“And you know how to treat me? No. So I thought. We resume our course toward the autumnlands, which should not take long now that I can walk unaided.” He avoided my eyes as he said this. Last night clearly wasn’t one of his proudest moments. “Whatever turn my wound has taken, it won’t matter once I can properly heal. Therefore we’re better off leaving without delay.”
I grudgingly admitted that in this matter, he knew better than I. He strode to the edge of the brambles, weaving only a little, and set his hands on one of the thorny coils. They began wriggling like worms, and retracted to form a doorway. I hastened after him, wincing at the chafe of my soiled skirts against my legs.
The forest we emerged into wasn’t as ominous as the place with the standing stones, but it still had an ill look about it that I hadn’t noticed in the dark and couldn’t easily explain. The green leaves were too glossy and glittering, almost as though a fever lay upon them, too. The sun labored to burn away the soupy mist I’d mistaken for clouds.
While we traveled, I couldn’t shake my memories of last night. Whiffs of imaginary decay dogged my steps. Inspecting myself, I found a smear on my left stocking where the corpse had seized my ankle. It was all I could do not to stop and tear the stocking off right then and there. In the way of minor discomforts, now that I’d noticed it I couldn’t put it out of my mind, maddened by the way it itched in the summer heat.
And with that thought, something occurred to me.
“The thane was from the summerlands too, wasn’t it?” I asked Rook. “The one you destroyed the day we met. The temperature changed when it appeared, same as the Barrow Lord. But nothing like that happened with the Wild Hunt’s hounds.”
Reluctantly, he nodded.
I narrowed my eyes. “And what about the unusual number of wild fairy beasts you told me about? Were the rest of those coming from the summerlands as well?”
“Ah,” Rook said. “A strange coincidence indeed, now that you mention it.”
“I sincerely doubt it has anything to do with coincidence!” I grabbed fistfuls of my skirt and trundled up next to him, feeling dirtier and more disgusting by the minute. Good. He deserved it. “You mean the connection’s never occurred to you before? Do you have any critical thinking skills at all?”
He stared straight ahead in full hauteur. “Of course I do. I am a—”
“Yes, I know. You’re a prince. Never mind.” I got the distinct feeling he’d never heard the term critical thinking before in his life. “Have any of the other courts been talking about it, then?” I pressed on.
He tore his crown off and ruffled his hair. “Why is this so important to you?” he exclaimed, vexed.
“Why is it . . .” I halted in my tracks. He turned around when he noticed I’d fallen several paces behind. “Why? Because a fairy beast from the summerlands probably killed my parents. Because one almost killed me, twice. Because they’re going to kill more humans if nobody figures out what’s going on. You know—just stupid, mortal reasons.”
He paused. I clenched my fists against the unhappiness stealing across his expression. I didn’t want him to feel bad and apologize, I wanted him to understand.
“We do not speak of such things,” he said finally. “At all. Because we cannot. We cannot think of such things. Even this conversation puts you and me in grave danger.”
Like bile, the forbidden words crept up the back of my throat. Shuddering, I swallowed them down.
Rook wasn’t responsible for the fairy beasts. And while he was, to be fair, entirely at fault for dragging me into the forest in the first place, he had nearly died last night protecting me. This I couldn’t deny. He drooped in his ragged clothes, and the crown shook between his fingers. He labored for breath. Arguing had obviously taxed him.
“I’m sorry,” we both said at the same time, in identically grudging voices.
A startled smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. It was my turn to avoid his eyes. I took a deep breath, determined to address one more thing before we went on.
“We need to talk about what you said last night.”
“I hate it when people tell me that,” he replied. “It’s never good.”
“Rook. You aren’t still taking me to trial, are you? You’ve changed your mind.”
I’m not sure what reaction I anticipated. Perhaps for him to draw himself up and say, You claim to know the mind of a prince? Anything but the way he looked aside and uneasily toyed with his raven pin.
