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“You just half-froze yourself,” Aric said to her, “rescuing the idiot. They’ve got at least a few weeks, up there. We can put the word out for someone else. We don’t have to do this one.”
But as he said it thunder boomed, low and cruel; the rain-drums grew harder, and someone said, “Hail?”
Em’s smile quirked, entertained by his phrasing, understanding every word.
Aric shook his head. “Don’t say it.”
“You were thinking it before I was.”
Theo glanced from Aric to Em, downed more hot cider, and announced, “Well, I’m not fucking going back, so don’t expect it.”
“No one’s asking you to,” Aric told him. “Em…”
“Not today,” Em said. “Not tonight. Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” Aric echoed, and sighed.
Chapter 5
In the night, after they’d gathered supplies, after they’d sat up with Theo to buy him drinks and learn everything he knew, after Aric had made sure Emrys had enough food—Em could eat enough for a small army—he leaned back against the headboard of the creaking bed, and watched Em demolish the last berry pie in two neat bites. Her sleeves were rolled up, neat and tidy; she did not wear jewelry, nothing extravagant, nothing unnecessary. The collar of her shirt was open, tempting, displaying smooth skin.
She licked a fingertip, looked over, came over. Sat squarely on his thighs. “Of course we’re going to help.”
“That wasn’t my question.” He traced a curl of ink-black hair up from her eyebrow. “What can we do about ghosts?”
“I don’t know. Yet.”
“Does your magic work on them?”
Em gave him an eyebrow-shrug. “We’ll find out.”
“Whatever we do, I’m not going to lose you.” He touched Em’s cheek, hand large against her face. “I mean that. If we try something, and it doesn’t work, we come back down. Silverscarp will survive for a little while, at least. We can regroup.”
Em made a resigned face about that, but nodded.
“The other question,” Aric said, stepping cautiously around hidden perils, mushroom circles, hidden doors into other worlds and back again, with consequences. “Will someone…notice?”
Em’s face, features, expression collectively shimmered and flickered: reaction, emotion, shifting states. Human, less so, back again, a petite young man this time. “My father might notice, yes. Or not. It’ll depend on what I do.”
“After Dun Nas, and what that sorcerer said…”
“He’s looking for me. Trust me, I remember.” Em rolled off Aric’s lap to sprawl across the bed, fluid and annoyed as a cat rubbed the wrong way. “Because I’m finally playing with the power. Not hiding. Useful to him. I’ve never even met my father, and he wants me now.”
Aric knew some of that story. What Em had given him, over the last two years. A mother taken as a plaything into a fairy-hill, taken as carelessly as a child might pick up a toy; discarded the same way, when the king under the hill grew bored. She’d wandered, half-mad and with child, until someone had brought her to the nuns for care.
The nuns had called her Deryn, the little bird. Aric knew, because Em had told him, that she’d liked to sing, and to tell stories about great feasts, and jeweled gowns, and dancing under the hill, and a tall dark man with stars in his eyes and a crown upon his hair.
“It doesn’t matter,” Em said to the ceiling, to the wooden beams and white plaster. “You’d never not help someone in need. And they hurt your friend.”
“Don’t do this for me. I don’t even like Theo that much.”
“He’s your friend, and you’d try it even without me. Because that’s who you are. A hero.”
“Not without you.”
“Says the person who rode into a fire to pull me out of it, when you’d never even met me. For all you knew I was a witch. A warlock. Wicked.”
“I’d do it anyway,” Aric said, “no one deserves that kind of death,” and Em rolled his head across the mattress to look Aric’s way. “You mean that.”
