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.