He rose and took them. "It is very strange to get what I've needed for so long, and what I wanted even more, and find I was wrong about the one."
"And right about the other." There followed more of those liquid syllables that had no meaning for Kai.
Nathan chuckled. "Fare thee well, my queen."
"And thee, my hound." She dropped his hands, turned, and a slit opened in the air before her. But she paused to glance over her shoulder, a spark of glee in those silvery eyes. This time she looked about ten, and full of mischief. "Do not worry about your grandfather, Kai. I will explain to him. Nor will the police chief trouble you again."
"But what—"
She was gone.
NATHAN felt the queen leave as clearly as he saw it. Yet she wasn't fully absent, not as she had been for all the long years of separation. She had come when he called—come the second he called her, leaving her court, the press of duty and love and need and laughter there. She had come.
As he would go to her if she called. That had always been true. But now he knew that she, too, would come to him.
Yesterday he hadn't known he needed that. Today he did.
"Did you think," she'd said, "I'd gone through all the grief of setting you free—and put you through it, too—only so I could force you back into shapes of body and mind no longer yours? You are still my hound, as I am your queen. But now you are your own, as well."
Today many things were clear to him. He'd been foolish. He could see that now—how foolish he'd been in thinking the queen hadn't known from the moment she sent him here that by the time he could return, he would no longer need to.
He went to Kai and slid an arm around her waist. "Axe you…"
"Okay" wasn't the right word. What was? She'd be struggling—her life nearly lost, then saved, and now overturned. "Unbearably confused," he finished, "or simply overwhelmed?"
"Yes! Yes and yes." She laughed, or choked—the sound held both. "I'm to leave? To leave Earth?"
"Yes." He pressed his face into her hair and breathed her in. "I'm sorry. Probably not forever, but the leaving is hard. At least we'll have a little time to gather supplies first."
"We?"
"Kai." He smoothed her hair back from her face. "Of course. You and I and that great cat of yours will go together, since she couldn't stand to be parted from you, either."
"I thought… you love the queen so much. You've missed her and your home so much. And she clearly loves you."
"I do, and she does, but I've loved many over the years, and in many different ways. She isn't mine, Kai. Not as you are." Words. He would have hated losing speech, but words didn't come easily. How to put this feeling, this certainty, into something as limited as words?
He looked at her beautiful face, so uncertain, and finally found the question in her heart. "Eh. You want to know… but of course I love you. I am yours as much as you are mine. That's what I wasn't saying, isn't it?"
She laughed and kissed him and hugged him hard. "Yes. Yes, it is. You are such a man."
That was the word for him, he realized, happy. He wasn't fully human, nor truly hound. He was sidhe—wild sidhe—and he was a man.
[end]