Page 40 of Dark Sun (Wicked Lovely 6)

Aislinn sighed, wondering how much to share, wondering what he already knew. Politics were easier after several years of practice, but there was a chasm between her and Keenan. He was raised to this, spent nine centuries dealing with it, and she had . . . not even a decade of experience.

“Ash?” Keenan prompted, still strolling at her side as if they were merely nobles in another era.

“Once upon a time,” she began, “there was a woman in New Orleans called Thelma Foy. She was your destined queen, Keenan.”

He stilled briefly, a misstep that could have been a stumble.

“I never found Thelma Foy,” he said mildly. “I knew of her, of course. Niall had found her, but . . . I never found her.”

“True.” Aislinn led him to a bench alongside a street where a coffee shop had recently opened. “Do you want to know why? It might be better not to know, Keenan. I say this as a friend and . . .” Her words drifted away, as if she was not sure how to finish that statement.

Keenan waited. A thin line of frost outlined his frost steps, but it did not touch her. He was as capable with ice as he had been with sunlight. She wasn’t sure how he’d dealt with both sides of himself, and in a secret thought she wasn’t eager to share, she wondered if his limitations as Summer King were, in part, because he’d kept that sliver of ice in his heart all those years.

For a moment, Aislinn watched several faeries watching them, whispering and wondering. She smiled at them with more than a bit of bared teeth and waited for them to scurry away.

“Ash?”

The Summer Queen sighed louder. “Thelma was my great-grandmother, Keenan. You pursued her. You pursued my mother. Do you see the pattern?”

The former Summer King stared at her, frost pluming from his lips as he weighed that detail. He looked irritated, but she wasn’t sure if it was at her or himself.

“My missing queen was always one of the women in your family,” he said quietly, after several exhaled clouds of frosty air.

“Womenormen,” she amended.

“I . . . don’t, that is, I’m not like Irial and Niall in that regard,” Keenan said, a bit awkwardly.

“I know. That doesn’t make it less true.” Aislinn wasn’t sure if that was enough reason to satisfy his questions, if this sliver of truth-telling would send him away, thinking she had shared everything. She couldn’t exactlylieabout it, and her skills of deception were not as practiced as Keenan’s.

He has, of course, seduced dozens of young women, stolen their mortality.It created a level of skill she could not match.

“So the Dark has come to reveal this to you because . . .?” Keenan shifted so he could stare into her face. Snowflakes drifted behind his eyes, and the Summer Queen wondered how terrible he could be if angered. A certainty came over her that a rage-fueled Winter King would be devastating. He was, after all, the child of two faeries who nearly destroyed the world as a result of their twisted love affair.

She’d seen Keenan when he was willing to let the world die for love of Donia.

She’d felt his rage when he breathed sunlight into his mother and took her life, literally burning her to death with sunlight.

She’d seen his passion when he gambled his throne for Aislinn’s promise to try to love him.

The former Summer King was a man who had been born of Summer and Winter’s deadly love. He was a man who was raised in one court, knowing he would rule the opposing court, a man who sacrificed his faery nature for love and then sought a curse in order to return to life as a faery. Underestimating him was dangerous—but so was telling him the whole truth at once. Winter could be as deadly as summer.

“The Dark Court knows whyyoucouldn’t find Thelma,” she hedged.

“Did they kill her?”

Aislinn stared at him, not sure how he could so obviously misunderstand another regent. In her few years as a faery queen, she’d strived to understand the courts, to study them to better know how to negotiate with them, to better destroy them if need be. Keenan saw only ugliness when he looked at Irial--and now Niall.

Would he see her differently knowing what he was about to discover?

“Killher?” Aislinn echoed. “You think Irial killed Thelma?”

“Yes, did Irial kill or give the order to kill the woman to stop—”

“No, Keenan, he did not kill my great-grandmother.” Aislinn glared at him, temper leaking in bright rays of sunlight. “He fell in love with her. He followed her to Faerie, and he fathered two children with her.”

Keenan laughed. “You’ve figured out a way around the no-lies rules! Joking. It’s all in the tone and—”

“No. Irial is my great-grandfather,” she said bluntly. “Grams is his daughter.Hermother was Thelma. My grandmother has lived so long because she is not fully human. She’s the daughter of a king, in fact. I am the great-granddaughter of the last Dark King.”

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