“Me?” Fy was surprised into a laugh. “I don’t have a Flower. Of course, I don’t. But I can dream. I think that song wants me to.”
Peach slapped a hand over the kit strings and stared at Fy with those dark, troublesome eyes.
“Don’t be upset.” Fy patted the air to calm them. “I liked your smile more. I didn’t mean to take it away.”
“You might have one. A Flower,” Peach replied in a voice that hummed like the kit’s strings. “There are three songs, Fy. Beauty admired is only the first.”
The lump in Fy’s throat came from nowhere. He had trouble swallowing it down. “I don’t have a Flower, unless it’s a peach blossom, and that would be only for tonight, I think. Or perhaps a day or two longer. So, no need for the other songs.”
He turned to study the altar and gave a start despite himself to see it empty. After years with the Tialttyrin, he ought to have been used to the sudden nature of fae action, but he was twitchy tonight.
“Every wish granted?” he asked Peach in a playful tone and turned back, only to give another start at the sight of Peach seated on the end of Fy’s bench.
Peach looked at the altar, then at Fy, their dark, nearly black, eyes shining in the moonlight. “Why not? Do you think the fae don’t wish for love and happiness too?”
Peach did have freckles. And a curvy figure beneath more velvet, and they weren’t tall at all, though they had somehow seemed larger when farther away.
They wore no jewelry, but their clothes alone were worth more than half a year of Fy’s wages. Their hair still seemed dark, but inky and soft and shimmering in the light as if dying to escape the bands holding it in place.
“Ah,” Peach said, smiling winsomely once again without looking up, “you’ve found your Flower.”
Fy opened and shut his mouth, hesitating as he would not have in his younger years with wine in him and someone pretty and nice giving him glances and smiles like this.
“At least that,” he finally agreed, and wasn’t sure what he meant.
The song shifted, becoming at once both The-Flower-of-the-North and something else, something faster and more dramatic, although Fy didn’t know it and Peach didn’t sing any words. The style remained old-fashioned. It might have been the second of the set of three that Peach had mentioned.
“More about the Flower?” Fy wondered, pleased when it brought Peach’s gaze up. “Do the Canamorra play this one at weddings too?”
“Oh yes.” Peach continued to play, although a sweet color filled their face while Fy continued to admire them. “If you listen well, you can hear it being played in the main hall even now.”
Fy didn’t strain his ears for it. He had the song with him here.
“Why aren’t you there? As a bard, I mean.” That was where they money would be, for a regular bard at least, as well as the acclaim.
“You think I’m so good as to go there?” Peach beamed at him so warmly that Fy leaned in before he could stop himself. He didn’t go so far as to press a kiss to plump lips, but Peach must have known he wanted to. “They have many others to play for them,” Peach explained, watching Fy closely. “But I was drawn here. A wish, you see, unvoiced but echoing.”
Fy took far too long to hear and understand the words, and had to force his attention from Peach’s mouth to Peach’s dark, dark eyes.
Zelli’s eyes.
Faeeyes.
Fy made a sound. He didn’t know what kind of sound. A meek, startled squeak of a sound that should have made him blush.
He didn’t mean to but he looked from side to side, to where ears were still hidden by the hat of velvet. He looked down, at the figure who seemed much smaller than they had even moments before. He looked up again, to eyes that had not changed, and to lips that were no longer curved into a smile.
“No?” Peach asked quietly, gaze more sorrowful than Zelli at his most dangerous.
But even Zelli’s danger was loving. Protective and bright and terrifying, yes, but good at heart.
Fy swallowed. “Still only for tonight?” he heard himself ask. Nearly every story and joke about taking a fae lover was a reminder; they did not stay. “You’ll leave.”
“Oh,” Peach said, a breath, not even a whisper. “Another wish. But that’s why I’m here. Isn’t that clear to you? Fy.” Peach put down the kit or it simply ceased to exist, Fy wasn’t sure. Peach’s hand was small and warm against Fy’s jaw. “Fy,” Peach said slowly, “a name for a sound, a ghost sparrow’s call for its mate, which in time came to mean a greeting to one much cared for. It signifies devotion.”
“It does?” Fy tried to keep his wits sharp, but a member of the fae was still sitting before him, touching him tenderly and telling him something that felt secret. “That’s what it means?”
“Fy,” Peach said again, impatient and maybe even a bit sulky.Fy, a call for a mate, a sign of devotion. “Will you kiss me now?”
Fy did, kissing plump lips until he was hot and dizzy and found himself with a lap full of fae lover.
“Do you hear it?” Peach whispered, their husky voice full of wicked pleasure as they bit Fy’s ear with sharp, sharp teeth. “Listen.”
Fy did his best to obey, although he mostly heard harder breathing and a soft, delighted squeal when his hands rucked up velvet robes to find bare skin beneath.
In the distance, probably in the great hall exactly as Peach had said, the second ancient song was being performed. Fy tracked it on the breeze for one tiny distracted moment, as if the song itself stirred the Canamorra banners above them and made the dog crowned in flowers on its field of blue seem to move.
Then he went back to kissing.
The End