“Lead on,” Wren said, his heart beating double as their entwined arms folded him closer still to Shrike’s warmth.
Shrike did so.
Their passage through the enchanted wood—Wren couldn’t conceive of it by any other description—was marked by silence. In contrast to the constant clatter and hum of London, the stillness of the wood was such that Wren could hear every fallen leaf shifting underfoot. The warbling notes of a thrush’s song echoed clear as church-bells. All the while, Shrike strode on, each step swift and sure. Wren’s eye continually wandered to his surroundings, but he always returned to Shrike’s face. And when he did, he often caught Shrike glancing admiringly at him in turn.
Wren could have happily spent an eternity strolling arm-in-arm with Shrike. But at length, their trail brought them to an apparent impasse. A wall of thorns rose up before them, high as a house and almost too thick for the sun’s rays to penetrate. Blackthorn trees had overgrown all other breeds. Here and there clusters of familiar purplish-black sloe berries belied the wicked points of the thorns surrounding them. Yet unlike the blackthorn bushes Wren had encountered in the mortal countryside, their leaves glistened burnt-black instead of green.
Shrike did not seem perturbed. Nor did it look as though he intended to alter their path by even a single step.
“How do we pass through the briars?” Wren asked.
Shrike gave him a bemused look. “I planted their seeds, tended their soil, and trained them up to grow into the shape they now hold. I know them, and they know me.”
Wren didn’t consider that much of an answer.
Until Shrike stepped forward and held out his hand—palm upraised, fingers relaxed, the way one might reach out to scratch the chin of a house-cat—and the briars withdrew like black lace curtains to reveal a flagstone path in the midst of the tree-roots blanketing the forest floor. The briars continued alongside it and overhead, forming a natural tunnel.
“Come,” said Shrike, who’d already stepped up the path a ways and turned to offer his arm to Wren again. “They’ll not harm you.”
Wren blinked out of his stunned stupor and hastened to follow him.
The path wound through the briars until they opened into a meadow. Sunshine filtering down through the canopy above glistened off the babbling brook that ran behind a half-timbered, thatch-roofed cottage. A flock of chickens in motley feathers pecked their way across the yard in front of their own thatch-roofed coop, between three skeps with bees buzzing ‘round. Flop-eared goats wandered amongst them, two chewing meditatively on the briars and one clambering atop the woodpile.
The walls of the cottage’s single storey curved into squat turrets, and its slender windows resembled arrow slits. Thorns and ivy mingled in their upward climb towards its round chimney. They covered the door so completely that at first Wren thought the flagstone path led up to a wall.
As Shrike approached the door, the thorns withdrew, though the ivy remained. He reached out his hand as the last tendril unwound itself from the latch—tarnished copper, Wren realized, rather than wrought iron.
The latch clicked. The door swung inward to reveal impenetrable shadows. Boot-heels thudded against flagstone as Wren followed Shrike inside.
The thing which first caught Wren’s eye was the enormous tree stump in the centre of the cottage. It ran as wide as Shrike was tall and had been cut off at the height of Shrike’s waist. Its axe-hewn edges bore the polish of many decades’ use. But what really drew Wren’s attention, aside from its size, was that it’d been hollowed out down to its roots and fitted with copper piping leading up to a pair of faucets at its rim.
Above the stump, bundles hung from the rafters beneath the thatched roof. Dried lavender, chamomile, garlic, and sundry other herbs Wren’ didn’t recognize dangled amidst stoneware jugs and copper kettle and cauldron. As his eye followed one particular beam down from the roof’s peak to the wall, he found sconces with beeswax candles over a broad hand-carved work-bench. Copper fastenings gleamed amidst sheets of vellum, scraps of leather, knives, chisels, needles, awls, ink-bottles, brushes, and wooden mallets. Several works-in-progress were laid out amongst the tools, but before Wren could move to examine them more closely, his eye fell upon a series of hooks along the wall. They had the shape of fish-hooks grown from thorns, and from them hung wool and linen garments alongside a padded tunic, an unstrung longbow and quiver, knives and short swords in tooled leather scabbards, and a cuirass, greaves, and bracers of boiled leather. Beside and beneath this open-air wardrobe lay a queer bed. Its round frame was woven from willow saplings to form a sort of enormous nest with a quilt of soft silver pelts.
A scraping sound tore Wren’s fascinated gaze away from the rest of the room. Shrike bent before a stone hearth, stirring the banked charcoal out of the ashes and breathing life back into the flames. Warm flickering firelight washed over the room. As it went, it revealed a broken loaf of bread and the crumbled remnants of a piece of cheese on a baking slab beside the hearth.
“Did you build all this?” Wren asked when Shrike rose and set the poker aside. “The cottage and the work-bench and—everything?”
“Aye,” Shrike replied. He sounded far from proud. Downright bashful.
Wren, who’d wrought nothing in his life with his own two hands, could hardly disguise the enthusiasm in his breathless exclamation. “Marvellous. Simply marvellous.”
A shy smile broke over Shrike’s handsome features. “You like it, then?”
“It’s wonderful,” Wren said.
For the first time in his life since his mother had passed, Wren felt as if he’d come home.
~
Chapter Eleven
It was foolish to get attached to a mortal. Such ran the common wisdom, at least. Their lives proved too fleeting for true affection. Dally with them, by all means, but do not pin your hopes on them, lest you spend eternity mourning the loss of a mere flickering flash of a life. Or worse, let your own grief drag you down into their grave. After all, what was a mere thirty, fifty, seventy years when compared to the centuries any fae may live?
Any fae save the Oak King, who would die on this solstice or the next.
Yet as Shrike watched the wonder and delight steal over Wren’s handsome face upon entering Blackthorn, he felt more certain than ever before that his attachment was well-placed.
Despite Shrike’s evident poverty—no fae or human servants, and all he owned crafted by his own hands or bartered by such craft thereby for articles made by those no better off than himself—Wren seemed in no way daunted. Far from it. His excitement sparked through the air as he examined all Shrike had wrought.
