21
What was left of my heart was troubled as we walked back to the cottage, but I tried to meet Sylvester’s eyes without giving away the confusion I felt. It helped that he looked so ridiculous, and it was hard to do anything but smile.
“She can’t help us with the hearts,” I told him instead. “You were right. No one can fix them.”
He unfolded himself from the chair. “I am sorry. I suspected it might be so.”
“I am sorry, too,” said the Weftwitch.
“We might still be able to stop my father, though,” said Sylvester. “I have to try, at least. Knowing what I know now.”
The Weftwitch raised her eyebrows. “Bold,” was all she said.
“You said my father managed to defy his,” Sylvester said to the Weftwitch. “Perhaps it runs in the family.”
“You are welcome to stay here for a time, until you decide,” offered the Weftwitch. She flicked her eyes to me, and I saw her fist was still closed about the seal.
“No,” I said. “We have to go. The king is probably already riding out. If we have any chance of stopping the harvest, we need to be quick.”
“Very well,” she said. “Let me make a few preparations, and I will pack you some victuals for the road.”
She sent us on our way with a basket of fresh rolls, ham, cheese, and hard-boiled eggs, a skin of ale, and the little seal, which she slipped into my pocket without Sylvester noticing. It might have been my imagination, but it felt heavier and warm to the touch.
We said our farewells and started out toward the edge of the forest again. I imagined Cornelius curled up at the base of a tree, waiting for us, and resolved to save him some of the ham.
“Let us stop for a while,” said Sylvester when we were perhaps halfway back. He had perked up considerably at the Weftwitch’s cottage after the tea and the sugar, but now he looked very green about the gills again.
“All right. Maybe getting some food into you will help,” I said.
We found a clearing and gathered some sticks for a small fire. Sylvester couldn’t light one with magic, of course, but we managed all the same.
It was an oddly convivial little meal that we had there as the sun set and our little fire burned. We talked. I laughed, and so did he. I was surprised to find that I enjoyed his company, even without the spell, and that he seemed to enjoy mine.
“Are you feeling better?” I asked.
“Yes. I think food helps,” he said. “It is like your meals, back home. Perhaps eating proper human food is what turned me into a proper human.”
“Oh, so you’re a proper human now?” I said, laughing.
“I feel like one, at least.”
He stayed smiling and held my eyes, and his smile did not waver. I felt a spreading warmth, starting in what was left of my heart and moving through me and sinking into me like butter into hot toast.
I wondered if it was the spell descending again—but that was impossible. We were still in the Weftwitch’s forest. I found that I wanted to reach over and touch the sharp lines of his cheekbone and jaw, see how his black curls would look against the pale skin of my breast.
Did I actually love him now, even without the magic?
That was a startling thought. I glared internally at the butterflies in my stomach and my quickening heartbeat, searching them for any sign of enchantment. I scoured them with my most clinical gaze, daring them to show any kind of magical sparkle. I doused them with my most wet-blanket, cold-water-pouring cynicism.
They were still there.
And what’s more, he was still smiling at me. Even wrapped up in my comically too-small petticoat, he was inhumanly beautiful, and he had not dropped his gaze from mine. The moment stretched itself out like a yawning cat, long and luxurious, and the flattering firelight softened any chance of embarrassment or awkwardness.
Well, almost. I twisted my hands in my skirt. I wished I could forget myself even for a moment, and just enjoy the night and the firelight, without being painfully aware of how I looked from the outside.
“I remember the first time I saw you,” he said, unexpectedly. “When you turned up at the House, out of nowhere, telling me you had come to be my housekeeper.”
I felt myself cringe a little. “I was a fool,” I said. “I didn’t want to tell you I had been snagged.”
“You were so sure of yourself.”
“No, I wasn’t!”
“Well, you seemed so,” he insisted. “You spoke with such certainty. You seemed so strong. I wouldn’t have dared turn you down. You are always so strong.”
I remembered that girl, exhausted and heartsick, standing in front of the handsome sorcerer and trying to find any way possible to stay in his presence.
