Sentiment #3
Instead, Wren found Shrike gazing down at him with a tenderness that was frankly too much to bear at present.
Wren swiftly glanced away and crept out of the boudoir without another word.
Shrike followed close behind; Wren knew this not from the sound of any footsteps or creaking floorboards but from the faint blue glow of the will-o’-th’-wisp over his shoulders, illuminating the path ahead.
Somehow, he made it through the corridor.
Down the stair. Into the hall. And then he stood in the library.
The window remained open. A faint breeze stirred the curtains. All that remained was to slip out into the night and from thence escape home to the fae realms.
Yet something in his heart pinned him where he stood.
He carried scraps of himself in his satchel now…
but what of his mother? The puzzle-purse, yes, folded by her own hands—and if he dwelt on that for more than an instant he knew not what he would do—but—was there nothing else he might find of her?
Even a fragment… His gaze slid to the shadowed hint of bookshelves all around him.
He could never forgive his father for selling off the Audubons.
And yet, he realised with a thud in his skull not unlike a book snapping shut, the Audubons had not been his mother’s sole tomes.
A fiery surge of determination scoured the melancholy from his mind. If there was the merest pale shadow of his mother left in the library, then by whatever fates had made him king, he would find it out. He went to the shelves and began thumbing over the spines with more desperation than skill.
“What are you looking for?” Shrike enquired, his voice gentle even after one accounted for the soft speech required of night-work.
“Books,” Wren told him unhelpfully. He struggled to give voice to foggy childhood memories which only seemed to grow dimmer the more frantically he grasped for them.
“My mother’s books, I mean. Some will have calf-skin spines.
Or did,” he muttered darkly, “if he’s not had them rebound.
There’s Pride and Prejudice,” he added, louder again.
It seemed useless to list off titles in the dark, but then again Shrike’s eyes were far keener than his own; perhaps he could read the minuscule stamped letters by the mere light of his will-o’-th’-wisp. “And Sense and Sensibility and—”
“Here.”
Wren turned, astonished at his beloved’s swift victory, but did not find Shrike at the shelves.
Instead Shrike stood a stride aback from them with one palm upraised and the fingers of the other hand pinched over it.
Belatedly, Wren realized he was holding a pendulum.
The thread of Shrike’s silver hair faintly glimmered in the dim will-o’-th’-wisp glow.
But rather than spinning down into his palm, the acorn at the thread’s end pointed upwards at an acute angle in defiance of gravity.
The queer sight sent Wren’s heart fluttering into his throat. He tried to swallow it down and settle his nerves. His eye traced the pendulum’s path towards the shelves…
To three familiar volumes with calfskin spines.
“What did you ask…?” Wren wondered aloud, though he supposed it hardly mattered.
Shrike answered him anyway. “I asked it to show me that which had belonged to your mother. I began,” he added, “by asking where to find that which had been beloved by her, but…” A wistful smile graced his handsome lips. “It just pointed to you.”
Wren’s eyes burned. He blinked them with rapidity lest something unbidden fall. “Yes. Well. That’s… that’s certainly…” He trailed off, not knowing what it was.
Shrike’s smile faded.
Wren drew in a tremulous breath, rolled his shoulders back, and turned to the shelves.
He couldn’t read the titles by fairy-light, but he knew them at once nonetheless, their calfskin spines and marbled boards familiar beneath his fingertips as he plucked them down.
Pride and that alone, the return of the prodigal son, would prove shocking enough, Wren thought, even without Shrike looming before him, with his medieval garb and pointed ears and frankly imposing frame.
Then again the old man never did let anything show in his face.
A trait Wren had oft wished to inherit. Alas it had never come to pass.
Wren didn’t recognize the hound. It would’ve had to be an elderly creature indeed to remember him from when he’d last graced these halls more than a decade hence.
Yet despite the impossibility of familiarity, no sooner had the hound laid eyes on the intruders than its ears pricked up and its tail began to wag.
Its gaze fixed not upon Wren, but rather Shrike.
The same natural charm that had won over the gelding Rainscald evidently worked upon dogs as well.
Wren could only hope his father didn’t notice Shrike’s eye-shine in the candle-light.
By Wren’s calculations his father must have been two-and-sixty by now. He’d just turned fifty when Wren saw him last. There didn’t seem so great a difference between fifty and sixty, at least not to Wren’s eye, though perhaps his mother’s death had aged his father prematurely.
Wren stepped in front of Shrike, just barely, and faced his father, though he knew not what to say.
His father broke the silence. “Come for your inheritance, then, I suppose.”
The dull and dusty observation emerged in the dry, arch manner of speaking down his nose that Wren had grown up under; the same way his father dressed-down servants that displeased him. All at once Wren felt like a boy of twelve again, on holiday from school and dreading every minute of it.
This was the only excuse Wren had for the sullen and sharp reply, “Not from you.”
One of his father’s brows arose at a glacial pace. “From whom, pray tell.”
Not once in all Wren’s years had his father’s voice ever lifted to form a proper question. Mr Lofthouse, Esq., never spoke enquiries. Only imperatives.
And yet Wren answered him. “From Mother.”
If it pained the widower to hear of his lost wife, it never showed in his stone-carved face.
His flat gaze seemed at most unimpressed.
His eyes roved over his son’s features. Wren wondered how much of his mother showed in his own visage.
Small, sharp features set in a heart-shaped face…
Did it trouble his father to gaze upon him?
“I’ve come for her mementos,” Wren continued, his tongue blathering on to fill the silence without his permission. His mind had fallen back into old patterns. He knew not how to claw his way out. Not with his father before him. “And her books.”
His father’s lip curled into a sneer. “And so you’ve thrown in your lot with a common sneak-thief.”