xxxi. In which Arthur gets cozy in a cave
With the coming storm, Ira’s limp had been worsening for hours, but they’d kept going. Never mind the dropping temperature
and gusting wind. But when it started raining, so hard they were soaked within minutes, Ira’s pace slowed. He stumbled; Arthur
caught him.
He had to shout over the rain. “Can’t we get out of this wet?”
Jaw tight, Ira nodded. “There’s a cave not far from here.”
He leaned on Arthur the whole way. Fat raindrops pelted them. The cat mewled pitifully; fur matted with rain, she looked like
a drowned rat. Hopefully Charlotte found shelter, too, Arthur thought. Storms always worsened her pain, but at least she’d
be dry.
A handful of silver saplings grew at the mouth of the cave. Half of them were tarnished. Arthur bit his lip, but with the
way Ira leaned on him he didn’t think they could make it any farther.
The cave was small and sandy, well ventilated with a large opening in the ceiling forming a chimney, but mostly dry.
Ira collapsed against a stony wall, nostrils flaring.
He ripped off his knee brace and stretched his leg out, working his knee with his fingers, then dug through his bag for ointment.
Arthur shivered with cold and wet, but he scoured the cave for tinder. Naturally, there was none. He braved the pounding rain
again, though the wet twigs and branches he gathered probably wouldn’t light. With rain-smeared glasses, he stumbled back
toward the cave. His right foot sank into a puddle, soaking his shoe and sock.
When he returned, arms full of soggy wood, Ira said, “I could’ve just—”
He waved a hand. A shrub sprouted, its leaves blooming and changing color and falling off all at once, until it was bare and
dry.
“Oh,” Arthur said in dismay.
Ira’s mouth twitched, and that was something. The acorn still kept fresh greenery from creeping across his face. That was
something more.
Arthur abandoned the wood he’d collected and built a little tent near the cave’s chimney from the shrub’s branches. It took
him a while to get it to light, but he managed. He sat back with a small sense of accomplishment he didn’t often feel unless
he’d recently gotten a clock working. Freya rubbed against him in gratitude, settled by the fire to bathe until she was dry
and fluffy, and curled up for a nap.
Now his damp clothes, which stuck to his skin in a deeply unpleasant way. Arthur dug dry clothes from his knapsack, wishing
his journey hadn’t involved quite so many wet socks. He tucked himself into a corner to change, further wishing he had a towel.
The idea of putting dry clothes on his wet skin so they could stick right back to him was nearly as bad as being in wet clothes
in the first place.
He wrung water from his hair. Droplets spattered his glasses, not that it mattered since they were smeared from the rain outside. He wiped them off on the dry shirt from his knapsack, grimacing, and dressed.
When he turned around, Ira was wrestling with his own wet clothes. Arthur reddened, but Ira didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.
His thick, furry fingers could no longer work the buttons and toggles.
“Would . . .” Possibly this was a terrible idea, but Arthur asked anyway. “Would you like some help?”
A brief pause. Ira nodded.
Arthur knelt before him, unbuttoned his trousers, and peeled them off. His stomach swooped as Ira’s bare thighs appeared,
then his calves, transitioning smoothly from human legs to wolf paws. Ira’s chest heaved.
Arthur’s tongue stuck in his throat, but he said, “About earlier . . .”
Ira looked away. “You don’t need to explain.”
“No, I—I do. I do.”
Arthur had been thinking about it all day. Wondering why he cared so much what the villagers would think when he was deep
in the forest and they’d never liked him anyway.
Standing, he reached for the first toggle of Ira’s shirt. “It was nothing to do with you. It’s . . . This is all very—very
new to me. Everything about it. For God’s sake, I’ve hardly even courted anyone. None of the young women in the village has
ever been interested, and I’ve never . . . I thought I hadn’t found the right girl. And now . . .”
He let out a breath, feeling foolish for never realizing. All those years longing so desperately for Cormac to notice him.
Stumbling through every interaction with any man with nice eyes or an air of kindness. Attraction. Crushes. He’d read about
love endlessly, dreamed about it, longed for it, yet he’d never understood his own feelings.
How could he have known, when none of his books showed romance as existing between anyone other than a man and a woman?