“Stop,” I blurted. “I know how you see me.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Of course I do!” I gestured at him. “Look at you. Everything about you is perfect.”
“No, it isn’t,” he said, but I wasn’t listening.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” I said wildly. “To feel like you’ve always been wrong. That you shouldn’t be here at all.”
“Don’t I?” he said drily.
“You can have anything, anyone you want. You can literally snap your fingers and have it, when you’re out of this forest. You have no idea what it is like to be someone like me—none! You and your sisters think of us as servants, as crops to be harvested at your convenience.” He had listened to me with his eyes turned down a little, allowing me to have my rant without interruption. He raised them to my face now.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
That took the wind out of my sails. “What?”
“You are right about us. That we treat you like things and not people. It is what we were made to do. And you are right that we shouldn’t exist. If it helps, we had no say in it.”
“I know that,” I said unwillingly.
“But you are wrong about some things too,” he continued. “I do not think you are ugly. I do not know what you mean by that. I must see things differently from you, I think. Perhaps it is because I am not quite human, as you have said. I don’t see the incredible beauty that you describe in me and my sisters, because I can also see the wrongness in us that you have talked about.”
He paused and stared at the fire, before looking back at me. “I see it in myself like a sickness, moving under the skin. And I see the rightness in you. You belong in the world, Foss. You are right to take up space in it, and move through it, and leave your mark on it. There is nothing about you that should be other than it is.”
I was flabbergasted. This was the longest speech I had ever heard from him concerning me—or anything.
“I don’t understand what beauty is for you; but perhaps you can believe me when I say that rightness , that is beauty for me.”
I didn’t know what to say. No one had ever spoken to me like this, nothing near it. I couldn’t believe that the sorcerer looked at me and saw something different from everybody else. And I could not believe the way he was looking at me now.
Neither of us was under a spell, for the moment, and we were in firelight, and his eyes glowed with ghostly light. I wondered if I was dreaming. It was so like dreams I had back at the House when I had been fully in his thrall and longing for him to enter my bedchamber at night.
“Am I dreaming?” I asked, just to clear it up.
“No,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“As sure as anyone can be about someone else’s dream.”
When he reached for me, I had to fight the urge to make a joke or say something about how much of a mess I was, or how marked the contrast was between his smooth white hand and the redness of my cheek as he rested his palm against it.
It took all of my strength to swallow the words and let him touch me without comment. He looked at me as if my face was wine, and he were thirst.
I could not meet his gaze, not even when he placed that same smooth hand beneath my chin and tipped my mouth up to meet his.
His mouth was warm and soft, and tasted of magic: metal and spice. We bumped teeth for a moment before we found our rhythm, and I felt his smile against mine.
One of my hands gripped the grass at my side, while the other snaked into the waves of his black hair, smooth and lithe as water, just as I had imagined them, and his into my red locks, and I felt them tingle against my scalp.
Everything about me awoke. The woodsmoke was at once sharper, a blue-tinged scent, and the earth under my fist became as rough and sweet as sugar against my skin.
He pushed the stubborn curls back from my forehead and tucked them behind my ears, all without ceasing to kiss me, and I let my plump, work-roughened hands move over his skin also.
We clung together for a long time before we parted, and when we did, I felt the loss of his body against mine like a death. I would have died right on the spot, I think, had he not immediately taken my hands again and moved them to the buttons of my dress, showing me what he wanted.
I undressed myself, slowly, and with reluctance, peeling the layers off like you’d pick the skin off a stubborn orange. I was not accustomed to being naked, nor did I find it comfortable. When it was absolutely necessary, I did it as quickly as possible, leaping in and out of the bathtub as swiftly as I could and looking at as little of myself as I could possibly manage.
Occasionally I would glare at my knees, rising to the surface of the bath like two potatoes bobbing in a pot, or at my hands, red and stinging as I washed them free of the butchering blood, but for the most part, I avoided seeing any part of what I bound into place with buttons and belts every morning.
