"You shouldn't be here." Talisa turned to face Adrial as he slid his leather-clad legs over the sill of her open bedchamber window.

"Here is the only place in the world I should be." The creaky slats of the inn's wooden floor didn't make a sound as Adrial crossed the room to sit beside her. When he drew her into his arms, she didn't protest, but instead pressed her face into his throat and began weeping softly. For those tears alone, he could kill diSebourne without a qualm. If diSebourne hadn't gone downstairs to cool his temper in a pint of ale...

"Oh, Adrial... what are we going to do? I don't know how I can bear to let him touch me when the only man I want is you."

He stroked her dark, tumbled hair. "He isn't going to touch you. Not ever again." His lips found the soft skin of her temple, her damp eyelids, the tender fullness of her mouth.

She pulled back. "Adrial... no, this is wrong."

"Nei, shei’tani, finally, this is right." Holding her gaze, he lowered his lips again and kissed her. Softly at first, delicate brushes of his lips against hers, tiny nibbling kisses, tasting her lips with the tip of his tongue. Soft kisses deepened with increasing ardor as she began to kiss him back. She tasted like light and joy, like hope and peace and happiness and all the sweet, secret dreams of his heart.

And as her arms lifted to wrap around his neck, he knew he would kill any man who tried to keep her from him.

Colum diSebourne clutched the stair rail tight and concentrated on planting his heavy, uncooperative feet squarely in the center of the stair treads. He took pride in being a man who could hold his liquor, but that last round of whiskeyed ales had nearly dropped him.

With the company in the inn's small pub so much warmer than the reception awaiting him upstairs, Colum had not objected when the first celebratory round had turned into another. Somewhere after five, he'd lost the ability to count.

He reached the landing and clutched the wall to keep from falling back down the stairs he'd just climbed. Five more staggering steps brought him to the door of his room.

He wasn't sure what to expect when he opened the door, but the sight of Talisa sleeping in the flickering candlelight made him squeeze his eyes shut against the sudden burn of tears. She was so beautiful. He'd loved her since he'd first laid eyes upon her as a boy, and his father had always promised she would be his. He'd never wanted anything more than he wanted Talisa, never known a longing so deep. Yet now she was his wife, and his dreams of the life they would have together had turned to bitter gall.

He took a ragged breath and began shrugging out of his clothes. Drink made his hands and legs unsteady and he nearly fell several times, but finally he managed to strip and climb naked into the bed beside his wife.

The sweet, warm scent of her dizzied his inebriated senses, and when he pressed his body against her back and cupped her small, round breast through the thin silk of her nightgown, she awoke with a soft sigh. He held his breath as she turned in his arms, and her lovely eyes, large and dark as a doe's, blinked up at him.

"Colum," she whispered. Her arms slid around his neck, and her petal-soft lips parted for his kiss.

Outside, on the rooftop just above the bedchamber window, a lavender glow of magic swirled as the Fey Spirit master spun his weave, while behind him in the darkness of the forest, Adrial vel Arquinas and his shei'tani slipped silently away.

Chapter seventeen

Elvia ~ Navahele

Three belts after sunset, the last of the dinner dishes were finally cleared away and the hauntingly beautiful strains of Elvish night music filled the meadows of Navahele.

Fanor pushed away from the table and rose to his feet. "Come, my friends. It is time. Lord Galad will see you now."

He led the Fey off the terrace and across delicate bridges that spanned the silvery pools ringing the island at the city's heart. There, rising in splendor from a wide, mossy knoll, stood the centermost tree of Navahele, a giant king among Sentinels, with a trunk easily twice the width of any other.

"This is Grandfather," Fanor said. "The ancient I told you about, who was a sapling in the Time Before Memory."

"He is magnificent," Ellysetta breathed. She tilted her head back. Grandfather was so tall she could not see his upper branches. Beside it—him—she felt dwarfed. An ant standing at the foot of a giant. Grandfather's bark was smooth and ageless, shining a silvery gold that shifted color in the glow of the butterflies hanging from the Sentinel's vines and branches.

"Aiyah, he is that," a low, musical voice agreed.

Rain put a hand on Ellysetta's shoulder, and together they turned to face the stranger who seemed to materialize from the forest itself. One moment, the stretch of mossy ground to their left was empty; the next, the Elf king stood there.

Galad Hawksheart, a man who'd been a legend before Gaelen was born, needed no introduction. Tall, broad shouldered, and lean hipped, the Elf king was even more breathtakingly beautiful than most of his kind, with strong, masculine features framed by a fall of burnished gold hair threaded with shining beads, aromatic leaves, and fluttering hawk feathers. Except for the golden cast to his skin and his tapered ears, he was almost Fey in appearance.

Until you looked into his eyes.

Hawksheart's eyes were a fathomless emerald, swirling with infinite sparkling lights, as if all the stars in the sky had been cast down a bottomless green well Those eyes looked so ancient, Ellysetta wouldn't have been surprised to learn they had witnessed the birth and death of worlds or gazed upon the faces of the gods.