Deeds of Men by Marie Brennan Page A

heart.”
    He had been gone only a few days—a customary absence, to protect himself against the dangers of time spent among the fae. Still, her words were apt; his return always felt like a homecoming. If not to the Onyx Hall, then to her.
    They were not so hidden as to be private, so Deven contented himself with a kiss upon her ungloved hand, her skin cool against his lips. Nonetheless, he heard a mischievous giggle from the underbrush of the garden. The fae were hardly puritanical in their behaviour, but they still found delicious scandal in the decision of their Queen to take a mortal consort. Dalliance was one thing; many of them indulged in it from time to time. But love? The emotion—not what the Queen did in her bedchamber—was shocking, even after all these years.
    Certainly Deven’s own fellows would be appalled, if they knew he remained a bachelor for love of a faerie Queen.
    Already they said too much about him. A man might live fifty-eight years and no one would remark on it. But to live fifty-eight years and show scant sign of it…his health was unflagging, his hair untouched by grey. When in public, he took care to move slowly and stiffly, as if his joints pained him in the damp. That pretence, however, could not hide the smoothness of his face, where time ought to have carved lines marking the passage of his mortal span. Men noticed, though they did not know the cause.
    Lune said, “You are brooding on something.”
    She spoke the words lightly, chiding him for bringing heavy thoughts into her garden diversion. She might have been the subject of a pagan fresco, there beneath the flowering apple tree, with her moon-bright hair loose like a maiden’s, and the sight of her gave his heart a sudden pang. As little as he had changed, she changed even less: only the style of her hair and gown, idly following in the wake of mortal fashion as it pleased her. Time would never touch her face—nor would death.
    Her silver gaze sharpened. “What troubles you?”
    Deven bent his head, playing idly with her long, delicate fingers. He accepted the impossibility of hiding the evidence of his thoughts from her, but that did not mean he must share their substance. “Nothing you wish me to speak of,” he told her.
    But the words were ill-chosen; he might as well have hung out a sign. Lune’s face stilled, and she drew her hand from his. It shivered there between them: mortality .
    She could shelter him from it, a little. The faerie touch he bore, the legacy of a cup of wine, slowed his aging. Every moment he spent in a faerie realm was a moment in which time stopped. But to stay among them forever would shatter his mind, and so instead he walked between the two worlds, mortal and fae.
    And in time, the mortal side must win.
    “That day,” she said, “lies far off yet.”
    “May it be so,” Deven said, long habit suppressing the more common invocation of God. They would not thank him for that, here in the heart of the Onyx Hall. “But Lune…we must speak of what will come.”
    “Why?” It came out angry, but he understood. “’Twill come when it comes, and when it does, my heart will break. Then you will be gone, and I will live on in grief. What is there to speak of?”
    “The Onyx Court,” he said.
    It quieted the trembling of her shoulders, armoured in their midnight silk. Lune had never studied for sovereignty, not as a prince might. Then again, neither had old Queen Elizabeth. But both women shared a quality that stood them in good stead where no number of books and tutors would: they both held an unwavering commitment to the stability of their realms—though Elizabeth had refused to wed and bear an heir.
    Lune’s heir was not in question; immortal creatures need not concern themselves with such things. Deven, however, was another matter.
    “You made a promise,” he reminded her.
    “Always to rule with a mortal at my side. I have not forgotten.”
    Mortal and fae, hand in hand, had created this