“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.”