Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices, #2)

Kieran gave a soft, impatient noise and flopped down on the bed, among the sheets. The blankets were already flung onto the floor. With his black hair tangled against the white linen, his body sprawled out with no regard for human modesty—his shirt had ridden up to the bottom of his rib cage, and his legs were flung wide apart—Kieran looked even more of a wild creature. “Come with me, then,” he said. “Stay with me. I saw the look on your face when you saw the horses of the Hunt. You would do anything to ride again.”

Suddenly furious, Mark leaned down over him. “Not anything,” he said. His voice throbbed with low anger.

Kieran gave a slight hiss. He caught at Mark’s shirt. “There,” he said. “Be angry with me, Mark Blackthorn. Shout at me. Feel something.”

Mark stayed where he was, frozen, just above Kieran. “You think I don’t feel?” he said, incredulously.

Something flickered in Kieran’s eyes. “Put your hands on me,” he said, and Mark did, feeling helpless to stop himself. Kieran clutched at the sheets as Mark touched him, pulling at his shirt, snapping the buttons. He moved his hands over Kieran’s body, as he had done on countless nights before, and a slow flame began in his own chest, the memory of desire becoming the immediate present.

It burned in him: a lambent, sorrowful heat, like a signal fire on a distant hill. Kieran’s shirt came up and over his head and his arms were tangled in it, so he reached for Mark with his legs, pulling him in, holding him with his knees. Kieran lifted up his mouth to Mark’s, and he tasted like the sweet ice of polar expanses under skies streaked with the northern lights. Mark couldn’t stop his hands: The shape of Kieran’s shoulder was like the rise of hills, his hair soft and dark as clouds; his eyes were stars and his body moved under Mark’s like the rush of a waterfall no human eye had ever seen. He was starlight and strangeness and freedom. He was a hundred arrows loosed from a hundred bows at the same time.

And Mark was lost; he was falling through dark skies, silvered with the diamond dust of stars. He was tangling his legs with Kieran’s, his hands were in Kieran’s hair, they were hurtling through mist over green pastures, they were riding a fire-shod horse over deserts where sand rose up in clouds of gold. He cried out, and then Kieran was rushing away from him as if he had been lifted up off the bed—it was all rushing away, and Mark opened his eyes and he was in the library.

He had fallen asleep, head on his arms, face against the wood of the table. He bolted upright with a gasp and saw Kieran, sitting in the embrasure of the windowsill, looking at him.

The library was otherwise empty, thank the Angel. No one was there except them.

Mark’s hand was throbbing. He must have struck it against the edge of the table; the sides of his fingers were already starting to swell.

“A pity,” said Kieran, looking at Mark’s hand thoughtfully. “Or you wouldn’t have woken up.”

“Where is everyone?” Mark said. He swallowed against the dryness in his throat.

“Some have gone to find ingredients to dissolve the binding spell,” said Kieran. “The children became restive, and Cristina went with them and Magnus’s lover.”

“You mean Alec,” said Mark. “His name is Alec.”

Kieran shrugged. “As for Magnus, he went to something called an Internet café to make printings of Emma and Julian’s messages. We were left to do research, but you promptly fell asleep.”

Mark chewed his lower lip. His body could still feel Kieran’s, though he knew Kieran hadn’t touched him. He knew it, but he had to ask anyway, despite dreading the answer. “And you made me dream,” he said.

It wasn’t the first time Kieran had ever done that: He had given Mark pleasant dreams a few times when he could not sleep during the nights of the Hunt. It was a faerie gift.

But this was different.

“Yes,” Kieran said. There were white threads in his dark hair, like lines of ore running through a mine shaft.

“Why?” Mark said. Anger was gathering in his veins. He felt it like a pressure in his chest. They’d had terrific fights while they were in the Hunt. The screaming sort you had when everything in the world seemed to be at stake because the other person was all you had. Mark remembered pushing Kieran partway down a glacier and then flinging himself after: catching him as they both rolled into a snowbank, gripping each other in the cold with wet, frozen fingers that slipped and slid on their skin.

The problem was that fights with Kieran usually led to kissing, and that, Mark felt, was not helpful. It probably wasn’t all that healthy, either.

“Because you are not truthful with me. Your heart is closed and shrouded. I cannot see it,” Kieran said. “I thought, in dreams, perhaps . . .”

“You think I’m lying to you?” Mark felt his heart give a thump of dread.

“I think you are lying to yourself,” said Kieran. “You were not born for this life, of politics and plots and lies. Your brother is. Julian thrives at it. But you do not wish to make these kinds of bargains, where you ruin your soul to serve a greater good. You are kinder than that.”

Mark let his head fall against the chair back. If only he could tell himself Kieran was wrong, but he wasn’t. Mark loathed himself every moment of every day for lying to Kieran, even if the lie was in a good cause.

Kieran said, “Your brother would burn the world if it saved his family. Some are like that. But you are not.”

“I understand you cannot believe this matters to me as much as it does, Kieran,” Mark said. “But it is the truth.”

“Remember,” Kieran whispered. Even now, in the mundane world, there was something proud and arrogant about Kieran’s gestures, his voice. Despite the jeans Mark had lent him, he looked as if he should be at the head of a faerie army, flinging out his arm in sweeping command. “Remember that none of it is real.”

And Mark did remember. He remembered a note written on parchment, wrapped in the shell of an acorn. The first message Kieran had sent him after he’d left the Hunt.

“It is real to me,” Mark said. “All of this is real to me.” He leaned forward. “I need to know you are here in this with me, Kieran.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means no more anger,” said Mark. “It means no more sending me dreams. I needed you for so long, Kieran. I needed you so much, and that kind of need, it bends you and warps you. It makes you desperate. It makes you not choose.”

Kieran had frozen. “You’re saying you didn’t choose me?”

“I’m saying the Wild Hunt chose us. I’m saying if you are finding strangeness in me, and distance, it is because I cannot help but ask myself, over and over: In another world, in another situation, would we still have chosen each other?” He looked hard at the other boy. “You are a gentry prince. And I am half-Nephilim, worse than the lowest chaff, tainted in blood and lineage.”

“Mark.”

“I am saying the choices we make in captivity are not always the choices we make in freedom. And thus we question them. We cannot help it.”

“It is different for me,” said Kieran. “After this, I return to the Hunt. You are the one with freedom.”

“I will not let you be forced back into the Hunt if you do not wish it.”

Kieran’s eyes softened. In that moment, Mark thought he would have promised him anything, no matter how rash.

“I would like us both to have freedom,” Mark said. “To laugh, to enjoy ourselves together, to love in the ordinary way. You are free here with me, and perhaps we could take that chance, that time.”

“Very well,” Kieran said, after a long pause. “I will stay with you. And I will help you with your dull books.” He smiled. “I am in this with you, Mark, if that is how we will learn what we mean to each other.”

“Thank you,” Mark said. Kieran, like most faeries, had no use for “you’re welcome”; instead he slid off the windowsill and went in search of a book on the shelves. Mark stared after him. He had said nothing to Kieran that was not true, and yet he felt as leaden inside as if every word he had spoken was a lie.

*

The sky over London was cloudless and blue and beautiful. The water of the Thames, parting on either side of the boat, was almost blue. Sort of the color of tea, Kit thought, if you put blue ink into it.