“I realize now that I—made a mistake,” he confessed. “You did not intentionally sabotage me. What you did with your Craft was . . .” He struggled to find words, incapable of describing that which he didn’t understand. “When I came to fetch you,” he went on instead, “I told no one of my plans. We won’t be missed in the autumn court. Once I have healed, I promise to return you to Whimsy.”
The strength went out of my knees, and I steadied myself on a tree trunk. I was going home. Home! To Emma and the twins, my safe warm house filled with the smell of linseed oil, the work I already missed so much. And yet—back to the endless summer, and the way things were before—a life that crept along to the endless buzzing of grasshoppers in the wheat. I’d leave the autumnlands’ wonders behind forever. My heart soared and plummeted by turns like a bird buffeted by a storm. If I felt like this too long, I’d tear myself apart. But what could I do? How could I stop?
And what exactly had finally gotten the truth through to Rook?
I studied him. His expression was impassive. But the way he ran his fingers over the raven pin, his eyes getting duller and duller, worsened the turbulence battering my spirits.
“What of you?” I asked. “Your reputation? What will you do next?”
He mustered himself and replied, “I will think of some—” Just like that he stopped. His jaw worked. “Let us not speak of it,” he finished oddly. “Do you see that hill ahead? Once we reach the top we’ll be back in the autumnlands.”
I squinted. The hill looked no different to me than the forest behind us. While I puzzled over this, I realized why Rook hadn’t been able to finish his sentence.
It had been a lie.
Nine
AS SOON as we crested the hill, it was autumn again. I turned a full circle. Gently swaying birches stretched into the distance across a forest painted in dreamy tones of white and gold. I took a step back, and another, but the summerlands didn’t reappear.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
Rook didn’t hear me. He’d leaned against the first autumn tree we’d come to and stood propped up like a scarecrow in his torn coat. His eyes were closed, and the relief on his face was profound. I was glad to see it, because after our last conversation his fever had seemed to sap his strength. He’d barely made it up the hill.
I waited for at least an hour for him to recover. I sat down, and tried lying down, but the leaves tickled my neck and I couldn’t relax in such a vulnerable position. My fears and worries and longings and questions jangled around in my head, and the weight of my dirty, scratchy clothes and my own smell were apt to drive me mad now that I didn’t have anything to distract me. Every time I glanced at Rook, he hadn’t moved.
Finally I approached him.
“I hear running water nearby,” I said. “I’m going to go find it. I’m thirsty, and I need to wash up.”
I didn’t expect him to respond, but his eyes opened halfway, and he regarded me as though in a trance. I fought back a shudder. It wasn’t like being looked at by a person. His gaze lacked sentience, as though the forest, not him, stared through his eyes. Then he blinked and the impression went away.
“Follow me. It’s safer here than in the summerlands, but you shouldn’t wander around by yourself.” He scrutinized me. “You are quite filthy,” he added, as if only just now noticing it.
“Thank you. I’m in good company.”
His indignation didn’t stop him from replying inevitably, “You’re welcome.” After he’d bit out the relucta
nt words he swanned the rest of the way down to the brook and knelt on its mossy bank, reviewing his own reflection. I spied a patch of honeysuckles I could use for privacy—I wanted to rinse my clothes and let them dry a bit before I put them back on. A scrubbing would accomplish little in the way of comfort if my dress remained stiff as treated canvas with mud and horse sweat.
“I was without my glamour this whole time,” Rook said behind me. He had a question in his voice. I turned and found him staring at the water, aghast.
“Well, yes.” I wasn’t certain what else to say. “Ever since you were injured by the Barrow Lord. Or no, a little after that—when you slew it and passed out.”
“You’ve been looking at me!”
“Yes,” I said again. Baffled, I went on, “It was hardly avoidable.”
His expression hardened. “Stop this instant,” he said in a cool voice.
I stood there a moment longer—out of sheer perplexity, not resistance. But the look he leveled at me was so hair-raising I wasted no time vanishing behind the shrubs.
“Don’t look at me, either,” I called back to him. “Bathing is private. Like peeing.”
