“Yeah, but isn’t she your wife?”
Celeste was pulled out of her melancholic thought by little Willow’s all-too-inquisitive voice floating up from the table below.
“No, no, I don’t have one of those.”
The noise of the tavern was a mostly muffled mess from where Celeste stood on the inn’s second floor, but the conversation taking place at the bottom of the stairs was funneled right up to her.
“But you’re together all the time,” said Willow, and Celeste leaned over the railing, concealed in the dark. The ginger girl had her elbows on the table and her knees up on the chair, absolutely interrogating the knight. “You come here together, and you leave together, and you sleep together.”
“No, we donot.” Reeve waved his hands through the air. “By Valcord, you should not even be asking—”
“She means you sleep in the same place, in the same home,” said Charlie, the girl’s deep voice full of amusement as she leaned back in her own chair, arms crossed. “We know because Halfrida said that you’re fixing up the old temple together, and you sleep there instead of sleeping here.”
Eliot stood at the table’s end, head pinging between them as they spoke, nodding along.
Reeve grunted and finished the last of his milk. “We have an agreement, yes, and it is only meant to be for a brief time.”
“Well, you shouldgetmarried.” Willow’s voice was run through with a thrill. “Then it can be forever!”
Reeve brought his stein of milk back to his mouth, mumbling something unheard into it, though it didn’t sound agreeable.
Celeste’s fingers tightened on the banister.Don’t, she said sharply into her mind,You cannot feel bad about a thing you already know. Yet there was still a sinking in her chest, and while she should have shut herself back up in the privy to avoid any more of it, she realized it would do her good to hear, to dash away all of the over-indulgent, fanciful thoughts about the holy knight that she kept failing to overcome.
“Why not?” Willow was pouting. “Is it because she keeps saying no?”
Reeve squeezed his eyes shut and groaned.
“Because Auntie Frida keeps telling Gaspard no too, but he says he’s never going to give up asking her to be his wife because Auntie Frida is the prettiest lady he’severseen. Don’t you think Celeste is pretty?”
Celeste’s stomach flipped over twice. She knew she should thunder down the stairs as loudly as possible and put an end to their collective misery he didn’t know they shared, but she’d already committed herself to the torture of hearing him say it and couldn’t seem to move.
One of Reeve’s eyes popped open and found Charlie. His face creased with a frown as if begging the girl to help him.
Charlie only shrugged. “Well?”
“That’s really not—I mean,” Reeve grunted and took another drink. “I have not askedanyoneto marry me.”
“But why not?” Willow’s voice dragged the word out as she threw her head back dramatically.
Clearly at a loss, Reeve stuttered out a string of nonsense words that amounted to neither the answer Willow was looking for nor any answer to any question at all.
“But you think she’s pretty, right?”
Reeve dropped his stein down and sighed. “Yes, of course I think Celeste is pretty.”
The twisty burning in Celeste’s stomach suddenly soared into her throat, and her heart came to a stammering halt.What the fuck?
“I think she’s very pretty, and she has lovely hair and beautiful eyes and these long, gorgeous legs that,”—he coughed—“well, she has legs too, and that’s…normal.”
“Then you should kiss her!” Willow lifted her arms high over her head and squeezed her little fists, shaking them. Eliot laughed silently behind his hand.
The world beneath Celeste shifted, and it felt as though there wasn’t floor under her anymore, there was just air and light, and she was floating on nothing but words and imagination. Gods, she would love to be kissed by Reeve. Even if it was stupid and dangerous and would amount to nothing, to be held in his strong arms for even a fleeting moment and to be kissed would just—
But then she crashed back down, gripping the railing so tight it could have splintered. No oneeversaid those things about her—not about her stringy hair or her spindly legs and especially not about her ghoulish eyes. Since he had stopped calling her a witch, Reeve had revealed himself to be kind, one of the helpful holy men as Kori had suggested, or so Celeste thought. Yet he was being so needlessly cruel with his deceptive words.
At the table below, Reeve took a deep breath, face going stoic like how he looked first thing in the morning, sitting still in the courtyard. “You cannot just kiss people because you think they’re pretty, Willow. You have to at least ask them first. I think.”
“So ask her.”
