Page 62 of The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire
“I can waltz,” Neirin says confidently.
“I can’t.”
His faces crumples with confusion. “But… that’s your time period.”
I hold up my hands in surrender. “You need to stop reading romance novels. Waltzing is for rich people with a penchant for parties and lots of time.”
Neirin’s lips part. “Humans worry about time a great deal.”
“We don’t have much of it, I’m afraid.”
“How strange. How lovely.”
“There’s nothing beautiful about time and how much of it goes to waste,” I tell him.
“When you have less, things matter more,” Neirin counters. “Less food makes what you do have taste better.”
“Spoken like someone who has never gone hungry.”
He holds out his hand again. “Come on, Habren, show me how to dance like we’ve got mere hours left.”
“Wedoonly have hours left.”
“Then don’t waste them.”
Even I can’t argue with that.
“Let me.” He moves behind me and takes the shoulders of my jacket. I help him shrug it off.
“Wait.” My eyes fall on the iron ring upon my hand. We both stare, but I try to seem casual as I tug it off and tuck it into a pocket. “Wouldn’t want to burn you again, would I?”
Neirin crosses the room and lays my coat over the piano bench. Then he returns to me, and I take his hand. He moves us into a waltz position, but I don’t let him lead. I drop my grip on his shoulder with one hand and hitch up my skirt instead. The piano takes my side. The music turns racing, loud. There’s a fiddle somewhere that I can’t see.
Before Neirin can say another stupid thing, I surge forward and take him with me.
Mam taught me to dance. On good days, I’m half as all right as her. And for all Neirin’s otherworldly grace and long limbs, he can’t flail and turn like me. He can’t clumsily jump from one foot to another or take the corners of the dance floor in wide, crashing arcs—but he learns as we go.
Other teg join us. Some spin solo, others move in groups of five. I try to force Neirin into another lap of the floor, but instead the hand on the small of my back falls away, and he turns me under his arm and doesn’t stop. I spin like a top—hair flying, ribbon trailing, perched high on my toes—and I’m going to fall, I really am, and I don’t mind at all.
But then I stop. Face-to-face with Neirin, our hands still entwined above our heads. I stagger even closer toward him. Neirin’s eyes drop to my parted, panting lips, and though he’s the only person to have ever looked there, I know in the pit of my twisting stomach what he’s thinking of doing. I want to let him.
“You belong here,” he says simply.
“In Eu gwlad?”
A part of me—and I hate to tell you this—wants him to say that I’m special after all, and that I belong in Gwlad Y Tylweth Teg,just like my sister.
Neirin shrugs. “No,here.In my court. With me.”
I give a small laugh. Right. “Like Beth? Completely at your mercy?”
“No!” He balks, offense contorting his face. “I like you.”
“You liked Beth once,” I remind him.
“That was different. You’re far more interesting,” he says, sounding a little irritable, though he quickly covers it with a smile. “Don’t you want to know why I like you so?”
I consider lying, but once again I can’t. The truth is, Iwanthim to like me. Not because he’s Neirin and he’s beautiful and irritating, but because so few people have ever liked me. God, how lovely it would be if one day someone saw my plain face and the lines around my mouth and decided that, somehow, I was exactly what they wanted.
