Before Briar could answer, a knock came at the door. His brow scrunched. It was too late to be a prospective customer wondering over the state of their commission.
Linden said, “Do you get many night callers?”
“No.”
“Shall I get it, then?”
“No, stay here.”
The wood under Briar’s bare feet was frigid, the squeaky stair creaking more quietly than usual. Outside, the wind whistled with streams of snow, and in the crescent moon window of his door, he could see a familiar shape.
Briar opened the door. Rowan stood there, as he had on so many days and nights past, but he looked very different. His face was open and scared. Wind and snow mussed his hair, and he breathed as though he’d run there. He had his hands in his pockets and pulled one out in a fist.
“Briar,” he said. “I’ve come to tell you something. And it might not come out right or make sense, but I have to tell you. If you’ll listen.”
Briar heard himself say “of course,” as if from far away. Internally, denial wrestled with intuition. There were few things he could think Rowan would come to tell him breathlessly in the dead of night. Either the forest had attacked someone again or this had to do with… them. Their relationship.
Rowan steeled himself. For a moment, instead of speaking, he looked like he’d be sick.
“I’m—” he said, but no more, because in the short intervening time, there came footsteps on the stairs.
Briar saw the moment Linden came into view. Rowan’s head snapped up, his gaze following Linden’s movement, until a long, cool arm draped across Briar’s shoulders. Linden wore the amulet but not his shirt.
“Ah, the alderman,” he said. “What seems to be the matter? It’s quite late.”
Rowan took in Linden’s state of dress, their tussled hair, the arm around Briar’s shoulders, and his harried breathing stopped. Briar would tithe anything of his to never again see Rowan look the way he did now. He thought about Rowan’s hands on his cheeks as they shared a kiss in the snow. His laugh. The lit fire between them.
He wanted to say,No, no, it’s not what it looks like.
It was.
I’m falling for you.
It didn’t matter.
He couldn’t even sayI’m sorry.Not with Linden standing right there.
Rowan’s normally stoic countenance wore a gutted expression for a beat too long to hide. Then he seemed to shore up the walls that had once contained and protected him before, the ones he’d let down for this moment, and he summoned a smile. Briar remembered learning in astronomy that a dead star’s light still reached Earth years and years later, so distant that it took all that time to go out. The light of a dead star and the brittle brightness of Rowan’s smile were the same.
“Never mind,” he said, so quietly Briar almost didn’t hear. “It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”
He was already moving away, turning and hurrying down the street into the snow.
Briar watched him go with the sense that he’d just lost something perfect he didn’t know had been his to claim.
CHAPTER 21
After Linden tucked Briar into bed, smoothing his hair away from his forehead and reminding him to take another potion if he felt unwell, he promised to return in a few hours.
But Briar wished to be alone. He couldn’t sleep, Rowan’s miserable expression painted onto the backs of his eyelids. He might as well have slapped him. On death’s doorstep, breaking up with him, then a few days later hopping into a relationship with some savant celebrity like their time together hadn’t mattered.
He took a whole roll of toilet paper into bed with him and spent hours weeping and moping. Vatii huddled close, but he could hardly abide even her company.
“You should be telling me off. This is my fault.”
“I can’t be hard on you when you’re already so hard on yourself.” At Briar’s wretched sob in answer, she added, “Linden has been doting on you more and more. Was it not nice to get to know him better?”
He didn’t know how to express how unhelpful that question was. Linden was the most buttoned-up person he had ever kissed. Kissing Rowan was bonfire warmth, and kissing Linden was cupping a candle in a blizzard. They hardly compared. He couldn’t say it out loud through the guilt, though.
