The fact that he had been a virgin not too very long ago didn’t enter into it, nor did the fact that he had never been in love.
A soft knock at the door heralded Alban’s arrival. Kieran felt the same flutter of excitement that came from playing before large audiences or important personages.
Ridiculous, it was only Alban, for whom he had played before. Alban, who often slipped into his room in the evenings while Kieran harped. That was the difference. Always before, Alban sitting quietly if appreciatively in the corner had been incidental to his playing.
Alban smiled shyly as he came into the room and closed the door softly behind him. A faint blush painted those pale cheeks, not entirely hidden by the fall of blond hair. So Kieran was not the only one to feel the difference this night.
Though what it meant Kieran couldn’t say, didn’t dare think too hard about.
Alban took his customary seat by the bedside. The glow of candlelight warmed his coloring and turned his hair rose-gold.
Kieran drew up the knee of his good leg to support the harp and began to play and sing. It was not the song he had intended to start with, but it was as though the harp had chosen for him. Liam’s Lament for His Love, a young man praising the grace and beauty and gentleness of the woman and the country he must leave behind because their families did not approve of the suit.
When he had sung the last note and placed his hands on the strings to still them, Kieran opened his eyes. Alban stared at him with rapt attention.
“Beautiful,” the prince breathed. “Utterly beautiful.” He shook his head, like someone coming out from under a spell. “You are so good at projecting this image of a reckless fool, but then you play like that, sing like that.”
Kieran’s pulse quickened at the emotion in Alban’s voice, the intensity in his gaze. Something was building between them. Something too powerful and dangerous to continue.
“I have plenty of foolish songs as well.” He launched into the song he had intended to start with, Huntsman’s Folly.
Alban laughed in all the right places, but behind his eyes there was a deep consideration that told Kieran he was not entirely put off by the sudden change.
“That is more what I expect from my wandering Fool,” Alban said when the song was done and he’d caught his breath from laughter.
Once again Kieran’s words slipped out ahead of his thoughts. “Here, then, is one appropriate to my Prince of Light.”
Had he really just said that? No help for it now. Kieran’s brain scrambled for a more appropriate choice than the one he was about to play, but he couldn’t come up with one and Alban stared at him with growing curiosity. No help for it now. He launched into My Love is the Morning Sun, an ode to springtime or to a first love, one of those many songs with a deliberately vague meaning. He did not look at Alban as he played.
“Is that how you see me? I’m flattered, especially considering how you felt about me when we first met.”
Kieran dared a glance. Alban blushed, but he did not seem displeased.
“I am, as you say, but a fool,” Kieran said, letting the comment cover both the circumstances of their meeting and the choice of song, however Alban chose to interpret it.
He played a tune that had no words then. It was getting late, and he was about to put away his harp when Alban made a request.
“Sing me your favorite song.”
Kieran should have dissembled. He should have outright lied. He was a bard, damn it, and he should have been capable of some glib turn of phrase. Unfortunately, the Leas prince had developed a dangerous and utterly unconscious ability to draw the raw truth out of him.
“I don’t think it would be to your taste.”
“Sing it anyway. It’s part of who you are. I want to know.”
Apparently Alban had developed another strange power; Kieran found it hard to refuse him anything. A dangerous power in one’s enemy, but it felt less like the regal power of a prince and more like what Kieran had with Brona. He could never say no to her, either, but he never feared that she would use it against him.
“You won’t like it,” Kieran said helplessly.
“Then I will have no one but myself to blame. Sing.”
Kieran improvised an introduction on the harp nearly twice as long as what he usually used on this particular song. Then he took a breath and began to sing of a Scathlan warrior, fine in his battle regalia, brave and loyal to his king, kissing his family and going off to battle the treachery of the ones he once named allies and kin, and how his family would always remember him that way, although the memory was all they had left of him.
Kieran let the last notes die away before opening his eyes to look at Alban. The Leas had a look on his face that Kieran couldn’t quite interpret. It might have been pain.
“Beautiful,” Alban whispered at last. “Although I think I can understand why you were reluctant to sing it. A mere week ago, you wouldn’t have been so sparing of my feelings.”
“I am grateful for the kindness you have shown me, though it is hard for me to reconcile that gratitude with what your people have done to mine in the past.”
He could have, should have left off that last part, but the emotions that particular song always stirred still burned in his chest.
“What my people have done? Have you ever considered that my father’s only crime was falling in love, and because of that breaking off a political betrothal that would have brought nothing but pain to everyone involved? Your queen caused the first blood to be spilled between our kindred peoples in known history, caused a war that decimated both our peoples, over a small breach of honor.”
Alban’s voice raised rose in passion, none of the sensible healer now.
“You hold love in a higher regard than duty and honor?” Kieran asked.
“You don’t? I have not yet found love, not like that between my mother and father, but I hope to someday. And if do, I will be as true to that love as they are to each other.”
“I hope never to find such love,” Kieran said. “And if I do, I will run away from it as far and as fast as I can.”
