“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.