give me an incentive.”
“My druids are there.”
“That is not one.” He doesn’t bother to conceal his bitterness. Should he take her beneath him? Discover if that makes her recall, if memory can be forced to return?
“You will not coerce intimacy where none is granted,” she says sharply.
He goes very still. “I did not say that.”
“You did.”
She can still hear him. She may not remember him or the epic love they share but she hears his desires, as she always has.
“I would never.”
“You would. You are the Unseelie King. You slew the one who ruled before me. You care for nothing and never have. You think you create but you destroy. That is all of which you are capable.”
Anger and something deeper ruffles his wings. Her words are too similar to the note he still carries. “That is untrue.”
“Show me. Help my druids.”
“God does not step in and adjust minute details on a whim.”
“You are not God. You are the Unseelie King, once the true queen’s consort. You built an army of monstrosities and took them to war against my people. And destroy is precisely what you do.”
Once, she helped shelter his monstrosities. Believed they deserved the light. That they could be perfected, freed. “For you, my love.”
“I am not your love. I am Aoibheal, queen of the Fae. Return me to my court. I am needed there.”
“Return you for what? You can do nothing to repair the rift between your world and theirs, the many rifts in them both. Abandon it and abandon your foolish, petty court.” Choose me, he doesn’t say. Not that insignificant world. Not those tiny, inconsequential beings.
“To live with a foolish, petty king?”
She thinks him a fool and petty. He will not acknowledge the arrow shot as a question. She calls him a destroyer. She sees nothing of his glory, recalls no details of the worlds they once made together, so beautiful they often rested on a nearby star for time uncounted to watch them bloom.
“You say you love me,” she says. “Show me. Restore Dublin. Heal their world and mine.”
“Why have you always cared so much about these tiny worlds?”
“Why have you never?”
He had once. When she’d cared about him. He’d made himself small for her and walked in her manner, tending small things. But being small was so much more complicated than being God. “If I do this for you, will you share my bed of your own volition?”
He feels her anger, her instant denial.
On stage, he weaves for her a brutal, horrific glamour of what’s to come. Dublin falling, the Earth dying, the lovely blue and white planet blinking out then gone. Attached to it by a planetary umbilical cord, the Fae realm also goes black and disappears.
Behind him, she gasps then says stiffly, “That is your price?”
“That is my price.”
“And you will fix our worlds?”
“I will.”
“And you can?”
“I can.”
“One time only,” she says tightly.
“I specify the duration.”
“It is limited to a single human fortnight. Then you will never come to me again. You will not seek me. You will never cross my path.”
“Before.”
“When it is done. That is non-negotiable.”
“Everything is negotiable if the correct pressure is applied.”
The look she gives him is venom and ice.
He will concede for her. Always only for her.
“Say it,” he demands.
“Yes,” she hisses.
She said yes. Even spat with fury, the single word is an aria to once deafened ears. None has ever been sweeter on her lips. He will taste her assent before, like her memory, it too vanishes.
“Your tithe to this compact between us will be a kiss.” He begins reducing himself to make it so. He will turn and touch her, take her in his arms.
He doesn’t tell her that it’s too late.
He will have, at the very least, a single kiss.
Without the Song of Making—which she has never known and he turned his back on long ago—none can save either world: Fae or human.