Nann brought breakfast to my room and I ate it in bed. It was weird. Not just eating in bed, and being served, which was a pretty novel experience, but the food. I'm still not sure what it was, but it tasted sweet and was crispy on the outside.

I brought the book with me to the library, so I could keep reading while I waited for him. I was having trouble focusing on the book that morning, though. I kept thinking about what Kieran might have planned for the day. I was hoping it didn't turn out to be as embarrassing as Zephan's tour of their art gallery, when he appeared beside me. Zephan that is, not Kieran.

"What do you think of your heritage?" Zephan asked, nodding at the book he'd given me.

"I think I was better off not knowing it," I admitted.

"Really?" he spun a chair around to face me and sat down.

"They were horrible," I said. Zephan laughed. "What's so funny?"

"You've been reading the annotations, haven't you?" he asked, smiling like he knew something that I didn't.

"Yes," I said, honestly. "Shouldn't I?"

"It doesn't make much difference," he shrugged, "so long as you remember that the notes were written by their political enemies."

"Are you saying that these," I held the book up and raised an eyebrow, "things never happened?"

"No," he shook his head, "they did happen. It's just that everything's slanted from the perspective of victory, you know?"

"I'm not sure that I do."

"Obviously our side wanted to make it look like a complete, unquestionable victory. And the only way to do that is to make sure that the bad guys," he pointed to me to indicate that the 'bad guys' were the necromancers, presumably, "look so evil that their exile is the only possible course of action."

"Are you saying there were other options?"

"I'm saying," Zephan leaned closer to me, "that your people should never have been cast out of Faerie Land." He placed his hand on my denim clad knee, resting his fingers lightly against the inner curve, where the skin gets more sensitive as it approaches the back of the knee. "You shouldn't have been forced to grow up around humans." Zephan's summer blue eyes caught mine in a stare that seemed to penetrate to the bottom of my soul. "You shouldn't have had to hide who or what you are."

I clutched the edges of the book, trying to imprint my senses with the soft leather binding. Anything to distract myself from Zephan's focused attention. I'd thought he was charming when other people were around. Alone, he was damn near dazzling. I felt something inside me grow soft and quivering.

"You are one of the Greater Fae," he said, leaning closer to me, "one of the Deadly Aristocracy. No amount of perceived power abuse should have driven you from your home." It was almost as if he knew exactly which buttons to press. I know that he was talking about the history of my people, but it felt like he was talking about me; about my parents making me live with Catriona because they didn't understand my power. "You aren't a freak, Laurel Tierney," he said, gently, "you're extraordinary."

I glanced away from Zephan's eyes. I didn't know how I was supposed to take that. Compliments weren't something I was used to. I saw Kieran standing in the doorway staring at me.

"Kieran," I said, surprised. I opened my mouth to ask how long he'd been there, but the anger on his face made me close my mouth.

"Zephan," he nodded. Zephan stood up, dragging his fingertips in a slow caress off my knee. I blushed, realizing how the gesture must have looked to Kieran.

"Have fun on your little outing," Zephan said, leaving the room. Kieran glared at his back on the way out.

"You coming?" Kieran asked, without looking at me. I stood up, slipping the book into my bag. He turned and left the room. I had to run to catch up to his lengthy stride. He looked really angry.

I followed Kieran out of the castle. He took me through the gardens and onto a long winding pathway.

"You know," I said, interrupting his broody silence, "most people talk when they give a tour."

"We're not there yet."

"Where?"

"You'll see," he said. I stopped walking and kicked at a stone on the side of the pathway. It didn't move. "What are you doing?" he asked.

"Nothing."

"Oh, that's mature."

"I am only eighteen, remember," I said, starring at the straggling countryside.

"So?"

"So?" I asked, incredulously. "Isn't that why you've been avoiding me?"

"I've been avoiding you?" he demanded. "You're the one who's been following Zephan around, like a lost little puppy."

"I wasn't like a puppy," I said, "he asked to give me a tour. Which is more than you did, by the way." I turned to walk down the path again. Kieran caught me by the shoulder and spun me around. His eyes burned down into me with a dark and tempestuous fire.

"I'm sorry if you find my manners beneath you," he growled.

"It's not that I find your manners beneath me," I shouted, "it's that you act like you own me."

"What?" Kieran's hand slipped from my arm. I took a step back.

"You heard me," I said. "Just because you brought me into this world, doesn't give you the right to control everything I do." That sounded like something you'd say to your mother, but Kieran had the same overbearing attitude you hear about controlling parents taking.

