Though “escape” is no longer the word she would use—that would imply a desire to leave all of it behind.
“Luckily, I don’t believe in ghosts,” Heath goes on. “Or true love, for that matter.”
Aurora balks. “You don’t believe in true love? That’s ridiculous!”
“Is it? What proof do you have that it exists?” he asks. He seems to be leaning in closer to her.
“I—it isn’t something to be proven.” She’s breathing slowly. His closeness is making her unsteady. “It’s just something you feel,” she says, thinking of the many epic tales of love she has read. “And when you feel it, you know.”
He tilts his head, smirking just a little. “Sounds like the stuff of stories.”
“Well, what evidence do you have that it doesn’t exist?” she challenges. This heady mix of frustration and determination is beginning to feel familiar, and not in a bad way. She finds she likes that he contradicts her, that he’s willing to debate, that he expects her to argue her side. And that, with her newfound voice, she can.
Now his face is so near she can feel his breath. “Just that I’ve never felt it before. That kind of love involves choice—or it should. And that’s something I’ve never had. You can’t have choice if you don’t have freedom.”
“Then I hope that changes,” Aurora whispers. “Everyone deserves true love.”
“I’m not so sure I agree. I’ve heard of people doing terrible things in the name of true love. Wouldn’t want to end up like old Blackthorn, mad and alone.”
“But if you don’t believe in love, then you will end up alone.” She blinks as her words settle into the narrow gap between their bodies. His lips seem to loom before hers, heart shaped and soft looking, even as they quiver into a smile.
“Maybe so,” he whispers back, lifting his hand to touch her face. He brushes a strand of wet hair off her cheek. As his fingers make contact with her skin, she shivers.
He leans back slightly, and she remembers she’s still drenched. Thunder crashes beyond the walls and rain pounds the roof, heavy and whooshing, as though an entire ocean has opened up in the sky.
“Let me build a fire,” Heath suggests. “You must be cold.”
But he doesn’t move to the hearth. He stands there, staring at her, his lips slightly parted. Plenty of men have gazed at Aurora with something akin to hunger, but none of them knew her; none of them could.
“You . . .” He shakes his head, his long hair swinging in front of his eyes. “You make me want things.” He licks his lower lip nervously. She stares at his mouth, horrified at the fire that instantly rages through her.
“You make me want to believe in other worlds,” he goes on. “In other possibilities. And I should hate you for that,” he says, though there’s a smile still trying to cut across the stricken look on his face.
She swallows. “I’m sorry.” Like everything about Sommeil, his words leave her tingly with dissatisfaction, with the fear that she will never be satisfied, never get what she wants, even if she doesn’t know what that is. Or perhaps because she doesn’t know.
“Don’t be.”
His voice is so quiet she almost doesn’t hear him, but something begins to rise within her, tightening around her lungs like vines. She always thought love would come to her just as it did in the romances she read: full-blown and overpowering. Absolute and unquestioning.
What’s happening to her now is nothing like that. It’s tremulous, curious, speckled with dangers and uncertainties.
“I . . . I . . .” But he can’t seem to finish what he was going to say.
She puts her hand on his shoulder, a small gesture but infinitely bold—bigger, even, than when she touched the spinning wheel and its sting changed her forever.
He seems to know this. He takes her hand and lifts it to his lips. He kisses her knuckles softly, hesitantly. His lips linger on her skin, sending currents of warmth through her arm and down her entire body. She feels light-headed as he tugs her closer to him, until his lips graze her ear, his breath tickling her neck. “Aurora.”
An aching desire leaps up in her like flames in a breeze. Her lips catch the stubble on his chin, the high ridge of his cheekbone—still wet from the rain—then find their way to his mouth. She feels his surprised inhale, the way something clicks into place as his body goes firm and urgent against hers and he begins to kiss her back.
She is falling—into the divide between before and after. Her world is changing again, no longer simply with the miracle of touch but this new discovery of how touch can have meaning. She feels the kiss everywhere: a tingling ache in her fingertips, a sigh against the backs of her knees—the kiss she didn’t realize she’d been waiting for, ever since meeting Heath, even when he had a dagger pointed at her throat.
Her first kiss.
The word “oh” drifts into the air around them as if on a swirl of fog.
Aurora pulls away, enough to take a breath.
“Oh.” A soft voice. Not hers, and not Heath’s either.
She turns. Wren. The girl stands framed in the entrance to the gallery, her face pale, her fingers clenched together. “Forgive me,” she says, backing away. And then she’s gone.
26
Isabelle
Reverend Mother Hildegarde keeps Isbe and William busy for most of the morning. It turns out there are many grueling chores to be done and too few hands to do them all. But Isbe hasn’t stopped wondering about Sister Genevieve’s appearance last night, that uncanny scent of blood and dirt and rust. She keeps imagining different scenarios: Sister Genevieve cutting her arm on a gardening hoe as she tends to vegetables, for example. Or perhaps Sister Genevieve discovering a rat in the granary and killing it with the sharp end of a pickax. Surely there are any number of possible explanations for her being out so late. . . .
And for her tending to the granary despite what the prioress said about it being empty.
Still, Isbe knows a lying voice when she hears one.
Finally, during a break for the nuns to have their midday meal, she finds a moment to pull William aside. They pass the dorter, the refectory, and the bell tower, turning the corner through the cloisters and moving across the graveyard to the granary at the far side of the complex. William throws open the double doors to the large grain storage room, and Isbe holds her breath.
“So . . . it is empty, then,” she says after a pause.
“Quite so. Hardly even a trace of wheat on the stone floor,” William confirms. “It looks as though the floors have been recently swept, in fact.”