Lava Red Feather Blue

by Molly Ringle

  A faery’s home, usually shared with others, was often called a haunt, though grander ones might be called a court. There were other fae whose homes were fortresses, caves, dens, or lairs.

  You didn’t want to go home with anyone who lived in a lair.

  “You are braver than I if you accepted that proposal,” Larkin said.

  “Oh, I’d always wanted to go into their realm. And Larkin, I tell you, in spite of all the horror stories you hear—look, some of that’s true. There’s danger in there, plenty. But aren’t there dangers in our realm too? You can’t live your life expecting to be safe all the time. Besides, with the right faery, in the right haunt, where they’ll protect you … ” The breeze mingled with his father’s sigh. “Nothing’s more beautiful.”

  Except she hadn’t protected him, Merrick thought. Look what had happened to him.

  “She held me and we flew,” Nye went on. “Took me to one of the mountains east of here. I’ve never been sure which one, though trust me, I’ve studied maps and tried to figure it out. It felt like a dream. Their haunt, their lights, the way they shaped the trees, the clouds and air, to make their home. The way everything felt and smelled and tasted.”

  “You tasted of their food as well?” Larkin sounded alarmed.

  “Not their food, but … her kisses. Her. Haluli.” Another sigh. “And she did bring me back in the morning like she promised. But it had been almost a month here! It was only one night from my point of view. My parents and friends had been looking for me, panicking. I told them I was fine, explained what happened. Then! A few months later—not nine months, like with a human, but just four months—this baby is left on my doorstep. Right there.”

  Merrick didn’t have to look up to know Nye was pointing to the patio door.

  “Cassidy,” Larkin said.

  “Yes. The fae decide, you know, whether to keep a half-blood baby or not. Somehow they can tell which realm they’ll fit into best, whether they’re mortal or can regenerate like fae.”

  “Then it happened with Merrick as well.”

  “Yep. Five years later, I’m living with little Cass, and one night Haluli comes back. She acts like no time has passed at all! Invites me to come with her again. I couldn’t resist.”

  “When you returned after that night, had another month passed?”

  “Five weeks this time. My mom was here that night, babysitting Cassidy, so at least Cass was okay, but they were shaken up. That’s the one thing I feel bad about. I think it really scared Cass, me disappearing like that. It’s the kind of thing that’s stuck with them.”

  They strolled back toward the patio, following the path between raspberry canes and a grapefruit tree. “And Cassidy gained a brother.” Larkin said it as if gaining a brother only added to Cassidy’s problems.

  “Took six months for him to appear, that time. No rhyme or reason to it. But I know they’re my kids. They’ve got the Highvalley eyes and stubbornness. And they’re Haluli’s too. I can see it in their magic.”

  Nye and Larkin stopped at the patio and looked up at Merrick.

  Merrick lifted into the air. He hovered, letting the marine-scented breeze caress him, then descended to land beside them.

  Larkin studied him. Nye’s floating lanterns had come on, casting a moon-like pale light on the prince’s face. “Clearly he does take after his mother,” Larkin admitted.

  “Have you shown him your neck, Merrick?” Nye said. “Show him.”

  Merrick turned his head and lifted his curls to display the back of his neck.

  Larkin leaned closer to view the downy feathers that grew at Merrick’s nape, gray shading into white and tipped with sky-blue. “Gracious me,” he murmured.

  Feathers grew between his shoulder blades and mingled with his chest hair as well, but at least Nye didn’t insist on showing people that. Merrick let his curls fall to cover them again.

  “Cassidy doesn’t have those,” Nye said. “Great matter-witch, though, incredible skill.”

  “Two children,” Larkin said. “Quite a gift to you.”

  “Absolutely. Worth the curse I got—which I know Cass and Merrick don’t agree with, but it is. That, by the way, was from a jealous fae suitor of Haluli’s. When he saw me the first time, he said, ‘Don’t come back here or I’ll curse you.’ But I took the chance, and he did see me, and, well, this is what I got.”

