Chapter Thirteen
Days slipped by and turned into weeks.
The wolf visited me every night, and we sat outside in the dark together until I got tired and had to go to bed. The cat came most days, mostly curling up on my bed to nap, or winding between my legs while I was in the kitchen organising the sideboard or making something to eat.
Neither animal ever accepted the scraps I offered, or drank from the water bowl I kept down for them. They both gave me the same haughty, unimpressed look when I tried to get them to eat or drink, which made me laugh.
I was positive they were the same creature, but I didn’t question it too much. I enjoyed their company. Was grateful for it. As much as I didn’t want the Folk to come sniffing around—nor did I want to venture into the village—it could have easily gotten lonely in this cottage on the edge of unseelie land, in the shadow of the forest I couldn’t enter. But the wolf and the cat fended the loneliness off. Maybe that was why they’d started visiting me—because they could sense how alone I was.
Caom did visit most days, but he never stayed all that long. He brought food baskets, adding vegetables when I asked him so that I could make stews in the big cauldron over the kitchen hearth.
We sometimes went for walks, but I still hadn’t gone into the village, despite the countless times he’d asked me if I wanted to.
“You have to go there atsomepoint, Ash,” Caom huffed as we slowly made our way back to the cottage one afternoon. “Don’t you want to look in the shops? Go for a drink at the tavern?”
I shook my head, belly squirming at the idea. “I’m happy out here.”
“You can’t just hide away. You’ll never shed your mortal skin if you don’t spend enough time around us.” He peered over at me with concerned eyes. “Aren’t you lonely? I wish I could come over more, but I’m needed in the shop most days.”
“What shop?”
“I run the dressmaker’s shop with my cousin.” He nudged me. “Why do you think you have such finely made clothes?”
I smiled. He’d delivered more to me the week before. Fresh shirts, and two more pairs of leather trousers, another in dark brown and one in a deep forest green. I liked the green ones the most.
“Well, I appreciate them,” I said carefully. I still didn’t want to risk thanking anyone again, although Caom had never brought it up. Never told me I owed him a debt for saying it before.
I hadn’t told him about the assassin prince’s visit, and I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like anything had happened—except for the way his hooded eyes had stared at my mouth for a suspended moment.
I hadn’t told Caom about the wolf or the cat either. If he showed up when the cat was around, it vanished and hid somewhere until he was gone.
They definitely understood more than a normal cat or wolf should. When I’d absently commented one morning that I wished I could fry eggs on the flat stone in the kitchen hearth, I’d woken up the next morning to the faint sound of clucking from outside.
To my utter shock, two brown and white hens were pecking round the tiny, fenced-off area at the side of the cottage, which had already contained an old wooden coop. Caom had asked me where on earth I’d found two chickens when he’d come to visit that morning, so I simply shrugged and told him they’d been close by and I’d managed to get them into the coop. He returned the next morning with a big bag of feed for them.
When I’d wondered out loud to the wolf if Caom would be willing to bring me some meat in his food baskets, I woke up the following morning to find three dead rabbits laid carefully on my doorstep. It had been a gory mess as I’d worked out how to skin and gut them, but the stew I made that night was delicious.
I was slipping into this life too easily. Too seamlessly. I still kept my eyes peeled for any sign of a black-haired, black-eyed face watching us from the water when Caom and I took our walks, but there’d been no sign of Odran in any of the lakes on unseelie land.
I’d tamed Briordan’s old herb garden and meticulously catalogued the bottles and jars of ingredients on the big sideboard in the kitchen, reorganising them alphabetically. I’d written down the names of any that were missing from the list of essential ingredients from theNovice Drachmsmithbook, and made a separate list of seeds that I wanted to ask Caom to get for me in the village, using theDrachmsmith’s Gardenbook for reference.
I’d refrained from asking, because… well, I had no money. It wasn’t his responsibility to buy me things. He’d done more than enough already, bringing me clothes and food.
“How do the Folk make money?” I murmured to the cat one afternoon, while we were both lazing on the bed in the warm patch of sunlight coming through the window.
I’d realised he was a boy, like the wolf, further cementing the idea that they were one and the same in my head. He kneaded my chest as he gazed down at me. I was lying on my back on the bed, running absentminded fingers down his spine, making him arch into the touch.
“I want to buy things. But I really don’t want to go into the village.” Unease filled me at the thought. “And anyway, I have no idea how I’d pay for anything.”
The cat just purred and curled up on my chest to take a nap.
The blackbird still appeared most mornings, no doubt making sure that I was staying meekly in my cottage like an obedient little mortal for the Carlin. It galled me that I was doing exactly that, although I was reading obsessively about potioncraft and devouring every book in Briordan’s bookcase. I’d yet to attempt another potion, but it was because I wanted to get everything in perfect order before I did. I wanted it towork.
No other notes had appeared pinned to trees. Maybe Nua was pissed that I was still sitting with the wolf every night after he’d told me I couldn’t trust him. Maybe he’d just abandoned me here because I’d ignored his warning, leaving me under the Carlin’s “protection”.
We were in the heart of summer now, but it never got particularly hot. I’d lost track of time a bit, but I thought it was sometime in July. I sometimes wondered what was happening in the mortal world, but tried to avoid thinking about it too much because it just filled me with a weird, restless sense of urgency, even though it all felt far away now. Distant. Faded.
Were the police looking for me? Had someone noticed the cottage standing dark and silent for days on end? Had Mags’ sister Carol or my friends called the police after I hadn’t answered the phone for weeks?