“Have you eaten yet?”
Arthur shook his head. Ira pulled a fur from the pegs by the door and tossed it at him.
“Eat. Stew is in the icebox. Then put that on and come find me.”
“Come find—”
Ira had already stalked outside. Calyx scrambled off the armchair to follow.
Arthur lifted Freya onto the floor. “Not very chatty, is he?”
He ate the stew cold, straight from the icebox. Freya begged for bits of meat. Had they been home, he would’ve resisted the begging (or tried to), but the cat had to eat.
When they’d finished, he wrapped the fur around himself. It was thick and warm and smelled, faintly but surprisingly, of spring flowers. Arthur closed his eyes, breathing in the scent and trying to pretend he was home, on a bright May morning, hanging laundry with Charlotte. But there was the scent from the woodstove, too, and the sting on his cheek where the brambles had struck him. With a sigh, he headed outside.
Ira had left clawed pawprints, bordered on one side by odd drag marks that must have been made by his guardian. Arthur followed them.
Around the side of the house, Ira had returned to chopping wood. Despite the cold, he’d shed his furs and shirt. His backwas corded with muscle—and his shoulders were feathered. Glossy black feathers like those of a raven winged from shoulder to shoulder across his upper back.
Arthur inhaled sharply. The paws and antlers had been quite enough.
Calyx huddled at the base of a nearby tree, smaller than usual. It shuddered at each chop of the axe, tendrils sliding over itself as if shielding nonexistent ears.
Wiping his brow, Ira turned and threw down the axe. The feathers were less noticeable from the front, barely rounding the tops of his shoulders. Instead, Arthur was confronted with his chest and the trail of fine, dark hair running down his stomach and into his trousers. The sight threatened to do funny things to him, like make him blush for unclear reasons. Arthur tended not to give his own body much thought—although he knew the village girls didn’t find him much to look at—but suddenly he was more conscious than usual of his love handles, his hairy chest and belly. Ira was so lean and muscular.
With the axe no longer working, Calyx relaxed, its vines and tendrils loosening.
“Sorry,” Ira grunted. “Thought I’d get a little more done before you got out here. How’s the fur?”
Missing,Arthur thought in a panic, averting his gaze from Ira’s chest.
“Fine.” His throat was dry. How odd. “Er, I mean, much warmer than my coat in all this snow, thank you.”
Ira nodded, turning away. To Arthur’s relief, he shrugged his shirt back on, redid the toggles, and pulled on his furs.
“This way.”
Arthur left a good distance between himself and Ira. Every time he strayed too close, Calyx grew, clicking at him.
The snow curved around behind the house, where bare winter trees closed in. Before them stood a half-buried hunkof rock like a single headstone. Rather than a name or dates orin remembrance ofor any of the usual things, it was carved with an image of yarrow in bloom.
Despite the frigid air, woodland flowers grew in a slab before the stone. Arthur recognized some of them. Five-petaled yellow flowers on a small shrub. Star-shaped blooms giving off a strong scent of garlic. Frothy white ones Arthur was certain Charlotte kept in stock in her medical kit as a matter of course. Good for pain, he thought, but he couldn’t remember their name. Not heal-all, although he saw that, too, with its tiny, two-lipped purple flowers. Similar blossoms in blue—or perhaps that was heal-all, and the purple ones were something else.
Mints, Arthur thought. He’d never get the hang of mints.
He bent and touched the leaves of the nearest mint, whichever kind it was, confused by this garden blossoming in the middle of the snow. “What is this?”
Ira gave a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Your father.”
He kicked at the snow. Calyx wrapped a single tendril around his leg, but he shook it off.
“The ground wasn’t so hard back then. Otherwise I couldn’t have given him a proper burial.”
It took several moments for Arthur to understand. His father’s headstone. His father’s grave. Of course the Throckmorton-Prentices had grieved him, but thirty years of grieving a man who had vanished was different than being presented with his resting place.
Arthur touched the top of the headstone. His eyes stung with tears, but the cold air threatened to freeze them. He swallowed.
He didn’t know what to say, but thinking of his father, he laughed wetly. Seacliff had found George so high-and-mighty when he’d returned from Port Lorne, because learning healing from the likes of them had been (as they thought) beneathhim. Because, while he’d respected their superstitions, he hadn’t believed them.
