Nettle tilted her head to the side. Tristan had described the singer as prickly, but that wasn’t quite the word for the way she tossed her head, carefully pronouncing each word. She was aloof, but sincere, watching Aurora like she was a curiosity that had stumbled into her path and needed to be decoded. “I believe he found you hard to miss,” she said. “The girl destroying all his hopes.”
“I am not destroying his hopes,” Aurora said. “I don’t even know what I’m doing.”
“Neither does he,” Nettle said. “At least you are able to admit it.” She sat. Her long dress darkened as it fell in a puddle, and her legs would be brown with mud by the time she stood, but Nettle either did not notice or did not care. She stared straight ahead, the picture of calm. “Will you sit with me? It is too cold and quiet out here to be alone, but I do not want to return inside just yet.”
Aurora hesitated. But the singer was right. She did not want to be alone.
She sank down beside Nettle. The rainwater soaked into her skirts.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I don’t know,” Aurora said. “I just . . .” She stared at the wall across the alley, watching the way the rain trickled down the stones. She tightened her grip on her knees, pulling them under her chin. “Tristan said some things that . . . I don’t know.”
“He has a lot of bitterness in him,” Nettle said. “He tries to hide it with jokes, but he is always angry. It is a dangerous way to be.”
The sound of conversation from the inn hummed behind them, and the rain patted out a rhythm on her bare arms. “He’s not who I thought he was.”
Nettle continued to watch her. “You have known him—how long?”
The nights all blurred together, a mess of smiles and fear and mead warming her lips. “Four days, maybe.”
“So. You meet a boy, and you imagine he is everything you want to find. Comforting. But now the real boy is fighting back.”
“It’s not that,” she said. “He was keeping secrets from me. All the time, he was thinking . . .”
“But you were keeping secrets from him too, were you not?”
“It’s different,” Aurora said. “My secrets . . . I needed to stay quiet. It was the only way to keep me safe.”
“Maybe he felt the same way.”
“No,” she said. “He made it quite clear that safety isn’t the issue here, his or mine.”
“Tristan is a fool,” Nettle said. “He does not know what he means. He is so full of his own plans and ideas that he cannot see anything else.”
Aurora rested her head against the wall, letting it scrape her scalp. The rain pattered out a rhythm by their feet. She needed to talk about something else, to shift the attention away from herself. “Is Nettle your real name?” she asked.
Nettle looked at her. A single strand of black hair brushed across her nose. “That is what I have told people to call me,” she said. “Does that not make it my real name?”
“I’m sorry,” Aurora said. “I did not mean to offend you.”
“It takes more than that to offend me. But you must know that names do not mean everything.” She shifted, pulling her right knee toward her chin. “It is not the name my mother gave me, nor a translation of it, although some people once told me otherwise. Boys like your Tristan, and yet not like Tristan at all. When I had only just begun traveling outside my kingdom, when I did not speak your language so well, they named me. Nettle. Like the flower that was my name before. They said it suited me. It was not until later that I found out what it meant. They thought me a weed. Something unwelcome, to be torn out.”
Aurora tilted her head to look at her. Her hair tangled on the stone. “Why did you keep using it?”
“You have seen flowers, have you not? Such delicate things. A rough hand, a strong breeze, the slightest frost . . . they die so easily. Even left to their own devices, they shrivel and die so quickly. But a weed . . . a weed is strong. Almost impossible to kill. And if someone tries to destroy a weed, it will hurt them back.” She stood up, as abruptly as she had sat down. “Let me give you some advice,” she said. “Don’t trust anyone except yourself.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I was you, once.” Nettle shifted on her feet. From Aurora’s angle on the ground, she looked disheveled, cold, and utterly beautiful. “People do not hear me in my songs. They only hear themselves. Selfish, self-centered, each thinking this is about me. This is about my life. And that is not a bad thing. But right now, I am not trying to tell you how you feel. I am telling you how things are. And the truth is that you must not expect others to be the way you would like inside your head. You must not let them in.” Nettle turned to look at the open door. “I must return to sing. But think about what I said.” She slipped inside before Aurora could reply.
Aurora rested her chin on her knees, shivering slightly. The rain had stopped, leaving a cool mist and sharp, fresh air in its wake. Soon Nettle’s music laced its way out of the inn. She took a deep breath, then another, savoring the sting of hurt that nestled in her chest. She closed her eyes and soaked in the music, trying to make the moment last. She could not come back, she knew. But even now, Nettle’s voice filled some emptiness inside her, and she did not want to let go. Not yet.