He didn’t respond. Well, that would have to do. Glancing all around, I pulled off my shoes, shucked my dress and underthings, and clambered shivering into the brook. I’d washed in colder from the well back home, but the water had a bite to it, and I didn’t waste time as I rinsed my hair and did my best to scrape some of the grime off with my fingernails. I dragged my clothes in with me and sloshed them around last, making a face at the cloud of dirt and horsehair they released into the clear shallows. Leaves floated along on the surface, twirling in the eddies I made. They were such marvelous colors I considered keeping one—here was a buttery leaf an almost perfect match for lead tin yellow, and here a vibrant orange one shot through with green—but I realized I wouldn’t be able to decide on a single souvenir, let alone a dozen, and discarded the idea with a wistful twinge.
When I was finished I crept back onto the bank and spread my dress and stockings on top of the honeysuckle where they might catch some of the breeze. More self-consciously, I hung my underthings on a pair of lower branches. Then I folded my arms tightly over my chest and pressed up against the bushes, more exposed than I ever had been in my life before. I waited. No sound came from Rook’s direction. Misgivings started knocking on the back door in my head, an endless stream of unwelcome visitors. What if he’d passed out? Or vanished, leaving me behind? Worse, what if the Wild Hunt stumbled across us while I was naked?
I’d feel much better if I had a look. But dare I? For a time I couldn’t will myself to put my back to the forest. I shifted indecisively, bare toes crunching the leaves, with my hair dripping all around me. Finally I gained the courage to crouch down low to the ground and peer through the honeysuckle.
The branches had a few gaps in them, no larger than coins, that afforded me a near-complete picture of the other side. Rook sat on a flat stone within speaking distance, but some length away from where I had left him, close to a bend in the stream. He’d taken off his shirt, though his trousers were still on, and his coat was draped loose on the ground around him. He was seizing the chance to have a wash too.
In some ways the ordinariness of it surprised me. Of course fair folk had to wash up from time to time. But he did it in such a regular way, cupping the water in his hands and scrubbing himself down with it, exhibiting no special speed or efficiency that I could determine. Perhaps it would have gone differently if he hadn’t been injured. I couldn’t picture another fair one, like Gadfly, doing this at all.
Feeling like some ill-behaved forest goblin hunkered down in the nude with my wet hair plastered to my shoulders and chest, I waddled over to a new spot and peeked through at a better angle.
The wound looked frightful, but better than before. The darkened veins had faded and receded, and the gouge’s edges seemed to be closing. I suspected it wouldn’t heal without a mark, however, because he had scars from older encounters: a long one across his forearm, and another going over his left shoulder. So his taste for battle hadn’t been exaggerated by Gadfly or put on for my sake. Would his glamour hide those scars or leave them?
Much more importantly, why was I even asking myself that question?
I expected to be unnerved by his half-naked form, but the longer I watched, the more he struck me as merely strange as opposed to monstrous. At some point my mind had stopped trying to see him as a human and accepted him for what he was. There was something undeniably striking about his leanness and his angular face. His eyes still appeared cruel to me, but also pensive. The thrill I felt whenever he looked at me was as captivating as it was dangerous, like having one’s gaze met unexpectedly by a lynx or a wolf in the woods at dusk.
Which was absolutely the last thing I should be thinking about. That was that. Time for this spying session to end.
But when I moved, a twig snapped beneath my heel. Rook paused, then looked over his shoulder straight at me through my leafy pinhole. I jerked upright, dizzy, heart thumping deep and muffled in my chest.
My clothes weren’t dry but I seized them off the honeysuckle anyway, bracing myself against the cold cling of my damp underthings, my stockings, the dragging roughness of my dress as I pulled it over my head. I had just finished lacing up my shoes when Rook’s footsteps approached, and knew he made himself heard deliberately for my benefit.
“Come along” was all he said, and with his face averted offered me his hand.
We barely spoke the remainder of the day. If Rook truly had caught me spying, he gave no indication of it aside from his silence. I was still growing used to this side of him. The smiling, devil-may-care prince I’d known in my parlor—he was real, too, but only a part of Rook, and the one I now suspected he preferred to show the world.
