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“Do you trust me?” he asked, his mouth close to my ear.
I took a breath, turning toward him slightly.
“This second, yes, but I can promise nothing beyond this moment.”
He pressed a kiss to my shoulder, and his hand flattened against the small of my back as he guided me into the lake. I stood for a few moments in the water, thigh-deep, and when nothing happened, I dove beneath the water to put distance between us. When I broke the surface, I faced him.
He had not moved, and I could not place the expression on his face. It was dark and sensual. It made me feel desired and it also scared me.
“Why did you leave the palace?” he asked.
“I heard a bell,” I said, and even now as I thought about the sound, the beauty of it brought tears to my eyes. “And I could not help but follow.”
“Where did it lead?”
“To my dead family,” I said.
His jaw tightened and I expected him to ask about them, but he didn’t.
“The bell was the mountains’ hold over you,” he said. “Your family…that was the fairies.”
I did not ask why because I knew. Casamir had warned me about the mountains, and the selkie had warned me about the fairies and their retribution.
“Naeve tells me you are cursed,” I said.
Casamir did not react.
“What did you do?”
He waded farther into the lake, and I tracked him as he moved, but he did not speak until he dipped below the water and resurfaced, his dark hair plastered to his face.
“I slept with a daughter of the Mountains,” he said. “And she fell hopelessly in love with me, and because I did not return her love, the Mountains cursed me to forget my true name.”
“Unless it’s spoken with love,” I said. “Isn’t that right?”
He only stared at me.
“Is that what you hoped for from me?”
The hollows of his cheeks deepened as he ground his teeth.
“I do not hope for anything,” he said.
We circled one another.
“I cannot believe that no one has fallen in love with you.”
“Many have,” he said. “But none are clever enough to guess my name.”
“And if I do not guess, you will cease to exist?”
“Eventually,” he said, and then he smiled, reaching to draw a piece of my hair behind my ear. “Something for you to look forward to.”
I wanted to argue, to tell him I would never feel that way, but the words were stuck in my throat, and I swallowed hard.
We did not speak after that, and once we had finished swimming in the lake, we came to shore.
“Put this on,” Casamir said, offering his tunic. It was a reminder of how I had come here and how I was leaving, my nightdress torn in two, a mark of the desperation we had felt to be inside each other.
