Galen reached out and grabbed Aisling’s outflung hand. “Let me help you, Aisling.” Galen’s voice held pain; he could never stand to see someone so distressed without wanting to make it better.

Aisling’s hand made a fist, and he went very still. “You are a good man, Galen; do not let me hurt you by accident.”

“Let me see what is bleeding on you.” Galen knelt beside the other man, his hand still holding his arm.

Aisling cried out and jerked free of him, crawling away from Galen, using both hands to scramble faster, and looked directly at me. He hadn’t realized I was standing just behind them.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

WE HAD A long, frozen moment of staring at each other. I waited to be bespelled, but though his skin was what the sidhe called sun-kissed as mine was moonlit, and though his face, like the rest of him, seemed to be sprinkled with gold dust, still there were others in faerie whose skin was more beautiful to me. The blue of his eyes was the color of a late-spring sky, but then part of Rhys’s eyes were a similar color. Aisling did have spirals in his eyes, as if someone had tattooed them on his irises, so that the spirals took attention away from the sky blue, but again there were others in faerie with more unusual eyes. I don’t think I would have been so critical if I hadn’t grown up being told he was so beautiful that to gaze upon his bare face was to fall in instant, irresistable lust, if not actual love. I tried to see the lines of his face and found him beautiful, but I thought Frost was fairer of face. Maybe I was prejudiced, but though Aisling was amazing, his was not the most amazing face I had ever seen. I had my father to compare him to, as well, and I still thought my father was one of the most handsome men I’d ever known. Maybe I was prejudiced, but then isn’t that what love, all kinds of love, is supposed to do?

I smiled, and Aisling let out a wail of despair and hid his face behind both of his hands.

Galen said, “Merry.”

I smiled at him, that face that I had loved since I was fourteen. “I’m fine.”

Doyle called out, “Merry!”

I turned and watched that tall, dark body stride toward us. He was moving so fast that his long braid bounced and I could see the flash of it as he stepped. The torn white shirt looked like some prop in a strip club, artfully ripped to give glimpses of his chest and stomach. The sunlight glittered off the silver earrings in the high, graceful points of his ears and caught the glint of the nipple ring on the left side. I just watched him and enjoyed the view, and the fact that he was mine, and I was his.

I turned back to Aisling, who still had one hand held up in front of his lower face like some movie harem girl, so that only those blue eyes with their spiral shapes showed. I smiled at him, and he closed his eyes as if in pain. He raised his other hand and hid even his eyes from view.

I realized he was saying, “No, no, no,” over and over again.

Doyle grabbed me and whirled me round to face him. He searched my face with nearly frantic eyes, and whatever he saw there calmed him, because he smiled. We wrapped our arms around each other and kissed. We kissed long and thoroughly, until I could wrap the sun-warmed feel of his body around me like a perfume made of flesh and warmth and love.

We broke the kiss and came away from each other’s lips smiling. “I love you, my Merry.”

“And I love you, my Darkness.”

His smile widened, and he ran his hand along the edge of my hair. “Let us comfort our fallen man.”

I nodded.

We went to him still holding hands. “Aisling,” Doyle said, “Merry is not bespelled by you.”

He just shook his head, hands still covering almost every bit of his face.

Doyle knelt beside him. “I saw your face when Talan struck you and ripped your mask off, and I was not bespelled either.”

“You saw what happened to Melangell,” he murmured through the shield of his hands.

Doyle touched his arm, and Aisling jerked away from the touch. Doyle touched him again.

“Don’t touch me!”

Doyle grabbed both his upper arms and held him tight when the other man tried to flinch away. “Your skin is just skin to me, Aisling, no more or less beautiful than all the sidhe.”

Aisling just kept shaking his head, hiding behind his hands, and whispering, “No, no, no.”

I knelt beside Doyle and touched Aisling’s shoulder. He tried to move away, but Doyle’s grip was too firm. If he wanted to escape from Darkness he would have to fight.

I petted his shoulder the way you’d comfort a friend. “It’s all right, Aisling; I’ve looked into your face and I’m not befuddled, I swear.”

“Look at me,” Doyle said.

“No.”

“Aisling, look at me.”

He lowered the one hand just enough to gaze over it at Doyle. “You have not harmed me, Aisling.”

He closed his eyes and whispered, “You don’t understand.”

Doyle put a hand on either side of Aisling’s face and gave him all the concentration out of those black eyes. “Drop your hands, Aisling, drop them.”

Those spiral eyes were too wide, almost wild like a horse that is about to bolt, but he slowly let the other hand fall away. Doyle held his face between those two, big, dark hands and gazed directly into his face. “You do not have to hide from us, my friend.”

I touched his arm and said, “You don’t have to hide anymore, Aisling, not from us.”

Aisling started to tremble, and then to shake as if he were freezing cold instead of kneeling in the warm sunshine. One single silver tear trailed down from the corner of his eye, and then another, until the tears seemed to be racing down his face. Doyle rose high on his knees and kissed him on the forehead.