  “She took the chance too,” Merrick said quietly. “Not just you.”

  “Ah, she tried to protect me.” Nye rubbed Merrick’s back. “For our second visit she picked a night he was away. Then he ran into us when she was taking me home. Just bad luck. All he did was blow a puff of air at me. I didn’t feel a thing. Took a few years for me to even know it was happening.”

  And Haluli hadn’t fixed it, nor even shown up to try.

  Merrick leaned on his father’s shoulder a moment. “I’ll get the dishes.”

  CHAPTER 16

  TO SAY IT HAD BEEN A STRANGE DAY WOULD be an understatement. Larkin could not even decide whether the revelation that Merrick could fly struck him as marvelous or disturbing. Feathers on part-fae were not in themselves terribly uncommon, nor were scales, skin like tree bark, stone fingernails, gills, webbed feet, hair that grew tiny leaves along its strands, or other oddities. Sometimes he found these features beautiful. Tonight he felt unsettled. This deceitful island, twisting everything so one could not trust what one saw! How wearying it was.

  His body was weary as well. To his dismay, his eyelids drooped and he began to yawn as the night progressed. He had rather hoped that sleeping for over two hundred years would cure him of the need to sleep for the rest of his life, but it would seem that upon escaping the spell he had instead resumed the normal cycle of a human day. Still, he was determined to resist sleep, for now he viewed it with fear, as if slumber might draw him down into its clutches and not release him for another century or two.

  The Highvalleys bade him goodnight and settled into their beds. Alone in the small bookshelf-lined guest room that faced the sea, Larkin found a book to read, by an Emily Brontë. Finding it was written a mere fifty years after his own time, Larkin was soothed by the familiar cadence of the language. He changed clothing, putting on what Merrick had called a T-shirt and boxer shorts, evidently the established thing to wear to bed if the room was not cold, and sat back upon the pillows with the book.

  Emily Brontë, however, in combination with his exhaustion, must have lulled him to sleep, for soon he found himself walking through Barish Temple behind his family, who did not notice him.

  “What good did he ever do?” his father said.

  “All trouble and cowardice,” said his sister Lanying.

  “I prefer him asleep,” said his mother.

  While hurt and anger lanced through Larkin and he shouted arguments at their backs, a wind shook the walls. It rose in strength until it tore off the towers as if they were tissue paper, exposing a night sky full of roiling red clouds. Lightning stabbed down, incinerating each of his family members, who collapsed into ash.

  Larkin threw himself forward, reaching for them. Their ashes sifted through his hands. Tears coursed down his face. Fae swarmed in, a storm of dark wings, teeth, and smoke, and from among them emerged Ula Kana, slim and white like a curl of mist. She stretched out her blackened fingertips, and flames shot toward Larkin.

  He awoke with a strangled shout. The book fell off the bed. He stared around in incomprehension.

  Realizing it had only been a dream was no comfort. His family was dead, Ula Kana did still live whether or not she still slept, and Larkin was alone and helpless in a time when everything was unfamiliar and no one truly knew or wanted him.

  He pulled up his knees, covered his face, and burst into tears, which he tried, for the sake of the sleeping Highvalleys, to keep silent.

  Merrick had finally fallen asleep on his father’s sofa-bed in the living room after an hour of shifting around to get comfortable, only to be awakened some time later by a thud.
He lay with open eyes, listening. It was still dark outside, but lamplight spilled from the door to Larkin’s room.

  Then came a muffled gasp. Merrick flung off the blanket, seized a fireplace shovel, and scrambled across the living room, imagining malicious faery intruders holding down Larkin and throttling him, or witches from the Researchers Guild trying to kidnap him.

  He halted at the doorway, shovel raised.

  There was no one to whack with iron. Larkin was sitting on top of the covers, alone, hunched in a ball with his hands over his mouth, crying like someone who had lost everything.

  Which, of course, he had.

  Merrick lowered the shovel. “Um. Are you okay?”

  Larkin glanced at him, then away again. He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. His voice hitched with sobs. “Only a d-dream. I am q-quite well. Pray go back to sleep. I apologize for disturbing you.”

