“Nothing to forgive,” Wren quickly added. “I’d do the same in your place.”
At length the murmurs ceased, and shortly afterward the cottage door creaked open. Familiar footsteps padded across the flagstone floor. A warm weight settled onto the bed beside Shrike. A soft hand stroked through his hair and alighted gentle on his brow. Then it withdrew, and the crackling of the hearth-fire rekindled in Shrike’s ears. The scents of lavender and honey wafted through the cottage alongside eggs and maple-cured venison. Soon Wren returned to his side and laid his palm on Shrike’s shoulder.
“I’m awake,” Shrike muttered, drawing himself upright despite the throbbing pain in his temples. The mug of laudanum-dosed tea Wren handed him dulled the pain enough for him to appreciate the offered repast. His gnawing hunger sated for the moment, he returned to his quiet rest with Wren curled up against his side.
Shrike had hunted deer for many, many years. From his careful observation in stalking quarry over the centuries, he knew the antlers of a stag grew in by a quarter of an inch per day, in the course of four full moons.
The morning after Nell’s visit, Shrike awoke to find his own antlers had grown another full inch overnight.
Again, Wren proved reluctant to leave Shrike to his fate alone. Only after laudanum tea and toasted goat cheese had revived Shrike somewhat did Wren consent to return to London. His parting kiss to Shrike’s brow soothed more pain than he might ever know.
After Wren had gone, Shrike made another attempt at his work-bench. Nell had spoken many true things the previous day—not the least of which was that Shrike couldn’t show his face in the mortal realm again until he found a way to disguise his budding antlers.
The scraps of leather left over from his Ostara work would suffice for his plan. He didn’t try his wooden mallet again, for it felt too much like tempting fate with the dull throbbing ache still behind his eyes, but his half-moon blades and awl he could wield without plunging his skull into agony. Even so he found his vision blurred within the hour. Retreating to his nest to shut his eyes a while restored his sight, and the day became a back-and-forth from bed to bench as he returned again and again to his work.
What he might have finished in a day when he had his health, he now supposed would take perhaps a fortnight. This didn’t trouble him overmuch. Its completion would require Wren’s particular talents, for which he must wait for Wren’s return.
~
The hours Wren spent in Mr Grigsby’s office in Staple Inn did not pass pleasantly.
Not that Mr Grigsby knew it. Mr Grigsby continued on in his merry ignorance, smiling at his newspaper, humming to himself over tea, and making occasional polite enquiries of Wren.
Wren, meanwhile, stewed in private agony. His thoughts continually wandered far from London’s clattering fog to the quiet cottage and the better half of his heart he’d left behind. Antlers sprouting oak leaves grew from the margins of the rent-collection ledgers whilst precious few figures made it into the columns between. In the rare moments when Wren could consider his present surroundings, it was with the expectation that someone—Felix or Tolhurst—would contact him either privately or, Heaven forbid, publicly, to reveal their knowledge of his worst manuscripts and threaten to expose him to the full wrath of English society and English law.
When at last Mr Grigsby departed for his dinner, Wren hardly paused long enough to lock up the office before he dashed down Oxford Street. The fog lay thick on the ground in Hyde Park. He depended on it to obscure him from view as he fell through the toadstool ring and landed amidst the ruins in the wood.
While the brisk air of the fae realms never failed to invigorate him, he could not breathe easy until he’d reached Blackthorn and beheld Shrike once more. He felt a brief reprieve as the wall of thorns parted to allow him up the path to the cottage. The door swung in at the barest touch of his fingertips.
And any peace he’d found vanished as he beheld Shrike slumped over his work-bench.
Wren strangled an instinctive cry of alarm as he dashed to Shrike’s side. Yet no sooner had he laid his hand on Shrike’s shoulder—warmth suffusing his night-chilled fingers even through Shrike’s woollen tunic—Shrike stirred beneath his touch. Moving as if his head bore the weight of an anvil, Shrike arose and sat blinking in bleary bewilderment at Wren.
“What happened?” Wren demanded, though he kept his voice low. His hand went to Shrike’s face at once, stroking his cheek and cupping his jaw. “Are you all right?”
Shrike nodded and winced. “Fell asleep at my work. As I’ve oft done this day.”
“How’s your head? Did you take any laudanum? Wait,” Wren added, all too aware that his babbling couldn’t be helping Shrike’s head-ache and very likely made it worse, yet powerless to halt his tongue. “What do you mean, your work?”
“Fine. Some. And this,” Shrike answered him, turning and fumbling at his bench until he brought forth a masterpiece-in-progress and held it out to Wren.
Wren took it from him warily. It didn’t look like the handiwork of a sickly man. Indeed, it looked like the beginnings of an improved version of the masks Shrike had crafted for Ostara. Like a Venetian domino in pattern, designed to conceal just the upper half of a face, with its edges pointed and curled like fallen oak leaves. At the peak, where the mask would cover the brow, the oak-leaf pattern mirrored from left to right and formed two particular rounded dales that Wren realized would match perfectly with the budding protrusion of Shrike’s new antlers.
“Nell reminded me,” Shrike added as Wren gazed at the mask. “I need something to disguise my oddities from mortal eyes.”
“They’re not oddities,” Wren said without even considering the matter, the words spilling forth from his heart rather than his head.
If Shrike minded, it showed neither in his face nor his speech. “I need your help to finish it.”
“How?” Wren blurted. He’d felt desperate to alleviate Shrike’s agonies since they’d begun and equally hopeless he might ever do so in his own mortal failings.
Shrike reached out his forefinger and tapped the centre of the mask’s brow, where a smooth field devoid of veins spanned between the two antler valleys. “It requires a cunning sigil.”
Wren’s unease increased. Even after all the hours they’d spent in each other’s company, hours in which Wren thought it woefully apparent his own mortal skill couldn’t hold a candle to Shrike’s fae mastery, Shrike thought him some manner of wizard. “What ought it to look like?”
“I know not,” said Shrike. “I’ve no gift for glamour. I’m ill-accustomed to seeming anything other than what I am.”
Wren had spent more than three decades disguising his truest self from society’s judgment. Shrike could not have chosen a more experienced practitioner in the art of deceit. When it came to enchanting, however… “I’m hardly magical.”
