Ira leaned against a silver sapling with a grimace.
“Used too much energy getting here. Harder to grow things from nothing when I’m injured anyway.” He stroked the sapling’s trunk and spoke to it. “Could you...?”
The sapling quivered. The silver trunk shivered and melted, reforming into a mass of low-hanging branches that wove through each other until they’d formed a little bench. When it wasn’t trying to kill him, Arthur thought, the forest’s magic was really something. Perhaps Ira didn’t consider ithispower the way growing something from nothing was, but Arthur doubted a tree would’ve helpfully made a seat that way at his own request.
“Thanks,” Ira said to the sapling. Its upper branches dipped as if in a bow.
Ira offered a hand like he thought Arthur might slap it away. Arthur took it gratefully and sat on the silver bench.
“You can sit, too,” he said. “If you want. I don’t mind.”
Ira bit his lip but joined him. The bench was so small their thighs and shoulders bumped together.
They gazed through the haze of slender silver trunks around them. Ira clenched the bench’s edge, leg bouncing like he was anxious. Not the way he so often was, his fear masked as anger, but the way Arthur usually was. It reminded Arthur how scared he’d been throughout their time together—and how badly Arthur had handled it the last time they’d seen each other.
He touched Ira’s thigh. The bouncing stopped.
“Listen,” Arthur said softly, “I’m sorry for getting so mad at you.”
Ira’s brow furrowed, but he said nothing as Arthur squeezed his thigh and let go.
“You were scared,” Arthur continued, “and I knew you were scared, and I should’ve—I don’t know—let you be scared for a bit, or kept trying to calm you down, or, well, I shouldn’t’ve gone off on you like I did.”
Ira hesitated.
“I needed to hear it,” he said. “And I don’t know that you could’ve calmed me down. I think I needed time away. I just wish I hadn’t left you undefended to get it.”
Arthur’s expression softened, but Ira looked away like he couldn’t bear it. His leg started bouncing again.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a low voice. “For everything. Even before—in the vale—every time I was scared, I lashed out at you.”
He hunched, dragging paw-like hands through his bedraggled hair. Before he could think about it, Arthur tucked the loose strands behind a cervine ear. The ear twitched toward him.
“The longer we spent together,” Ira continued, “the more I felt like a person. But then the forest took me over, and it felt like the Lord of the Wood was all I was or ever could be. I was so scared, Arthur, I was so afraid of hurting you—but I hurt you anyway, saying what I did.”
“You were right, though.”
Ira glanced at him. “No.”
“Yes.” Arthur smiled bitterly. “Everything you said about me—it was true. I’ve always been too scared to change my own life. This is the first time I’ve ever really tried to do something. To see things through.”
“I don’t think that’s true.” Ira reached for his hand, fingers curling uncertainly around Arthur’s. “Charlotte told me how you cared for her, growing up. How you asked that woman if you could repair clocks for her, even though you were afraid to knock on her door.”
Arthur opened his mouth but closed it again without speaking. Hehadbeen afraid, knocking on the Livingstons’ door that first time, twelve years old, with Charlotte’s small hand in his—but he’d done it anyway. Because someone had needed to put food on the table. Because Charlotte had been a child and needed looking after.
He glanced back through the trees, where she sat by the fire with Calyx, telling the children a bedtime story. His eyes stung. She’d been taking care of him far longer and better than he’d ever taken care of her. She’d come into the wood for him.
At last he said softly, “I’ve never thought of it that way.”
Ira gave a tentative smile. “I could tell. You’re more than you think you are, Arthur. You did what you had to for Charlotte then, and you’ve done what you could for me since the moment we met.”
Arthur’s throat was thick with things he didn’t know how to say.When you came, it felt like spring, he remembered Ira saying.Like you woke me up. Arthur felt like he’d been awoken instead, like Ira hadunlocked doors and solved riddles that had been a mystery all his life.
Angling toward Ira, Arthur looped his arms around his neck. Ira’s breath hitched.
“I’m glad you came back,” Arthur whispered.
Ira’s eyes flickered over his face. “I had to.”
