Page 30 of The Wind and the Wild (The Keepers of Faerie #1)

A s I ’m tripping over a bramble into Faerie, it occurs to me that I could have brought Una and Niall.

Aidyn will be coming to the human side of the border, and I doubt he means anyone here a stitch of harm—in fact, he seems to be concerned for our well-being.

But I’m uncertain that introducing him to the two people I care about more than life is a wise idea.

I do not know him, after all, and though he seems a gentle creature, the moon knows he isn’t.

At the very least, he has the ability to be violent.

Perhaps soon. Soon, I will ask the two if they wish to meet this strange creature. Niall might. Una might not.

If I’m the first human Aidyn has met, how would he see the villagers?

I shake my head as I creep in the side door, casting about glances for anything even resembling a hunt hound.

I shouldn’t be thinking along those lines.

I shouldn’t even be speaking to one of the Keepers , as Aidyn calls himself, even if he proclaims the Gentry to be gentler.

I should be leaving an offering and sending a prayer and hoping his silver eyes never fall on me again.

“ Aidyn? ” I call cheerily, heading for his room.

“ Yes? ”

I yelp. His voice came from behind, and I turn halfway up the steps, putting my hands on my hips and giving him a glower across the library. He’s found himself a nice spot across the upper level, half hidden by the maples, a book in hand. From here, it’s impossible to tell the topic.

“ What great amusement you must take in startling me,” I say.

There’s a flash of his teeth, and I’m pleased to see he’s returned to smiling at small things.

“ You’re so easily startled, Flower.”

Ignoring both him and the heat rising into my cheeks, I stomp to his room, uncovering the kittens and kneeling to scratch their cheeks and chins.

Sleepy as ever, they are gaining weight and opening their eyes.

A full jar of honey sits on the shelf where Aidyn keeps his little collection.

He must have returned to the hive. Still, I don’t glance out the window to see the back of the library.

A soft tap of his cane on the dusty wooden floor alerts me to his approach. “ Shall we?”

“ Yes,” I say, covering the kittens and joining him in the doorway of his room. “ Are they all right sleeping so much?”

“ Oh, yes. They would be sleeping between their mother’s shoulders for weeks. ’Tis their nature.”

I glance at him, thinking of the blood on the leaves near the hawthorn, and decide not to linger on the topic.

“ Very well, off on our little adventure, then. I’m not certain what you think you’re going to find.

Un—um, I’ve been looking for anything faerie that has been disturbed.

I haven’t so much as found a faerie circle. ”

If he notices I almost said Una’s name, he gives no indication. Instead, there’s a sly little upturn of his lips. “ You think I cannot find my own kin?”

I open my mouth.

“ Come along!”

Snatching my hand, he leads me back for the stairs. I’m forced to trot to keep up with his long strides.

“ Do you know I am not a short woman?” I grumble as he takes the same side door out into the woods.

“ Hmm? ”

“ You make me feel short.”

Glancing back, his eyes roam up and down every inch of me in much too intense a fashion, eyebrows puckering together as they did when I turned down his eggshells.

“ You are small.”

“ I am most certainly not.”

“ No? ”

“ You need to meet more humans. I can wrestle a good number of men.”

He blinks, aghast, looking me over once more. The flummoxed expression grows wickedly amused. “ Could you wrestle me? ”

Well, someone’s in a fine mood this morning. Or pretending to be—pretending is not lying, strictly speaking. “ No, I prefer to live.”

He leans against the edge of the honeysuckle. I imagine the heavy scent of it seeping into his clothes, clinging to him wherever it goes. I wonder if the others in my village smell honeysuckle when I return to the mortal realm.

“ I could let you win.”

“ That wouldn’t be too terrible.”

His grin grows.

“ But you would have to be very careful. If anything happened to me, I have a best friend who would come in here and enact her revenge.”

“ Ah, I see. Is she much larger than you, then?”

“ No, not at all. It’s much worse. She would cry at you.”

His shoulders shake with a silent laugh. It’s a shame, for I wanted to hear the sound. “ I shall be very gentle, then.”

The way he speaks has me wondering if he’s not teasing as much as I am. Only the knowledge he’s still nursing injuries has me thinking there isn’t a large chance he’ll spring upon me.

“ Go on,” he says, jutting his chin into the maze of flowers. “ I do not need to lose myself to leave Faerie. You go ahead. I’ll follow once you’re safely through.”

