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I shook my head. “You couldn’t know. I left my own amphibious phase behind a lot longer ago, physiologically speaking, than you did.”
He cocked his head studying me, helping me to sit when I struggled to do so. “Sometimes I think that, if I just listen harder, I’ll understand the way you see things.”
“But you never quite do? Welcome to my world.”
His lips curved in a smile, but he looked somber. “Did you find what you sought?”
“Quite a bit of it. Most important, I have new questions.”
“And…this pleases you?”
“Yes!” I laughed at his perplexed expression and knelt up to push the wet hair back from his forehead. “You see, half the battle is knowing what question to ask. Vague questions bring vague results.”
He narrowed his gaze, sifting through my surface thoughts like fingers running through my hair. “What now?”
“I want to look in your mind—for something specific. May I?”
“Of course. What’s mine is yours, my lady.”
A bit shaken by it, I realized he meant that literally. As much as I’d worried about being in his power, I’d neglected to fret over the sheer responsibility of his being in mine.
“Imagine that—you forgetting to fret about something.”
“Ha-ha.” But I grimaced in acknowledgment. Altering the position of my fingers, I touched them lightly to his temples. I probably didn’t need to do it this way anymore, as closely as our minds interfaced, but he’d first taught me this way.
I felt more than saw his smile over the shared memory. How hostile and uncertain I’d been, standing between his knees while he coaxed me to look into his mind, to discover his true intentions.
Forever ago and yesterday.
He stilled as I went deeper, searching for that pivotal memory I’d caught that first time and several times since. Ah, there. Himself as a boy, running on the beach, feathers raining through the air. I knew where this went.
I wanted to see immediately before.
Patiently I retraced, stretching the edge of the memory bubble to before that intensely emotional event that etched this moment so strongly in his memory. It wasn’t easy. The memory wanted to play forward, to rush down the tracks to the center of its gravity, to the birds dying and Titania taking his hand.
Rogue had grown tense under my hands, so I edged onto his lap, wrapping my legs around his waist, kissing him with gentle affection. He thawed, hands lifting to settle on my hips to support my back. It ached, I realized, from the swimming and the wrenching coughs. He kneaded the sore muscles and I dropped into his mind again, a sensation much like falling asleep while he held me.
The memory scrolled on, playing that same reel. I edged it back again, coaxing. Running on the beach. The sand sharp against his tender bare feet, danger breathing just behind. The world so beautiful, so new. Glorious and terrifying. Massaging it back further, I found it.
The boy, swimming. Limbs stroking through aquamarine water. A few others around him. Screams as the sharks attacked. Terrified, the boy swam harder, faster. Seeing the beach and striking out for it.
Dragging himself out of the water and through the rocks onto the sandy shore. Climbing onto it and looking around. Amazement. Curiosity. Safety.
And then the ravens.
Enormous, with clawed talons and sharp beaks. They dove on him, raking wounds down his body, seeking to carry him off. So much huger than he. He ran. Ran for his life. The land felt wrong and hard on his weak limbs but something else filled him, radiant energy running in his veins.
All of a sudden, he wasn’t so powerless. With vindictive rage, he lashed out, sending the magic—the coils of feral blue-edged black I knew so well, but raw and undisciplined—and vaporized the birds. With a thought he killed them all. All birds. Everywhere. The bubble pop of their nonexistence reverberating through Faerie, feathers swirling through the sky.
He ran from that, too, a sick sense of horror settling through him.
And Titania appeared.
So beautiful in his eyes. Strong, lovely, shimmering with pink-gold magic. Far from being upset about the birds, she laughed and took him by the hand. “Oh, my powerful sorcerer boy,” she crooned, “come with me. We shall do great things together. I will protect you and care for you. Forever.”
Rogue regarded me with his standard grave intensity. He’d learned not to care. Not immediately, but over the years and decades. As the magic infused his body, as he grew, matured and became eventually unkillable. That destroying the birds had been simply a careless demonstration of power. A young sorcerer, newly hatched, arriving in Faerie. Survival of the fittest in the extreme.
And one of my first acts of magic had been to bring the birds back.
