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 reluctant 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.
That night, I dreamed.
First I had the murky awareness that something was trying to infiltrate our shelter. The branches creaked, in one place and then another, as a being’s weight stole across the canopy. Through my eyelashes I saw Rook asleep a few paces away. He lay utterly boneless, with one hand flattened against the ground. I recalled his trance when we’d first entered the autumnlands, and it occurred to me that if he was healing himself now, he might not awaken as easily as he would normally.
Weariness blurred my vision. Exhaustion lapped at my mind like warm dark water, sucking me back down in the undertow.
When I regained awareness a figure sat perched in the willow above Rook. It was tall and thin and clung to the branches like a cricket, with its folded knees drawn up past its ears. Its colorless hair floated. Its white face was angled down toward him, and it was speaking to him, even though he slept.
No, she was speaking to him. Hemlock was.
“It’s only you now, Rook,” she said. Her tone was pleasant, but her inflection had a pelting, hissing quality like rain lashing against a window during a storm. “Only the autumn court remains untouched, and look at you! You’re too busy waving your sword about and collecting mortal pets to notice.”
Responding to no sound I could detect, she abruptly broke off, tensed, and stared off over her shoulder at nothing. She silently watched the darkness for a time before she turned back to him.
“I am forbidden to speak of it, but you can’t hear me, can you? Then I will tell you this: I no longer answer to the horn of winter.” Her jade eyes were as unfeeling as polished gemstones. “Snow melts on the high peaks, and the Hunt has a new master. Try as I might, I cannot make a game of things now.”
She paused to look over her shoulder again. “So I suppose what I’d like to ask you is, what are we to do when following the Good Law isn’t fair? It’s a dreadful question, isn’t it?” She spoke in a whisper now. A luminous fascination had entered her eyes, and they seemed to swallow up her face. “Rook”—she lowered her voice even further—“do you ever wonder what it would be like to be something other than what we are?”
I swear I didn’t make a sound. But suddenly Hemlock looked around directly at me with her lustrous cat’s eyes, and gave me a feral smile.
Down, down I sank, down into the dark. It was only a dream. I slept.
Rook had moved during the night. When I blinked against the morning light I found him facing me, close enough to touch, but still asleep. His glamour had returned. For all that I’d grown used to the way he looked without it, I knew him best like this, and was glad to see him restored. My gaze wandered over his eyebrows, arched slightly even in sleep, his long eyelashes, his aristocratic cheekbones and expressive mouth. Good health—or at least the illusion of it—burnished his golden-brown skin, and his tousled hair pillowed his head. I noticed an indentation in his cheek where the dimple appeared when he smiled.
He sucked in a breath trapped halfway between a muffled yawn and a sigh, and his eyebrows furrowed meditatively before he opened his eyes. At first hazy with sleep, his face showed dawning comprehension as he looked back at me, followed by acceptance of where he was and with whom. We lay there watching each other in silence for some time, listening to the breeze sigh through the trees, each time followed by the rustle of leaves falling.
“May I touch you?” he asked.
At that moment nothing existed beyond the clearing, beyond us, as though we drifted on a mirror-still sea with no land in sight. Soon we’d part ways. There was no harm in allowing myself this, just once. I nodded.
With a fingertip, he traced the curve of my jaw. His touch was so light I barely felt it. His hand brushed the collar of his coat pulled up around my neck, and a trickle of cool autumn air spilled into my warm cocoon. He traced all around the edge of my ear and up toward my forehead. His finger paused near my hairline.
Mortified, I realized a blemish had appeared there overnight. “Rook! Don’t touch that.”
“Why not?” he said. He lifted his finger and regarded my forehead. “It wasn’t there yesterday.”
“You aren’t supposed to poke people’s spots. It’s embarrassing. It’s—like when I was looking at your wound, I suppose.”
“Your face isn’t festering. Nor is it hideous.”
“Thank you. That’s nice.”
He frowned at my amusement. Haughtily, he said, “Something about you changes every day. Isobel, you’re very beautiful.”
I harbored no illusions about my appearance. I was neither homely nor pretty; I occupied an unremarkable spot in between. But Rook couldn’t lie. Despite his obnoxious tone, he really meant it. It wasn’t so much of a stretch to imagine that fair folk saw humans differently than we saw one another. A flutter stirred in my belly even as I determined not to make too much of it. He was the vain one, not I. And I needed to keep my head out of the clouds.
His hand had wandered to my hair, and he spread it out on the moss, combing through the strands with his fingers until it gleamed as straight and smooth as it could get. It seemed impossible that someone who had lived for hundreds of years and hunted fairy beasts for sport could find this entertaining, but his expression was transfixed. I glanced at the trees, suddenly a bit afraid of how much I was enjoying his attention. How much time had passed? Surely we couldn’t afford to linger like this. Shadowy anxieties flickered at the edges of my thoughts, some not unpleasant in the slightest, yet it surprised me how worrying about the Wild Hunt, getting home safely, and the possibility of getting attacked by more fairy beasts paled in comparison to the queasy anticipation of wondering what Rook and I might do if I allowed this to go on much longer. The whole world and its myriad possibilities shrank down to the tingling caress of his fingertips every time they brushed my scalp: all its beauty, and all its terror. Did other girls feel like this the first time they let a boy touch them? And not that I was humiliated by it, but—even at the age of seventeen?
His knuckles skimmed the nape of my neck. Well, that decided it.
“We should get moving,” I declared, sitting up. The crisp outside air came as a shock as his coat slid away.
But Rook didn’t move; he only regarded me indolently from the ground, with a look that plainly said he didn’t much feel like going anywhere, thank you very much.
“Get up.” I nudged his side with my shoe, hoping he couldn’t sense how forced my composure truly was. “Come on. We can’t lie about all morning like lumps.”
He allowed my nudge to flop him over onto his back. “But I’m injured,” he complained. “I haven’t finished healing myself yet.”
“You’re looking very well to me. If you insist that you’re in pain, however, I ought to take another look at your wound without your glamour on. The inflammation may have returned.”
His eyes narrowed. Then he extended his hand. Unthinkingly I reached for it to help pull him up. But as soon as our skin touched he clasped his fingers around mine and pulled, and I landed on his chest with a thump. The coat drifted down after, settling neatly over our legs. Rook gave me a charming smile. I glared back at him.
“I’ll use iron on you!”
“If you must,” he said sufferingly.
“I really will!”
“Yes, I know.”
I became conscious of the fact that his chest felt very solid, and I was straddling his slim waist. Our uneven breathing rocked us against each other slightly. Molten heat pooled in me again, ebbing lower.
I didn’t use iron on him.
Instead, I leaned down and kissed him.