The corner of Ira’s mouth turned up. “As long as you have the acorn, you can find your way through the forest.”
He doubled over. Freya twined around his legs, mewling.
“Ira?”
Ira breathed hard through his nose, straightening slowly. “M’all right. The tarnish.”
His jaw tightened with pain. Moss spread across his face.
“It’s growing back.” As Arthur watched, white flowers burst into bloom in Ira’s hair. Moss crept down his throat and toward his collarbone. “It’s growing faster.”
Ira shrugged, but a muscle tightened in his neck, from the pain or the growth Arthur didn’t know. “It’ll get worse the farther we go.”
Arthur lurched closer, scraping moss away with his fingers. Freya scrambled out from underfoot.
“How can you be so calm about it?”
Ira flinched and placed a clawed hand over Arthur’s, stilling his frantic scraping.
“We’re two days from the heart of the wood, and with the detour, we’re almost as far from the vale, too. I’m sunk no matter what we do. It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me. Surely there’s some way to...”
Arthur’s fist clenched tight around the acorn. Something so small, yet it could save the whole forest if only they brought it to the place it had come from.
“I wonder...” He unfastened the chain. “May I?”
“It’s the only thing protecting you.”
Arthur gave a small smile. “I thought you were doing that.”
Ira bit his lip but nodded. Arthur fastened the chain around Ira’s neck, fingertips brushing against his skin.
The moss stopped growing. Ira’s jaw relaxed. He ran a hand over his face with a sigh.
Letting out a breath, Arthur smiled. “It worked.”
Ira’s brow creased. Arthur didn’t understand why; surely he ought to have been happy, or relieved.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I just...”
Ira’s gaze roved over Arthur’s face, up to his eyes, down to his mouth, in a way that made Arthur’s stomach swoop. He touched the hollow of Arthur’s throat, fingers curled to keep his claws away. Arthur shivered pleasantly.
He wondered whether Ira felt the things he did. The things he thought he did. It was so much like the things the heroines in his books felt for the strange, exciting men who rescuedthemfrom danger, but he wasn’t sure he was meant to feel this way about another man. He’d never known it to be like this, either in books or real life, could remember nothing like it in any story his father had ever told or any romance he’d ever read.
He touched Ira’s cheek with a finger, thinking again of the old fisherman and his friend. In three decades, he’d never wondered what had become of them.
Now he wondered a great deal. About himself. About things about which he’d never thought to wonder, because he’d thought his parents and his novels had taught him everything he needed to know about the way love was supposed to be.
Arthur traced a finger along Ira’s scar, down his cheek, to his jaw. Eyes fluttering closed, Ira slipped a hand through Arthur’s hair to the back of his neck, drawing him closer until their foreheads rested against each other. Until they shared the same air.
“Arthur,” he breathed.
His breath was warm in Arthur’s face, sweet with the scent of flowers. Arthur was seized with a wild urge to kiss him.
Mrs. Young’s muttered words sounded in his head. He pictured the expressions on the faces of the other men as he and Cormac drove through Seacliff together. Cormac stiffening beside him, creating space so their thighs no longer touched.
