A breathless laugh escaped Shrike. “That she is, indeed.”
“How did she pass through the briars?”
“She is a friend and ally, and so the briars part for her. Just as they part for you.”
“They part for me?” Wren echoed. All this time he’d assumed he gained passage through them due to Shrike’s presence alongside him.
Shrike looked almost as bewildered as Wren felt. “Of course.”
“Oh.” Warmth suffused Wren’s heart and rose in his cheeks. He cleared his throat. “So it isn’t just anyone who might wander through the mushroom ring and find us.”
“No,” said Shrike.
Uneasiness came over Wren. “Though Felix did follow us on the Winter Solstice…”
“Not to Blackthorn,” said Shrike.
Wren fought to keep his rising panic at the notion out of his tone. “But if he did—”
“He cannot,” Shrike interrupted him gently.
“Yes, the briars, I understand,” Wren admitted with impatience. “But he need not follow us so far as to the cottage to know where we go and to surmise what we do. It’s only a stone’s throw from the well, after all.”
“No it isn’t.”
Wren stared at him in frank disbelief. “We walked it ourselves not an hour hence.”
“If you know the way to Blackthorn,” said Shrike, “then the path is very short. If you don’t know the way to Blackthorn, then the path is very long.”
Wren continued staring as he pondered this riddle. “It’s magic, then?”
“Enchanted, aye.”
In retrospect, Wren supposed he ought to have supposed it himself. “So when you say hecannotfollow us, you are speaking literally.”
“Aye,” said Shrike, with evident relief that Wren had understood him at last. “We would vanish into the woods before his eyes the moment we left the Grove of Gates.”
Wren filed away this information with far more interest than he’d ever filed accounts for Mr Grigsby. “Then, if none but friends may enter Blackthorn, why did you draw your sword when you found someone already in the cottage?”
To Wren’s surprise, Shrike appeared chastened by the question. He glanced away and hesitated, the silence broken only by the slight clink of his sword in its scabbard as his fingers played upon the pommel. When he met Wren’s gaze again, the fathomless depths of his dark eyes shone soft with reverence. In a much-abashed tone, he replied, “I have far more to lose now than ever I had before.”
To be wanted was one thing. To be cherished and defended was another. To be loved… Wren dared not think so far as that. But nevertheless his heart sang with the knowledge that Shrike considered him worthy of protection, and that the loss of Wren would pain Shrike as much as the loss of Shrike would pain Wren.
No words seemed sufficient to express even a fraction of what Wren felt. As such, he abandoned language entirely. Instead he reached out his hand to Shrike’s scarred cheek, turning his face so he might capture his mouth in a kiss.
Shrike’s fervour for defending Wren was well-matched by the passion with which he returned the kiss as Wren guided them both toward the bed.
~
The next morning, Sunday, dawned bright and clear. Frost crept across the narrow window-panes in delicate spirals and Wren’s breath left his lips in plumes of vapour. Shrike rolled out of bed and stirred the hearth-fire out of the ashes. Then he returned to warm Wren with his embrace. Wren drifted off again.
A gentle repetitive tapping roused him a second time. He blinked his eyes open to find Shrike had vanished from the still-warm hollow beside him, and the sunbeams had travelled across the bed-furs to his face. It was still morning, according to his pocket-watch laid out atop his neatly folded clothes. And the tapping sound, he discovered as he glanced over the cottage to find where Shrike had gone, came from Shrike himself, bent over his work-bench as he plied a wooden mallet and bronze spike to leather.
Wren wrapped himself in a pelt moreso for warmth than for modesty and wandered over. As he approached, Shrike turned his head over his shoulder to regard him—Wren supposed his footsteps must sound as loud as galloping hooves to fae ears— and shot him a smile so handsome and gentle that Wren could hardly do otherwise than bend to kiss it.
“Masks for Ostara?” Wren murmured when the kiss broke at last, peering over Shrike’s shoulder at the leather laid out before him.
“Aye.” Shrike idly picked up a particular scrap of leather cut in the swooping webs of a bat’s wing and began worrying it betwixt his thumb and forefinger. The spike lying atop its fellows, Wren now realized, had a broad rounded end, which when hammered into the leather created a thin burnished surface to stretch between the long and slender lines that marked the bat’s bones. Several bat-wings already lay across the bench. Many more than a single bat would require. “For Nell.”
