Chapter Seven. Rory
Rory
Autumn slipped into winter, bringing with it storms to rattle the windows and bury the last leaves under inches of snow. A few days after Saint Winebald’s Day, Rory helped Wynne collect pine needles and holly berries, winter honeysuckle and tree bark.
But when Wynne ordered Daye to lie down and close her eyes, Rory ran back to the house.
For hours he paced back and forth by the back door, desperately needing to know what was happening, desperately wanting not to see any of it.
Until Wynne finally came trudging into the kitchen, grumbling about the cold, and Daye drifted in behind her—her hair night-black and a small, hesitant smile on her lips.
Three weeks later, Wynne left for the university. “I’ll be back most weekends,” she told Rory the night before she left, leaning against the doorjamb of his room.
“I don’t care,” Rory said, purposefully not looking at her. “As long as you’ll be back in time to fix Daye.”
“Right,” Wynne said through pinched lips. And then she was gone.
But that was okay. He had Daye.
Daye was different in winter. Restless. The house, with its roaring fireplace and frosted windowpanes, seemed to be itching at her, too hot and stuffy for her winter skin. So they spent as much time as they could outside together, skating on the lake and tracking badgers back to their den.
At night they camped together in the backyard, imagining they were great explorers on a quest. Lying side by side—Rory bundled and mittened, Daye in one of Wynne’s old wool dresses—they built a secret language, one hand gesture at a time: linked fingers for ‘tie,’ a winging motion for ‘bird,’ their frowniest face for ‘Wynne.’ He had tried to teach Daye to write, too, but her fingers—so deft weaving garlands—turned clumsy wrapped around a pen.
And though she never complained, her knees kept jiggling up and down, as if she was already galloping through the snow and it was only that the rest of her body didn’t know it yet.
So after a while, Rory stopped trying. Their secret language was enough.
And in any case, Daye liked it better when Rory read out loud to her, their heads close together as the stars shone through the tent’s fabric.
But soon it became too cold for Rory, even with his coat and boots. So Daye slept out alone between the skeletal rows where strawberries grew in summer, and mint and rosemary in spring.
Still, they spent as much time together as they could during the day, parting only for Rory’s lessons.
When spring came, Rory and Daye—newly brown-haired and hazel-eyed—worked on their fortress, adding a stepladder, a new floor, hauling up furniture they scavenged from odd corners of the house.
They kept adding to it every spring until the ramshackle structure of their first summer was long gone, replaced by a sturdy house with a roof that leaked only a little and a window that would almost latch shut.
It was lodged between the branches of a large beech, in a forest clearing with a small, shallow pond, perfect for frogging.
Two months after Rory’s twelfth birthday, swans came to nest in the pond under their fortress, majestic and loud.
They spent weeks that spring and summer sleeping in the fortress, coming to the house only for food and supplies, watching the swanlings learn to swim in a line while Rory read adventure stories out loud and Daye rearranged her collection of shells, golden hair sparkling in the sun.
At night, frogs lulled them to sleep. And in the morning, the breeze brought with it scents of algae and tree bark and the tantalizing promise of berries ripening in the shade.
From the landing of the fortress, they surveyed their land: meadow and forest and lake and fields. A kingdom, all of their own.
Wynne’s presence was a fickle, unforeseeable thing.
Sometimes she spent every weekend at home.
Sometimes she’d be gone for months at a time.
In summer, she’d stay for weeks on end, holed up in her room like a menacing dragon.
They rarely talked now that they didn’t have lessons together.
Mostly, Rory tried to stay out of her way.
She was always back in time to fix Daye, though sometimes Rory worried that this was more by accident than by design.
The seasons kept passing, swirling with them a kaleidoscope of Dayes: from fair-haired to red-headed, from night-black locks to a cascade of rich, woody brown. Her lips red, pink, red again. Her eyes swirling from blue to violet to the warmest, lushest hazel. But always the same. Always his Daye.