Raffe swallowed. Then he dropped his hand. “I’m not worried about the money,” he said. “I’m worried about you.”
Her mouth twisted; he couldn’t tell what emotion caused it. Kayu took a breath, looked away from him. Thoughts raced behind her eyes.
“It’s this place,” she said finally, softly. “I don’t have pleasant memories here.”
“At the Temple?”
She nodded, making her waterfall of black hair ripple in the wind off the ocean. “I didn’t come under the best circumstances.” It was almost a whisper, like it was something she didn’t want to admit. “My father… he wanted to marry me off. To a brute of a man who’d had four wives already, every one of them mysteriously dead within six months of matrimony. I’m the third daughter. My only value is in my marriage, how much money or power or strategic influence it can bring the Emperor.”
He nodded, piecing together the narrative. “So you came here—started traveling, studying elsewhere—to escape.”
A high, harsh laugh. “More or less.” Kayu shrugged. “The night I refused the marriage, I stowed away on a ship. I didn’t care where it was going. It brought me here, and things…” She stopped, swallowed. Another flash of rapid thought behind her eyes, calculating, tallying up what she wanted to reveal. “I did what I had to do. Took shelter in the Temple. My memories of my time here are not kind.”
His older sister, Amethya, had been married to a man his parents chose. But he’d been kind and funny and handsome in addition to being immensely wealthy, and Raffe knew his family wouldn’t have consented to the marriage otherwise. He couldn’t imagine sending someone he loved to marry a person he knew was dangerous. “And your father… he still doesn’t know where you are?”
Her chin ducked; she tucked her hair nervously behind her ear. “Even if he does,” she murmured, “it doesn’t matter. He can’t touch me.”
The words could’ve been full of bravado, but the way she said them was almost regretful. Raffe nodded, arms crossed. “It’s hard, being somewhere that holds bad memories,” he said. “I understand.”
“Do you?” Still so soft, so quiet. But Kayu brushed past him without a backward glance.
When they topped the dunes again, Fife and Lyra were standing by the fence, talking quietly. It seemed they were playing some kind of game—Lyra would point to a plant, and Fife would name it.
“Threader moss.” Fife sipped from a steaming cup of tea in his hand—he’d found the kitchen, apparently. Lyra’s finger moved, pointing to another variety of moss clinging to the fence. “Queenscarpet.” Another, this one on the ground and dotted with blooms. “Mermaid hair.”
“I hate it when they name real things after pretend things.” The mask of a sunny smile and easy laughter had slipped back over Kayu at some point between the harbor and the dunes, the mask she’d been lacking since they stepped onto the shore of the Rylt. She rested her arms on the fence, leaned over to see the plant in question. “It seems inconsistent.”
“Unless mermaids are real?” Raffe mimicked Kayu’s stance, though he kept careful distance between them. “Honestly, at this point I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“If they are, I don’t know about it.” Lyra bent down and plucked one of the blooms she’d pointed to; small, pale blue petals drooped from a green stalk. “Maybe they’re just too smart to leave the sea. Things seem much more complicated on land.”
“What with the maidens to save and the plagues that need breaking,” Fife muttered beside her. She bumped him with her hip and stuck the tiny flower behind his ear.
Kayu’s eyes flickered between them, bright and full of questions. “Are you two…”
Raffe’s brow lifted, his gaze slanting her way, then back to Fife and Lyra. The two Wilderwood denizens looked at each other, an unspoken conversation.
“Well,” Fife said, putting down his tea and cocking a brow at Lyra. “I love you. But you know that.”
“And I love you,” Lyra replied. She reached up, adjusted the mermaid-hair flower so it brushed his temple. She looked back at Kayu, shrugged. “I’m not one for romance. Or sex, mostly. But we love each other. Always have.” She gave Fife a wry smile. “Always will, at this point.”
“To my great chagrin,” Fife said. But he reached over and threaded his fingers through Lyra’s, soft and easy.
That was the only mark of connection between them, solid friendship and clasped hands. No kisses, no signs of romantic love as Raffe knew it. But it seemed like Lyra and Fife ran deeper than that. A different sort of love, one perfectly tailored to them.
Raffe was feeling very out of his depth on love as a concept lately.
The four of them stood in silence. Down on the beach, a gull cawed.
Kayu straightened, dark-bright eyes turning from the moss to Raffe. An unreadable expression crossed her face, somewhere between hope and vulnerability and steel. “You coming?”
And even lost in a haze of thoughts about love and things he didn’t understand, Raffe caught her meaning, the question behind the one she asked. A need for comfort, for something warm, for a place to not think for a moment.
So when Kayu started toward the Temple, a particular kind of determination in her gait, Raffe followed and knew what that meant.
Behind him, the murmur of Fife and Lyra’s voices, gentle against the wind and the gulls and the crash of waves on the shore, a secret language only the two of them shared.
Raffe followed Kayu through the Temple door, down the hall, toward the small cloister rooms with their small cloister beds, toward the one she’d claimed for herself when it became clear they’d be staying at least one night. He didn’t think of what was coming next, though his body knew it. He didn’t let himself think at all.
It was nice, to let his mind settle. Let the rest of him take over for a while.
When the door closed behind them, Kayu turned. She was small, her nose nearly level with his sternum, and when her eyes tilted up to look at his face, her pupils were already wide. His breath went ragged in his chest as she shrugged out of the billowing shirt, the trousers, the boots, and stood before him pale and bare.
“It’s been a while,” she whispered.
“Same here,” Raffe replied.
Kayu kissed him, and she tasted like spice and like flowers. His hands wove through her hair, impossibly silky, running over his skin like a black curtain.
“It doesn’t have to mean anything.” She pulled away, tugged his shirt over his head, ran her hands across the mahogany planes of his chest. “It doesn’t have to mean anything you don’t want it to.”
Comfort. That’s what they were both after. That’s what he told himself as he kissed her again, as his hands came to her hips and lower. Comfort didn’t mean anything, did it? He’d done this before, with other people who knew it wasn’t anything deeper than solace, who knew his heart was elsewhere and didn’t mind. This didn’t mean anything beyond needing some respite. So few things Raffe knew about love, but this, he knew.