Roses and Rot by Kat Howard Read Free Book Online Page A

making slight adjustments that I couldn’t see. But I could see that she flew higher, fell faster. My heart raced to watch it.
    Then he said something, and stepped closer, and it was not with the grace of a dancer, but something very mortal, hesitant andnervous. And even though it was a not a wild flight through the air, there was peril in Marin’s answering movement, as she stepped into the circle of his arms. Peril, but grace there, too.
    And then his hands moved on her body, and her mouth touched his, and I turned away, and I did not watch.

5
    The Mourning River, which Marin could see from her window, cut through the grounds at Melete, dividing the place almost exactly in half. Clear and swift-flowing, it was arched with bridges, installed with the same sense of artistic chaos that suffused the rest of the design here. I stood in the center of a miniature version of the Thames’s Tower Bridge, and I could see the Rialto Bridge just downriver. The experience was like standing on a fold in a map, impossible geography made solid.
    I still hadn’t gotten over the slight feeling of unreality that Melete gave me. The night before, I had felt the sensation that someone was watching me work so strongly that I had to close my windows and curtains before it went away. I had slept fitfully, and woken up before dawn feeling like the shadows were staring at me.
    But the late morning was bright and clear. Light dappled through the leaves of the trees, and I closed my eyes and tilted my face toward the warmth.
    “Those trees are my favorite.”
    I looked toward the voice.
    “The ones you were looking at. They’re called elf maples.”
    He might have been an elf, the modern film version, all red-gold hair and cheekbones so sharp you could cut yourself on them, worn jeans, and a T-shirt as green as the leaves. He smiled, and I felt heat rise just under my skin.
    “It sounds like a name from a fairy tale,” I said, and it did, so much that I filed it away in my brain for later use, imagining people who made their houses in trees, and stepped, dryad-like, out of them. An entire forest of trees that were also people, the rustling of their leaves a slow, ongoing song with seasonal movements.
    “Someone else told me that, once.” His eyes went very far away. “She didn’t like fairy tales, though. She said they made things sound too easy.”
    “Not all of them do,” I said. “Not the true ones.”
    “True fairy tales?” He turned back to me, all the way back from wherever he had been lost. “Do you think they exist?”
    “I don’t think that someone named Sleeping Beauty literally slept for one hundred years,” I said. “But there are fairy tales where there is a cost, where the veins of the story run deeper than ball gowns and handsome princes. I don’t think they’re real, but I think they’re true.”
    “Interesting,” he said. “Is that what you’re here to write?” He nodded at the notebook on the bridge in front of me.
    “Something like that. Are you a writer?”
    “No, I leave the words to people who are better with them.” He walked closer, and leaned on the edge of the bridge, watching the river flowing beneath. The light through the trees, through the leaves of the elf maples—which I would have called by the much less romantic name of box elders—slanted across him, covering him in alternating patches of bright and shadow, obscuring his expression. “I’d forgotten how beautiful it is here.”
    “Forgotten? So you’ve been here before.” He must be a mentor, in that case. Fellows weren’t allowed more than one residency.
    “I have. And only recently returned. I’m Evan.” He held out his hand.
    “Imogen. I just started my residency.” His hand was rough, callused. I wanted to ask if he was a sculptor, but that would mean admitting I had noticed.
    “Do you like it here so far?” he asked.
    “Very much.” I smiled. “It’s more than I expected. Better, somehow. Which is weird,