"I haven't done anything," Kieran said. His eyes went soft and injured.

"No," I said, "but you're angry that Zephan has."

"I..." he shook his head.

"If you didn't want me spending time with him, you could have said something earlier, instead of flying off the handle at me."

"Flying off the...?"

I frowned. "Losing your temper."

"You were mad at me too," he pointed out.

"Only because you were chucking a tantrum at me," I challenged.

"I'm sorry," Kieran said. He looked down at the ground between us.

"Okay," I said.

"I don't want you spending time with him," he said.

"For political reasons, or something else?"

"Just... don't." He looked me in the eyes, "Please."

I know I shouldn't have agreed to that, but I couldn't keep myself from nodding.

"I'll try," I said. It wasn't a complete promise, but it was all that I could give him. I couldn't just ignore one of the princes. I was supposed to be the neutral third party, in this situation. I was the expert witness, called in to raise the dead... and just because I couldn't do that, didn't mean I was allowed to take sides, did it?

Kieran brought me to a field of wildflowers, a huge park filled with drifts of colour. It was like something out of a poem, the sheer grandeur of delicate life encapsulated in the blossoms. The stems of the flowers pushed up out of the ground, before being overburdened with the sheer weight of beauty.

There was a winding dirt track that led through the middle of the field and Kieran started off down the path.

"This is what I wanted to show you," he said, turning around when we got to the middle of the field. I looked around. Undulating hills stretched out across the horizon, draped in acres of blossoms.

I finally saw the part of Faerie Land where our stories had come from. The sheer, overwhelming beauty of it made my chest ache, like when you breathe too deeply in cold air. I saw the small winged folk that I'd read so much about as a child, that I'd dreamed about. They flew through the flowers, moving around each other in a complicated twirling pattern reminiscent of butterflies. They threw up puffs of color as they flew, so that it looked like they were dancing through fireworks.

"It's beautiful," I said.

"No," Kieran growled, "it's not." I looked up at him in surprise. He sounded so angry. Haunted. I didn't think he was still angry about seeing me with Zephan. I just couldn't believe that he'd care about me that much.

I looked back at the field of wildflowers, searching for something I hadn't seen. Surely, I'd missed something. I must have. Something had happened to make him this angry, to give him that tortured look, something I couldn't see.

"It's just wrong," he muttered, watching the tiny, butterfly winged faeries flit amongst the flowers. "I believe that everyone should pull their own weight," he scowled down at me with such intensity, I was a little afraid of him, "instead of leeching off the hard work of others."

"Sometimes," I murmured, "it's harder than you'd think."

I felt Kieran grow darker beside me. His eyes burned into the side of my skull but I refused to look back up at him. He took a step closer to me, lording his height over me. I watched our shadows join each other.

"It's not impossible." He spoke the words so close, I felt his breath shift my hair. His body heat seemed to envelope me. It was filled with a crackling energy. So strong, so full of life and power. I suddenly found it hard to breathe. I was choking on his life force. It hurt. My skin burned with it. Tears streamed down my cheeks.

"Laurel?" he asked, uncertainty filtering through his voice. Bright spots of light sparked across my vision. Kieran leaned down to look at me, pressing his face up against mine. His ivory skin became even brighter. Like lightning. Burning into my eyes. He put his hand on my shoulder. Everything went white, like the whole world had become an overexposed image, the ghosts of ancient photographers playing with my vision.

I pushed through the light with my mind. Reached out into it, blind, grasping. I felt Kieran's hand against mine and I gripped it as tight as I could. It was so hot. Everything felt hot against my frozen skin. I tried to pull some of that heat into me. If I could just warm up a little, grow accustomed to this sudden heat and light, maybe I could survive it.

I felt a line of heat travel from Kieran's hand up my arm. Heat flooded my body. It ran up trough my veins. So hot. But I was still cold. So cold. Impossibly cold. As cold as the grave.

It burnt me. I was filled with fire at the same time I was made of ice. I wasn't melting. I thought I was more likely to explode. I gasped for breath. I was dying. Being burned up by that spark of life. Consumed by a magic that had nothing to do with me. I reached down into that dark place in the centre of my being - the place where I never go without a circle to keep it in check - and I ripped the coverings off.

Death flowed from my heart the way blood flows from a vein. It poured over me, cooled the flames. It pushed the overwhelming light back so that slowly my vision returned to normal and I could breathe again.

