She took a steadying breath and tried to focus on the stranger’s voice and not the muffled sound of Jude crying into his clasped hands.
‘We’re sending you somewhere you will be safe,’ they said, voice softening. Though the voice was still strange in its anonymity, the cadence reminded Maeve of the interactions she’d had with the nurses at the Abbey any time she felt unwell. Straightforward, yet still caring. Was that who was on the other side of the door?
‘You won’t hurt anyone ever again. Is that not what you want?’ the stranger asked.
‘The Goddenwood?’ Jude choked out. His eyes were fever bright with a sudden dash of hope.
‘No…’ they replied, slow and careful. ‘Not there. Somewhere else.’
Jude’s lower lip trembled. He scrubbed his eye with the back of his fist. The slender slice of his wrist she could see was wrapped in a bandage, blood seeping through the edges. Hardening the soft lines of his face seemed to take effort. It was the same stubbornness Maeve saw in the present Jude. ‘I don’t want to hurt anyone. Inever—’
‘Shh,’ the voice soothed. ‘All that matters is that it doesn’t happen again.’
‘Is… all right?’ Jude asked. The space a name would fall came through as a buzz.
Silence hung in the air. Jude stared blankly forward as he waited, fingers drumming on his thighs. ‘Time will tell. What matters is there isn’t a repeat performance.’ Another pause, this one longer. Then ‘… is missing. But you knew that, didn’t you?’
A strange buzz obscured the name. Did Jude not remember that, either? Maeve studied him, cataloguing the way he flinched at the missing name. Why would he have forgotten such a fundamental detail?
‘Okay,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll go.’
A light tap on the door, like the stranger wanted to convey their approval. ‘You’ve made the right choice.’
As the memory faded, she caught the tail end of Jude’s expression as he listened to the footsteps leaving his door. The young lines of his face, both familiar and not, shifted from heartbreak to anger to resignation, settling there. He scraped both hands over his head, pulling at the hair around his temples until long strands released into his fingers. The other hand rose to his mouth, forming a fist.
Maeve came back to herself with a gasp.
She was lying flat on her back on the floor of the library. Gold dust shimmered in the air, casting the room in a sense of unreality. Jude’s stifled whimpers still rang in her eardrums as warmth ran from her eye to slide down her jaw. She didn’t know how she could face him again after what she’d just viewed, knowing she’d see the echo of his boyhood self, broken and pleading. Her heart rattled unsteadily at the thought of it.
Suddenly, the soft pad of footsteps sounded from the corner of the room.
Maeve shoved to her feet, heart pounding a dangerous rhythmas she turned towards the door, already knowing who she’d see watching her.
And there he was: Jude, bandages and a jar of poultice in his hands. Eyes fixed firmly on the book open beside her feet.
15
Jude
The scent had been the first sign something was amiss. He recognized its sharpness: a candle freshly blown out, a hearth fire left to smoulder. But the power behind it wasn’t its own. The edges were unfamiliar.
It hadn’t taken him long to realize his key was missing once he’d pulled off his muddied jumper and slid on a fresh pair of trousers to tide him over until he could bathe, the bandages and poultice for Maeve’s injury already in hand, her bath filling just down the hall. She must have slipped it from his neck while he’d been waist-deep in the bog.
He had been desperate and vulnerable, and she had stolen from him.
Jude drifted down the stairs in a half-conscious daze, knowing,dreading, what he’d find once he arrived, only to have his worst nightmares confirmed. Maeve, in his library. His book, open beside her. His memories, laid bare for her viewing.
The only sound was his heart beating in his ears and her rough, panting breaths. His attention skated between the part of her lips and the flush settling high on her cheekbones. The hem of her muddied skirt, faded blue and white checkered gingham today, opaque throughout, stirred up a cloud of gold.
Distantly, he recognized the screaming cry of violation battering against his walls. He should be shouting, raging at her for the egregious misstep of breaking into his private space, butinstead, Jude was calm. Coldness swept over every still-smoking coal as he stepped towards her.
‘Jude,’ Maeve begged, holding out her hands as if to ward him back. ‘I’m sorry. Please, I didn’t know. I didn’t realize—’
He reached forward with both hands, fingers curling around her wrists.
His magic sighed in relief.
It breathed in, then clamped down.