  Nye’s snores sounded from down the hall, regular as ever. Merrick looked at the shovel dangling from his hand.

  He could do as Larkin said, bow out and leave him alone. But his feet wouldn’t move. His voice wouldn’t make those excuses. He could not, he found, simply bid Larkin goodnight and go back to bed while Larkin sat there crying.

  He couldn’t exactly go over and hug him, though, either; not with the awkward way they’d been acting around each other.

  Yes, Merrick had saved Larkin from the spell, but only accidentally, and he’d essentially been telling Larkin to shut up and not get them in trouble ever since. Even when Merrick had acknowledged the grief and shock Larkin must feel, he hadn’t plumbed that thought to its proper depth.

  Seeing Larkin with his eyes and nostrils swollen with tears, his hair sliding in untidy pieces out of its braid, his posture huddled and defeated like an ordinary human, Merrick felt the remorse like a stab to the center of his being.

  He set the shovel against the wall and found one of the boxes of cut-up cloths that Nye kept around in lieu of tissues. He brought the box to Larkin and set it on the bed. “Handkerchiefs.”

  “Thank you.” Larkin took a cloth and blew his nose. “Truly, you needn’t do anything for me.”

  Merrick wandered to a bookshelf and ran his finger along it. “I can’t imagine being in your place. I’d have broken down within the first ten minutes.” He glanced at Larkin. “I’m … sorry. For the way I’ve been acting.”

  “This is nonsense, Highvalley. You’ve kept me safe. Let us leave it.”

  “It’s hard to wrap my head around. I’ve always viewed your era as ancient history, but to you it probably feels like it all happened yesterday.”

  “It doesn’t really. I knew years were passing; I simply didn’t know how many, nor if the things I saw in my dreams were real. I … dreamt of my family aging and dying, in circumstances that, your history book tells me, were accurate. Perhaps the spell allowed me to leave the bower in spirit and view the world around me at times while I slept.”

  Merrick gazed in fascination at him. To think, some ghost version of Larkin could have drifted past him when he was a high school student gawking into the bower.

  “This was only a nightmare after a difficult day,” Larkin continued. “I was overcome. It does not feel like yesterday that I lost them. The dream merely brought it back for a moment.”

  Merrick tried a smile. “I thought you were taking it all a little too stoically.”

  “I was determined to. But … ” Larkin sighed, folded the handkerchief, and set it on the side table. “Laird-a-lady. I did suspect I would hate sleeping once I tried it again. How right I was.”

  In his antiquated dialect, the common interjection “Lord and Lady” became something rather charming. Even hot.

  Merrick blinked and turned to the books. He had ended up near the shelves holding Nye’s published poetry. A memory surfaced, and he pulled a book out, checked the table of contents, then brought it over. He plunked himself next to Larkin on the bed, letting their shoulders knock together. Might as well continue erring on the side of over-familiarity. “When I stayed with my grandma, when I was a kid,” Merrick said, “and I had bad dreams or couldn’t sleep, something she used to do was read me a poem by her favorite poet.”

  “And who was this poet?”

  “Nye Highvalley.” Merrick smiled. “Her son. My dad. He taught poetry, among other things. Was poet laureate of Eidolonia about ten years ago.”

  “My word. He never said.”

  “He’s modest about it. But here, he wrote one about you. I just remembered and thought … I don’t know, maybe you’d want to read it.” Upon finding the page, Merrick held out the book.

  Larkin gave him a fleeting smile. “Should you not read it aloud to me? Is that not the tradition your grandmother set?”

  Merrick laughed uncertainly. “If you like. I don’t have much flair for poetry. But all right.” He cleared his throat and read the poem aloud.

  For Larkin

  Sometimes I lie awake

  Thinking of he who always sleeps.

  I hope he dreams,

  Hope he canters and gallops through otherworldly adventures,

  Hears our poems, smiles at our foolishness.

  I hope he is not locked in a dream-garden

  With the other who sleeps.

