“May I?” Wren asked, moving toward the work-bench.
Shrike granted him leave to examine it as he willed. Still, whenever Wren reached for a particular piece, he turned to Shrike again and waited for his nod before he picked up each with a delicate hand. Scores of oak leaves cut from leather lay scattered across the bench as if they’d fallen from the forest surrounding Blackthorn. Some joined together to adorn a pair of boiled leather pauldrons.
“For the Solstice?” Wren asked.
Shrike nodded.
Wren set them aside. His gaze fell on the other work in progress on the bench. Shrike held his breath as Wren lifted the palm-sized book, shrouded in a cover of soft suede that tapered off far beyond the borders of its pages to end in a stout knot. A smile wonderful to behold stole across Wren’s speckled lips as he examined it.
“By Jove,” Wren murmured, turning the blank pages with a gentle touch. “Is this vellum?”
“Aye,” Shrike admitted, still somewhat stunned by his reaction. “I’ve not yet mastered wasp-work.”
This confession did nothing to damper Wren’s enthusiasm. “It’s magnificent. I’ve never seen its like.”
An unbidden smile came to Shrike’s lips. “High praise from one of your talent.”
This seemed to take Wren by surprise. “You flatter me.”
“You forget I’ve held your work in my own hands. I know what praise it’s worth.”
Not the prettiest speech—Shrike didn’t have a talent for pretty speeches—yet, judging by the roses that bloomed beneath Wren’s freckles, it pleased him all the same.
“If that’s so,” said Wren, “then perhaps you’ll consent to sit for a portrait?”
Shrike stared at him in frank amazement.
The rosy tinge in Wren’s cheeks bloomed further. He fumbled for the clasp of his satchel and brought out a codex not unlike the manuscripts Shrike had found in his chamber in Staple Inn. Words tumbled from his tongue as he flipped through its pages. “That is to say, I brought my sketch-book and pencils to try and capture the imagery of the fae realms—I anticipated beauty, but this has surpassed all my wildest notions—and, with your permission, I would like to preserve your likeness as well. I’ve tried already from memory, but—”
Wren thrust the open sketch-book at Shrike, who received it with reverence. Ink covered the pages like ivy creeping over a ruined castle and overwhelming its rigid stone with verdant growth. A dark figure shrouded in mystery appeared again and again. Here standing vigil beneath the shadow of colossal Achilles in Hyde Park, and with a frame comparing favourably against that mythic hero. There hunched over the corner table in the Green Man with a coffee cup before him and his eyes verily glowing beneath his hood. And there, perched on the window-sill of Wren’s garret, long limbs bent sharp with lithe agility, a hawk-nosed profile with hair rendered in streams of ink that poured down to become a border of thorns across the bottom of the page. With astonishment, Shrike recognized himself many times over.
“I wanted to have something to remember you by until we might meet again,” Wren continued. “After all, Felix carries a miniature of Miss Flora, even though they might visit each other whenever the whim strikes him.”
“Aye,” said Shrike, as if he’d ever heard of either person before and wasn’t mesmerized by the depth of craft bent to capturing his own image.
“There’s very little between Oxford and Rochester besides—what?” said Wren, glancing up at Shrike.
Shrike couldn’t help smiling as he replied, “If you think me a worthy subject, then I’m honoured to appear in your pages.”
“Oh.” A shy answering smile alighted on Wren’s bespeckled mouth. “Then—might we venture out-of-doors?”
The meadow surrounding the cottage seemed to impress Wren no less than the cottage itself had. His approving gaze fell in turn on the coop, the skeps, and the goats’ shed. Even the garden delighted him, hidden as it was behind the cottage and fenced in with the same briars that protected all of Blackthorn. This late in the season, only turnips, beets, and fennel remained to be harvested. The scanty offerings did nothing to deter the goats in their efforts to reach the vegetables within.
“Are you not worried they’ll gnaw through it?” Wren asked as he watched the goats crunch away at the thorns.
Shrike shook his head. “All they eat today will have grown back by tomorrow morn.”
After looking over the whole of the yard, with particular attention to how the shafts of sunlight fell through the forest canopy above, Wren asked Shrike to assume a pose on the flat slab of worn boulder beside the waterfall where the stream passed through the wall of thorns into the brugh.
“However you feel most comfortable,” Wren added, seeming to feel he owed Shrike some explanation for his direction. “You’ll be sitting still for a long while, I fear.”
Shrike, who had many a time stood motionless in the fork of a tree from dusk until dawn waiting for a particular hart to wander within range of his bow, doubted very much that anything Wren could ask of him in that regard would prove beyond his power to achieve. He sat on the rock in the same manner he’d sat on Wren’s bed when he’d visited his garret. At Wren’s gentle suggestion, he turned his face towards the stream and sunlight. Wren took up his own position some yards away from him across the stream. Fixing his eye on Shrike, he braced his sketch-book against his hip and began sketching in pencil.
The goats found all of this very interesting. Hawise, the fawn-coloured doe, left off gnawing the garden brambles to see if Shrike had tasty morsels to offer. Her kids, Meggy and Molle, ran to join her and discovered Shrike’s seated pose made for a splendid climbing obstacle. The piebald doe, Etheldreda, wandered over to Wren and began investigating his pockets.
“No, no, nothing for you, I’m afraid,” Wren told her, all politeness, before Shrike called her away. Turning to Shrike, he asked, “Are you all right over there?”
“Aye,” Shrike answered—just as Molle used his shoulder as a spring-board to leap across the stream.
