Chapter 12 #2
They crest a low rise where the trees thin. She pauses to breathe. He doesn’t close the space, only tilts his head, studying the shift in light.
‘Are you enjoying the Greenwake rituals?’ he asks, almost idly.
His question snares at a guilty place in Marian’s gut; the image of his face upturned to torchlight, the hush of confessions threading through the clearing, the way his gaze had struck her window like an arrow.
‘You were hardly inconspicuous,’ he adds casually, ‘leering from your perch like a hawk.’
She whips around, wild curls flying across her face. ‘I wasn’t leering! I was—’
‘Learning?’
‘Observing,’ she corrects, then hears how prim it sounds and winces.
‘From the best seat in Elswyth. See anything of note?’
She turns away, tugging a thorn from her sleeve with more force than necessary.
‘It was quieter than I expected,’ she says at last. ‘I thought it would be blood and spectacle. That you would chant strange words and call down storms to prove your power. But,’ she clears her throat, ‘I have never seen grief treated as if it was something you could touch. We humans bury our dead. We say words and we leave them to God and worms. You put your dead back into the ground you will walk on tomorrow and call that returning.’
He hums, pleased in a way that skims along her nerves. ‘And the confessions?’
Marian keeps her eyes on the path ahead. ‘Startling.’
‘Honest,’ he counters.
‘Both.’ She steps over a root that shifts as she does, not enough to trip her but enough to make her heart hop.
‘A woman admitting she lusted after another’s wife.
An old man who hid jars of his neighbour’s honey in his rafters because the theft made him feel alive.
A hunter who resented the buck that kept eluding him, yet prayed for the arrow to fly crooked so the chase never ended.
’ She glances at him. ‘None of that was monstrous.’
‘You sound disappointed?’
‘None of this is as I expected,’ she finally admits, and hates herself for it.
‘And that unnerves you?’
‘It complicates things,’ she mutters. ‘I was raised to expect blasphemy and vice, not . . . ordinary hunger dressed in honesty. It’s difficult to call people monsters while they confess to being afraid of the dark.’
‘Some of us are monsters,’ he says without flinching. ‘And some of us are saints. Most are neither. The stories you were fed had fat trimmed off the bone until only teeth remained.’
‘And what about the tales you were raised on? I’m sure they told you that all mortals were greedy parasites—’
‘With hands that never learn to loosen, aye,’ he finishes dryly. ‘We’re taught you’ll take until the world is a husk, then pray over the husk as if that mends it.’
Her temper kicks hard enough to steady her. ‘What do you think?’
‘I believe your kind are very good at convincing yourselves that needing is the same as deserving. Human lives are fleeting, which makes every appetite feel justified.’
‘You speak as if you’ve never wanted something you shouldn’t.’
‘Wanting is easy,’ he sighs. ‘Restraint is the work.’ Curiosity claws up her throat, but she swallows it.
Around them the mist shifts and resettles.
They walk in a hush salted with small sounds. Twice she catches herself anticipating the ground’s treachery and changing her step before it betrays her.
‘Tell me what you really think about us,’ he says after a time, almost idly.
Marian’s steps stutter. ‘What?’
Lox steps over a slick rock and offers a hand. ‘Think of it as your own Hollowing. An offering to Sherwood to grant you safe passage; an emptying of what you carried in so it doesn’t fester and rot on the path.’
She eyes his palm. Pride would have her refuse, but tact takes his fingers. His grip is warm and certain. Heat skims her wrist where his calluses meet skin, and something in her spine loosens.
‘One truth for another?’ she dares, her voice thin.
He smiles and nods, letting her hand go the moment she’s past the rock. When he does, the air feels colder.
‘Ladies first.’
Her fingers fiddle with the hem of her sleeve. ‘I was jealous of the way the confessors were listened to,’ she finally offers, surprising herself with the simplicity of it. ‘There was no mockery. No punishment. Only bearing witness.’
Lox nods and Marian swears the veil of fog before them thins, if only slightly. ‘I envy mortals their endings.’
She blinks. ‘Our endings?’
‘You get to be finished,’ he says, not looking at her.
‘To close a life in a single arc. To say, “This is what I was,” and then let the earth have you. Fae go on until our choices repeat, only in wider circles, to the point where we wear grooves into ourselves. Sometimes I would like to be a line rather than a ring.’
The admission unsettles her; the words sit too bare between them.
‘I long for the ease with which you and your people move through joy without apology.’ She blows a curl off her cheek.
‘I was taught to kneel, to hide want until it starved. To pull beauty apart until it became usefulness.’ The words leave her before prudence can catch them.
‘I drew a blossom once and my father called it a waste of charcoal, unless it could be hammered into a blade.’
Lox studies her, his expression unreadable. ‘He sounds like a man who mistakes control for safety.’
‘He is a man who keeps his head by bending his neck.’ Silence folds between them.
Marian chooses each step, feet testing before committing, her breath a measured count.
Lox moves behind, sure as water finding a channel.
A root heaves under her sole at the last instant.
She pitches forward, a gasp breaking loose as the ground tilts.
His hand catches the back of her vest and the other clamps around her forearm, as he spins her around and pulls.
She collides with him, palms braced against his chest, breath knocked crooked.
For a stunned heartbeat they are joined at too many points – her forearm to his grip, her hip to his thigh, the shallow rise and fall of both their breaths trapped in the narrow space between.
His skin is warm through linen. The scent of resin, smoke, rain-drenched pine rushes at her in a dizzying flood.
She stares at the laces of his shirt because she can’t bear his eyes; looking at the small notch at the base of his throat is already too much.
‘Careful,’ he murmurs.
‘I had it,’ she lies, pride clawing up her spine.
‘Of course,’ he says mildly, as if he hadn’t just hauled her out of the earth’s mouth. His fingers linger a fraction too long before he releases her, and they keep moving.
A gust of wind threads the branches and carries with it a faint, high sound at the edge of hearing.
Marian frowns. It’s too thin for birdsong, too steady for branch-squeak.
It needles the hollow behind her ear and disappears.
At first, she takes it for insects, a summer whine.
But it sharpens as they climb, turning metallic, a pressure more felt than heard, sliding under her skin and sawing at her nerves.
‘Do you hear that?’ she breathes.
‘The ridge is old.’ He doesn’t slow, but his antlers tilt as if testing the air. ‘It speaks in many ways.’
The sound comes again, higher now, as if a wire has been plucked. The hairs along her forearms lift. ‘This is something different.’ She hates the urgency in her voice. ‘It’s like . . . a cry.’
He glances back, quickly, a question flickering over his face. ‘Stay close.’
The note threads itself through her teeth, a pressure that makes her breath catch in her throat.
Each step higher turns the keening half a note sharper, until it is a filament running from the soles of her feet to the back of her skull.
The forest grows wrong. Birds fall quiet.
The air thins, stripped of the green sweetness she’d come to know.
Lox moves faster. The path steepens into a spine of rock.
They scramble the last few yards, hands and boots digging for purchase.
She follows his footprints exactly, her breath counting steps.
The sound crescendoes in pressure until her skull feels too small.
When she crests the last lip, the ridge breaks like a wave, curling away to reveal the bowl beyond.
Marian’s lungs seize at the view.