Chapter Thirty #2
His eyes lift to mine, wide and hungry. “How do you mean?”
The clock’s hands creep onward, its ticking a hammer against my skull. But Conrad is looking at me with such desperation. He reminds me of Sylvie that night I caught her Weaving, begging for magic. Pleading for answers.
Once again, I find myself torn between the teacher and the Weaver. My two halves have been at constant odds since the moment I arrived at Ravensgate.
“Well, look here.” I scoot closer and spread the shawl so it covers both our laps like a treasure map.
“See, this pattern marks her birth in Turkey, but she traveled all through Europe and the Mediterranean before coming to the British Isles. Each section of the design corresponds to a different country.” I point out each one woven into the scarf, tracing the journeys of Vera North through Damascus, Crete, Rome, Paris, Lisbon, and more.
But after a while, I become conscious of Conrad’s eyes on me, and not the fabric.
I pause, looking up at him, and find myself unprepared for the heat of his gaze.
His eyes catch the lamplight, threads of gold twining through his irises.
His thigh rests against mine, the heat of him sending warmth rolling up my hip to pulse in my belly.
I feel nearly sick with it, the quiet, soft nearness of him making me lightheaded.
“You did this for me?” he asks softly.
The warmth in my abdomen travels up my neck as I look down at the scarf. “I suppose I’ve a weakness for tattered, forgotten things. I couldn’t bear to see it left to unravel.”
He watches me still, the crackling fire and the ticking clock the only sounds in the room.
“You are a North, Conrad, and this manor is your home.” I slide my hand over the record of Vera’s travels until my little finger comes to rest against his. “But this is your story too. A story woven in thread across continents.”
Breathless and still, I watch his little finger graze over mine, his knuckle exploring the sensitive skin of my fingertip.
I clear my throat. “You, er, said you had a gift for me?”
He blinks, pulling back as if freed from a spell. “Yes. Yes, of course.”
He raises the little box, extending it to me. I stare at it, and my stomach turns over.
“’Tis an apology gift,” he says, his tone rough at the edges. He does not quite meet my eyes. “For being such an arse, after . . . the revel. And it is a thank-you gift. For everything you’ve done. In finding Sylvie. And for the house.”
“For the house.”
His voice is as soft as a settling leaf. His fingers curl in the scarf. “And for me.”
I look down at the box; it’s tied with a thin gold ribbon. “This isn’t necessary.”
“Well, are you going to open it, or shall I cast it into the fire and be off?”
“Fates, must you be so dramatic?” I pull the ribbon apart and tuck it in my nightgown pocket, then lift the lid of the box.
And gasp.
“Is this . . . ? No. It can’t be.” I touch the slender skein of yellow-gold thread. “Conrad. Conrad.”
I jolt to my feet and begin pacing, my heart thudding against the wall of my chest.
He looks at me shyly, a boyish flush to his cheeks. “Do you like it?”
“I—I’m not even sure I should be touching it.” But I do, reverently, letting it slide over my hands and savoring its smoothness, its weightlessness. The fibers in the thread are finer than the hairs on a newborn’s head.
“Sea silk,” Conrad says. “The rarest and most powerful thread in the world.”
“I know,” I whisper.
I remember the sea silk I saw in the King Street Threadshop, kept under glass with its own guard to stand watch over it.
The skein in the box Conrad gave me is thirty times the length that one was.
“This is worth a king’s ransom,” I say. “Conrad, how did you—?”
“Morgaine’s had it lying around for centuries. It was an easy matter to slip it in my pocket. She won’t even remember she ever had it.” He looks down at his mother’s shawl, his thumb tracing the hidden language in its hem.
I suppress a shiver, imagining Lachlan’s laughter. If Conrad would steal sea silk for me, would he steal a branch from the Dwirra tree?
No. I won’t find out. It won’t come to that.
“What on earth am I to do with it?” I ask.
“Save it. For something special.”
My voice sticks in my throat. I can only shake my head, letting the thread fall back into its box with liquid fluidity, where it coils like spun gold. I cannot take my eyes off it. I cannot quell the butterflies panicking in my stomach.
This is not the sort of thing you give a guest. This isn’t the sort of thing you give your sister or mother or best friend.
This is the sort of gift you give a queen . . . or a lover.
