“How is that possible?”
I wished I hadn’t asked. His misery was terrible to see. “She didn’t love me back.”
Silence reigned in the meadow. After a time, a squirrel started gnawing on an acorn overhead.
He resumed haltingly. “She was—fond of me, but she knew she could not be anything more. We decided it would be best if we never saw each other again. She gave me the pin as a good-bye present. I stopped visiting Whimsy, and more time passed than I realized.” He looked at the ground. “When I returned, I found that her great-grandchildren now lived in the village, and she had died long ago of old age. Until your portrait, I never came back.” He drew in a breath. “I know it’s—wrong, that I care so much about the pin. I can’t explain it. It’s—”
“It isn’t wrong.” My voice was so soft I barely heard myself speak. “Rook, it isn’t. It’s just human.”
He hung his head. “What has happened to me?”
I couldn’t stand it any longer. I went to him and pulled him into an embrace. He was so tall I felt I barely accomplished anything; I had my arms wrapped around his middle like a child. But after a tense moment he stumbled into my touch, as though he were too crushed by despair to stand on his own.
“You aren’t weak,” I said. I knew no one had ever told him that before in all the long centuries of his life. “The ability to feel is a strength, not a weakness.”
“Not for us,” he said. “Never for us.”
There was nothing I could say to that. My words of comfort were in vain. I could say nothing to reassure him, not truly. Because here, in the forest, his humanity would be the death of him. Perhaps not now—perhaps not for hundreds of years—but in the end, no matter what, he faced murder at the hands of his kind. I steeled myself against the tears stinging my eyes and the hard, painful knot swelling in my throat. It seemed terribly, unimaginably unfair that I was going to leave him here to die alone. The unfairness of it howled within me like a storm, tearing everything apart.
He pulled away. I must have lost track of time, because I felt cold without his touch.
“It was arrogant of me to assume that I could protect you from every ill at the hands of my kind.” His voice sounded empty. “I barely arrived in time to save you.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
He shook his head. “If something like this happens again tomorrow, whose fault it is won’t matter. You might be killed.”
And here I was, deciding to stay an extra night despite the danger. An extra twenty-four hours was nothing. Yet, it was everything. I might live more tomorrow than I did all the years of the rest of my life combined. How much was I willing to risk for it? The old me, the one who’d hidden Rook’s sketches in the back of her closet, would never have asked that question. But that was the problem with the old me, I was coming to realize. She’d accepted that behaving correctly meant not being happy, because that was the way the world worked. She hadn’t asked enough—of life, or of herself.
“Is there a protective charm you can cast on me?” I asked. “Just until we part.”
His expression shuttered. He spoke carefully. “There is only one way to safeguard a mortal from fairy magic. No other fair one would be able to enchant you or influence you while it lasted, but it’s more than a mere charm. For it to work, you would have to tell me your true name.”
Rasp, rasp, rasp, went the squirrel, a harsh and grating sound. “You speak of ensorcellment.”
“Yes. I understand if you won’t allow it. But if you asked it of me, I would use it only to keep you safe. I would never manipulate your thoughts.”
“If you did, I’d have no way of knowing.”
He dipped his head in assent. “You would have to trust me. I give my word.”
If he had been any other fair one, I’d have been combing through his words in search of a trick—the lie of how he planned to hurt me twisted into truth. But god help me, I wasn’t. I believed him. I closed my eyes and breathed in and out in the darkness, turning my judgment inward. Keeping my true name a secret was among my most deeply held principles. Trusting a fair one was madness.
I was tired of it all. Perhaps it was time to stop keeping secrets and become a little mad.
This time, both my heart and my mind screamed the same truth.
I opened my eyes to find Rook studying me, gaze shadowed by the hair falling to frame his face. His lips thinned. Reading my expression, he gave the slightest nod. “We’ll think of another way—”