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“What is this?”
“A prism.”
The stone was heavy in her hand. “And what is that?”
“I will show you.” He got to his feet and moved across the room. He shuttered the window, plunging the room into darkness, then arranged coverings until only a single beam of sunlight rayed into the chamber.
She watched, bemused. “What are you doing?”
“Patience, lass.”
He dug around in one of the chests and extracted a piece of parchment and held it vertically behind the prism, at a slight angle. Holding the stone up into the light, he let the single ray of sun through it. It emerged on the paper as a prism of color, a rainbow projected onto the parchment.
“Oh,” she said, enchanted.
He made a gesture, beckoning her, and she reached out with her thumb and index finger and very carefully took it from him. “Hold it there,” he ordered. He backed up with the parchment, and took another, curving glass stone, cut slightly different, and lowered it down, passing it, too, through the beam of sunlight. The rainbow stayed projected on the parchment. Then he slowly pulled the parchment back further.
The rainbow became a single beam of white light again.
“What did you do?” she said at once. “What happened?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.” He pulled the paper back further, and the rainbow slowly reappeared, the colors now blurring up the page in the opposite order.
Her eyes widened, and she looked up to smile at him in astonishment, then returned to watching the show he’d given her. “It almost makes one think the colors are…within the light.”
His gaze flew to hers. “Aye,” he said, a low hum of agreement.
“But that cannot be,” she said, although not in a rejecting way. In a…hopeful way.
“Anything can be, Katy.” He ran his hand through the beams of light, and they fluttered in bands of color across his hard fingers. “Go on, touch it,” he urged softly.
She bent and put her face into the rainbow streams of light.
Her nose became streaked with red and orange and yellow. She moved slightly, and it turned violet, blue, the slightest sliver of green. Her eyes came up to his, and the light shafts sprayed across her face, across her eye in red and gold, like a pathway leading in.
He lowered the second prism and came to her, folded her fingers around the stone and brought her fisted hand to his lips. He kissed her knuckles. Just skin and bone, it was as if he’d broken her open.
“Why are you giving me this?”
“Because it makes me think of you.”
“Aodh,” she whispered. “Please, stop.”
“No,” he murmured. He knew precisely what he was denying her; as if to prove it, he turned her hand over and kissed her inner wrist.
She shivered. “Why are you trying to win me, Aodh? Why does it matter so much?”
His hand slid to her waist. “My intent is not to win you.”
She stared up into eyes so blue it almost hurt to look into them. Blue like the sea, blue like blood under the skin. “Then what?”
“You are a fire that was almost extinguished, Katarina. And I need your flame.”
“Oh, Aodh, no.”
He tugged on their entwined fingers, guiding her forward as he backed up, leading her to the bed.
“This thing you want of me, Aodh, it almost ruined me. It destroyed my parents. I do not care if you need my fire; I do not need it,” she said, hoping he would save her from herself, because she was swiftly losing the fight.
