Stolen Songbird(61)

“No.” I pushed away the worms, then reached down to the water to rinse my hands. It had been weeks since the necklace debacle, but I had not once seen Tristan alone. We were together often enough in public – at parties and dinners, sometimes in audiences with his father – but he always treated me with either cold civility or picked cruel little arguments that sent rumors swirling through the city. I had no choice but to play along – and I played my part well – but every argument left a sour taste in my mouth and a cold emptiness in my heart. I slept alone in our rooms every night, although he kept up the pretense that he was making at least some attempt at fathering a child by ensuring he was seen stopping in at odd hours of the night. But he arrived when I was sleeping, was gone again by the time I awoke. The only evidence that he had been there at all would be a rumpled shirt tossed over a chair back or objects rearranged on a table – enough that I would notice and know to come up with another version of the same lie about what passed between us in the night.

Marc knew me well enough now to know this wasn’t a topic I cared to belabor, and he changed the subject. “Did you fish much before?”

“When I was younger,” I said. “My father used to take my brother and me, and my friend Sabine would come as well – not because of the fishing, but because she fancies my brother. Sometimes she and I would go, but instead of fishing, we would lie by the banks of the stream and tell stories to each other. And once I learned to read, I would sometimes bring books and read them to her. But I had less time at that point.”

“You learnt to read late,” Marc commented, winding up his fishing line.

I shrugged. “That is a matter of perspective, I suppose. Most Hollow folk can’t read much – there isn’t a need. I wouldn’t have learnt if my mother hadn’t insisted. She started sending tutors to teach me when I was thirteen. I was the only one who received more than a cursory education.” I paused for a minute, then I glanced at Marc, who was silent. “I feel as though that misrepresents them, though. They are very practical folk – everyone knows how to do things. They are a very self-sufficient lot. Just because they can’t read, doesn’t mean they are stupid.”

“I never said it did,” Marc replied.

“I know. But it seems as though you value a different sort of knowledge.”

Marc chuckled softly. “By you do you mean Tristan? Because I have certainly never given you cause to think such a thing.”

I made a non-committal noise. While we had been talking, Victoria and Vincent had decided to wade into the river and were attempting to catch fish with their bare hands. A smile slipped onto my face as I watched their antics. “This city is too small for them,” I said. “I think they are stifled here.”

“The world might be too small for them,” Marc replied, and we both laughed as Victoria threw a fish at Vincent’s head. He promptly grabbed her braid and dunked her under the water.

“When you spoke about your village,” Marc said, “I noticed that you said ‘they’ and not ‘we’. It seemed as though you saw yourself as separate.”

I frowned and plucked at the ribbon on my dress. “I was. My mother and her tutors ensured that. They didn’t just educate me – they changed the way I spoke, the way I moved, the way I acted. At first I tried to be two different people so that I wouldn’t seem strange to everyone, but that didn’t last.” I swallowed hard. “They changed the way I thought – once I could read, especially, it seemed the world grew in leaps and bounds with every passing day. There was so much I wanted to talk about, but no one wanted to listen.” I felt my cheeks flush. “I wanted to leave so badly, and the second I was gone, all I wanted was to go back.”

“Do you still? Want to go back to your village, that is?”

“I…” Such a simple question demanded a simple answer, but I found I had none. Shoving my hands into my pockets, I felt a piece of paper crinkle: the most recent of Tristan’s notes.

His love notes, as his mother insisted on calling them, had not improved in quality. If anything, they had grown snider, but I found myself treasuring each one more than the last. With the notes had come fur-lined cloaks and heavy blankets to ward off the endless chill. The high-heeled shoes I detested all but disappeared from my wardrobe, replaced by practical flats that did not pinch my feet or cause me to “limp about like an old lady”. Sheets of music and collections of famous operas appeared on tables, chairs, and the pillows of the bed. A lute was the first instrument to arrive, and was followed in short order by a harp with a note stating his hope that I would “show more talent if given more strings to pluck”. Everything he sent seemed for the express purpose of making me happy. But all the gifts in the world meant nothing, because all my heart wanted was the one person it shouldn’t.