Alban stared at him as though he had confessed a penchant for slaughtering infants. “You are unnatural.”
That hurt more than it should have.
Kieran shook his head. “I have seen too much of what a love like that can do, is all. Your parents brought war to our peoples for such a love. My mother loved my father with the same depth and, when he died the shock caused her to lose my little brother growing within her. She followed both of them into death within a day. Even my queen fell victim to such love.”
“Your queen was a victim of nothing but her own pride.”
“Her daughter was my best friend, growing up. When she turned eighteen, her mother’s counselor gave her the queen’s private journals.”
Eighteen was considered coming-of-age for most purposes, although tradition reserved the throne until a more sober five-and-twenty, which mercifully postponed the question of Brona’s status while the queen remained not-quite-dead-not-quite-alive. Not for much longer, though, if he were not successful.
“The queen’s first husband, Brona’s father, had been a love match,” Kieran continued. “When he died in a hunting accident, the only thing that kept her from following him was her love for Brona and her responsibility to the people.
“And then your father came along, proposing an alliance by marriage to renew and restore our waning peoples. Because the well-being and fruitfulness of both peoples have always been tied to their monarch’s unions. Your father was then unmarried and the queen long widowed, and both our kindreds were not what they were in the glory days the bards sing of. Why not unite and try to restore elvenkind to what it once was?
“For the sake of the people, Scathlan and yes, Leas as well, she agreed. The queen agreed even though in her most secret heart she felt like she was betraying her dead husband by replacing him with one she did not love.
“Then, somehow, through the dan
ces and feasts of the formal courtship, she fell in love with your father. Brona thinks she may have convinced herself that she loved him to make the betrayal of her father’s memory more bearable. Nonetheless, to her it was real and deep, and in her journal she wrote of her anticipation of the upcoming marriage and her dreams for the future.
“And then your father broke the engagement, a week before the wedding, when her dress had been made and the feast planned. She was humiliated, yes. But she was also heartbroken.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I don’t think my father knew.”
“Perhaps he didn’t want to know.”
“Perhaps,” Alban said equably.
Patient, quiet Alban was back. Kieran was glad to see him, but he wasn’t done.
“Out of your parents’ union, your people enjoyed a rebirth—healing, art, trade with the mortals. Defeated in war, my people languished with our stricken queen.”
“No Leas laid a hand on your queen. Her wound is in her own mind. Have you considered that a marriage that wasn’t meant to be could have doomed both our kingdoms?”
Kieran, having no answer for that, played a few bars of a tune, a simple tune, one of the first he learned. An old friend that he could always turn to for comfort.
“I think about it sometimes,” Alban said. “Quite a lot, really. I think about everyone killed in that war—Leas and Scathlan both—and how they wouldn’t have died if my parents hadn’t fallen in love, or if my father kept his vow to your queen despite that love. But then I wouldn’t have been born and, selfish as it is, I can’t wish that.”
With sudden, swift, painful realization, Kieran knew that he couldn’t wish it either. But he also couldn’t stop wishing the war had never happened, that his father hadn’t died, that his mother hadn’t miscarried his baby brother in her shock, that she hadn’t died of grief soon after. Couldn’t stop wishing that his people weren’t broken and that his queen wasn’t lost in her own mind. So where did that leave him?
“I’m sorry,” Alban said. “I shouldn’t have pushed you to play that song. But I thank you for sharing it.”
Kieran’s throat ached, and he didn’t think he could sing or even speak. But he didn’t want to end the night at the place they found themselves. So he put his hand to the harp strings and played a sweet, wistful tune that made Alban smile, segueing into a powerful improvisation on an old melody supposed to express the changing of the seasons.
#
Alban sat, transfixed, sensing a power like the magic of healing, only different, and wilder. Kieran’s music could move stone. Such depth to the bard, so easily forgotten when faced with the brash, careless face he showed to the world.
If Alban had thought he knew the bard’s skill before tonight, he had been mistaken. Tune merged into tune without pause, until he wondered if the music would ever end or if they would both be forever lost in it.
Then Kieran stilled the strings with his hands and met Alban’s gaze, his eyes fey and bright. He smiled a rapturous smile, which Alban returned.
“Thank you,” Kieran said.
“For?”
“Indulging me. You always listen so quietly, and you never try to talk to me when I’m playing.”
“People do that?” Quite apart from the rudeness of such an action, how could anyone interrupt such magic? It would be like dropping an exquisite blown-glass goblet onto a stone floor and watching it shatter.
“Only all the time. Pubs are the worst. ‘Can you play louder?’ ‘Can you play softer?’ ‘Do you know The White Rose and the Briar?’ I’ve even had the mother of the bride try to talk to me when I played at a wedding. Of course, I must smile and nod and be gracious, even while I want to garrote someone with my spare harp strings.”
The absolute exasperation in Kieran’s voice made Alban chuckle. “That last piece, it was one of your own?”
Kieran nodded. “Farewell to Brona.”
“Brona. You mentioned her before. Your queen’s daughter?”
