Shadows and Light

open-air room,” Falco said. “Another few steps and you’ll go right over the balcony. Since you can’t sprout wings, it would be a hard fall.” He smiled shyly, hesitantly. “Blessings of the day to you, Lyrra.”
    A witch’s greeting. The same greeting he’d offered every morning when she’d lived at the cottage that had belonged to Ari’s family, as if to remind himself of the young witch he’d been acquainted with briefly.
    Or to take to himself one small custom that belonged to the Mother’s Daughters.
    “Blessings of the day to you, Falco,” Lyrra replied softly. Dear Falco. A year ago, he’d been an impetuous young man, too quick to speak without thinking, so sure that the Fae, who called themselves the Mother’s Children, were superior to anything else that lived in the world. Then he went down to the Old Place with Dianna, Aiden, and her to celebrate the Summer Solstice with Ari, and, that night, saw the power a witch could command. The past year had been a hard one for everyone in the Clan whose piece of Tir Alainn was anchored to the Old Place near Ridgeley, but Falco had surprised her. He’d accepted the need for so many of the Fae to remain in the human world in order to keep the shining road open with more grace than she’d thought he had in him. And he’d been a friend to her during all the months she’d stayed at the Old Place to be the anchor the others needed to keep the magic alive.
    “What brings you so far north?” she asked.
    “I’m ... visiting.” He released her arm and walked the few remaining steps to the balcony.
    Lyrra followed him, trying to sort out all the nuances in his voice. “Did you come with ...” Lucian’s name stuck in her throat. She wondered if it always would after today.
    “No,” Falco said, staring at nothing. “It was unfortunate timing that he arrived here the day after I did. He
    ... wasn’t pleased.”
    “You’re entitled to some time away from the home Clan to ... visit,” Lyrra said, still trying to decipher the underlying meaning to his words. For a Fae male, “visiting” meant enjoying the bed of one, or more, ladies in the Clan where he was guesting. If Falco had become restless for that kind of “visit,” there were other Clans closer to his home Clan where he could have found a lover for a few days.
    “You’re not going back,” Lyrra said, suddenly understanding. “That’s why you’ve come this far north.
    You’re not going back to your home Clan.”
    “No,” Falco said, his voice holding a deep-rooted unhap-piness. “It’s not like it was when you were there, Lyrra. Dianna left you there to do what she had promised to do, but you never took it out on the rest of us. You never—” He bit off the rest of the words.
    Lyrra rested a hand on his arm. “Darling, I know Dianna can be difficult, but—”
    “Difficult?” There was more than unhappiness in his eyes. There was anger, too. “She resents all of us.
    Her kin. Her Clan. Nothing we do is good enough. Ever. She’ll jump her pale mare over the wall enclosing the kitchen garden and trample the young plants past saving, then complain about the sparsity of the food set before her. We give her more than her share of the food grown in the human world because it does taste better than what we grow in Tir Alainn, and she takes even more than that. She has two rooms of her own while the rest of us sleep wherever we can, and it’s not enough. If she walks into a room, she gets the chair. If she walks into the kitchen, she expects to be served food, no matter the hour.
    And she reminds us, constantly, that her sacrifice is the reason the rest of us can still ride up the shining road and enjoy Tir Alainn.”
    “Hush, Falco, hush,” Lyrra said, glancing over her shoulder to see too many of the Fae starting to pay attention to them. “Don’t call attention to yourself.” Think before you speak, she pleaded silently, knowing it was useless. He may have matured in many ways, but he was still Falco.
    Surprisingly, he paused, then continued speaking quietly. “She resents me most of all.”
    Lyrra frowned. “But... why? You did everything you could to help the others get settled in the human world. And I’m sure it would have been harder on all of us if you hadn’t hunted to provide some meat for the table.”
    “That’s just it, don’t you see? I hunted, at Dianna’s command, to provide Ari with some meat after Dianna gave her that puppy. And I hunted for