Page 28 of The Wind and the Wild (The Keepers of Faerie #1)

Edging around until I can lean carefully against the chimney and seat myself beside him, I smooth my skirts over my knees.

The cut doesn’t hurt much, and what does sting is probably due to a bit too much kneeling in the garden.

My arms burn from all the work, and my lower back is happy to be upright again.

I glance at his shoulder where I tore the bandage, feeling worse and worse for my ridiculous reaction and the pain I must have caused.

There’s nothing to see, but I’m going to ask about it.

Once I get him to speak.

He continues to gaze down at me, just his eyes following, the rest of him unmoving.

I am, perhaps, growing accustomed to his odd movements. Or lack thereof.

Still, the silence is driving me over the trees. “ Well, you need to say something profound. I’m just a human, and we’re terrible at this.”

He raises an eyebrow, which I count as making him move.

“ You’re the ones with silver tongues, are you not?”

Finally, he drops his hand, and I’m relieved he wasn’t hiding some new injury behind his palm. “ I’ve never been too terribly fair at such things.”

There. He spoke. Perhaps that shouldn’t give me such a sense of victory. But I ran home to people who cared about me. He did not. I know little of the fae and how they are put together, but no creature must find that comforting.

“ I don’t mind. Neither have I. Even for a human, I’m remarkably terrible at it.”

He continues to stare down at me. Am I going to have to pull each sentence from him?

“ Well, I brought more food,” I tell him.

“ Today seems like a lounge-inside-and-cook type of day. It’s too hot, anyhow.

Maybe while everything’s in the oven, we can pick one of those recipes you read the other day to write down.

I need to be able to bake the most spectacular pie this midsummer.

Last year, a girl from the village over beat me out of it.

That’s what I got for trying to bake something with human ingredients.

This time, we’re going to find the perfect filling on this side of the border. ”

“ Isn’t that cheating?”

I shrug. “ If anyone else had half a mind to come into the edges of Faerie, they’d do the exact same thing. Besides, half of baking a good pie is finding the best ingredients to use on the inside. All I’m doing is finding the best fruit. It just happens to be over here.”

His expression is heading toward somewhere between amused and baffled, and I smile up at him until I can’t bear his intense gaze and stare out at the trees instead.

He is facing my side of the woods, or at least my side if I get lost just past the honeysuckle.

From here, they appear to be Faerie woods forever and forever, disappearing into mist quite quickly.

I consider what might happen if I were to walk that way without closing my eyes and consider with more alarm that perhaps that is how humans entranced into these lands fail to return—they simply do not know where the border lies.

But Aidyn has been overlooking the woods in the human direction. It occurs to me he may have been watching for my appearance to ensure I arrived safely should I be foolish enough to return.

Apparently, he picked up on my senseless tendencies rather quickly.

Finally, I decide I may as well ask, considering he’s spoken very little to my more cheerful promptings. “ Do I wish to know what happened after I left?”

Finally, he stops giving me those intense eyes and gazes out at the woods instead. I’m not sure I prefer it.

“ It is dead.”

I nod, relieved but nervous on his behalf.

“ I think it must have been alone,” he says, voice faraway. “ If it were not, the others would have come to its aid. I do not know where they ran—the Gentry have not come. I don’t suspect there is danger of more, particularly not in the daylight, but let us not test that theory.”

“ No arguments from me,” I say, looping my arms around my knees.

“ Have you any idea what brought them here?”

I shake my head. “ I looked for faerie circles and didn’t find any, and other than that, I’m not sure what would bother them. Perhaps... you can help me look?” The idea has me nearly smiling. “ You probably know what you’re searching for better than I do.”

After some silence, he says, “ Perhaps.”

It is enough. Attempting to imagine him on the human side of the border is useless—I’ll have to see for myself.

“ You came back,” he says with enough calm I believe he must be disguising the emotion behind his voice.

I wring my fingers in my skirts, already sweating even in the thin, loose material. I didn’t expect him to be so blunt, so I don’t have anything planned to say. Instead, I shrug. “ I was worried.”

Not a lie. My face heats anyhow, and I hope he doesn’t notice.

