Page 20 of Ravished By the Revenant

“Repaired them. A man with eternity acquires skills. I can fish, farm, cook, cobble, thatch, keep bees, and shear a sheep in under four minutes.”

“That’s the most unemployable résumé I’ve ever heard,” she says dryly.

“I don’t know what a résumé is, but I am confident it is another insult.” I shoulder the gear and push open the garden door. The morning is bright and cool, dew still silvering the cabbages. “Keep pace. The path is overgrown.”

“Everything here is overgrown. Your whole aesthetic is ‘overgrown.’”

Schmetterling trots ahead of us down the garden path, tail high, and stations himself at the orchard gate as though he has appointed himself guide.

“He’s coming?” Clara asks.

“He always comes when I fish. He is under the deranged impression that the first trout belongs to him.” I unlatch the gate. “He has held this belief since approximately 1740. I have never once agreed to it, and he has never once failed to collect.”

She snickers. “So you lost a negotiation to a cat.”

“I lost a war of attrition to a cat. There is a difference, and the difference is three hundred years.”

She laughs then, and the sound goes through me like a blade between the ribs. Birds startle from the apple trees. The sun catches on her hair and turns it to white fire, and I have to look away toward the treeline before I say something possessive again and ruin the first hour of peace we have managed.

“Half an hour, you said?” She falls into step beside me on the forest path, close enough that her sleeve brushes my coat. Elderberry and basil. I could find her blindfolded across a battlefield.

I can’t resist teasing her. “For me. For someone with legs like a newborn foal, perhaps forty minutes.”

Clara snorts delicately. “My legs outran the Italian mafia through this exact forest, thank you.”

“Your legs ran in a circle back to my gate,” I counter.

“That was the curse, not my cardio.”

“Of course,” I say gravely.

Schmetterling pauses on the path, looks back at the two of us bickering through the trees, and gives one long, weary meow.

“Not a word from you either,” I tell him.

Clara grins up at me, wicked and bright and alive, and God help me, I would carry a thousand buckets up a thousand stairs to keep that look aimed in my direction.

“So,” she says, swinging the creel she stole from my shoulder when I wasn’t watching. “Tell me about your pike.”

14

CLARA

The universe has a sick sense of humor.

I know this because I just spent forty-five minutes creeping along the lake’s edge, ducking behind reeds like a low-budget spy, following the shoreline in one continuous direction—and I have arrived exactly where I started. Aldric sits on the same flat rock, line in the water, coat folded beside him. Shmoo sits on the coat. Neither of them has moved.

Aldric doesn’t turn around. “Welcome back.”

“I wasn’t—” I stop. There’s no version of this sentence that preserves my dignity. “I was admiring the flora.”

“The flora.” The line twitches, and he pulls it in with a lazy flick of his wrist. Nothing on the hook. He recasts. “You admired it in a full circle.”

“It’s very circular flora.”

Shmoo yawns at me. Even the cat knows.

I give up and drop onto the pebbled shore a few feet away. The lake is gorgeous, glassy and dark, ringed by firs so tall they look like they’re holding up the sky. Somewhere beyond that treeline is a world with phone chargers and oat milk lattes and people who were born after the invention of the wheel. And between me and it, an invisible wall built by a woman who died before forks were popular.