His answering smile evoked silken sheets and jasmine-scented breezes at midnight.
A dangerous line—one Rhys was forcing me to walk to keep me from thinking about what I was about to face, about what a wreck I was inside.
Anger, this … flirtation, annoyance … He knew those were my crutches.
What I was about to encounter, then, must be truly harrowing if he wanted me going in there mad—thinking about sex, about anything but the Weaver of the Wood.
“Nice try,” I said hoarsely. Rhysand just shrugged and swaggered off into the trees ahead.
Bastard. Yes, it had been to distract me, but—
I stormed after him as silently as I could, intent on tackling him and slamming my fist into his spine, but he held up a hand as he stopped before a clearing.
A small, whitewashed cottage with a thatched roof and half-crumbling chimney sat in the center. Ordinary—almost mortal. There was even a well, its bucket perched on the stone lip, and a wood pile beneath one of the round windows of the cottage. No sound or light within—not even smoke puffed from the chimney.
The few birds in the forest fell quiet. Not entirely, but to keep their chatter to a minimum. And—there.
Faint, coming from inside the cottage, was a pretty, steady humming.
It might have been the sort of place I would have stopped if I were thirsty, or hungry, or in need of shelter for the night.
Maybe that was the trap.
The trees around the clearing, so close that their branches nearly clawed at the thatched roof, might very well have been the bars of a cage.
Rhys inclined his head toward the cottage, bowing with dramatic grace.
In, out—don’t make a sound. Find whatever object it was and snatch it from beneath a blind person’s nose.
And then run like hell.
Mossy earth paved the way to the front door, already cracked slightly. A bit of cheese. And I was the foolish mouse about to fall for it.
Eyes twinkling, Rhys mouthed, Good luck.
I gave him a vulgar gesture and slowly, silently made my way toward the front door.
The woods seemed to monitor each of my steps. When I glanced behind, Rhys was gone.
He hadn’t said if he’d interfere if I were in mortal peril. I probably should have asked.
I avoided any leaves and stones, falling into a pattern of movement that some part of my body—some part that was not born of the High Lords—remembered.
Like waking up. That’s what it felt like.
I passed the well. Not a speck of dirt, not a stone out of place. A perfect, pretty trap, that mortal part of me warned. A trap designed from a time when humans were prey; now laid for a smarter, immortal sort of game.
I was not prey any longer, I decided as I eased up to that door.
And I was not a mouse.
I was a wolf.
I listened on the threshold, the rock worn as if many, many boots had passed through—and perhaps never passed back over again. The words of her song became clear now, her voice sweet and beautiful, like sunlight on a stream:
“There were two sisters, they went playing,
To see their father’s ships come sailing …
And when they came unto the sea-brim
The elder did push the younger in.”
A honeyed voice, for an ancient, horrible song. I’d heard it before—slightly different, but sung by humans who had no idea that it had come from faerie throats.
I listened for another moment, trying to hear anyone else. But there was only a clatter and thrum of some sort of device, and the Weaver’s song.
“Sometimes she sank, and sometimes she swam,
’Til her corpse came to the miller’s dam.”
My breath was tight in my chest, but I kept it even—directing it through my mouth in silent breaths. I eased open the front door, just an inch.
No squeak—no whine of rusty hinges. Another piece of the pretty trap: practically inviting thieves in. I peered inside when the door had opened wide enough.
A large main room, with a small, shut door in the back. Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined the walls, crammed with bric-a-brac: books, shells, dolls, herbs, pottery, shoes, crystals, more books, jewels … From the ceiling and wood rafters hung all manner of chains, dead birds, dresses, ribbons, gnarled bits of wood, strands of pearls …
A junk shop—of some immortal hoarder.
And that hoarder …
In the gloom of the cottage, there sat a large spinning wheel, cracked and dulled with age.
And before that ancient spinning wheel, her back to me, sat the Weaver.
Her thick hair was of richest onyx, tumbling down to her slender waist as she worked the wheel, snow-white hands feeding and pulling the thread around a thorn-sharp spindle.
She looked young—her gray gown simple but elegant, sparkling faintly in the dim forest light through the windows as she sang in a voice of glittering gold:
“But what did he do with her breastbone?
He made him a viol to play on.
What’d he do with her fingers so small?
He made pegs to his viol withall.”