He plays with my fingers. He does it absentmindedly, without thought, without reason. Sensation—real, present, oh, so real—and I haven’t felt that since… when? Have I ever really felt it?
“What are you thinking about?” I ask. My skin? My bones? My bones under the skin? The trees, inching closer, even as we sit here?
He smiles as he looks at me. “My mind is as empty as air.”
“Liar. Tell me.”
A hesitation. “You won’t like it.”
“Wanting us to go with you again?”
“Yes. And if what you say about the trees is true, and they really are—”
“Moving.”
“Yes… moving. Getting closer—”
“They are. I measured them with a root.”
“—then maybe that’s all the more reason to go. Get away from here. This house… it’s not good for you.”
It is W R O N G.
I glance back at La Baume. In the early-evening light it looks even more like blood.
“It’s home.”
“Home can be unhealthy.”
I know this too well.
“And Nori?” I ask.
“She’ll come, too.”
“And Cath? She won’t leave.”
Gowan hesitates, then opens his mouth to reply.
I cut him off. “I’m not leaving her behind. Besides… I told you before. Those trees are wrong. I won’t go back in there.”
“They let you in the first time; they’ll let you leave. You just have to be strong. Small and strong and… beautiful.”
Beautiful. Broken. Cracked. Decaying. Wrong. You are wrong.
“Why would we go with you anyway? We hardly know you.”
I could have spat on him he looks so surprised. Then he nods, with a terse smile.
“Anyway,” I add, “going through the woods was different then. Everything was different then. They let us in. They won’t let us leave.”
“You just have to have faith.”
“In what?” I don’t mean to sound so bitter. “Tell me other things, Gowan. Tell me stories of the sky and the sea. Open places full of magic. Tell me tales of places where music dances on breezes and girls go twirling through the sand. Tell me, Gowan.”
Tell me pleasant lies, and I will believe them before I throw them away.
We spend our days like this. Me, sitting close by, my head cocked, or lying in the patchy, dead grass, crunchy beneath me. Gowan, weaving strands of longer grasses into plaits and telling tale after tale, while Nori plays in the ash-dirt of the garden or dances around us. Sometimes she stretches herself on the ground beside me, too enthralled by the tales he weaves to do anything else but listen.
I watch him closely.
And swallow my beating heart.
And push away my burning stomach.
And remind myself that he is a stranger.
I know nothing about him. I shouldn’t trust him. You can’t love what you don’t know.
But he’s so familiar.
But that, too, might be a trick.
“Come for a walk with me.”
Gowan holds out his hand.
“No.”
“Why not?”
I fold my arms. “I have to look after Nori.”
Gowan grins. “She’s in the library sleeping on the rug. I checked on her before I asked.”
“Doesn’t matter. She’ll wake. Get scared.” [YOU ARE AFRAID TO LEAVE HER. YOU NEED HER.]
Gowan’s hand is still waiting, open and ready. “We’ll bring her, too.”
“You want to go walking with me… and my little sister.”
“If it gets you to come with me.”
I consider him, reading his every muscle, his every blink, twitch, and smile.
And I take his hand. It closes around me like a warm bath, comfort and safety— [DON’T GET COMPLACENT.]
We walk the perimeter of the garden; he never lets go of my hand. When we arrive at the gate, I pull free. He looks back at me.
“You’re like water slipping through my fingers.”
I shake my head. I don’t understand him.
He opens the garden gate and walks out, into the field, leaving it open behind him so that I can follow, if I want.
I follow when he is thirty paces in front of me, panting with the effort of walking uphill, my calves burning.
“Look at this.” There is wonder in Gowan’s voice, and it calls to me. He is crouching down some way ahead of me, and I hurry over, breathing hard.
“I can’t believe it…” Gowan murmurs.
A yellow flower, small—minute—has pushed itself from the earth. It’s not three paces from the woods. I haven’t seen a flower in weeks. Longer. Not since the end of summer, which feels too long ago now.
“I can’t believe it,” he says again. “It’s strong. Small, but strong. Like you.” He looks at me. “It’s beautiful.”
“Asshole,” I whisper, though my chest is filled with a rushing warmth, like a river in a growing storm. “It’s a weed. Useless.”
“Beautiful like you,” he persists, grinning now.
I nudge him. “Shh. Nori might hear.”
And then something horrifying occurs to me. Before I know what I’m doing, I pluck the flower from the earth, fragile and delicate roots dangling from my fist, crush it in my hand, and throw it into the woods.
“It’s a trick,” I say, shrugging away the look on Gowan’s face and the awful way I feel inside. “The trees are trying to trick me.”
Gowan swallows. “I have to go.”