Rosemary Thorne's Arc

Chapter 1 of 24

Rosemary Thorne counted the minutes the noble stayed at her door, and tonight he gave her four. She knew because she watched the candle on the sill. Damien Ashford came at moonrise, as he had for eleven nights. He stood on the stone step of her ivy-wrapped cottage, accepted the mug she pressed into his scarred hand, and drank it standing. His white shirt hung open at the collar. His dark curls caught the porch light. He never sat. He never crossed the threshold. When the moon cleared the pines, he set the mug down and walked back into the trees. Rosemary wanted him to stay. She wanted it plainly, the way she wanted rain in August. She had moved to these woods to be alone with her books and her three cats and her garden, and instead she had grown attached to a man who would not sit down. Tonight she tried a new plan. She did not meet him at the door. She let him knock twice. Then she called through the wood, "I need help. Something's in the garden." He came around the side of the cottage fast. Rosemary stood by the bean rows with her satchel over her shoulder and a lantern in her hand. At her feet, tail lashing across the cabbages, sat a purple alligator the size of a hound. It was chewing one of her apples. It looked up at Damien with bright, interested eyes. Damien stopped. "That is not from these woods." "I know," Rosemary said. "It walked out of the hedge an hour ago. It won't leave. I've tried." The three cats watched from the porch rail, unbothered, as if they had already decided the creature was staying. Damien knelt. He held out his scarred hand. The alligator sniffed it, then bumped its snout against his palm. He almost smiled. Rosemary saw it and held very still. "It likes apples," she said. "I have a bushel inside. I can't carry them and hold the lantern." He looked up at her. He looked at the moon, already halfway above the pines. She watched him weigh it. "Show me the bushel," he said. He followed her through the door. Inside, he set the basket by the hearth. He sat on the floor beside it. He fed the alligator apples one at a time, and the cats came down from the rail and settled against his knee. Rosemary sat across from him with her satchel in her lap and did not speak, because speaking felt like it might break something. The moon rose. The moon crossed. Damien did not leave. At the hour he should have been gone, he pressed his scarred hand flat to the floorboards. His breath caught. Something under his skin moved that should not have moved. He looked at her, and his eyes were not the eyes she knew. "Rosemary," he said. "Lock the door."