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 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.