“Jacob?” the woman asked, her voice the whispered quiet of an isolated sea cove. She was curled on the crumpled sheets, the sun her only blanket. Her cheek was cradled against the boy’s arm, and her warm breath fanned over the pale skin on the underside of his bicep. She turned her head and pressed her coral-pink lips to his arm.
“Hmm?” The boy ran his fingers along the curve of the woman’s cheek, tracing the pink flush that rose at his gentle touch. He grew fascinated with the seashell-pink flush, his pupils dilating as he followed a path down the woman’s delicate neck, her sharp collarbone, the soft slope of her chest. Everywhere he touched, the pink glow followed. He flew over the sunset color, his fingers feathering, his own cheeks turning a bright red.
The woman’s limbs relaxed as she settled deeper into the mattress. Goose bumps rose on her skin, and her lips parted, her expression softening, as she watched the boy’s enraptured progress.
“You look at me like . . .”
The boy paused in his erotic explorations, lifting his pupil-blown eyes. “Like what?”
She rubbed a hand along his stubble-lined jaw, the scratch of the bristle scraping her fingertips. She looked frightened for a moment, like a woman afraid to share a secret. The wind ran over the pulse at her neck, fluttering on the thrumming beat. She was warm, sweat-slicked. She still smelled like a ripe orange warming in the sun and pearl dust crashing against the seashore, but now, she also smelled like the boy. Her citrus and pearl dust had settled in a sunny meadow, in the center of a forest glade, with the scent of pine riding on a gentle gust of wind.
The wind tousled the boy’s messy golden hair, wondering if he smelled like the woman now too. Yes—there was the hint of oranges where the woman had kissed her way along his throat.
“My whole life,” the woman said, weaving a spell with her seaside voice, “people have been looking at me. Some of them love me. Some of them want to be me. Some of them envy me. Some of them hate me. But none of them see me. You look at me like you see me.”
The boy brushed the woman’s long black hair back from her face and looked down at her. The wind whistled softly. It knew that look. It was the look a man had right before he jumped off a cliff and threw himself to the mercy of the sea.
“I do see you.”
She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pulled him on top of her.
“I’m almost ready,” she said, “to ask you to take me out to sea. I’m not so afraid anymore. I only need to take care of a few things.”
The boy stared down at her, the flush in his cheeks deepening. “Do you want my help?”
The woman shook her head. “No. This is a Bard thing. If a Ward were involved . . . No . . . They wouldn’t understand.”
“What happens if Ragnor dies?”
The woman stiffened, then her arms tightened on the boy’s shoulders. He lifted himself over her and looked down, his nose nearly pressed to hers.
The wind saw the battle inside her. This was something the Bards never shared. If anyone even suspected, they were killed to keep this secret.
“Lia,” the boy whispered. “It’s all right.”
Finally, she nodded, her body relaxing. “I lose my power. It trickles away until I’m so weak I can’t even conjure a drop of water. That takes a month. Two. After that, my organs would start to fail. I’d have a year. Two. No one has lived longer than five without a sibling donating. It’s why my parents had Ragnor ten months after me. As soon as I was born, my dad knew, and for some reason, he went against everything he believed and decided to keep me alive. I never understood that. He slaughtered dozens of his own family, and then he kept me. Hid me in plain sight.”
The wind knew why the Bard had chosen to keep the infant. It was something his sister—the fawn-like one—had told him. She was ten years old when she’d sleepwalked into her older brother’s bedroom and said, in a sleep-filled monotone, “If you kill your firstborn daughter, your line will end with you. Stay your hand, brother. Her death cannot come through you.”
Everyone knew the fawn-like one could see fragments of the future. It was why every family wanted her as their own. The Ward especially wanted her for his son. She’d once told the Ward he’d die locked in his own asylum, and that she’d seen the man who would deliver his death. She wouldn’t tell him who it was, though, even when he’d threatened. Even when he’d tortured his own son. No one had ever been able to prevent what the fawn-like one saw.
So her brother, the Bard, had remembered her advice and stayed his hand.
“He’s scared of you,” the boy said to the woman. “He always has been. Even when you were a baby, he was terrified.”
The woman scoffed. “He didn’t have to be. I would’ve done anything for him. I loved him.”
“People who don’t know how to love can’t imagine anyone else being capable of love either. It doesn’t matter if you loved him. If you did what he wanted, he’d let you live. If you didn’t, then . . .”
“He’d ask my brother to kill me.”
The boy didn’t say anything.
The woman smiled up at him. “I used to think you had a weird family. But mine . . . it takes the cake.”
At the mention of cake, the woman flushed, and the boy’s mouth spread into a happy, laughing smile.
“Am I out of favors?” the boy asked.
