He sobered abruptly, leaned forward. “You said Gwen spoke to Brenna O’Toole. What did she say to her?”

“Don’t you know?”

He was on his feet without seeming to move at all. “I’m not permitted in the cottage, nor past the borders of its gardens, though my home is beneath it. What did she say?”

Sympathy stirred in Shawn’s heart. The question had been more plea than command. “ ‘His heart is in his song.’ That’s what she said to Brenna.”

“I never gave her music,” Carrick said softly. He lifted an arm and with a flick of his wrist had the light blazing. “Jewels plucked from the fire of the sun. These I gave her, these I poured at her feet when I asked her to come with me. But she turned away from them, from me. From her own heart. Do you know what it is, Gallagher, to have the one you want, the only one you’ll ever want, turn from you?”

“No. I’ve never wanted like that.”

“There’s a pity for you, for you’re not alive until you do.” He lifted his other hand, and darkness fell with silver beams and sparkles. Fog, thin and damp, crawled over the ground. “Even so, even when she took another at her father’s bidding, I gathered the teardrops from the moon, and these I spilled into pearls at her feet. And still she wouldn’t have me.”

“And the jewels of the sun, the tears of the moon became flowers,” Shawn continued. “And these she tended, year after year.”

“What is time to me?” Impatience shimmering now, Carrick glared at Shawn. “A year, a century.”

“A year is a century when you’re waiting for love.”

Emotion swam into Carrick’s eyes before he closed them. “You’re clever with words as well as tunes. And you’re right.”

Once more he snapped his wrist and the sun was back, winter pale. “Still, I waited, and too long I waited, to go to her that last time. And from the sea, through the deep blue depths of it, I took its heart. And from this, hundreds of sapphires I gathered for her, and these, too, I poured at her feet. For my Gwen, all that I had and more for Gwen. But she told me she was old, and it was too late. For the first time, I saw her weep about it, weep as she told me if I’d once given her the words that were in my heart instead of jewels, instead of promises of eternities and riches, she might have been swayed to give up her world for mine, her duty for love. I didn’t believe her.”

“You were angry.” Shawn had heard the story too many times to count. When he’d been a boy, he’d often dreamed of it. The dashing faerie prince astride a white winged horse, flying to the sun, to the moon, to the sea. “Because you had loved her, and didn’t know how else to show it, how else to tell her.”