“If crying made me half as brave as your sister, I’d fill my pockets with handkerchiefs,” I told her. “That she wears her heart on her sleeve is one of the things I love about her most.”
She eyed me suspiciously, then nodded. “All right. You can sit if you want. They won’t take kindly to interruptions, so it’s best you wait for them to come down.”
I pulled out one of the chairs surrounding the scarred kitchen table and sat.
“You don’t look much like I thought you would,” she said, going back to the stove. “Trolls are supposed to be big and ugly and stupid.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Cécile wouldn’t talk about you much, but she did say you were the handsomest boy she’d ever met. Of course I couldn’t really trust in that, because there isn’t much accounting for her taste.” Her blue eyes gleamed with amusement. “She kisses the pigs because she thinks they’re cute.”
“There is something endearing about the baby ones,” I said, thinking about the small pink creatures I’d seen in the barn.
Josette laughed wickedly. “I’m not talking about the piglets.”
She could be making up stories, but I sensed every word of it was true. “The good thing about setting your expectations low is that you will not often be disappointed.”
“Who said I’m not disappointed?” She tasted whatever was in the pot, frowned, then added a pinch of what looked like salt. “She also said you were magic, but the only magic I’ve seen you do is convince Papa to let you do my chores instead of me.”
“She was telling the truth,” I said, struggling to keep the smile off my face.
“Prove it.”
Laughter burst from my chest. “Are you quite serious?”
“If you hadn’t noticed–” She paused to taste her sauce. “I’m always serious.”
I extinguished all the light. Lamps, fireplace, stove, all smothered so that we sat in darkness.
“Well, that’s clever,” she said. “Make it so that I can’t see a thing so I won’t know if you’re doing the magic or not.” Her words were light, but I hadn’t missed the gasp of surprise.
I obliged her with several dozen little orbs of light that I set to drifting around the kitchen. Her eyes leapt from light to light, reminding me of the first time I’d lit the glass gardens for Cécile.
She reached out a hand to touch one of the orbs, then hesitated. “May I?”
I nodded, watching as she passed her fingers through one of them in an attempt to catch it. While she was distracted, I wrapped a delicate web around her, then gently lifted her up in the air. She shrieked, then laughed. “Higher!”
“I thought it was rude to tell a troll what to do with his magic?” Cécile whispered in my ear, her breath against my skin making me feel things that were not appropriate under the circumstances.
Catching her hand, I kissed her fingers. “I’ve been known to make exceptions.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of her grandmother standing by the stairs, arms crossed. In a flash, I had Josette back on the ground, my lights extinguished, all the fires relit, and my feet underneath me.
Cécile took hold of my hand and squeezed it. “Gran, this is Tristan.”
“It is a pleasure to finally meet you, Madame de Troyes,” I said, more than a little worried what the matriarch of the family would have to say to me.
“Well, at least he knows his manners,” her grandmother said. “Have a seat, young man. Girls, get dinner on the table. I can hear your father coming up the steps.”
* * *
“She won’t abide smoking in the house,” Louie said, leading me outside after dinner. I sat next to him, drink in my hand, and looked up at the massive moon overhead. It was ominous in its fullness, and I distinctly remembered the last time I had paid it this much attention: the night before Cécile had been brought to Trollus, which I’d spent racking my brain trying to think of a way around being bonded to a human. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
“Can’t help but think I might have kept Genevieve safe if only I’d tried harder to get her to come to the Hollow.”
I thought about the letters he’d written her, and knew that short of dragging her forcibly, there had been nothing more he could have done. “I’m sure Anushka has her ways of keeping track of her family,” I said. “You would have needed to take her far further than the Hollow to be out of her reach. And quite frankly, I’ve met her – I don’t think she does anything she doesn’t want to.”
“Might be you’re right.” He puffed on the pipe. “She weren’t always this way – her mother’s disappearance changed her.”
“They were close?”
He laughed. “Furthest thing from it. Genny hated her mother. The woman was a dominating old shrew. Was one of the reasons why Genny was so excited to move to the Hollow. She wanted to get as far away from that woman as she could.”