“Just do it, Isobel!” Lark cried. “We aren’t going that way.”
What other way could there possibly be? Certain I was about to experience another fairy strangeness I’d rather go without, I took Rook’s offered arm. I observed how delicate my hand and wrist looked resting on his sleeve, and conceded it was possible to see how fair folk got so vain, parading around in Firth & Maester’s and constantly discussing which colors looked best on them.
Rook looked down, his gaze stripped bare.
He really is in love with me, I thought. My heart leapt forward like a startled deer. Seeing a confession of love in his eyes was nothing like hearing it declared aloud. This was a look that would make time stop, if it could. Soft and sharp at once, an aching tenderness edged with sorrow, naked proof of a heart already broken. Here I stood in a dragonfly dress, holding his arm, and he knew our time was almost over.
A thousand wings unfurled inside me. I chased after them, trying to silence them, stuff them back down where they’d do no harm, but I might as well have been in the middle of a whirling vortex of butterflies, attempting to capture each one by hand. I became conscious of the heat of Rook’s skin through the fabric of his silk jacket, and that ever so slightly, my hand had begun trembling.
He couldn’t say anything in front of Lark, and he didn’t need to. I saw everything I needed to know reflected back at me in his eyes.
What was I feeling? How could I be certain?
Love between us was impossible. I forced myself to confront what would become of us if I allowed this feeling to take flight. There were only two options: drink from the Green Well, or condemn us both to death. Meeting his gaze, I let the resolve show on my face. I could permit neither. I was stronger than my emotions. If I lived a thousand times, not once would I destroy my own life and another’s for love. A storm gathered in my breast; the butterflies fell fluttering weakly to the ground.
With a sharp intake of breath, Rook looked away.
According to my head, I’d done the right thing. But my heart yawned dark and hollow with the emptiness his averted gaze left behind. I wondered if my head and heart would ever reconcile, or whether I’d just cursed myself to relive this moment for the rest of my years, half assured I’d made the only choice available to me, half always whispering if only, the whole of me filled with bitter regret.
The Bird Hole creaked. The floor shivered beneath my feet, and the walls’ wicker branches began twining about like thread in a loom, weaving, tumbling, bowing outward. I clenched Rook’s arm by reflex. Lark howled devilishly at the look on my face. All around us the room transformed, and a panicked thought gripped me: during that single intimate moment, had Rook and I broken the Good Law after all?
Twelve
THE WICKER floor cascaded downward, starting at the tips of my shoes. Slender birch supports rose from the ground to meet the newly forming stairway at intervals, creating elegant arches above and below, their branches fanning out as banisters.
In mere seconds I stood at the top of a broad, sweeping stair grander than that of any palace, stretching down five stories or more. At the bottom a crowd of fair folk awaited, arranged around a semicircle of open grass to which I assumed we were about to descend. Gadfly knelt in the middle of it, his hair glinting silver in the sun. As I watched he stood, reviewed the tip of his index finger, and then discreetly brought it to his lips, sucking away the blood. He had done all of this, it seemed, with little more than a single drop.
My pulse raced stumbling along. Though my worst fear hadn’t come to pass, I now possessed ample material with which to replace it. There were even more fair folk gathered here than there had been in the meadow before, and as grand as Rook looked beside me, I was the one they’d truly come to see. All of them were dressed to perfection in the delicate pinks, greens, blues, and yellows of a spring garden, resplendent in silver embroidery and mother-of-pearl buttons, with jewelry that glittered as brightly as their immortal eyes. I knew if I walked among them for hours, I wouldn’t find a single chipped nail or hair out of place. And I also knew that each and every one of them could kill me as easily, and as casually, as dropping a teacup.
Gadfly inclined his head to us.
One foot in front of the other. That’s all it took. Yet the descent seemed to stretch on for minutes rather than seconds, and the crowd waited in complete silence, the only sound the susurrus of my gown’s fabric slithering over the steps behind us. The closer we grew, the more unnatural the multitude of fair folk looked. The flawlessness that only nagged at me a little in the presence of one or two of their kind amplified to a sensation of dread when I was confronted by so many, as though I were beheld by an army of living dolls.