I tried engaging him in conversation once or twice, but he only gave me perfunctory replies and eventually I abandoned the effort. His pace was calculated as well: he walked at a speed that allowed me to trail behind him, but not catch up. By the time the daylight faded I had memorized every individual tear in his coat’s hem as it swept over the ground.
Yesterday, I think I would have bullied him into acknowledging me whether he liked it or not. But I didn’t have the heart for it now. He was no longer my captor. He was returning me home. And, I suspected, he was doing so at great personal cost, the scope of which eluded my mortal understanding.
The shelter he made for us that night was unlike both the rowan cathedral and the fortress of thorns. Slender yellow ashes and weeping willows sprang from his lifeblood, their branches trailing to the ground. A breeze sighed through the boughs. These were not perfect and elegant trees: some grew crooked or had knotholes, or hosted gatherings of toadstools on their roots. They weren’t diseased like the ones in the summerlands. They were simply flawed, and seemed to vie cautiously for my attention, lonely and wary of rejection.
Without thinking I went to one and placed a hand on its bark, and looked inside the hole in its trunk. The shadows were too deep for me to see anything. When I turned around Rook was watching me, frozen halfway in the middle of shedding his coat. It was the first time he’d willingly faced me since the brook.
“This is the sort of thing I like painting best,” I explained. “The details, the textures—” I saw I was losing him. “Perfect subjects make for less interesting work.”
Slowly he finished taking his coat off. “Then I hardly imagine you enjoy painting fair folk,” he remarked aloofly.
“Rook,” I said with a smile, perhaps a fonder one than I intended, “you can’t just go around calling yourself perfect, you know.”
His shoulders tightened. Somehow, I had struck a nerve. With a closed-off expression he handed me his coat. He’d removed the raven pin.
“The cold won’t bother me. I’m aware it’s ruined, but it should keep you warm.”
Just like that the source of his frostiness revealed itself. I held his coat in my arms.
Sympathy pierced me like a dart—a sharp, exquisite pain. Without willing my feet to move I found myself standing close enough that I had to tilt my head back to see his face. He tried to turn away, but I touched his shoulder. Marvelously, he stilled. He was a head and a half taller than I, and the forest leapt to obey his power, but with that one touch I might as well have clapped him in irons.
“It doesn’t bother me, seeing you without your glamour,” I told him. “You aren’t unsightly.” You aren’t ruined.
He leaned down and put his face close to mine. The back of my neck prickled, and gooseflesh rose on my arms. His inhuman amethyst eyes moved across my features as though he were reading a letter, and then he made a soft, bitter sound and pulled away. “And yet you’re frightened of me still.”
I pushed his shoulder. It wasn’t enough to move him against his will, but he took a step back. Color had risen in my cheeks.
“Only because you’re deliberately being frightening!” He had put me off-balance and I was gripped by the sudden, defensive urge to return the favor. “I watched you at the brook, you know. And—and I kept watching.” God, what was I saying? “If I had been frightened, or disgusted, I wouldn’t have.” I lifted my chin, though I’m sure the gesture came across rather differently on my diminutive frame.
He stared at me.
“Our true forms are loathsome to mortals,” he said finally, as if I’d just declared the moon was made of cheese.
“It isn’t as though we get a chance to see them very often. ‘Loathsome’ is a bit of a stretch. How many mortals have seen you without your glamour?”
Slowly, he shook his head. I took that to mean none aside from me. Not even the girl who’d given him the raven pin? Oh, Rook!
“Well . . .” I was running out of words to say. “That’s that, I suppose,” I finished awkwardly. “Thank you for your coat.”
He inclined his head, and then stalked off, bringing to mind a tomcat retreating beneath an armchair to nurse his injured dignity. Still blushing hot enough I was amazed my red face didn’t illuminate the clearing, I found a soft patch of moss, cleared it of twigs and leaves, and huddled down for sleep.
An Enchantment of Ravens Page 10