Ira dabbed blood from Arthur’s forehead. Arthur studied him. The scar over his left eye. The long, dark lashes. The curve of his nose, lips, and chin. The gentle expression he wore, though he’d been so angry to find Arthur in his home in the first place.
Ira’s eyes met Arthur’s. Arthur flushed. Eye contact felt too intimate at the best of times. Far more so now, when the Lord of the Wood was inches away, tending his wound, and it didn’t matter that the left eye was milky and unseeing. But he couldn’t turn away as Ira’s gaze flickered over him.
“I see him in you,” Ira said. “George. You have kind eyes like he did.”
Arthur’s skin prickled. No one had ever said they’d seen George in him, except occasionally his mother when she was trying to make him feel better about himself. Now someone had, he felt his father had been keeping secrets. Like the rowan cross in Arthur’s pocket that Charlotte had found in their father’s things.
Arthur’s hand clenched in the cat’s fur. “What was he to you?”
“He was my friend.”
Looking away, Ira opened his hand. Arthur was both relieved and disappointed to no longer endure the Lord of the Wood’s gaze, but he didn’t think about it long: A single leaf grew from Ira’s palm.
Arthur’s breath hitched, but Ira plucked the leaf and smoothed it over his forehead like a gauze pad as if it had been nothing.
“He talked about you all the time,” he continued. “You and your sister. How tall you’d gotten. The latest trouble you’d been into.”
His eyes flashed once more across Arthur’s face. Arthur reddened. The only trouble he’d ever gotten up to was being pushed around by the other boys. Nothing to have made him seem bold and intrepid.
“He was terribly proud of you both,” Ira said, and Arthur couldn’t take it anymore.
“He always told us he just met you once.”
His voice rang in sudden silence. Calyx clicked ominously, but Arthur hardly noticed.
Ira’s brow furrowed. Swallowing, Arthur lowered his voice.
“He said you saved his life, and he never saw you again.”
Ira’s hand lingered on Arthur’s forehead. Freya swatted at his fingers. Calyx surged up from its spot by the stove, but Ira smacked the tendril that reached for the cat. The plant creature curled up with an angry rustle.
“Would you like to see?” Ira asked.
“See?”
Ira reached for the silver basin hanging from the branches overhead. He filled it with water from a pitcher and handed it to Arthur. Nudging the cat from his lap, Arthur placed the basin there instead.
It was shallow, of dimpled silver, with a leather strap at one end. Arthur’s reflection peered up at him.
Ira plucked a strand of long, dark hair from his own head and dropped it into the water.
The basin glowed; the water rippled. When the ripples stilled, Arthur was looking at his father.
He was younger than Arthur had ever seen him, with thick black hair kept longer than he’d worn it in later years. He sat leaning against a tree, shivering, his skin ashen with illness.
A stag approached. Larger than most red deer, with a glorious golden mane and antlers twined in autumn leaves. The Lord of the Wood. Ira.
The air shivered around him, and he was a man—but different than he was now. No antlers grew from his head; his boot-shod feet were human rather than canine. His eye was unscarred, his leg untwisted. He crouched beside George and felt his forehead, giving a small, reassuring smile when George’s brown eyes cracked open, fever bright.
The image shifted. George Throckmorton was well, his color better, eyes no longer glazed with sickness. He sat in an armchair—the same armchair Arthur sat in now, Arthur realized with a jolt—drinking from a mug and laughing. His laughter echoed, shivering through Arthur. He’d never thought he’d hear his father’s laugh again.
Ira sat across from him, also laughing, and perhaps that was even more surprising than the way he’d transformed from stag to man. He rose to refill George’s mug.
Arthur’s heart thumped painfully. “I don’t understand. How...?”
A new image. George and Ira hiking the forest together. Trees turning gold and crimson bent as if in greeting. A hare rabbited across the path, whole and healthy. Not one tree dripped ooze. Birds sang in the branches; none was translucent or veined with black.
Pausing, George pointed at fleshy, pinkish fungi growing out of reach on an elder.
