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.