Page 52

Harper gave me one of her curious looks. “Can he really pull anything from anywhere?”

“He told you what he is?” It wasn’t all that surprising. Arlo had displayed his gift in her presence often enough. And he liked her. Once he relaxed around people, he tended to open up.

“Yes,” she said. “He also told me his people rejected him for being gay.” Harper offered me a soft smile. “It was kind of you to give him a job.”

I snorted. “It wasn’t kindness. It was pure selfishness. Arlo is the best steward anyone could ask for.”

Curiosity sparked more brightly in her eyes. “How did you meet him?”

A tendril of discomfort snaked through me. Arlo was a safe enough subject, but talking of him had the potential to lead the conversation down paths I wasn’t quite ready to tread. But I had to tread them eventually. I knew that.

Just not right now. Not when things were so perfect.

“It was on this mountain, actually,” I said. “About fifty years ago now.”

“You’ve known Arlo for fifty years?”

“Yes. Watch that tree root.” I guided her around a thick vein of wood protruding from the ground. “I’m sure Arlo told you that demons can be pretty backward in their thinking.”

She nodded. “He said they’re usually assassins.”

“The Legerdemain are, yes. Arlo didn’t want that life, and he wasn’t going to settle down with a demoness like his parents wanted. So he found a place in the middle of nowhere and made camp.” I smiled at Harper. “He definitely wasn’t expecting me to stumble upon him. Literally. I tripped over him on a walk to the spring.”

Harper put a hand over her mouth, her eyes twinkling above it. “He didn’t know you lived here?”

“At the time, he was fresh from the demon plane and still jumpy around other people. He didn’t venture out of the forest, so he had no idea Draithmere was just over the rise.”

“So what happened?”

“I invited him to the house. It didn’t take long for me to realize how much I needed a steward. And Arlo needed the protection Draithmere provides.” I cleared my throat as I searched for a way to tell Arlo’s story without divulging secrets I’d sworn to keep. “His people don’t like it when one of their own leaves the nest, so to speak. They can be heavy-handed about forcing runaways back to the fold.”

Harper made a soft, approving sound. “You gave him safety.” She glanced at me. “The same as you did with Myrna.”

The tendril of discomfort sprouted another shoot. “Did Arlo tell you about her, too?”

Harper kept her gaze on the trail. “A little. She lives in the maze?”

“Yes.” I held my breath, waiting for Harper to keep digging. It was only natural for her to have questions about the maze. She’d seen the centaurs, after all. Of course she wanted to know what other manner of creatures lived among the hedges.

But Harper stayed silent. Grass crunched under our feet, and fingers of crisp wind tugged at our hair and clothes. We walked, content in each other’s company, until the sun began to kiss the horizon. Eventually, Draithmere’s chimneys came into view.

Finally, Harper stopped. As I halted beside her, she turned to me. “You built the maze for supernatural beings who don’t have a home.”

I kept my expression as neutral as I could. “I have the space. Might as well do something with it.”

“It was a good thing to do.”

I didn’t deserve her praise, but rejecting it meant opening myself to questions I wasn’t prepared to answer. “It was no trouble.”

Harper looked toward the mountain we’d just left. “Arlo came here to escape a future he didn’t want.”

“That’s right.”

She swung her gaze back to me. “Why did you come here?”

I startled, her question landing like a grenade lobbed at the center of my chest. She held my stare, her blue eyes clear and steady. Like any good journalist, she’d warmed me up, pitching softballs until she reached the destination she’d aimed for all along.

For a moment, the impulse to brush her off was almost too tempting to ignore. It would have been easier to order her back to the house. But it would destroy the fragile thing I’d built with her.