I looked up from where I kneeled on a patch of bare, blackened earth. Kieran held me in his arms, clutched tight to him. My cheek was squashed against his chest. He was gasping for breath, kneeling in the dirt with me. I gathered my powers back into my centre, pulling them into their tight little ball and wrapped them back up in a protective bubble.

I stayed pressed against Kieran for a while longer. I felt his breathing return to normal.

"What happened?" he asked, not moving.

"You," I whispered into his chest, "seem to have a lot of your life force involved with something around here." I breathed in deeply, trying to figure out how to explain what had happened. He smelled like old leather and sandalwood. There was a distractingly sensual quality to the smell. "Your energy sort of... spilled over."

"And you sucked it up?"

"No," I pushed away from Kieran, horrified by the thought. "It almost strangled me."

"Strangled you?" he asked, frowning down at me. The deep darkness of his eyes seemed to try to suck me in.

"Smothered," I said, "would probably be a more accurate description. I thought I was going to die." I wiped the tears from my cheek, embarrassed.

"My life force nearly killed you?" he gasped. "So you struck back in return."

"Not intentionally," I tried to explain. "It was overwhelming me and I just tried to push it away." I smiled guiltily up at him. "Guess I pushed a little too hard."

"I don't understand," Kieran shook his head. "You bring the dead back to life. Doesn't that mean that you're overflowing with the stuff?"

It was my turn to shake my head. "I might be able to make it look like the dead come to life again," I said, "but I don't do that by forcing the spark of life into their bodies." I paused, suddenly struck by the idea of what it would be like to do it that way. I shuddered. "What a horrifying thought, trapping a person's life force like that. I just bring the dead closer to the living. I'm like a bridge. Alive but full of death. It's in me, you see. Like a deep, still well. Not empty. Just not filled with anything that the living could understand."

"And I...?" Kieran began haltingly, "I brought this on?" He looked down at the charred patch of earth we were kneeling in. "How?"

"I'm not exactly an expert on the living you know."

"Yeah," Kieran gave a choked laugh, "none of us really are."

"Huh," I said, thoughtfully.

"What?"

"I've just never thought of it that way before."

"Okay..."

"I guess I always figured I was the only one. You know, living on the outside. Not understanding anything because I was different. I never thought that anyone else might feel the same." I looked away from Kieran, suddenly embarrassed. "That probably sounds really stupid." I felt his hand reach out to cup my cheek, the heat emanating from his flesh warning me of his approach. He froze, inches from my skin.

"I don't think you're stupid," he whispered. "It's never easy being different." Something brushed up against my leg. I looked down to see a tiny, red-winged faerie beside me. She was holding a basket and wearing a miniature dark hood, like the brownies at the Great Court wore.

"What's she doing?" I asked Kieran.

"Replanting," he said, glancing down at the faerie. She was joined by several others. Up close they didn't look so wonderful. In fact, they looked tired. Really tired. I watched the faerie with the red wings dig a hole, one inch deep. She took a seed out of her basket and placed it in the hole. She brushed some soil over the hole, burying the seed, and left her hand pressed against the mound where the seed was planted. Her hand glowed gently and I saw a line of energy spiral out of her body into the ground.

"Oh," I gasped, watching the faerie collapse. Her body disintegrated before I had a chance to pick her up. She vanished in a puff of red dust. It looked like pollen. But it wasn't. Realizing what the puffs of colour I'd seen the faeries dancing through had actually been, I reached out into the field with my powers. I felt faint with the amount of potential in that field. I might have thought the flowers were the markers of a thousand deaths, if I hadn't just seen the red winged faerie die. I looked down at the flower beside me. The seed she'd planted just moments before had already grown to full maturity. I looked back out at the field.

Acres of flowers spread out in front of me. Wild flowers, I'd thought. Now I knew better. Each tiny bud held the energies of a faeries' death. I could feel it pulsing through the field. If I hadn't had my powers held so tightly in check when I entered the field, I might have thought it was a burial site.

But it was worse than that.

It was a prison.

It was a prison for the dead.

I looked back at Kieran. He was staring at me intensely, his expression unfathomable.

"I want to go home," I said.

----------------------------------------------

Oh la la. Kieran, should he be trusted or no?

And the faeries... yikes. A prison for the dead.

Did anyone catch that little tease somewhere in this chapter that relates to something in the prologue? ;P

Leave me your thoughts!

Til next time,

x zuz