I turned to fluff my pillow and snuggled down into it, enjoying his company. “That sounds ominous,” I replied.
“It’s not,” he said, watching me over the cover of his book while pretending to read. “He finds amusement in a great many things, but one of his favorite pastimes is trying to spook a friend who also startles easily because she shifts forms when she does.”
I groaned. My sister had also found amusement in jumping out at me to make me scream. I already felt bad for this poor friend of theirs, probably afraid of what was around every corner like I had been growing up.
He dropped his left hand onto the bed with his palm up again, and I’m sure I had hearts in my eyes when I took the offering and placed my hand in his with a grin. He didn’t seem to emote much, but his eyes were sparkling, and even though his face was stoic he still seemed… happy. Which made me happy. His expressions were there, they were just incredibly subtle. A minute shift of an eyebrow, the slightest crinkling at the corner of his eyes, a so-faint-it-might-not-exist twitch of his lips. I drank up every understated expression like a parched woman. It was kind of pathetic really, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.
He reminded me that there was food waiting on the tray by the door if I wanted breakfast, but I wasn’t hungry yet, and didn’t want to risk breaking the spell of this comfortable bubble. We weren’t exactly cuddling, but holding hands in bed together andtalkingwas a win in my book.
“Can you tell me about the mark?” I asked, scanning the lines of it with my eyes and wanting to hear more of his voice. I reached with my other hand to touch it, but he held his breath, so I took my hand back. I was curious about the image that had bloomed on his arm, but I didn’t want to push him too much. When he’d bared it to me last night, it had reminded me how different it looked from mine. His skin had been perfect, smooth alabaster before the knife had marred it during our ritual, and now there were thin tendrils of black mist snaking their way into a shape like a half-dead tree. Mine didn’t look anything like that. It was just a white scar where my cut had been and a few dark lines beginning to spread out from the newly healed wound.
“Mm.” He looked down at his arm and twisted his wrist slightly, taking my hand with it as he watched the mark move along his skin. “It’s the Tree of Life. It imprints in our skin during the binding ritual to show that our magic has left us and given immortal life to another.”
“But why does it look half dead?” I asked. The trunk and the roots of the tree looked normal, but the canopy was split directly down the middle with leafy growth on one side and bare, skeletal limbs on the other. A large, thin, misty circle sat behind the trunk like a sun hanging low in the sky.
“Because I exist in both worlds.”
I shivered at his words, unable to imagine that.
“Are you cold?” he asked.
I shook my head, amused at his protective concern. “No. Will mine look like yours?” I asked, pulling my own arm up to study the unformed image.
“I believe so,” he murmured, staring at it with an odd mixture of curiosity and apprehension. “The pair that participate in the ritual always has matching marks as far as I know. It’s always a Tree of Life inside a setting sun, but the mark is unique to the couple. Our trees won’t perfectly match anyone else’s but each other’s.”
“I think that’s lovely,” I said, looking at the forming mark with a new kind of appreciation. I couldn’t feel it at all; it felt just like my normal skin. “How long will it take?” I glanced back up at him when he didn’t answer right away.
“I don’t know,” he said with a small shrug. “Everyone I know was married long before I was born, and I never thought to ask.”
I loved this. He was so fascinating to me, and though he was guarded, I didn’t think he was being particularly cagey on purpose. He just seemed… quiet. Like he spent a lot of time in his own mind but didn’t know how to articulate what he wanted to say. And perhaps, since we had forever, this was a gift. He was a puzzle I could tinker with for years and get to know a little at a time, treasuring each little kernel of himself that he shared with me instead of consuming him all at once.
“Do you have any other tattoos?” I asked, my eyes wandering over his soft-looking undershirt. I wondered if he would take it off to show them to me. Granted, I hadn’t noticed any when he’d been chopping wood the other day, but a girl could hope, right?
