“Very well.” He rose. “I will bring you your sticks.”
“Wait,” I said, before he could vanish again. I held up the hare. He tensed. “Can you skin this for me? You know, remove the fur? And it needs to be in pieces, too. I can’t do any of that without a knife.”
“How very mortal you are,” he said disdainfully, and seized the hare from my hand.
“Oh, and take the insides out first, please,” I added, undeterred.
He halted just as he was about to disappear, shoulders stiff. “Will that be all?”
A devilish part of me wondered how far I could push him. If I pretended it was necessary for my Craft, could I command him to stand on his head or turn in a circle three times while he prepared the hare? Only my empty stomach’s increasingly urgent demands prevented me from having some fun at his expense. “For now,” I replied.
Less than twenty minutes later we sat in front of a badly smoking fire, which had seemed hopeless until Rook tired of watching me rub two twigs together and set the kindling ablaze with a flick of his long fingers. He cast impatient glances at the sun while I turned a haunch （at least I think that’s what it was—fair folk weren’t scrupulous butchers, as it turned out） over the flames. Grease dripped from the meat, hissing when it struck the smoldering wood. My mouth watered, and I tried not to dwell on the likelihood that under better circumstances, I would find the odor rank rather than appetizing. I’d never known rabbit to smell quite like this. But as long as I kept charring it by accident, at least it probably wouldn’t make me sick.
Waiting for me to finish, Rook gave his seventh dramatic sigh. I’d started counting.
“You give it a try, if you’re so bored,” I said, handing over the skewer. He took it between his thumb and forefinger. After examining the meat, turning it to and fro, he flippantly lowered it toward the fire.
Instantly, a change came over him. At first I thought he had spied something awful in the forest behind me, and I jerked around with my skin crawling. There was nothing there. Yet he still wore the same expression: his eyes wide and stricken, his features utterly still, as if he’d just received news of someone’s death, or was dying himself. It was terrible in a way I cannot describe. I’ve painted a thousand faces and never seen such a look.
What was happening? I scrabbled for an answer until I realized—Craft. We could transmute substances as easily as we breathed, but for fair folk, such creation did not exist. It was so contrary to their nature it had the power to destroy them. Astonishingly, even something as simple as roasting a hare over an open flame seemed to count as Craft according to whatever force governed his kind.
No more than a second or two had elapsed before Rook’s glamour began flaking away like old paint, revealing his true form, but not the way I remembered it. His skin was desiccated and gray, his eyes fading to lifelessness. It was as though I watched lights go out within him one by one, dimming with every heartbeat.
And I knew that if I did nothing, in another moment he’d be gone.
I would be free. I could escape—or at least try. But I thought of the forest cathedral, the scarlet leaves sifting down in silence. The look on his face when he’d transformed into a raven in my parlor. The smell of change on the wild wind, and the way he had let me turn his head, his eyes on mine full of sorrow. All those wonders crumbling to dust, without a trace of them left in the world.
So I lunged across the fire and tore the stick from his hands.
Seven
HE CRIED out when the stick left his grasp, a sharp, haunting sound of anguish—pain, but also loss. Color flooded back into him, his glamour following behind, though he still slumped to the side and had to catch himself with a hand against the ground before he fell.
“Isobel,” he croaked uncertainly, looking up at me.
My voice came from far away, swept downstream by the blood rushing in my ears. “It was Craft. Cooking. When I offered it to you, I didn’t know. I had no idea.”
His attention fell to the stick I held, a piece of wood with a lump of rabbit flesh smoldering on the end. I shared his disbelief. Almost impossible, that something so ordinary could harm him.
“We should—we should go.” He was so out of sorts he nearly sounded human. He staggered to his feet and turned first one way and then another, unable to get his bearings. “We haven’t covered nearly enough . . . have you eaten? Are you still hungry?”
“I can eat as we walk,” I said quietly, stunned to see him reduced to this. From Emma’s instruction, I recognized the symptoms of shock.