“ I—”

“ If you apologize again for frightening me, I’ll be very upset. The hound frightened me, you didn’t. And I’m so very sorry about your shoulder. I... panicked.”

He shakes his head, but the accompanying shrug is mostly with the other shoulder.

I think of trying to lift away the fabric to see if he’s bandaged it.

I keep my hands to myself. At his continued silence, I glance at his sword, thinking of picking it up but not entirely certain he wishes me here to begin with, let alone to touch a weapon he went out of the way to hide.

“ Does it have a name?” I ask, and he follows my gaze to the scabbard between us.

Taking in a long slow breath, he says, “ Yes...” What follows is a breath of a word as foreign to me as every other he’s ever spoken in his own language. I keep in my mind that it is a short soft sound with a sharp note to the end, but I do not have a prayer of repeating it.

I give him a wry smile. “ I wish I could understand any of your words. They leave my mind immediately.”

He does not match the smile but nods. “ It is a word meaning something like the cold of starlight. There is no direct translation for most of our tongue.”

I inspect the sheath about the bright silver blade matching his eyes and wonder if the sound of his name in his own tongue sounds like the wind over the leaves.

“ Is it heavy?”

“ No,” he says, but he does not offer it to me, instead turning his face aside.

I let the topic fade. “ So, are we staying up here on the roof all day, or would you like to join me in the kitchen?”

He returns to that funny little stare from the corner of his eye.

“ I will be very cross if you make me cook by myself,” I say primly, picking leaves off the cotton of my dress.

If he’s going to act strangely, I may as well say whatever I like.

Still, my heart is pattering in much too irritating a fashion—he may still ask me to leave or may simply not join me in the library.

I very much wish him to stay within my sight.

We were beginning to speak to each other as friends yesterday, before the beast appeared between the trees.

I can coax him back. Besides, he could use a good meal and a friendly face after whatever happened when he took his blade out back and bade me leave.

Stubbornness is something I got from both parents—he has been much too kind a faerie to dissuade me now with a bit of uncanny staring.

He lets out a gentle sigh like the breeze over the leaves, a near-startling soft noise after all the human voices surrounding me in my mortal life.

Finally, he turns his face fully, which is no longer as strange as it once was. “ Can you make custards?”

As it turns out, what Aidyn can speak about all day without growing tired is the creatures of his Faerie.

For the first half hour, he’s utterly silent while I heave the basket of ingredients onto the kitchen counter and get to work on a large batch of soup my mam used to make when I was sick—before I overtook the kitchen from her.

I want it simmering while I make a custard.

I already checked on the kittens, asleep as usual, and made a point not to look out his window at whatever may lie in the woods.

Aidyn eyes the quilts on top but says nothing, handing me things or wordlessly peeling the carrots I give him.

He barely looks at the blade as he does so, his eyes focusing on a random point on the table.

I glance at the delicate precision of fingers performing such a simple task as peeling a vegetable and shake my head to myself, chopping herbs too fast.

When the silence has begun to nag at me, I say, “ You never answered my question.”

He blinks, halfway into the potato I sent his way to peel. “ What?”

“ I asked you what you could do all day the way I can cook all day and never grow tired of it. You never answered my question.”

Because we were interrupted by a monster.

No use saying it aloud. I can read in his expression that he’s considering it as I am.

Each creak in the old library, gust of a breeze from outside, or leaf fluttering silently past the window has me jumping.

Certainly he’s seen. Still, I haven’t yet had the courage to ask him what happened after I left or to take a glance out one of the back windows or doors.

At least the broad kitchen window makes it easy to keep track of the light.

Better to start slow.

Aidyn shrugs.

I consider him for a moment. He isn’t looking at me.

A strong urge to sit near him lodges in my chest. I am quite accustomed to offering physical comfort when Niall or Una or my parents are upset, and Aidyn has taken my hand once or twice and held me under the elbow so I would not fall.

Perhaps it should not be as intimidating as it is, the concept of getting within his personal space.

But the idea of anything other than touching his hand has the human side of my brain screaming not to.

It’s not a side I’ve been listening to much, but I’m uncertain Aidyn would appreciate a human being so bold.