When every marriage and courtship he’d seen had been the same?
Only that single fisherman and his friend, living together in a shack with a single bed, might have given him the idea that romance could look different.
But it hadn’t, because his father had offered another explanation.
He wondered what his father would say about this now, or his mother. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, not that he’d ever
find out.
What about Charlotte? His stomach twisted, but she wasn’t here. For the moment, Arthur could imagine she’d understand. He
finished undoing Ira’s toggles in silence.
Ira shrugged out of his shirt, grimacing as he worked it over his injured shoulder. He was naked, now. Firelight gilded the
feathered curve of his shoulders. His buttocks. His antlers and paws. His gnarled right leg, a map of scars.
He was beautiful.
He tugged furs from his pack, settled one on the floor of the cave and wrapped another around his shoulders. Arthur sat beside
him.
“And now?” Ira said softly.
Arthur tried and failed not to let his eyes follow the trail of hair down Ira’s stomach. Nether regions: thoroughly human.
For now. He glanced hastily away, running a hand through his own damp hair.
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “But I know I care about you. And I find you—you’re very—well, I think you’re beautiful. And
I wish I hadn’t pulled away earlier.”
Ira’s eyes flickered over him. Fingers curled, he touched Arthur’s cheek.
“Can I . . . ?”
Arthur shifted closer, and closer, and closer. Then he thought, Confound it, and he crawled right into Ira’s lap, straddling him as he had last night to shave away the greenery on his face. Ira’s breath
hitched.
Biting his lip, Arthur ran his fingertips over Ira’s antlers. They were hard and bony, not as smooth as he’d expected. Ira’s
eyes fixed on his face.
Arthur flushed. “Sorry, I, er, I was wondering what they’d feel like. Can you, er . . . feel anything, when I . . .”
Ira shook his head.
“If you’d caught me this summer,” he said hoarsely, “before the velvet sloughed off, I would’ve.”
Arthur traced his fingers down the side of Ira’s face. His cervine ears, silky soft. His neck. His uninjured shoulder, black
with smooth, glossy feathers. Ira caught his hand, pressing it to his chest. He pressed tighter and tighter, his pulse raced,
his eyes flickered over Arthur’s face, so Arthur leaned in and kissed him.
A moment of surprise, in which Arthur thought he might have done it wrong and started pulling away. Then, with a soft growl,
Ira pulled him back in. Arthur’s stomach tingled. He looped his arms around Ira’s neck and kissed him with more certainty.
Ira’s mouth was hungry on his.
His claws tangled in Arthur’s hair. Arthur trailed a hand down his body. Ira inhaled sharply, but Arthur stopped at his stomach,
liking its softness, its rise and fall.
Ira gripped him so tightly his claws dug into Arthur’s sides. Arthur gasped into his mouth—but he found he liked it, the pressure,
the slight stab of pain. With a low groan, Ira slid one hand lower and lower, trailed a curled finger over Arthur’s inner
thigh—
“Wait,” Arthur breathed. “Wait, wait, wait.”
Ira jerked away. “Sorry. I should’ve—”
Shaking his head, Arthur looped his arms back around Ira’s neck. “It’s not that I’m not enjoying myself. I’m, er, actually I’m enjoying myself very much. I just—I’ve never done this before. I think I might like to go slower than we were about to.”
Letting out a breath, Ira leaned his forehead against Arthur’s. “Of course. Whatever you need.”
His breath was sweet like spring flowers. Outside, rain pattered thick and fast, but the fire was warm and bright at Arthur’s
back. He kissed Ira’s scarred eye, then the unscarred one. His forehead. His nose. The metacarpal pad on his left hand, then
the one on his right, then held Ira’s hand just because he could.
Ira brushed a lock of hair back from Arthur’s forehead. “When this is over . . . If we make it. If we save the forest . . .”
“We will.” Arthur kissed him again. “And you, too.”
The corner of Ira’s mouth turned up.
“. . . when everything’s done, maybe . . . you could stay. I mean,” he added, “of course you’ll go home to your family, I
know what they mean to you, I know they’re really why you’re doing this, I just . . . Maybe, afterward, you could come back.
To the vale. With me.”