“Ah, no,” he replied, hunching into himself shyly, as if trying to hide from my eyes. “My skin would never take a traditional ink tattoo. I heal too fast. The pigments would metabolize within days, maybe hours.” He laid his book down beside me and practically oozed off the bed to get away from me while muttering something about getting breakfast.Perhaps I flew a bit too close to the sun that time, I thought as he piled tarts and fruit on a plate while looking hunted with his pink cheeks once again.
But Victor did make an effort to spend more time with me, even if he was a little skittish about being touched or having in depth conversations about himself. He showed me around the keep—there truly was only a hearth-kitchen at the bottom of the spooky stairwell and no dungeons to be found anywhere—and only disappeared once before taking me down to the library so I could pick out my own books.
Just a few moments after coming up from the kitchen, he’d stopped in his tracks, told me to stay where I was, created his shadow dog in the blink of an eye, and then pulled more shadows around himself and was gone. I was left staring at a black-furred hellhound made of nightmares and fangs, with a happily wagging tail and a dopey grin. I patted his head for less than a minute before he disappeared in a curl of smoke. A black line immediately split the air at the end of the hall. Purple light exploded out of the center in a circular ring, stopping just before it touched the ceiling or the walls, and Victor stood in the middle of it with an obsidian-colored staff in his hand even taller than he was. There was a lantern hanging from the top that emitted a soft blue light, and the black cloak he had begun to form around himself before flowed from his shoulders and flung shadowy tentacles out into the darkness behind him—some kind of rocky riverbank as far as I could tell. He stepped through the strange opening, and it collapsed into nothing behind him, disappearing as if it had never been there. I noted the snowflakes on the hood of his cloak and that his eyes had gone all white again. He approached until he was standing where he was before and stared down at me, blinking strangely with those solid white eyes. “Right,” he said, shaking himself off and dropping his hand to his side as the staff disappeared and his eyes began to clear of their white haze. “The library.” He nodded to himself and took a few steps before realizing I wasn’t with him and turning to see if I was coming.
“Where did the dog go?” I asked, still rooted to my place on the stone floor and trying to make sense of what had just happened.
He stared at me as if not comprehending what I was asking.
“The dog. You made the dog again, just now, and then it disappeared when you came back.” I pointed to the spot where the shadow dog had sat in front of me, probably looking entirely crazy, but I wasn’t and I knew it. He didn’t get to just do strange stuff and then pretend like it hadn’t happened.
“Yes,” he agreed. “I didn’t want to leave you without protection, but it’s faster to get back to you using a portal. When I step into the underworld to do that, my magic can’t reachthis worldbecause I’m not in it.”
I didn’t understand any of that except that the hole he had made was a portal from the underworld. And that he wanted to get back to me the fastest way. Why was that so cute? I flicked my wings before I caught myself and barely stopped from grinning.
His cloak of shadows was slowly disappearing from around him, ebbing away from the ground up so that it looked like thick black cloth draped over his shoulders that faded into murky looking shadows before vanishing altogether before it touched the ground. “Did you want me to make it again?” he asked, clearly puzzled. At least we were together in that.
“No, that’s okay.” But it was nice to know he could make it for me whenever I wanted. “Where do you go when you have to leave so suddenly?” I asked as I stepped up beside him and we started back toward the library. I trailed along beside him, taking two steps for his every one, and noticed the hitch in his step when his gaze swung to peer at me out of the corner of his eye. He did that a lot.
“Outside.” We stopped at the library door, and he gestured me inside like a gentleman. Now that it was daylight and there was sunshine filtering in through the high, arched windows, the room didn’t feel so eerie.
“And what were you doing outside?” I asked as he led the way to a back corner of the room, praying that he wouldn’t shut down and return to his silence.Talk to me.
“Removing vermin,” was all he said before bending down to the bottom of a row of shelves. “These are all of the books inSanrin,” he explained, referring to my native tongue as he gestured to the few lower shelves. He retrieved a large book—an encyclopedia of plant species in the dwarvish realms that had been translated intoSanrinfor some reason—and handed it to me. It looked ancient. “Most of the rest here are Common Tongue,” he said, “which you speak very well. Do you also read it?”
