Page 8 of The Prince or the Bard?
I'll only bring myself more pain by agreeing. Yet I find myself nodding anyway. Anything to be closer to him.
He offers me his arm, and together we slip away into the starlit gardens.
Ilearn many thingsabout the bard tonight.
Cillian Cloudtongue is so named not only for the lightness of his song, but from his origins as a sky fae. He has three brothers and three sisters, all of them musical. He has a gaggle of nieces and nephews whom he adores, too, for whom he always brings back trinkets from his travels, though he confesses it has sometimes made him poor. He also tells me how it breaks his heart to see how they’ve grown in his absence.
Yet he loves the road, and has a fondness for out-of-the-way places and smoke-filled taverns, whose patrons are often better audiences than the nobility. He’ll never stop playing for common folk, no matter how many nobles offer him patronage.
I also learn what his lips taste like.
As we stand under a shady bower, me on the tips of my toes, him with his bent back against a tree, and the sky filled with dancing stars overhead, our lips meet in a cautiously tender dance. I taste the salt on his lips from supper and think of home.
Then we walk a little further. I tell Cillian about my family. About Unagh, and my various cousins scattered along the coast. I tell him about the sea fae we revel with four times a year, and about the devastating storm that hit Diarmuid’s Row not long before I took this position as a queen's maid. I tell him about my adventures beneath the sea with Niamh, about our customs, about everything I miss most. The soothing crash of the ocean waves at night. The irreplaceable scent of a peat fire in the hearth.
“If you could do anything for a living,” Cillian asks me, all curiosity, “what do you suppose you’d do?”
“Something with the sea fae,” I say with a wistful shrug.
“You cannot tell me any more than that?”
I laugh. “I tell you, I haven’t really thought about it. When I was just a púca living among our clan, I thought we’d go on like that forever. Sure, I traded with the sea fae often enough—”
“Traded with them?” He nudges me playfully. “Traded what? Tell me everything. I’ve never met a sea fae.”
“Sometimes it’s knowledge. Sometimes it’s goods from around the world, or works of low fae craft. You’d like them well enough,” I answer, blushing for some reason. “They’ve a fondness for music, too.”
“Whale songs and the like, I suppose?”
“Goodness, no!” I chuckle at the thought, as if the sea fae—kin of the púcaí—were unsophisticated. “They prefer lyres and singing. They have the most wondrous sung epics.”
For a moment, he gives no response. Then Cillian bursts out laughing. “You mean the sort of thing that lures human sailors to wreck their ships on the rocks?”
“What? No! They would never!”
“They would indeed! I’ve traveled the human realm a great deal.”
He tells me more, then, about the human lands. About the legends of the sea fae. I tell him the sea fae I know are peaceable folk, and it isn’t their fault if the humans are bad at navigation.
And then his lips are on mine once again. This time, his arms wrap around me, lifting me from the ground. His tongue slips into my mouth, deftly exploring.
I am glad he holds me, for my legs turn into moon jellies. And then, without thinking, those same useless legs have somehow wrapped themselves around his waist, and we are slipping intothe clandestine shadows of the trees. Cillian's touch is soft and sensual, never greedy as he traces my curves.
I do not know how long we remain there under the bowers, learning each other’s contours, our hands slipping under each other’s clothes. He lays me down on the dewy grass, soaking my dress, though I do not mind.
Nor do I think I'll wear it for much longer. His skin is almost moonlit as I pull his tunic over his head, an entirely different color than his deeply tanned face, arms, and neck. Heat pools below my belly, chanting my want for him in a steady pulse.
He is as beautiful as his songs. And the desire darkening his eyes makes me feel beautiful, too.
Our mouths meet again, our kisses growing urgent. As my hands rove his warm body, my heart beats faster. Yet at the same time, it calms for the first time in these past two weeks. This feels good. Better than that, it feelsright.
Slowly, as he unlaces the bodice of my dress, I feel my heartache easing.
And afterward, when we lie together, naked and sated and a little drunk on each other, I feel what I’ve longed for since arriving here.
I am filled with belonging and joy.
Chapter Six