I had certainly never undressed before anyone else, as I was doing now. I felt like a babe learning about laces and fastenings for the first time—my fingers fumbled and slipped, until he put his hands over mine, gently, and stopped them.
I thought for a moment that he was stopping me altogether, I and flushed with shame—had I read it all wrong? Was the spell on me again, somehow, clouding my judgment?—but he took over the undoing for me, carefully taking apart all the fastenings of my clothing, his fingers working with grace and even reverence, as if he were undressing a goddess rather than my lumpen self.
Under his fingers, I felt myself softening and opening, forgetting my embarrassment as my body sprang to life everywhere he touched.
When he unwrapped himself from his makeshift garment and was fully naked, I could barely look at him for the beauty of it—his narrow hips, the length of his thighs, as smooth as if someone had carved them from cold butter.
I recoiled from him and did not meet his eyes. I did not want to see what was in them. Scorn would not have surprised me, nor disgust, although I imagined he would have tried to hide those for my sake. Kindness would have broken me, as would pity.
“What is the matter?” he asked.
“I am ashamed,” I said.
“You should not be,” he said.
He took my face in his long hands, closing it in like the frame around his old oil painting. I dreaded to think what I must look like, so encircled, and I pressed my eyes tighter shut. He stilled, however, and stayed unmoving for so long that, unwilling, my eyes started to open of their own accord.
I saw none of what I had feared. He looked back at me, open-faced, and, once again, there needed to be a new word for looking that didn’t just mean eyes pointed in a direction, because this new look, like the very first, reached down into my gut, turned me inside out, and made me someone different and surprising.
I had thought, before this, all the times I had imagined this, that his being so well formed would look laughable beside my poor body, a body that I had been told so often with words and with glances was ugly, pitiable, even disgusting. But now I found that nothing of the sort was true.
When I reached for him and touched the smooth, white plane of his stomach, he shivered. I could not believe that I—I, Foss! Foss Butcher!—could produce such an effect. It made me feel more powerful than the king himself, knowing that I could touch Sylvester and make him tremble with wanting me.
“Wait,” I said, as his hands traveled the length of my legs.
He paused.
“Just . . .” I said weakly.
“You are beautiful,” he said, and pressed his mouth to the inside of my ankle, then my knee, leaving bright flowers of sensation wherever he kissed.
“I have never done this before,” I confessed.
“Nor I,” he said, and did not stop.
I finally saw what my body could be for, other than a clumsy sack for bundling up my innards. It responded so sweetly, so neatly, that it was hard to remember how ugly I had always felt. How ugly I thought the world had always found me.
I had experienced pleasure before, of course, at my own hand, but comparing that to this was like comparing a lone flute to the whole orchestra playing together, singing and strumming and drumming and all. And no edge of shame or anger to it either, as there had been on my own, when I knew that the things I was picturing would never really happen to me.
Even inside my own head, when I had imagined myself receiving pleasure, I had pictured myself as different—smaller, prettier, a different person altogether. There was no need for that now. I was myself only, and wholly myself, and he was himself, and we were together, traveling upward together in excited discovery toward some new, sweet landing place that would leave us both breathless.
My imaginings of it had all been exterior, from the outside looking in, which is perhaps why I had been so nervous about the real thing.
I had not expected the startling interiority of it. It was like the House, opening new rooms inside me in unexpected places. Inside me were whole worlds, it turned out, that people like Aron and his friends had never imagined.
I felt dizzy standing on the edge of my known self and looking into that vastness, seeing all the pinpricks of light that were little points of pleasure, placed all along every limb and nerve. The sorcerer worked a kind of magic in me, bringing all those separate lights together into one.
I was still not sure if he was entirely human, but all that meant was that we were discovering this together, how skin yielded to skin and opened, and I felt for the first time that I was made right, fit for my purpose, entirely well designed and engineered.
My hair was damp at the temples, and so was his. I was not aware of myself as ugly or beautiful, nor him. We were two creatures differently formed—unusually formed, maybe—but one no more wrong than the other.
I laughed, to feel myself so free.