Rook sank onto the end of the settee. He hesitated, then peeled his coat off and laid it over me. It was warm and smelled of him. Overwhelmed by his gentleness, I began weeping again in earnest. He drew back in alarm, clearly thinking he’d made things worse.
“Er,” he said. He patted the nearest part of me he could reach, which was my foot. “I apologize for . . . that. If you would stop crying now,” he added, a trifle desperately, with a note of princely command.
It was no use. Just then, a random thought renewed my anguish. “Oh, I destroyed your raven pin!” I choked out. “I’m so sorry.”
“Well, I think I’ve found that I don’t need it anymore.”
Because he loved me. I covered my face with my hands.
“Isobel, I appear to be . . . shall I leave the room?”
“No, it isn’t you.” Muffled by my fingers, my voice was smudged pitifully with tears. “I’m just, I’m being really human right now, all right? Give me ten seconds.”
I sucked in a deep, shaking breath and counted to ten. When I reached it, I had stopped crying. Mostly. After a shuddering exhale, I rubbed my face on my sleeve, which turned out to be a bad idea; the lace scraped my swollen eyelids like sandpaper. Reaching out, I enlisted Rook’s help in wedging myself up into the corner of the settee, because I wasn’t sure I could sit upright on my own, and determinedly pretended I didn’t have a bright red face and a snotty nose.
Good enough. “There. Now, let’s open the box.”
His fingers tightened around the box’s edges. Its varnish gleamed in the lantern light. A gift, May had said. My best guess was that it was some sort of cruel joke, a prank played on the two of us for breaking the Good Law. But that didn’t make much sense, did it? One didn’t play pranks on people who were supposed to be dead. No one had expected us to survive the night, much less return . . . return to my house. Unless . . .
Gadfly.
A chill rippled up my legs, over my arms, and into my scalp.
There was something going on here I didn’t know about. Something, I suddenly felt certain, that like most things I didn’t know about, I wasn’t going to like at all. The room shrank away, its familiar odds and ends blending into an ominous clutter.
Rook passed his hand over the locked latch. I forced myself not to look away from the stump of his little finger. He had already used his glamour to make it appear healed, and for the sake of his pride I would not dispute him in the matter. The wound must have hurt terribly, but aside from that single noise he’d made earlier, he revealed nothing.
He snapped his fingers, and the lid sprang open. Inside, upon a pillow of black velvet, lay a newly forged dagger. Its point glinted, needle-sharp.
I asked, even though I didn’t need to, “Is it iron?”
“Yes,” he said.
Whether it was due to the ensorcellment, or simply that we had grown familiar with each other, I knew we had the exact same thought simultaneously. Gadfly, standing over us at the Green Well, describing the terms of our violation and the limited means by which we might escape punishment. The way Rook had pleaded with him to end his life, and thus spare mine. He played games with us even now.
Without another word, Rook passed the box over. I wouldn’t take it, so he set it down on the cushion beside me. Our eyes locked. A silent argument raged between us. When he drew a breath to break the stalemate, I emphatically shook my head.
“No,” I said. “Stop it.”
He leapt up from his seat and knelt on the floor in front of me. He took the dagger from the box and turned it against himself. It shook so badly in his grasp he’d drop it before long, and I took cold comfort in the assurance that he couldn’t use it without help. But when his glamour flowed away I wasn’t prepared for the sight of his true self. His skin held a terrible pallor; his overlarge, queer-looking eyes were shadowed by exhaustion and pain. Sweat had left streaks in the dirt on his face.
“Listen to me,” he croaked. “Both of us need not die tonight. Isobel, you cannot break the Good Law alone. If the fair folk sense I am no more—”
I seized the dagger from him. Having no idea what to do with it afterward, I lifted the cushion I was lying on and shoved it underneath, then threw my weight back on top. “Stop being melodramatic! I am not going to kill you in my parlor!”
He stared at me in disbelief. “Did you just sit on it?”
“Yes,” I said mutinously.
“But there is no other way.”
I must have gotten quite a ferocious look on my face, because he leaned back a little. “Have you considered what it would be like for me to go on with my life after murdering you? Imagine if it were the other way around!”
He paused, and looked ill.
“Exactly!”
“No—yes—you are right. I should not have asked it of you.” His eyes flicked toward the hallway. Emma. A vise squeezed the air out of my lungs. If Rook asked Emma, she would certainly slay him to spare me, just as she would have killed the fairy beast to save her sister, if only she had had the strength. She wouldn’t let another family member die because of the fair folk.
My pulse roared in my ears. I no longer felt the settee’s cushions or the tears drying on my face. In the stories, maidens drank poison and jumped from high towers upon hearing of their princes’ deaths. But I wasn’t one of them. I still wanted to live, and in fact I had lived seventeen perfectly functional years before I’d ever met Rook. I had a family who loved me and needed me. I couldn’t ask Emma and the twins to suffer through the pain of my loss. If this was the only option . . . if this was what we had to do . . . but I couldn’t countenance it; I ached to think of him gone, a vast empty ache I couldn’t face head-on for fear of drowning in it.
His fingers stroked a strand of hair behind my ear. “It would not be like a mortal dying,” he said. “You have seen it. I will leave no body behind. There will be a tree, perhaps. A bigger one than that absurd little oak outside your kitchen.”
I couldn’t stand it. I choked on a laugh. “Show-off.”
“Yes.” He gave me half a smile. “Always.”
I twisted and dragged the dagger back out from under the cushions. I closed my eyes, squeezing the blade so tightly I almost drew blood. I pictured a version of myself, perhaps a year or two from now, walking up the hill to my house. Still grieving, but getting better every day. In my mind March and May ran out of the kitchen door to wrap themselves around my legs—no, around my waist, for surely they’d grown taller. A majestic tree dropped leaves that painted one side of the roof scarlet year-round, demonstrating an arrogant disregard for the state of our gutters. Clouds scudded across a blue sky. Heat simmered. Grasshoppers buzzed in a ceaseless, mind-numbing chorus.
I recoiled from the image. No. I couldn’t accept that world, a world where we had lost and the Alder King had won, a world where nothing ever changed, and the evidence of it surrounded me every day.