“Don’t I?” he said drily.
“You can have anything, anyone you want. You can literally snap your fingers andhaveit, when you’re out of this forest. You have no idea what it is like to be someone like me—none! You and your sisters think of us as servants, as crops to be harvested at your convenience.” He had listened to me with his eyes turned down a little, allowing me to have my rant without interruption. He raised them to my face now.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
That took the wind out of my sails. “What?”
“You are right about us. That we treat you like things and not people. It is what we were made to do. And you are right that we shouldn’t exist. If it helps, we had no say in it.”
“I know that,” I said unwillingly.
“But you are wrong about some things too,” he continued. “I do not think you are ugly. I do not know what you mean by that. I must see things differently from you, I think. Perhaps it is because I am not quite human, as you have said. I don’t see the incredible beauty that you describe in me and my sisters, because I can also see the wrongness in us that you have talked about.”
He paused and stared at the fire, before looking back at me. “I see it in myself like a sickness, moving under the skin. And I see the rightness in you. You belong in the world, Foss. You are right to take up space in it, and move through it, and leave your mark on it. There is nothing about you that should be other than it is.”
I was flabbergasted. This was the longest speech I had ever heard from him concerning me—or anything.
“I don’t understand what beauty is for you; but perhaps you can believe me when I say thatrightness, that is beauty for me.”
I didn’t know what to say. No one had ever spoken to me like this, nothing near it. I couldn’t believe that the sorcerer looked at me and saw something different from everybody else. And I could not believe the way he was looking at me now.
Neither of us was under a spell, for the moment, and we were in firelight, and his eyes glowed with ghostly light. I wondered if I was dreaming. It was so like dreams I had back at the House when I had been fully in his thrall and longing for him to enter my bedchamber at night.
“Am I dreaming?” I asked, just to clear it up.
“No,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“As sure as anyone can be about someone else’s dream.”
When he reached for me, I had to fight the urge to make a joke or say something about how much of a mess I was, or how marked the contrast was between his smooth white hand and the redness of my cheek as he rested his palm against it.
It took all of my strength to swallow the words and let him touch me without comment. He looked at me as if my face was wine, and he were thirst.
I could not meet his gaze, not even when he placed that same smooth hand beneath my chin and tipped my mouth up to meet his.
His mouth was warm and soft, and tasted of magic: metal and spice. We bumped teeth for a moment before we found our rhythm, and I felt his smile against mine.
One of my hands gripped the grass at my side, while the other snaked into the waves of his black hair, smooth and lithe as water, just as I had imagined them, and his into my red locks, and I felt them tingle against my scalp.
Everything about me awoke. The woodsmoke was at once sharper, a blue-tinged scent, and the earth under my fist became as rough and sweet as sugar against my skin.
He pushed the stubborn curls back from my forehead and tucked them behind my ears, all without ceasing to kiss me, and I let my plump, work-roughened hands move over his skin also.
We clung together for a long time before we parted, and when we did, I felt the loss of his body against mine like a death. I would have died right on the spot, I think, had he not immediately taken my hands again and moved them to the buttons of my dress, showing me what he wanted.
I undressed myself, slowly, and with reluctance, peeling the layers off like you’d pick the skin off a stubborn orange. I was not accustomed to being naked, nor did I find it comfortable. When it was absolutely necessary, I did it as quickly as possible, leaping in and out of the bathtub as swiftly as I could and looking at as little of myself as I could possibly manage.
Occasionally I would glare at my knees, rising to the surface of the bath like two potatoes bobbing in a pot, or at my hands, red and stinging as I washed them free of the butchering blood, but for the most part, I avoided seeing any part of what I bound into place with buttons and belts every morning.
I had certainly never undressed before anyone else, as I was doing now. I felt like a babe learning about laces and fastenings for the first time—my fingers fumbled and slipped, until he put his hands over mine, gently, and stopped them.
I thought for a moment that he was stopping me altogether, I and flushed with shame—had I read it all wrong? Was the spell on me again, somehow, clouding my judgment?—but he took over the undoing for me, carefully taking apart all the fastenings of my clothing, his fingers working with grace and even reverence, as if he were undressing a goddess rather than my lumpen self.
Under his fingers, I felt myself softening and opening, forgetting my embarrassment as my body sprang to life everywhere he touched.
When he unwrapped himself from his makeshift garment and was fully naked, I could barely look at him for the beauty of it—his narrow hips, the length of his thighs, as smooth as if someone had carved them from cold butter.
