Page 30

“A half measure, really.” They wiped their face with their sleeve. “Just deserts is throwing me in the river.” They bared their teeth. “If you dare.”

She looked at them warily.

“You don’t,” they observed. “Well, that’s for the best. It would be unwise.”

She pounced, seizing them around the waist. The boat rocked. They felt absurdly joyous as they wrestled her down to the boat’s floor.

“Do you give up?” They were half on top of her, their legs and hers in a tangle, jammed beneath a thwart.

The boat was hard, and various objects poked at them, but Elf was soft and warm, and they’d swear on their life she smelled like rainbows.

Red was strawberry. Orange was orange. Yellow was a lovely lemon custard.

“I don’t give up.” She tried to twist.

“Ow,” they said mildly. “Easy there.”

She twisted again, this time managing to flip onto her side. This maneuver had the inadvertent effect of trapping their arm between them. Their palm came flush against her breast.

She froze, her face inches from theirs. They froze too.

Their gaze traced her brows, the slope of her nose, the curve of her lips, the freckles below her right eye.

Her eyes themselves were midnight dark, glowing with midnight’s magic.

They could feel her heart beating into their hand.

If they curled their fingers, they could tug down her bodice.

Their other hand was free to slide up her skirt, to skate over her stockings, over the bare skin of her thigh.

“You win.” They bolted to sitting, squirming away from her, voice hoarse. “ I give up. I will throw myself into the river.”

“Don’t.” She fumbled upright, raking back her hair. “You need to steer the boat.”

They collapsed onto their bench, grabbing for the oars. “Another time, then. At your convenience.” They rowed, without looking at her, because if they did, they might wrestle her down again, and lick her neck, eat her in bites.

Shipwreck the boat.

Spoil the friendship.

Their eyes roamed the landscape. It appeared aroused in its own right, every budded blossom on the verge of bursting open, every open flower sticky and swollen, petals ready to drop. The sap coursed audibly through the trees. And the birds! Had birds ever twittered so excitedly?

I will destroy you.

She’d vowed it in that pasture. She was small but strangely powerful. They should have known then to fear for their body and soul.

“Tell me something about the ninth century,” they demanded. Boredom was the solution. Boredom was ardor cooling.

In the pause that followed, they listened to the birds, the sap, the plash of the oars.

“How about the seventh?” she asked.

“Better still.”

“I can tell you more about the olden-day riddles,” she said, and did, and it didn’t bore them, but at least it diverted blood back to their head.

There were different types of riddles, and people had riddled them all over medieval England, and kiss was never the answer, although some riddles mentioned kissing: Courtly men and women kiss me!

Answer: Cup . The best Saxon riddle writer, Aldhelm, was imitating an earlier riddle writer, Symphosius, who lived in North Africa.

“And this Aldhelm, you said he was taught by the archbishop of Canterbury, who was also from Africa?” They lifted the oars from the water, so their mind could churn on its own.

“The archbishop of Canterbury ? Chap who heads the entire Church of England and crowns the king? Doesn’t that mean we should trace our forebears to Carthage?

” They shook their head and started rowing again.

“Funny how some debts never get acknowledged. Do you know what I’ve noticed, about your Fellows of the Albion Society of Antiquaries?

They’re all using the past to substantiate a particular version of the present—the version they think most favorable to men like themselves.

I don’t trust it. What they say the world was. What they say the world is.”

They lifted the oars and looked at her. A line formed between her brows.

They waited for her to argue.

“I don’t either,” she said.

“But you hope to join them?”

She crossed her arms. “I hope to say things about the past as well.”

“What do you want from it? The past?”

They waited, and when it seemed they’d waited too long, asked a question to which she had no response, they dipped the oars.

Her lips parted. “Connection.”

“Connection,” they repeated, and paused rowing, waiting for more.

“A single life is such a little thing. It’s barely anything, in the succession of generations.

The generations go on and on, but individuals vanish like foam.

” She broke their gaze, watched the river instead.

“When I touch a jet bead that a girl wore around her neck five centuries before I was born, I feel as though we’re part of something continuous, she and I, for all our smallness.

When I dig, I feel as though my grandmother is with me. I want that contact. It’s silly.”

“No,” they said, and she lifted her gaze. “It’s not silly.”

Her brown irises were starred with deeper, darker brown, as though the black had leaked from her pupils. She had eyes like portals.

They were staring into them, no, falling into them.

She was going to destroy them. After this ended, whatever this was, they would never be the same.

Shadow swallowed the boat. They tipped their head. There was the bluff, rising from the earth like a shrugged shoulder, blocking the sun. Home lay just around the bend.

Elf stood abruptly. The boat seesawed. They lunged and grabbed her legs before she was ejected into the river.

She staggered, laughing, bouncing even.

“Here!” she cried. “It’s here!”