I cross the room and sit heavily on the armchair, putting down the box because my hands are shaking, and I fear I’ll drop it. Leaning forward, elbows on knees, I run my hands through my hair.
“Oh, Fates,” I whisper.
“You have no idea what you’ve done, do you?” He rises to his feet and looks at me directly, his eyes fevered. The shawl drapes over his arm. “You’ve made me want things; don’t you realize that? Things I should never have wanted. How much easier my life would be if I had never met you!”
I stare at him.
He growls, rubbing his face. “That’s not what I .
. . I didn’t mean that. It’s only that—damn it, Rose, why is it so difficult to speak around you?
You’ve ruined everything: my plans, my expectations, my very idea of the world.
” He raises the shawl, giving it a small shake.
“You made me want to go beyond the borders that have measured out my existence, to experience things I never dared dream . . . Rose.”
I am a curse on his lips, and a prayer.
“This place is too small for me now,” he says helplessly.
“Do you understand that? I can never go back to the way things were. I was content, and you rattled me out of my contentedness. I was safe, and you made me want to fling myself off cliffs to see if I might fly. Never did I ask anything for myself, until you came along, with sunlight in your hair, and inspired in me a great and terrible selfishness.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that just for once, I’d like to do what makes me happy.” He turns away, pacing restlessly, eyes boring into the carpet, as if searching for words among the curling shapes there.
“What are you asking of me?”
“I’m asking . . . What about you? Might we both want the same thing?
Is that why you stayed here, even after learning the truth about me, when anyone else would have fled to the other side of the world?
” He stops and gazes at me from across the room, like a starved pauper begging me to save him.
“Might I be half so constant in your thoughts as you are in mine?”
I rise with a rustle of skirts; my own shawl slips, and I let it pool on the chair. The box of thread I set on the table.
Conrad walks to me slowly, his eyes gauging my expression, searching for my answer.
But what do I tell him? That yes, he is constant in my thoughts, that I’ve begun to expect his footstep outside my door for nights now, hoping to hear his soft “Good night” through my door?
That I’ve come to anticipate our nightly trysts, eager not just to teach him, but to watch him work, his brow furrowed in concentration as he tries to make sense of the thread in his fingers?
That I’ve come to dread his going away, and when he leaves, that I long for his return?
That I relive our kiss every night until I’m soaked in sweat and half mad with need?
How do I tell him that I am his enemy’s tool? That my heart is in the clutches of the monster who killed his father?
My kiss would be poison to him.
“We lied to Morgaine about what we were to each other,” he says. “But what if . . . what if our lie became our truth?”
He stops a step away from me. If I moved a little closer, our toes would touch and our breaths would meet. Even here, I can feel his heat, see the expanding of his pupils. His eyes are soft as dark, sweet honey.
He is still waiting for my answer, dangling at the end of my string, his entire world holding its breath for me.
If I just took one step forward, if I only tilted my face, he would kiss me. I feel the certainty of it in my marrow. The smallest movement, the slightest invitation, and he would open to me like a leaf unfurling to the sun.
“Conrad . . . there is something I must confess.”
“Confess that you hate me, and I will go now and never ask again.” The shawl slides from his grasp and drapes over the footboard of the bed. Then his hands take my waist, drawing me closer, forcing me to tip my head back to hold his gaze. “Confess you do not feel as I feel.”
I cannot, and he knows it.
His hands rise up my bodice, his thumbs tracing slow, tentative circles, small questions that sink through the fabric of my dress and curl like fire over my skin.
Even if I told him I hated him—I don’t—that I did not want this—I do, oh Fates, I do—my lies would be betrayed by my body, which trembles at his every touch.
We turn slowly, eyes locked, until my hips rest against the edge of the bedframe. Then he lifts me, gentle as if I were a spring lamb, and sets me on the bed.
It is like the faerie revel, only this time, the urges controlling my limbs come from within, not from some cobweb of spells. It is my own heart driving me, my own desire flushing my skin with heat and desperate, primal need. I need him, his touch, his lips on my bare skin.
My hands slide up his arms, his neck, to his face.
My fingertips trace the rough stubble on his jaw and the softer skin under his eyes, exploring every inch of his face as if he were a complex pattern I were trying to unravel.
The details of him hold all my attention: the creases of his dimples; the small bump on the bridge of his nose; the coarse, dark hairs of his eyebrows.
I sink my fingers into his hair, pulling him closer.