Arthur’s breath caught. His imagination bloomed with images of him and Ira, after they’d saved the forest, after he and Charlotte
had made it safely home to the children. The vale would blossom, green and sweet with flowers instead of cold and white in
eternal winter. Ira could transform at will, never worrying about whether he’d be able to change back. They’d wander the forest
at leisure, no longer afraid, and at the end of each day they’d return to the vale, curl up in that little bed together, and
maybe— Arthur’s brain stalled out before he could delve too far into what exactly might happen in that little bed, but he’d
read enough romance novels to have ideas, if ever he wanted to put them into practice.
“Why—” he started, but he wasn’t sure how to finish the question. “I mean . . . you’d want that? For me to . . .”
Ira let out a breath, ran his hands through his hair. Strands came loose and fell around his face. Arthur tucked them behind his ears, which twitched toward him.
“I’ve been alone a long time, except for Calyx. Then you came. You’re so . . .”
There it was, Arthur thought with a twinge of disappointment. The same trailing off that had plagued his entire life, although
this time it at least suggested something positive.
Then Ira said, “You went back for me. Even after Calyx attacked—even worrying for your sister—you went back to the vale anyway
because I needed help.”
He touched Arthur’s cheek.
“The way—what you said about your books. How they make you feel like everything will be all right, even when it’s terrible?”
He kissed Arthur’s fingertips, one at a time. “That’s how you make me feel. You give me hope.”
Arthur’s fingers tingled at the press of his lips. He’d always figured he made people feel, at best, nothing. Indifference.
Annoyance. Contempt. That last morning in Seacliff, something akin to danger, like any man so much as seen being too friendly
with him might be tarred with the same term Mrs. Young had lobbed at him.
Ira had kissed him like none of that meant anything. Like such thoughts had never occurred to him.
Like Arthur mattered.
When this was over, the two of them could return to the vale and create a world for themselves where Arthur could read his
romance novels and repair timepieces and no one would say he was odd or useless or not much of a man. Where he was worth something.
The two of them, he thought, and his stomach twisted.
Twenty miles from Seacliff, farther from Port Lorne—or wherever Charlotte and the children settled.
Of course they could visit each other, but Arthur had never lived apart from his family.
The thought of not seeing them every day, not waking to Sasha’s raucous play, was intolerable.
And who would take care of Charlotte? She needed so much help now, no matter how she resisted and denied it. He couldn’t leave her.
What had he expected to happen should he ever marry? That his wife would live in the cottage on the heather-grown cliff with
his sister and niblings? Well . . . yes. Of course he had. John had moved in with Charlotte’s brother and mother. Why shouldn’t
any future wife of Arthur’s? Why not Ira? As much as Arthur had dreamed of change, he’d never once dreamed of a life in which
he did not live with his sister and the children.
Ira’s forehead rested against his. “You don’t have to decide now. I just . . . I wanted to say that. You could. If you wanted
to.”
Arthur touched his face. “What if you came back with me, instead?”
“I can’t.”
“It doesn’t have to be Seacliff. We could go to Port Lorne. It’s right by the forest, too, you could visit whenever you wanted—”
“I mean I can’t leave the forest.”
“No, I suppose that would be difficult, since you’re its . . .”
Arthur paused, not quite sure what Ira was to the forest. Its spirit, perhaps.
Before he could continue, however, Ira said, “I mean I can’t. Physically. I’m incapable of it.”
Arthur opened his mouth, couldn’t think of anything to say, tried to say something nonetheless, and gave up. A little unwillingly,
he crawled out of Ira’s lap and sat beside him.
“But surely once we replant the tree—”
Ira shook his head. “I’ve never been able to. I’ve never been beyond the forest.”
Arthur’s skin prickled. Until a week ago, he’d never been beyond Seacliff, either, but he’d always known it was an option. One dependent upon money and transportation and any number of other things, but an option nonetheless.
He took Ira’s hand, stroking the furry back of it with his thumb. “I’m sure we’ll figure something out.”
“I hope so.”
Arthur kissed his hand. Despite himself, he chuckled ruefully.
“What?” Ira asked.
“I was thinking, it’s a good thing Calyx wasn’t here for all that. I can only imagine what it might’ve thought I was doing to you.”