trembled. Silver lute strings plucked by soft ageless fingers, their nails faintly blushed with the pink of a tender rose’s heart, and amid the quiet music, a mortal breathing.
He sat on the nacreous marble floor below the window, her cascading green mantle almost swallowing him whole. The heart of Summer essayed a lazy rill of music, one bare white foot peeping from underneath a mantle’s fold. The loveseat was of frayed red velvet, but you could not see the bloody fabric under the green. The Jewel on her forehead flashed, once, as the balance tipped, evening into night. The flower-carven walls, glowing softly, bathed the entire host in spectral light, moonglow captured by the tower’s top and slowly released when Summer willed it. Low couches covered in velvet and watered silk held those few honored enough to attend, and sigh-wrought draperies wrapped each wall and sconce, not to mention the shell-glowing lamps and the couch legs, in cobweb-fine mist.
She played, the Queen of all she surveyed, and looked out upon the night. Those high in favor at the moment amused themselves in their own quiet fashion, the highbloods feigning interest in books or each other, soft whispers traded behind slim, cruelly beautiful hands or fans made of multicolored gossamer wings and tiny bleached bones. The ladies-in-waiting, their skirts spread according to arcane etiquette, alert to each small change of Summer’s expression, draped themselves in languid poses. Braghn Moran, Ilara Feathersalt’s erstwhile paramour, held a moonwrought chalice while a masked brughnie squeezed freshly picked cloister-grapes in her knotted, barkbrown fists, the feathers on her mask quivering. Chantment dropped from Braghn’s lips, turning the stream of amber fluid into thick honeyspice mead.
Summer’s other favorite, a lean, black-masked rogue rumored to be Arcad Shallowdraft, held a gold-trimmed tome weighing as much as a kelpie. He did not bother to pretend to peruse its fantastically colored pages, choosing instead to study the mortal boy crouched in the folds of Summer’s mantle. The eyeslits of the sidhe’s beaked mask showed hot crimson sparks, and some of the ladies-in-waiting tittered among themselves. Imagine, to show jealousy of a mortal so openly! Especially a mortal tainted by association with that Half girl, the russet-haired one Summer sent hither and yon.
But it pleased Summer to let it continue, and when she set the lute aside to invite the golden-haired boy onto her seat, the rogue had the grace to look away. Soon his identity would be revealed, and a delicious play would have been wrought, and they would politely applaud.
For now, Summer smoothed the mortal boy’s hair while he gazed adoringly at her. “Little Sean,” she cooed. “And how is my little sprite, my little joy?”
“Your Majesty…” The boy stumbled over the words, blushing. So charming, when the mortals flushed with their hot salt-sweet blood. A changeling held his place in the mortal world, and would until Summer tired of him. It was inevitable.
“Oh, little sprite.” Pearl-white, sharp teeth flashed between her carmine lips. “Speak again.”
His tumbled curls parted under her snowy fingers, and he shuddered like a pony under the brush. A hush fell—even among the sidhe, silence sometimes falls at once on a gathering. Mortals called it a god passes among us, but the sidhe have a word for it—one mortals cannot hear, even when spoken.
The high, sweet music of a mortal child’s voice broke it, clear as crystal. “When is Robin-mama coming back?”
Silence deepened, as every sidhe in attendance tensed, waiting to see what Summer would make of this.
She laughed carelessly, but a darkness passed briefly over that ageless-beautiful face. Pinpricks of light in her black, black eyes winked out, something moving in the depths of her gaze. “Oh, she is on an errand, flapping her ragged wings.” Summer exhaled a sweet-drugging breath over the child’s head. “She’s quite forgotten about you, little one.”
The boy’s face slackened, drooping, but he brightened when Summer toyed with his hair afresh. It was so easy to divert the mortal mayflies, and so pleasant. If this one was returned to the mortal realm he would lead a shadow-life, longing for the Court he would remember only in dreams; when the changeling who held his place was brought home and fêted, its sojourn and celebration would end among the Queen’s apple trees, or in some corner of the sideways realms not yet Summer. The blood would flow hot, loosed by the flint knife only a queen could wield, and wherever it sprinkled would be forever under her sway.