I blink. Never has it occurred to me how fae come and go from their own realm into Nevyan.

Giving him a careful eye, I slip into the vines, glance over my shoulder to see him peering at me, and close my eyes, feeling silly now I’m watched.

A few steps has me back in my own world, stumbling against the hawthorn in my hurry to turn and catch him.

For whatever reason, I expect him to merely appear from thin air.

Instead, he steps from behind a lone pine tree as if he were always hiding there, looking mighty pleased with himself.

“ How did you do that?” I ask, keeping on the lookout now we’re in the human realm.

Most of the villagers don’t wander on the edge of Faerie unless there is a specific reason—and there rarely is—but I’m still jumpy.

If the kittens were worth swearing Una and Niall to secrecy, Aidyn is every superstition and fear we’ve ever had brought down upon our heads.

He shrugs. “ I wanted to.”

“ That’ s all? ”

“ That’s all. Why do you have to close your eyes?”

“ We pretty much only make our way into Faerie if we become lost. If you close your eyes and run into the woods, you’re pretty much lost immediately. Or I suppose the magic thinks so, at least.”

I’ve no concept if magic indeed works that way, but Aidyn shrugs as if it’s a reasonable answer.

He wanders past me. I squint after, wanting to warn him not to venture into sight of the village, and am caught strangely off guard by how he appears on our side of the trees.

Remarkably normal if I look at all the little individual parts of him—his stable shoulders, the straight arrow of his back, the gentle fall of hair across his shoulders with the one strand newly braided in a fashion I’ve never seen, a ring of moss looped into it.

Remarkably like a wolf lurking along the borders of a village if I take him in all at once.

He is getting dangerously near where sunlight makes it through the thinning trees.

“ What are you doing?” I ask, voice rising, hurrying after him.

“ Merely looking. You live here?”

He has stopped just inside the shadowy section of the woods, mostly behind a tree, taking a peek at the tips of the newly thatched cottages.

“ Yes,” I say, pausing just behind his elbow. What does this place look like to him?

“ It’s so small,” he murmurs, as if he is not truly speaking to me.

With no concept of what he must be comparing it to, I nod, remembering how I imagined him walking by our cottages in the moonlight, gazing up at my window.

“ You should not be seen,” I whisper, trying to quell the anxiety within my chest.

“ I shall not be,” he whispers in return, then gives me a wink. With a frown, he glances back into the open trees as if looking for hounds or his own folk.

They still have not come.

Catching my eye, he offers a smile too tense to be properly happy and turns on his heel at once, tromping off into the woods with his hand back to being wrapped around mine.

Perhaps I did not believe him when he implied he could find a faerie circle, but within fifteen minutes, we’ve trekked around and through the edges of the human woods, taking very specific twists and turns, Aidyn humming under his breath, until spread before us in a particular little spot of sunlight is a circle of white death’s breath mushrooms.

“ Huh,” I huff, and Aidyn releases my hand, leaning both palms on his cane, looking pleased with himself.

I am going to keep quite a good eye on whether he appears to be ailing, but for now, he appears full of energy. Besides, I’m not sure if yesterday’s quiet was his body ailing him or his dark thoughts. If it was the first, I tell myself it was my soup that did the trick.

“ Very impressive,” I say, watching him step around the edges of the circle, inspecting.

He has kept us very close to the tree line the entire time. Certainly, more circles would be deeper in the woods, in places where humans are less likely to tread on them.

Is he doing so because of my hesitation to venture into the woods with him?

It’s oddly touching—the idea he would not only notice but care for whatever unsaid fear I maintain.

Likewise, he did not suggest using the tree-lined tunnel at the bottom of the library.

I stuff my hands into my pockets and watch him step gracefully about the long grasses, the stark human sunlight catching in shimmering dapples across his hair and his cheek whenever he turns his face up to me.

When he steps directly into the space of the circle, I squeak without meaning to, clapping a hand across my mouth.

He blinks at me.

“ You know, monsters tend to come out of the woods when those things are disturbed,” I remind him.

The grin returns. “ I am not human, Flower.”

I know that, but hearing him admit it so freely is unsettling.

Kneeling carefully in the center—I do not miss the way his hand touches his leg as he’s careful to bend it—he spreads his hand across the moss growing in the center. “ This is as much a creation of my own as it is of the little creatures who built it. Nothing I do will cause harm.”