“I do housework,” she snapped, feigning outrage.
“Chatting to Emily while she does housework is not in itself housework.”
She stuck her tongue out at him, and he laughed. “Perhaps I’ll leave.”
“And go where?” he asked, surprised.
“The palace city,” she said, sitting up. “I’d love to see it, to meet all the different sorts of people who live there.”
“Aw, Ro,” he said, gazing at her with pride. “They’d be lucky to have you. Anyone would.”
“So let’s do it, then. Let’s run away.”
“You must be joking.” He snorted at the idea. “I’m never leaving Nag’s End.”
“You don’t even dream about it, about seeing far-off lands?” Rowan asked, trying to keep the disappointment from her voice.
“Nag’s End is good enough for my father, and it’s good enough for me.” Pushing himself up to sit beside her, he stared at the sky a moment, as if pondering something wondrous. “Rowan,” he said, “do you think it possible to love someone upon first laying eyes on them?”
Rowan sighed and pulled her knees to her chest. The idea of love made her nervous, and she and Tom never discussed it. “Well, the poets certainly thought it so,” she said, drawing on her scholarship, as she always did when she felt unsure of herself. “If they’re to be believed, a woman’s eyes can know a future lover upon seeing him, and if the man sees the fire in those eyes, sees himself there, then he can fall in love before they’ve even spoken a word.”
“But what do you think?” he asked, a fervor in his voice. “Do you think it’s possible?”
She considered this, furrowing her brow. “I don’t know. I suppose I like the idea of some part of our bodies knowing and recognizing our futures even if our minds cannot. That appeals to me. But no,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t think it possible.”
“You don’t?” he laughed. “Really? If your future husband came riding into the village one day, you don’t think you’d recognize him immediately?”
Rowan shook her head. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”
“How does it work, then?”
She was silent for a moment as she tried to untangle what she thought from what she felt. “I think in order to love someone, you must know their heart. You need to witness their goodness, and you can’t know something like that unless you’ve known someone for a while. I think familiarity breeds love.”
“That’s not very romantic of you,” he laughed.
“Isn’t it?” she wondered. “I think there’s something charming about couples who grow to love each other as they get to know each other. Why, didn’t you tell me that your parents only married because their own parents wanted to merge families? Presumably they didn’t love each other at the beginning, but now I imagine they feel all the more proud of their love because it wasn’t easy to come by. It was something they worked at.”
Tom snickered. “You can imagine all you want, Ro, but I find it highly unlikely that my parents love each other even now.”
“No,” she said, mildly troubled. “They love each other.”
“They’re familiar with each other. There’s a difference. I’m talking about love, grand love—that thing that makes your chest feel like it’s about to explode, that makes you feel like your knees are about to give way, that certainty that you’ve seen the essence of your future in a pair of red lips.”
Rowan sighed. “Tom, beauty isn’t the same thing as goodness; it isn’t the same thing as love.”
Tom smiled slyly. “Ro, just because you haven’t experienced it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
Rowan was growing increasingly uncomfortable. “You needn’t play games, Tom. We both know you’re talking about Fiona Eira. You might as well call her by name. But you haven’t even met her—you’ve only seen her once. You’re delusional if you think you know her.”
“But my heart knows her,” he said, not to be dissuaded. “She is my future. When I looked in her eyes, I saw my birth, my death, everything in between, as if knowing her so intimately in the future means that I already know her now.”
Rowan noticed an unfamiliar tension in her shoulders. In their relationship, she was the one used to having the answers. She was the one who explained things to Tom, but here he was so confident, explaining things to her as if she were a child. She didn’t like it.
“Tom,” she said. “I know you want me to make the introduction. I know that’s what you’re getting at, but you’ll have to ask another girl. My father doesn’t want me speaking to her, remember? Can’t your mother do it?”
“My mother won’t do that, and you know it,” he said. “She already thinks poorly of the glassblower. And besides, sometimes I’m not sure my mother is fond of the idea of me ever taking a wife, especially not …”
“Such a pretty one?” Rowan finished what Tom seemed unable to say.
Tom nodded. “The pretty ones are always ill tempered. I’ve heard her say it fifty times if I’ve heard her say it once.”
“Let me guess, the lovely harlots are for Jude. You’re meant for a dull girl with big cow eyes who knows her way around a broom.”
“Exactly,” he laughed, and then he reached out for her, placing a hand on her arm. “Ro, you have to help me.”
She bit her lip and exhaled a long, painful sigh. “Fine,” she said.
Hearing the words was like a cure-all. He sat up and took her tiny hands in his, unable to keep what he knew was a very stupid grin from his face. “Are you sure?”
She nodded. “I promised my father, but you going on and on about your one true love is beginning to nauseate me. I’ll do it, but on two conditions.”
“Anything.”
“One, my father can never know that I disobeyed him.”
“I’ll not tell a soul,” he said, a hand to his heart.
“And two,” she said, grinning, “you must stop being so sentimental. It’s making me sick.”
“Oh, Rowan,” Tom said, hugging her. “A person could not have a better friend than you.”
She laughed and pushed him away. “What did I say about being sentimental? I’ll go tomorrow, okay? And then I’ll report back to you.”
Tom squeezed her hands and looked deep into her eyes. “I don’t know what I’d ever do without you,” he said, and she laughed and pulled away, focusing her attention back on the frozen lake.
“I can’t wait until we can swim again,” she said. “Sometimes winter seems interminable.”
He nodded, his mind drifting to the countless days they’d spent together in the lake as children, and he wondered if those would be able to continue now that they were grown. There was a game they used to play. His grandmother said that when she was a girl, water nixies had lived in the caves under Seelie Lake. They were fierce creatures, she said, that no one ever saw because they only came out at night. But, she insisted, were a man to go swimming by the light of the moon, the nixies would tear his flesh from his bones. Tom had told Rowan, and the game had been born. With the sun high in the sky, they would take turns swimming out to just above what they’d decided was the nixies’ cave, and lingering there, they would try to count to ten before swimming back to safety. Tom knew the nixies were no more than a tall tale told to frighten children, but when he was alone in the frigid water, that knowledge did nothing to still his fear.
He would feel it start at his toes, and then slowly it would creep up his foot until it felt like an icy hand grasping the base of his ankle, sliding up, and soon he would start to lose his breath. Gasping for air, imagining a horrifying underwater death, he would propel himself up and out of the water, flailing and desperate to get to shore, convinced that the sharp teeth of the nixies were within severing distance of his feet. Consumed with horror, he would plunge farther and deeper into the water, as if this would somehow help him to clear the distance more quickly, when what was really needed was a light and steady stroke along the surface. But sometimes when you want something so badly that you will do anything to get it, a light touch simply isn’t possible.