Bats were certainly not ravens, Wren had to admit. Beyond the bat-wings he espied other works-in-progress. Two round green glass lenses sat atop three long triangular leather tapers. Several rolls of vellum pale as moonlight lay beside half-moon knives and a scalpel with a blade as small as a thorn. A pile of pointed oak leaves—which Wren only realised after several moment’s study were cut from leather and not plucked from a branch—were raked into the far corner of the bench. And in the other corner, stretched atop a polished wooden block-head, sat a mask with feathered wings outstretched on either side and a wide round mouth like a Roman font, but not yet any holes to see through.
“What will you make of that one?” Wren asked, gesturing to the mask without eyes.
Shrike returned him a puzzled glance. “It’s finished.”
“Oh,” Wren replied as if he understood. “And the others?”
Shrike rolled his broad shoulders in a stretch that drew far more of Wren’s attention than he probably intended. “Finished for the moment. You must be hungry. I know I am. The hens and goats have already broken their fast.”
Honey and goat cheese melted over toast tasted all the sweeter and all the richer to Wren for being wrought by Shrike’s deft hands. To have Shrike’s company, to lean against his warm bulk and to have those same clever fingers brush against his own as their shared their repast, nourished Wren’s soul as well as his body. Falling into step beside Shrike as he tended his flocks felt as natural as breathing.
And when Shrike returned to the masks afterward, Wren took up his sketch-book to preserve what had already begun to assume the shape of a treasured memory.
The sheer strength of Shrike’s frame proved itself through his strapping shoulders and sinewy arms. To Wren, he appeared all the more breath-taking when he bent over work so fine and delicate as plying the merest sliver of a blade to the thin sheet of pale white hart’s hide and slicing the leather into lace. Rough yet gentle hands, whose touch could make Wren tremble, now split a slender piece of wire in twain—a boar bristle, Shrike explained when he caught Wren’s curious gaze—and wound with catgut for needle and thread to piece together a patchwork harlequin who would’ve been the envy of all in Venice’s Carnivale. Wren felt his pencil scribblings hardly did justice to the man he knew and loved. Still, as the house passed in comfortable silence, he filled his sketch-book’s pages with his attempts to capture the knife’s-edge balance between brutish brawn and elfin grace.
When the golden afternoon faded into rosy sunset, Shrike rose and stretched with a deep groan that rumbled through Wren’s own ribcage. A knowing glance from those dark eyes was all the invitation Wren required to follow Shrike out of the cottage and through the wall of thorns to stroll arm-in-arm through the tranquil twilight of the fae wood.
Wren’s breath mingled with the mist roiling through the trees in the chill night air. Yet, as Shrike enfolded them both in his cloak, a warmth to rival a bonfire seeped in through Wren’s veins to his heart. To wander so entwined with Shrike and watch the moon-rise through the bare branches of the fae forest left Wren with a sense of serenity he almost believed might persevere even after he returned to Staple Inn.
“When will Nell return for her mask?” Wren asked as he ambled alongside Shrike.
“She won’t,” Shrike replied. “I’ll deliver it to her at the Moon Market. Along with the others.”
The mere mention of the fabled Moon Market sent a thrill through the withered husk of Wren’s cynical heart. “When?”
“Under the last half-moon before Ostara.”
“May I come along?”
Shrike glanced sharply down at him, and even in the dim silvery moonlight Wren could read the astonished cant of his brows.
Hot shame rose in Wren’s cheeks. “Forgive me—that was rather too forward on my part.”
“Nothing to forgive.” A sly and handsome smile graced Shrike’s otherwise stoic features. “I like you forward.”
The heat in Wren’s face assumed an entirely different character as he found an answering smile tugging at his own lips.
“And,” Shrike added, his arm twining ‘round Wren’s waist as naturally as ivy encircling a castle tower, “I’d be glad of your company in the Moon Market.”
Such was Wren’s delight, both in the woods beneath the moon and nestled in the cottage beside Shrike soon after, that he could almost forget what awaited him in the mortal realm.
~
Morning dawned—Monday, as Wren called it—and Wren himself departed Blackthorn to return to Staple Inn.
Whilst Wren toiled in the mortal realm, Shrike remained behind to work on his craft for Ostara.
For a few hours, at least.
At length, however, when he’d stitched together every oak-leaf and burnished every bat-wing and sewed the green glass lenses into their long leather snout, he arose from his bench, wrapped his cloak ‘round his shoulders, and set off out of the briar to the Grove of Gates.
Before he dove into the portal, he slipped into his more feathery form, and flew rather than crawled out of the stable-yard well into Rochester.
The horses took little notice of his appearance. The mortal stable-hands noticed even less. Shrike swooped past all of them and flitted down the by-streets toward Cemetery Gate.
Smoke drifted from the chimney at the top of the gate, which prevented Shrike from diving down it to search as thoroughly as he wished. Still, he could perch on the window-sill and peer in through the latticed glass as he’d done in Staple Inn so many months ago.
A gap between the curtains allowed sunlight to stream in across the bed wherein lay Felix, his blond curls tousled, his hollow cheek propped up in his palm, and his blue eyes cast down into a book. Though, Shrike noted, Felix’s eye did not travel back and forth across the page as Wren’s did when he read from his romances. Several other books and papers lay scattered over the rumpled bed-clothes. None resembled Wren’s missing manuscripts. Felix’s chest rose and fell in a heavy sigh as he turned the page with a careless flick of his hand.
