Free Where Light Meets Shadow by Shawna Reppert

didn’t want to
know.”
    “Perhaps,” Alban said equably.
    Patient, quiet Alban was back. Kieran
was glad to see him, but he wasn’t done.
    “Out of your parents’ union, your
people enjoyed a rebirth—healing, art, trade with the mortals. Defeated in war,
my people languished with our stricken queen.”
    “No Leas laid a hand on your
queen. Her wound is in her own mind. Have you considered that a marriage that
wasn’t meant to be could have doomed both our kingdoms?”
    Kieran, having no answer for
that, played a few bars of a tune, a simple tune, one of the first he learned.
An old friend that he could always turn to for comfort.
    “I think about it sometimes,”
Alban said. “Quite a lot, really. I think about everyone killed in that
war—Leas and Scathlan both—and how they wouldn’t have died if my parents hadn’t
fallen in love, or if my father kept his vow to your queen despite that love.
But then I wouldn’t have been born and, selfish as it is, I can’t wish that.”
    With sudden, swift, painful
realization, Kieran knew that he couldn’t wish it either. But he also couldn’t
stop wishing the war had never happened, that his father hadn’t died, that his
mother hadn’t miscarried his baby brother in her shock, that she hadn’t died of
grief soon after. Couldn’t stop wishing that his people weren’t broken and that
his queen wasn’t lost in her own mind. So where did that leave him?
    “I’m sorry,” Alban said. “I
shouldn’t have pushed you to play that song. But I thank you for sharing it.”
    Kieran’s throat ached, and he
didn’t think he could sing or even speak. But he didn’t want to end the night
at the place they found themselves. So he put his hand to the harp strings and
played a sweet, wistful tune that made Alban smile, segueing into a powerful
improvisation on an old melody supposed to express the changing of the seasons.
    #
    Alban sat, transfixed, sensing a
power like the magic of healing, only different, and wilder. Kieran’s music
could move stone. Such depth to the bard, so easily forgotten when faced with
the brash, careless face he showed to the world.
    If Alban had thought he knew the
bard’s skill before tonight, he had been mistaken. Tune merged into tune
without pause, until he wondered if the music would ever end or if they would
both be forever lost in it.
    Then Kieran stilled the strings
with his hands and met Alban’s gaze, his eyes fey and bright. He smiled a
rapturous smile, which Alban returned.
    “Thank you,” Kieran said.
    “For?”
    “Indulging me. You always listen
so quietly, and you never try to talk to me when I’m playing.”
    “People do that?” Quite apart
from the rudeness of such an action, how could anyone interrupt such magic? It
would be like dropping an exquisite blown-glass goblet onto a stone floor and
watching it shatter.
    “Only all the time. Pubs are the
worst. ‘Can you play louder?’ ‘Can you play softer?’ ‘Do you know The White
Rose and the Briar ?’ I’ve even had the mother of the bride try to talk to
me when I played at a wedding. Of course, I must smile and nod and be gracious,
even while I want to garrote someone with my spare harp strings.”
    The absolute exasperation in
Kieran’s voice made Alban chuckle. “That last piece, it was one of your
own?” 
    Kieran nodded. “ Farewell to
Brona .”
    “Brona. You mentioned her before.
Your queen’s daughter?”
    Kieran smiled wistfully. “And my
best friend. We were parentless children together, for all that she is not
technically an orphan.”
    There had been a lot of emotion
in that piece for just a friend. Alban felt a stab of jealousy, irrational and
unworthy of either of them.   
    “Did you love her?”
    “Brona?” Kieran laughed. “She is
too far above me for that. Scathlan may honor bards but not enough to marry
them off to royalty.”
    “I had forgotten how obsessed
your people are with position. But that doesn’t really answer the