Kieran smiled wistfully. “And my best friend. We were parentless children together, for all that she is not technically an orphan.”
There had been a lot of emotion in that piece for just a friend. Alban felt a stab of jealousy, irrational and unworthy of either of them.
“Did you love her?”
“Brona?” Kieran laughed. “She is too far above me for that. Scathlan may honor bards but not enough to marry them off to royalty.”
“I had forgotten how obsessed your people are with position. But that doesn’t really answer the question.”
If Kieran were pining after a Scathlan princess, it would do much to explain his bitterness toward love. It would also give Alban one more reason to quash any feelings he had for the bard, as though he didn’t have enough reasons already.
Kieran plucked a few strings on his harp, and his face turned thoughtful. Whatever he said next would be honest, and not one of his flippant bardic answers.
“I thought I loved her that way once, when I was just growing into adulthood and starting to get an inkling of all those things adults don’t discuss around children. I tried to imagine it, you know how you do. But it just felt wrong, like having improper feelings for a sister. I love Brona, but not in the sense you mean. I want her to be happy.
“The worse things get for our people, the more pressure is put on her to do something to fix it. Though there is little she can do while the queen remains as she is, neither dead nor alive. Some of the queen’s advisors are pressuring Brona to marry, hoping that will somehow help. But I wouldn’t wish that on her. When Brona marries, it should be for love.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in love,” Alban teased.
“For myself, no. But Brona is different. You’d have to meet her to understand. I wish you could meet her, the two of you would get along like a hand and a glove.”
Alban doubted it, even though his resentment of the girl was irrational. He wondered if Kieran truly felt only a sibling’s affection for her, or if he hid his true feelings even from himself.
“She deserves to live her life for herself someday, without carrying the burden of a doomed people.”
“I’m sorry.” Alban felt fully the weight of what his life had cost Kieran’s people.
Kieran put his harp aside and turned toward him. “None of it is your fault. You weren’t even born when the war started.”
“You didn’t feel so when first we met.”
“Then I was but a fool, O Prince of Light.” Kieran reached out and put a hand on Alban’s arm. “It seems to be a night for confessions, for speaking the words we’ve danced around before. So let me say this. Though our peoples are enemies, I do consider you my friend. If I didn’t say it before, show it before, then I am sorry.”
“And my people?” Alban knew how hard it had been for Kieran to say that last bit, and yet he would not take the easy path, not with this undefined thing building between them.
“Your people are still enemies of mine. Alban, how could it be otherwise, with what they have done to us?”
“The Scathlan spilled the first blood.”
“The Leas left us no choice. The last war is something we will never agree on. Your people and mine are enemies, but it’s all become more complicated than it was a few weeks ago.”
Seven
The next day, they went back to the library and didn’t talk about anything that had transpired the night before. Outside the window, snow lay stark white on the dark evergreens in the valley, reminding Kieran that it was not the season for travel even were he fit to ride. But the fire blazed bright in the hearth, filling the room with the distinctive sweet-sharp of cedar, and Alban brought him hot tea to warm him. He tried to find the contentment that came with being cozy inside while the world outside knew nothing but cold and wet.
Yet he found only growing despair as he paged through the maddening book, wishing that he had his father’s skills and training. With both his father and uncle killed in the war, no true
bard masters had remained to train Kieran. His tutor had been testy, inadequate, and all too aware that Kieran would surpass him one day.
He’d had to take the bare bones of what they had taught him and build on it from his father’s notes and from what the harp itself whispered in his heart. His elders never failed to remind him that he was not yet a master like his father, perhaps never would be.
Had his father ever seen this book? Surely with his greater knowledge, he would have had far less trouble deciphering it. If only his father had survived, if only Kieran had half his father’s knowledge and skill, then maybe this would not have been a fool’s quest from the beginning.
He rapped his fingers against the edge of the desk, playing imaginary scales too fast until a hand closed over his.
“I think you should take a break from this,” Alban said. “Honestly, if I had known it would vex you so, I would have never shown that cursed book to you.”
“Thank you for your insight, O Prince of Light,” Kieran snapped. “Perhaps the problem is not the book, but the useless fool reading it.”
Alban frowned. “Who has ever called you useless? I know I have not.”
“Most of the people in my life at one time or another. And I fear they are right.”
“With the way you play? The way you sing? Nonsense.”
Alban took the book from him. Only Kieran’s fear for the fragile parchment and leather prevented him from tugging it back. He hissed through bared teeth as Alban put the book away and closed the drawer.
“Come, why don’t we go back to your room and you can harp for me?”
“Don’t patronize me!”
“Then tell me, what will it take to put you in a better mood by dinner? Father explicitly wishes you to join us tonight.”
“I have no desire to do so.” After a day of utterly failing to aid his queen and his people, the Leas expected him to make polite conversation with the two who selfishly destroyed them?
Only Alban had no idea what the book meant to him. He couldn’t possibly understand the depth of his frustration which, in any case, Kieran should not take out on him.
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