Page 88 of Bane Bloom

I wasn’t ready to tell him the truth about that. So I shrugged and said, “Maybe because I’m curious about all of this. The glasshouse, the Elfbloom, your grandfather, your mother. The spirits, the spells and charms.” My gaze grazed the box containing the mandrake doll.

Thomas was softer now, watching me with a glimmer in his eyes. “She likes that. It will have reminded her of herself.”

I hadn’t thought of this, but I knew from her diary that he was right—we were both driven to study and understand things. I did it with my art, she with her craft. We’d also both lost our mothers very young.

“I do in fact know of another reason she’s interested in me,” I confessed, fixing my eyes on him. “And I’ll tell you what it is if you answer my questions first.”

He closed his eyes and slumped against the chairback. “I don’t know why I should be surprised that I’ve lost control of this discussion.” He looked so much like the old Thomas that I couldn’t help smiling. “Go on, then,” he said.

I sat up. “Have you always been like this? I don’t mean grumpy and disagreeable, but a shape-shifting creature?”

Amusement stamped crinkles at the corners of his eyes. “I was born a nokken. My father was one, as you already seem to know.”

“And what is that, exactly? I mean, I know it’s an allegedly ‘mythical’ water horse. But is there more to it than swimming around the lake in the middle of the night? Do you lure unsuspecting maidens to their deaths, for example?”

He eyed me from under a raised brow. “If I did, you’d hardly be here in my bed, reading my books, asking me questions that are none of your concern, would you?”

Trying to ignore how the bit about being in his bed was causing a molten heat to spread out from my core, I replied, “Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong. I’m very concerned.”

He sighed and shrugged the blanket onto the chairback. Which I was inclined to regard as rather devious, because now I’d all but forgotten my questions.

“I have no more purpose in my life than you have in yours,” he said. As I drew my face into a scowl, he continued, “I’m just a creature trying to survive, as you are.”

“Come now,” I protested. “You’ve never been tempted? Fairy horses must have this reputation for a reason. What about Mary Robson?”

Though my questions were genuine, I was at this point half flirting with him—a thing I’d never attempted before. I began to see the appeal.

“If you’ll recall,” he said, “Mary Robson was not harmed. She returned every May Eve.”

“Right, lucky Mary. Only abducted. Have you never had the urge to abduct someone, then?”

His eyes glittered in the firelight. “Once, aye.”

“Aha. When?”

“Very recently.” His gaze lifted to the window above the bed. “I was up the side of Fleetwith Pike, looking down at a woman I want, her hand in my neighbor’s, considering the possibility of greeting her every day for the rest of my life across my neighbor’s fence.”

My heart stumbled, and my breath stopped.

He scooted the chair toward me, knees pressing the side of the bed. He rested his elbows on them so that he was bent close and said, “Will you want to know why I didn’t go through with it?”

Heart quaking in my chest, I nodded.

“Because the Bane half of me wishes a better life for the woman.”

Faintly I replied, “Better than being abducted?”

“Better than any life I can give her.”

A slow frown curved my lips. “Would the woman not want to be the judge of that?”

In the silence that fell like a curtain at the end of a play, we watched each other. He folded one of his hands over the other, and I heard knuckles pop under the strength of his grip. The air around us grew heavy with words unspoken, with uncertainty, with . . . longing.

We were still locked in this tableau when I asked, “Do you change at will?”

His eyes were unusually relaxed and open, as if he were letting me see into him. “Aye. I can.”

“Do you sometimes change when you don’t wish to?”