Corny rolled his eyes. "Let's go.”
Kaye headed toward the music, letting her fingers run through the heavy green leaves. She plucked a great white flower down from one of the branches and pulled off one bruised petal after another.
"He loves me," Corny said. "He loves me not.”
Kaye scowled and stopped. "That's not what I was doing.”
Shapes moved through the trees like ghosts. The laughter and music seemed always a little more distant until suddenly she was among a throng of faeries. Crowds of folk danced in wide and chaotic circles or diced or simply laughed as though the breeze had carried a joke to their ears only. One faerie woman crouched beside a pool, conversing intently with her reflection, while another stroked the bark of a tree as though it were the fur of a pet.
Kaye opened her mouth to tell Corny something but stopped when her eye was caught by white hair and eyes like silver spoons. Someone threaded through the crowd, cloaked and hooded, but not hooded enough.
There was only one person Kaye knew with eyes like that.
"I'll be right back," she said, already weaving between a damp girl in a dress of woven river grass and a hob on crude mossy stilts.
"Roiben?" she whispered, touching his shoulder. She could feel her heart speeding and she hated it, she hated everything about how she felt at that moment, so absurdly grateful she would have liked to slap herself. "You fucker. You could have told me to go on a quest to bring you an apple from the banquet table. You could have sent me on a quest to tie a braid in your hair.”
The figure drew back its hood, and Kaye remembered the other person who would have eyes like Roiben's. His sister, Ethine.
"Kaye," Ethine said. "I had hoped I would happen on you.”
Mortified, Kaye tried to smile but it came out as more of a grimace. She couldn't believe she had just blurted things she wasn't sure, in retrospect, that she wanted even Roiben to hear.
"I have only a moment," Ethine said. "I must bring the Queen a message. But there is something I would know. About my brother.”
Kaye shrugged. "We're not exactly speaking.”
"He was never cruel when we were children. Now he is brutal and cold and terrible. He will make war on us whom he loved—”
It startled Kaye to think of Roiben as a child. "You grew up in Faerie?”
"I don't have time for—”
"Make time. I want to know.”
Ethine looked at Kaye for a long moment, then sighed. "Roiben and I were brought up in Faerie by a human midwife. She'd been stolen away from her own children and would call us by their names. Mary and Robert. I misliked that. Otherwise, she was very kind.”
"What about your parents? Do you know them? Love them?”
"Answer my question, if you please," Ethine said. "My Lady wants him to duel instead of lead the Unseelie Court into battle. It would prevent a war—which the Unseelie Court is too depleted to win—but it would mean his death.”
"Your Lady is a bitch," Kaye said before she thought better of it.
Ethine wrung her hands, fingers sliding over one another. "No. She would accept him back. I know she would if he were only to ask her. Why won't he ask her?”
"I don't know," Kaye said.
"You must discern something. He has a fondness for you.”
Kaye started to protest, but Ethine cut her off.
"I heard the way you spoke to me when you supposed me to be him. You speak to him as to a friend.”
Kaye shook her head. "Look, I did this declaration thing. Where you get a quest. He pretty much told me to fuck off. Whatever you think I know about him or can tell you about him, I just don't think I can.”
"I saw you, although I didn't hear the words. I was in the hill that night." Ethine smiled, but her brow furrowed slightly, as though she were puzzling through Kaye's human phrasings. "Still, one must assume the quest was not an apple from a banquet table nor a braid in his hair.”
Kaye blushed.
"If you thought the King of the Unseelie Court would give you so simple a quest, you must think him besotted.”
"Why wouldn't he? He said that I . . ." Kaye stopped, realizing that she shouldn't repeat his words. You are the only thing I want. It wasn't safe to say that to Ethine, no matter what had happened.
"A declaration is very serious.”
"But... I thought it was, like, letting everyone know we were together.”
"It is far more immutable than that. There is only ever a single consort, and more often there is none. It joins you both to him and to his court. My brother declared himself once, you know.”
"To Silarial," Kaye said, although she hadn't known, not really, not before right then. She remembered Silarial standing in the middle of a human orchard and telling Roiben that he'd proved his love to her satisfaction. How angry Silarial had been when he turned away. "He finished his quest, didn't he?”
"Yes," Ethine said. "He was to stay at the Unseelie Court, as Nicnevin's sworn knight, until the end of the truce. Nicnevin's death ended it. He could be the Bright Lady's consort now if he wanted, if he returned to us. A declaration is a compact and he has fulfilled his side of the bargain.”
Kaye looked around at the revelers and felt small and stupid. "You think they should be together, don't you? You wonder what he saw in me—some dirty pixie with bad manners.”
"You're clever." The faerie woman did not meet Kaye's gaze. "I imagine he saw that.”
Kaye looked down at the scuffed tops of her boots. Not that clever, after all.