  I hope he never has to see her.

  (My insomnia, my curiosity, however,

  Insist that I, perhaps, would wish to glimpse her,

  Provided she did not glimpse me.)

  Had I lived in that time, had he been my friend,

  Would I have begged him, “Do not surrender,

  Your heart will heal,

  We are not worth this”?

  It is part of what keeps me awake.

  For I don’t know.

  I would not change a bit of my own life,

  Which he has made possible,

  This enchanted isle of mirages, living dreams,

  Dangers savagely devouring and softly decaying, yes,

  And tricks devised by human minds,

  Noble, frivolous, and everything in between,

  To me it is beautiful, all of it—

  I would keep every moment.

  And this harmony, such as it is,

  Exists only because of our flame-haired dreamers.

  Yet sometimes I lie awake

  Because like every dreamer, I want it all.

  I want our harmony

  And I want him to open his eyes once more,

  See what we have become,

  And join us in our foolishness, our love.

  Merrick sat staring at the page, the last words hanging in the silence.

  Reading a poem about themselves to someone in the middle of the night? How weird was he?

  Larkin’s breathing had calmed, though, and he pulled the book onto his lap to study it. “I’m more honored than I can say. It … forges a connection between my time and yours, a connection I was not sure I could feel.”

  Merrick relaxed, lifting his face. “Exactly. And see, it wasn’t pointless, what happened to you. You made the truce possible. You saved lives. You became someone who poets gaze at for hours for inspiration. No one’s ever written a poem like that about me, and no one ever will.”

  Larkin turned pages. “When your own father is a poet? Surely that’s untrue.”

  “He’s written about Cassidy and me, but only small things. Us playing as kids, stuff like that. Nothing heroic.”

  Larkin pulled the elastic band and the clover-decorated bobby pins off his braid and set them on the open book. “I’m no hero myself. Your father and everyone else thought I chose this fate when I didn’t. I’m unworthy of such praise.”

  “That doesn’t mean you weren’t a hero. Heroes can be unwilling.”

  “It’s generous of you to say, in any case.” Larkin unraveled his braid, shook the strands free, and ran his fingers along his scalp. The warm scent of his hair drifted to Merrick’s nose, mixing with hints of sweat and cotton and the Mirage Isle sandalwood deodor
ant Merrick had given him.

  Their legs were almost touching. Merrick’s bare feet were narrower than Larkin’s. Larkin’s borrowed T-shirt revealed his arms with their auburn hairs, scar-slices, and strong cords of muscle and tendon, all of which had been hidden by his jacket sleeves in the bower.

  No one else alive had ever seen those details,

  Merrick realized. Just him. Merrick settled his fingertips around the corners of the handkerchief box, which sat beside his knee. “All okay now? Can we go back to sleep?”

  “Aye, I suppose.” Larkin smiled, his gaze dropping to the book. “The last time a man read me poetry in bed, he wanted me to do a great deal more than go back to sleep.”

  Merrick’s eyebrows shot up. A laugh escaped his mouth. “You’ve been seduced with poetry? Wow. I’m envious. No guy’s ever tried anything as classy as that on me.”

  “If only you could visit the eighteenth century, Highvalley. You would learn what it is to be courted properly.” He sent a sidelong glance at Merrick, full of mock pity.

  Merrick wanted to know, with an intensity and suddenness that caught his breath, what exactly Larkin had done in exchange for the poetry back then. Larkin’s lips were full and reddened, and he imagined how soft and warm they would be, how they would taste of salt from the tears, how they would stretch into a grin if Merrick could make him laugh, and furthermore how all that long hair would feel if Merrick sank his hands into it …

  He looked down, his heart galloping.

  You did not kiss historical figures. Not even if you’d thought about it as a hormonal teenager. Not even if you had awakened them and they made a flirtatious remark to you—which probably hadn’t been intended as flirtatious. Larkin was surely only joking.

  Merrick picked up the bobby pin with the emergency button stuck to the clover. “Oh hey. Don’t lose that, remember.”