“You little fool. Did you ever pause to consider what would happen if she escaped from you? Look.” One of the warm hands left my back. I trembled. “She’s already forgotten what she is. She would have lived out the rest of her short years as a common hare.”
A foot stomped. “I wouldn’t have lost her! I take care of my things! Rook, why are you being like this? You’re being awful, just awful. I’m going to tell Gadfly how awful you are.”
“Tell Gadfly if you like,” my captor said, “but I don’t think he’ll be pleased to discover how impolitely you’ve treated his guest.”
“Fine!” But the voice sounded uncertain. “I’m going right now!”
“See that you do,” my captor said, coldly.
Footsteps charged away across the grass. With my ears flattened against my back, I couldn’t hear well enough to determine whether the predator had left for certain. Even so, I wasn’t afraid. I trusted my captor wouldn’t expose me until the harm had passed.
He lifted me from the darkness and held me up at face level. I regarded him calmly with my hind feet dangling. I detected no one else in the clearing, no hawk-shadows, no fox-smell.
“Isobel, do you recognize me?” he demanded. A shadow had fallen over his face, and his smell acquired a bitter edge. He was angry. Even then I still thought to myself, Safe.
I wiggled my nose.
He sighed and cradled me against his chest again. “I’m going to turn you back. Try not to struggle, as I haven’t had a great deal of practice with this sort of magic. That is to say,” he added quickly, “I’m perfectly capable of doing it—I am sure you’ve noticed I excel at all enchantments—but it would be best if you remained still. So, please try.”
I sat obligingly in his arms, wiggling my nose.
At first, nothing happened. Then, just as I thought it might be a good idea to settle down for a nap, the world turned inside out, flipped over, and threw me down again as though I’d just spent a few seconds as a toddler’s spinning top. Everything shrank. My body became heavy and fleshy and slow. I blinked in a daze, orienting myself. Red leaves whirled across the clearing, and the trees swayed in a subsiding wind. When the wind gusted its last breath the autumn tree stood naked, bare-branched, without a single leaf left.
I wasn’t touching the ground. My feet hung in the air, and warm arms supported my shoulders and the insides of my knees. Rook. That was Rook, holding me.
I wasn’t wearing any clothes.
Before I could find my voice and ask him to set me down, he dropped me like a hot coal. I landed in the wildflowers with an undignified whump. Horrified, I squashed my legs together, hunched inward with my arms clamped over my chest, and stared up at him. He looked as aghast as I did.
“Why did you just—” I began, at the same moment he blurted out:
“You stopped being in peril, and I couldn’t touch you any longer! Are you all right?”
“No.” I’d just been turned into a rabbit! “But I will be. Thank you for coming to my rescue. Couldn’t you have set me down a bit sooner?”
He averted his eyes. “I was distracted,” he replied with dignity.
Oh—right.
When he started shrugging off his coat, I forestalled him by speaking. “I’m going to put my dress back on. Just . . . don’t look.” I stood and skulked over to the stump, conscious that lately I was doing an awful lot of sneaking about in the forest nude. Sporting a blush that spread all the way down my neck, I slipped back into my underthings, today’s Firth & Maester’s, and finally my stockings and boots and hidden ring, while Rook waited for me, gazing determinedly at a fixed spot away to the side. “Are they going to miss you back at the court?” I asked, hoping to dispel the tension, or at least refocus it to a more pressing topic.
“Undoubtedly.” He paused. “Isobel . . .”
I smoothed my skirts. The ground suddenly became very interesting to look at. “Yes, it was supremely idiotic of me to eat something Lark gave me. I shouldn’t have gone off on my own, either, but I’m worried the court—Gadfly especially—will grow suspicious if we spend more time together.” The leaf I’d torn up had blown into one of the teacups. “And I needed to get away. You noticed it too, didn’t you? What was happening back there?”
When I glanced up, Rook’s expression told me he would have brought it up himself if I hadn’t first. “Yes. Your Craft is affecting us somehow. Isobel, I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“If I keep demonstrating, do you think it will put us in danger?”
“As I said, this is—new. My kind hungers for your work, all the more for its difference. I cannot honestly say that I believe there to be no risk, but I do think it would make the court suspicious if you stopped now, with everyone expecting you to continue. If, perhaps, we stay for just one more day, and leave after the masquerade ball tomorrow night . . .”
A long pause elapsed, neither of us looking at the other. Our alliance had progressed far past the point of mutual survival; we both wanted to buy ourselves more time together for decidedly unpractical reasons. It was no use pretending otherwise, and yet we left those words unsaid.
“But I’m almost healed,” he went on decisively, forcing himself to finish. “If you would like to leave today, even right now, we can.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, cursing my foolishness. “After tomorrow night, then.”
His gusty sigh of relief wasn’t subtle. I aimed a wry smile at him, but something else drew my attention. “Your pin’s gone! It isn’t in your pocket, is it? It must have been torn off when you dropped me.”
He patted at his chest in alarm and then ducked to hunt through the wildflowers. This wasn’t the leisurely search of someone who’d lost a pocket watch or a handkerchief. Rather, he clawed at the ground with a wide-eyed desperation that could be inspired only by the loss of a priceless and irreplaceable treasure. When he found it, he gripped it tightly in his hand. He moved his thumb to the hidden clasp. But then he stopped himself, remembering I was there, and started to put it in his pocket instead.
My heart hurt for him. It was painful to watch Rook reduced to this over something so small. He cared more about that pin than most people cared about everything they owned in the world.
“Who was she?” I asked.
On his knees, he stilled.
“I just—I’m sorry. You don’t have to answer that. I suppose I only wondered whether—how the two of you escaped the Good Law.”
I thought he might be angry with me. Instead, he looked at me as though I’d torn his heart from his chest. His eyes dulled with shame and despair. He put the pin in his pocket.
“I was in love with her, but we never broke the Good Law,” he said.
“How is that possible?”
I wished I hadn’t asked. His misery was terrible to see. “She didn’t love me back.”
Silence reigned in the meadow. After a time, a squirrel started gnawing on an acorn overhead.
He resumed haltingly. “She was—fond of me, but she knew she could not be anything more. We decided it would be best if we never saw each other again. She gave me the pin as a good-bye present. I stopped visiting Whimsy, and more time passed than I realized.” He looked at the ground. “When I returned, I found that her great-grandchildren now lived in the village, and she had died long ago of old age. Until your portrait, I never came back.” He drew in a breath. “I know it’s—wrong, that I care so much about the pin. I can’t explain it. It’s—”
“It isn’t wrong.” My voice was so soft I barely heard myself speak. “Rook, it isn’t. It’s just human.”
He hung his head. “What has happened to me?”
I couldn’t stand it any longer. I went to him and pulled him into an embrace. He was so tall I felt I barely accomplished anything; I had my arms wrapped around his middle like a child. But after a tense moment he stumbled into my touch, as though he were too crushed by despair to stand on his own.
“You aren’t weak,” I said. I knew no one had ever told him that before in all the long centuries of his life. “The ability to feel is a strength, not a weakness.”