Page 41 of The Trick of It

Seph had been awake for some time, but she was still abed. She hadn’t moved much at all, since blinking out of her slumber, but to breathe a little deeper and lick the dryness from her lips. It was a bright morning. Cloudless, she wagered, based on the glare through the thin curtains of the inn room and the cheerful chirp of birds and passersby beyond the pane.

She hadn’t moved because she knew what she’d find once she did, and she was not yet sure she could face it. She was not yet sure she could reconcile that everything that had passed yesterday had been real and true.

And that she’d spent the night, the entire night, next to Rhys Caradoc.

“This place,” Merlin had said, soft and sincere in the embrace of midnight. “This ruin of pain and progress.”

They had been standing in what had once been a monastery. It had been a haven for the devout. And a king’s whims had crushed it into its own sacred soil.

She shivered, the arches and rounded plinths of the toppled stones swimming up in her mind, haloed in the dark. Walls with the spaces for doors and windows, with stone but no shelter to offer, had meandered endlessly into the night.

Perhaps the veil was thin there.

Perhaps that was true.

She pressed her lips together and gave herself a little shake to remind herself of sense. She rolled over, prepared to find her bunkmate gone. Or waiting, a mocking smile already on his face.

Instead, he was still sound asleep, curled on his side with his knees nearly brushing his chest and his arms wrapped tightly around the pillow against his cheek, as though it were keeping him afloat in the sea of his own dreams.

Somehow, that was worse.

She was able to study him this way, without his constant movement. Without observation. She could count the faint freckles on his nose, could see the shade of stubble on his jaw, could marvel at the perfect ringlets of brown hair that rested on his brow.

“I’m just not partial to blondes, Seph,” he’d said to her once, when they’d been young. When she’d asked him if he thought she was pretty, if her new costume was attractive. “Hard for me to judge you like that, considering.”

She bit the inside of her cheek.

They had been friends once. Good friends.

And it felt, after yesterday, like they could be again. Maybe they could. If she kept her head on straight this time. If she believed him when he told her she wasn’t a woman to him, not in the way she’d wanted, then it was possible.

She had thought, for just a moment yesterday … when he’d bought her the birds. But no, he bought gifts for his siblings too. It was just who he was. Rhys treated her like he treated the Starlings.

Like a sister.

“Blonde girls like you,” he’d said to her another day, another morning, before it all had fallen apart. “Remind me of princesses in old stories. Doesn’t heat the blood, you know?”

It might have been all right. She might have learned to accept it, if she hadn’t walked into that tent on the day of their last performance.

If she hadn’t seen what she’d seen.

She didn’t sigh.

But he woke up, anyway. The long, dark lashes that were resting on his cheeks fluttered open, followed by the heels of his hands over them, and then bright-green irises, meeting her own, dimmer pair across the room.

“Morning,” she said, her voice dry in her throat. “Sleep well?”

“Slept cold,” he replied, stifling a little yawn and then flashing her a drowsy smile. “But I slept. You?”

“No complaints,” she said softly, still bundled up to her chin under the coverlet. “It sounds like Mr. Cagney is awake as well,” she noted, nodding toward the door, which was no longer vibrating with the echo of snores.

It made Rhys release a little snicker, dragging his hands over his hair and pushing himself up to sit, his dark-green pajamas crooked over his lean torso. “Errol told me he snored,” he admitted, craning his neck side to side and rolling his shoulders. “That was all he said. ‘Da snores.’ Understatement should be a crime.”

“We should go down and eat,” she said, watching how he moved, hopping out of sleep like a cat, somehow both languid and alert as he stood and stretched once more, arms high over his body. “I’m actually starving.”

“Ah, right,” he said, blinking down at the nest of blankets at his feet, his arms slowly folding back down to his sides. “I need to take all this back where it belongs.”

She frowned. “Check the hall before you go out,” she told him. “I don’t wish to foster a bunch of nasty suspicions.”