Page 89 of Bane Bloom

“On certain nights I can’t stop it.”

“May Eve? Nights of a full moon?”

“All nights when the boundary between worlds is at its thinnest.”

“I looked for you the night the moon was full.”

“I would never have left you here alone for so long by choice, lass.”

“I know,” I said, looking down. “And you couldn’t tell me why. But it wasn’t the whole night. For a while you did come back, as Phantom.” I lifted my gaze again. He was watching me closely.

“I was fearful for you.”

I let out a reedy laugh. “It was a good instinct. When you’re in that form, are you much different in your mind?”

“My thoughts are simpler, and fewer. My body is less under the control of my mind. But I am aware of all I do as the nokken, and when I’m myself again, I remember.”

“When I came here looking for you that night”—my eyes went again to the box with the lily inlay—“I found something else.”

His gaze followed. “The mandrake.”

My insides knotted. “I had rather lost my way that night, and I was desperate for answers. I’m not proud of the snooping I’ve resorted to here.”

He laughed dryly. “No matter, lass. I hardly spoke to you. And then I disappeared, just as the house was becoming curious about you.” He folded his arms. “What did you see after you found it?”

My brows lifted. “Your grandmother, I believe. On the beach.” I shivered. “I read about her death in the diary. Your poor mother.”

“It weighed on her all her life.”

“And she tried to help your grandfather bring her back.”

He nodded. “She studied some old spell books they’d found inside a wall of the house, and she tried to draw my grandmother’s spirit into the mandrake doll so that they might speak with her. But handling the doll has only ever brought visions of my grandmother’s death, or her most unhappy moments in the house. Sometimes it causes the piano to play her favorite music, or the house to fill with the scent of her perfume.”

“So it only made things worse. Why have you kept it?”

“Mandrake is powerful. My mother believed it would be dangerous to try and destroy it.”

It was a good enough reason, yet I wondered whether it might be more than that. He’d never known his grandmother, and the doll was a kind of link to her. He was sadly lacking in relations. Even more so than I. And it seemed strange to keep a thing that should never be touched among one’s favorite books. It was another Bane family heirloom, and in his place, I would have kept it, too.

“Well,” I said, “after I saw her, I thought my mind was breaking. I was very near despair when you came. You can’t imagine what a comfort it was to me.” His features were soft, his expression attentive. “What the queen said tonight—that away from Pine Cottage, you . . . you wouldn’t survive—is it true?”

His hands rubbed over his upper arms and shoulders, his brow wrinkling in thought. “When I was a lad, there was a waterfall up in the fells that I liked to visit. One day I met a nymph there. She was bathing in the pool, singing with a voice like nothing I’d ever heard, and I got too close. She bound me with her magic. For the first couple of days, I didn’t mind so much.”

The color in his cheeks deepened, and I understood that by “lad” he meant “young man,” not “boy.”

“But I knew my mother would worry, and I soon asked to go home. The nymph refused, and I tried shifting to the nokken form, hoping it would help me break the spell.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t change, and each day after that, I grew weaker. So much so, the nymph lost interest and released me. I crawled out of the gorge half starved, and my mother, who’d been out looking for me, took me home, where eventually I recovered.”

“Heavens,” I breathed, still not quite over my imaginings regarding Thomas and the nymph.

“It’s more than my connection to Pine Cottage and the Elfbloom,” he said. “A nokken has a connection to a body of water that isn’t meant to be broken. Same for a nymph. I can go to Elfame, though, because it overlaps this place. Lakes and rivers—any places sacred to fairies—exist in both realms.”

Of course he would have visited Elfame—his house being a portal—yet it hadn’t occurred to me before now. “Have you never thought of living there? It must be less constrained for you. Nobody making you work their garden, or judging you for your family history. No apothecaries to rescue.”

He smiled. “I have sometimes thought I might. You can probably imagine what life here was like for a young lad with no fellows and hardly any family. Someone almost convinced me once, tempting me with beauty, power, and riches.”

“Nyv.”

“Aye.”