Wren laughed and returned to his sketching. Etheldreda and Hawise likewise returned to the garden bramble after they determined neither their master nor the stranger had carrots or pears for them. Meggy ran to join her mother, then moved on to chasing the chickens. Molle, exhausted by her acrobatic feats, fell asleep against Shrike’s knee.
Remaining motionless proved no challenge to Shrike, despite the distraction of the goats. Yet he found himself challenged nonetheless.
While he had stayed still as a matter of course in hunts throughout the centuries, he had never been so watched as he was under Wren’s steady and searching gaze. No one had ever looked at him for so long or with such eyes. Large and dark, their depths gleaming with curiosity and softened by something Shrike couldn’t quite place. Their intensity, as they flicked over the length and breadth of his body, made him feel more naked in his tunic and hose than he’d ever felt in his bare skin.
Yet he did not feel judged. No hint of reproach ever appeared in Wren’s eyes as they fixed on Shrike. Something else infused his gaze, something no less intense but far more enervating. Something that seemed to shine down on Shrike like the shafts of sunlight and illuminate him from within.
Admiration, Shrike realized. Appreciation. Affection.
No one had ever fixed such a gaze on Shrike before. He knew not how to answer it.
~
Drawing Shrike made Wren feel as much a sculptor as a draughtsman. Like Michelangelo revealing the angel trapped in the marble, as Wren’s pencil traced Shrike’s chiselled features and well-wrought frame onto the page, he found each stroke revealed something of the undercurrent of emotion flowing beneath the stoic exterior.
Englishmen were not particularly demonstrative as a rule, but Shrike’s restraint, in Wren’s opinion, exceeded even the reputation of the Queen’s Guard. If placed in front of Buckingham Palace, he would make them appear positively effusive by contrast. While Wren and Shrike had shared a powerful and undeniable connexion on Samhain, a great deal about him remained a mystery to Wren. He knew his body—intimately—but his history, his habits, his thoughts and feelings were beyond all imagining.
Wren could piece together a few hints from Blackthorn. Shrike had already proved himself a hunter against the boar. His home showed him likewise to be an architect, a gardener, a craftsman, and a tender of flocks. Glimpses of a gentle nature broke through his stoic exterior as the infant goats clambered over his back. Every cracked smile in those handsome features struck Wren to his heart and warmed him as well as sunshine. Even Blackthorn itself proved nurturing despite its rough and tangled boundaries. Nuthatches and finches hopped amidst the sanctuary of the brambles, singing merrily without fear of hawk or owl.
It might prove a sanctuary for Wren, as well, from the suffocating society of London.
As the young goat settled down to sleep at Shrike’s knee, Wren sketched it into his portrait. Likewise he added the soft and subtle smile that played about Shrike’s lips and the dark lashes of his downcast eyes gazing fondly toward the peaceful innocent at his feet. The wretched coal-lump of Wren’s heart stirred at the sight.
Wren felt loath to disturb a pose of such serenity. Yet his mind whirled with curiosity and unasked questions burned in his throat. All he’d seen within the cottage—the hollow tree-trunk with its copper taps, the nest of furs for a bed, the work-bench covered in leaves of leather, half-moon knives, and curious curving needles—provoked his imagination beyond restraint.
“Do you enjoy your craft?” Wren blurted.
Shrike glanced up with his eyes alone, his wide dark gaze darting to meet Wren’s without disturbing so much as a hair on the rest of his person. Unearthly stillness suffused his whole form. It ought to have unsettled Wren. It thrilled him.
“What?” said Shrike. His lips hardly moved, yet his voice carried clear across the meadow to Wren’s ear.
“The leather-work,” Wren hastened to explain. “Do you enjoy it?”
Amusement gleamed in those dark eyes. “I’d not do it otherwise.”
Wren found himself smiling in return. “Where did you learn it?”
Shrike looked as though he’d never been called to give such an answer before. “From my guardian. Long ago.”
As Mr Grigsby was to Felix and Miss Flora. Wren had difficulty picturing Shrike’s guardian as an awkward bachelor solicitor in Staple Inn. Some fae lord, surely. A squire of the forest. Or a huntsman.
“Guardian?” Wren echoed.
The light in Shrike’s eyes dimmed somewhat. “Dead. Some centuries hence.”
“My condolences,” said Wren, more sincerely than he’d ever said it to a fellow Englishman, though even now the phrase felt inadequate.
Still, Shrike seemed to take it as Wren intended. The slightest of solemn smiles curled the corners of his mouth for a moment, and his eyes glanced away as if fixed on a distant past.
While Wren didn’t wish to dwell on any subject which might give Shrike pain, his curiosity demanded he pursue the question. “What was he like?”
“A mortal,” Shrike replied in his soft burr. “Called Larkin.”
Shock halted the progress of Wren’s pencil across the page. He glanced up sharp to meet Shrike’s eye.
Shrike appeared as serene as ever, evidently unaware he’d said anything out of the ordinary.
Wren forced himself to continue drawing, though he couldn’t keep from repeating, “A mortal?”
